In 1946 John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, began working on a project with meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby: to predict the weather using one of the first programmable computers. Kristine Harper, a former meteorologist and now a historian of science at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, says, “What von Neumann really had in mind was being able to control the weather, and the military was all over that.”
Jule Charney joined the project in 1948; he and von Neumann made some simplifying assumptions about the atmosphere’s density and disregarded vertical air motion to make the simulation more tractable. The result was the first numerical weather forecast, produced in 1950. Although it predicted a few things correctly, it was also beset with problems. Nevertheless, the rudimentary forecast inspired Joseph Smagorinsky, a US Weather Bureau meteorologist, to adapt the new numerical weather model for studying...
