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© NOAA
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The United States Weather Bureau Building in Washington, D.C.
Frontispiece of "Meteorology" by Willis Milham, 1912.
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Most people are interested in what the weather will be tomorrow or in
the next few days. Predictions of the weather for up to a week in the
future are called short-term forecasts. Meteorologists also try to make
long-term forecasts of the weather for a month, a season, or a whole year.
In earlier times, before the telegraph and the telephone were invented,
weather observations from faraway places could not be collected in one
place soon after they were made. In those times, the only way of predicting
the weather was to use your local experience. Given the weather on a particular
day, what kind of weather usually follows during the next day or two?
As you can imagine, the success of such forecasting was not a lot better
than making a random guess.
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© NOAA
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The weather station at Cape Henry, Virginia (1900 Circa).
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Beginning in the late 1800s, weather services began to be able to gather
weather data from weather stations located all over the country. That
allowed meteorologists to plot weather maps and see weather systems moving
from place to place. That improved the accuracy of forecasts.
During the 1900s, meteorologists developed even better tools for observing
and predicting the weather. Special instruments measure weather in the
atmosphere far above the ground, and satellites orbiting the Earth send
back images of the weather over large areas. In addition, computer models
are now being developed for weather forecasting. In a computer model,
the important processes of the weather are built into the model. The model
starts with the present weather and tries to simulate how the weather
will develop in the future. Today's computer models do a very good job
of predicting the weather for the next few days.
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