Bombing and Research

Abstract

At the outset I hoped to build up a research and development group that could serve as a “think tank” in support of all forecasting activities then in existence. My plan was to analyze the atmosphere, layer by layer, up to great heights, combine these analyses with the data contained in the customary sea level charts, and try to determine how the various layers interact to produce the various weather systems. The philosophy underlying this approach had been developed by Vilhelm Bjerknes during the first decade of this century—long before upper-air sounding stations became established. In the thirties, Jack Bjerknes and Erik Palmén had used the method with great skill and elegance in their researches on upper-air structures. On a more limited scale, it had been used in the weather services of Norway and several countries in Central Europe, including Germany. Early in the war F. A. Berson brought the method to Dunstable, without much impact on their efforts in research and forecasting. As I saw it, our immediate task was to develop Bjerknes’s method into routines and then progress from analysis of current situations to prediction of developments in the near future. However, external conditions imposed their blinkers, and, for many good reasons, I had to shrink my ambitions and become directly involved in operational forecasting.

...let me be hardened, to suffice for this hard age.

—Nordahl Grieg