Lewis Fry Richardson, who died on 30 September 1953, was a British mathematician and meteorologist who developed a new type of weather prediction. Existing methods were approximations based on known weather patterns and how they had moved in the past. Richardson planned to predict weather using mathematical techniques he had developed to model the flow of water through peat. The only problem was the volume of data involved.
In his 1922 book, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, Richardson described a “forecast factory”, a vast hall filled with “computers” – people working with slide-rules. Each team of computers worked on a small geographical area and passed their results to the adjacent teams. A central conductor kept all the teams synchronised with coloured signal lights.
Richardson estimated it would take 60,000 human computers to keep up with the weather, making mathematical forecasting “a dream”.
His dream has become reality. By the 1960s the Met Office already had machines that were far faster than manual methods. Their latest Cray XC-40 supercomputer can carry out 14,000 trillion calculations a second. These calculate weather patterns exactly as Richardson imagined, but in far more detail and further ahead than he would have believed possible.
Richardson was a Quaker and pacifist who resigned from the Met Office when it was taken over by the air ministry in 1920. His other great project was predicting another sort of storm – mathematical analysis of communications between countries to spot when they were sliding towards war, and avert it.
