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Download PDF by Kristine C. Harper: Weather by the numbers: the genesis of modern meteorology

Weather and Climate: Decade by Decade by Kristine C. Harper

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. View all Google Scholar citations for this article. This article argues that such efforts to scale up were paralleled by efforts to define a place for local knowledge. By examining efforts of the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, near Boston, Massachusetts, to issue local weather forecasts that competed with the centralized forecasts of the U.

Signal Service, this article finds that Blue Hill, as a user of the Signal Service's observation network, developed a new understanding of local knowledge by combining local observations of the weather with the synoptic maps afforded by the nationwide telegraph network of the U. Blue Hill used these forecasts not only as a service, but also as evidence of the superiority of its model of local forecasting over the Signal Service's model, and in the process opened up larger questions about the value of a weather forecast and the value of different kinds of knowledge in meteorology.

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Weather and Climate: Decade by Decade

University of Chicago Press. A Government out of Sight: Cambridge and New York: Bulletin of the New England Meteorological Society. Carnegie, Institution of Washington. Reports of the Conferences on Cycles. Carnegie Institution of Washington. Clayton , Henry Helm. Measurements of Cloud Heights and Velocities.

Download PDF by Kristine C. Harper: Weather by the numbers: the genesis of modern meteorology

Annals of the Astronomical Observatory at Harvard College. John Wilson and Sons. Mapping the Austrian Climate between Empire and Republic. Conover , John H. The Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory: The First Years: Abbott, A Linked ecologies: States and universities as environments for professions. Sociological Theory 23 3: Report to the Department of Commerce. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 82 9: Barry, RG The shaping of climate science: Half a century in personal perspective.

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Weather and Climate: Decade by Decade by Kristine C. Harper

Duke University Press , — Farrell, J Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1: Fleming, JR Fixing the Sky: Fleming, JR Planetary-scale fieldwork: Harry Wexler on the possibilities of ozone depletion and climate control. Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences.

Garriott, the head of the U. Skip to main content. Third, the Galveston hurricane revealed continuity rather than disjuncture in that it did not transform meteorological infrastructures or debates over forecasting in the region. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Science as a diplomatic weapon in the Lyndon B. Can all this be entrusted to a foreign government?

Rutgers University Press , — Friedman, RM Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology. Fujimura, JH Crafting science: Science as Practice and Culture. University of Chicago Press , — Gieryn, TF Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: Strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists.

American Sociological Review 48 6: Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30 2: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer. Disciplines of Marine Science. University of Washington Press. Harper, KC Research from the boundary layer: Civilian leadership, military funding and the development of numerical weather prediction — Harper, KC Weather by the Numbers: Weather Bureau not issued hurricane warnings at noon on September 10, 9 hours before the winds reached their maximum force. This article examines the mutually constitutive relationship between government science and American empire through a history of the U.

Department of Agriculture, took over the administration of the first national weather service from the U. Army Signal Service, where it had resided since its creation in Weather Bureau needed to form cooperative relationships with existing weather services and obtain permission to establish its own stations. A meteorological infrastructure initially established to provide hurricane warnings was subsequently expanded to produce climatological data and agricultural reports for American investors in sugar cane and tobacco, as the U.

Weather Bureau's Climate and Crop Reporting Service aggregated climatological data that would be used in a predictive capacity in the world of agricultural commodity speculation. The meteorological infrastructure of American empire connected government officials and investors, commodity exchanges, ship captains, Weather Bureau and local observers in the West Indies, climate and crop reporters, Cuban meteorologists, newspaper editors, and residents of the West Indies and Gulf Coast to forms of future knowledge that protected lives and capital while also exploiting them.

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The humanitarian and commercial imperatives of the U. Weather Bureau's West Indian weather service were intertwined from its inception. The Weather Bureau's West Indian weather service was, I argue, a project of imperial meteorology that sought to impose a rational scientific and bureaucratic order on a region that American officials considered racially and culturally inferior.

The meteorological infrastructure of American empire in the Caribbean between and consisted of a system of observation and calculation that translated environmental data into predictive knowledge with economic value, as well as an information network that relied on the labor of local observers and meteorological experts. Yet it also restricted public access to daily forecasts and storm warnings in the West Indies, ultimately extracting agricultural and climatological information for the benefit of American investors.

The history of meteorological infrastructures in the West Indies at the turn of the twentieth century reveals interlocking conflicts over military and political power, government authority, and scientific expertise that characterized American expansion on both sides of the globe.

Weather Bureau sought to impose scientific and administrative order on these multiple registers: In its focus on how weather reporting networks aligned with American military, political, and economic aims in the Caribbean, this article follows the historiographical shift away from abstract debates over definitions of empire , emphasizing instead analysis of the imperial as it operates in specific historical contexts. Historians have recently identified the importance of an imperial context for hurricane prediction to histories of state-building and to global environmental history.

Cushman adopts a global framework for the history of hurricane tracking in the nineteenth-century Pacific and the Caribbean from to that demonstrates how hurricane prediction both reflected and transcended geopolitical competition among nation-states. While acknowledging the Atlantic World as the broader geographical framework for the history of hurricanes as well as the longer historical trajectories of natural disaster and hurricane prediction that have shaped the Greater Caribbean, this article focuses more narrowly on the American occupation of Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century in order to analyze the creation and contestation of meteorological infrastructures on the ground.

Weather Bureau's meteorological infrastructure in the West Indies from its creation, which has not previously been acknowledged. This historical connection between weather and crop reporting reflects the interlocking imperatives of humanitarianism and capitalism that structured the American meteorological infrastructure in the West Indies. While sharing Warren's and Cushman's thematic focus on hurricane prediction in the context of imperial expansion, this article uses archival sources to offer a more fine-grained account of imperial meteorology in the West Indies that includes the voices of historical actors who debated the scientific, economic, and geopolitical stakes of hurricane forecasting.

The archival record reveals how American imperial meteorology was met with not only resistance but also negotiation and cooperation on the part of elite Cuban scientists who sought to align themselves with the Weather Bureau as it established an official presence in the region. This map drawn by U. Weather Bureau personnel in June depicts the information networks lines indicate undersea cables linking the islands, and flags indicate stations where hurricane warnings were displayed that were the most crucial component of American meteorological infrastructure in the West Indies during the U.

Military conflict between the United States and Spain, which lasted from late April to mid-August of , ended just as the worst of the hurricane season began. But Weather Bureau chief Willis L. Moore offered a moral explanation for the absence of storms during American naval operations: Weather Bureau's extension into the West Indies took place in the context of turn-of-the-century expansionism, but both the United States and the Weather Bureau had sought an official presence in the region long before. The United States had made formal offers to purchase Cuba, under James Polk in and Franklin Pierce in , and the Weather Bureau had long hoped that its information network would reach into the West Indies, as eminent meteorologist Cleveland Abbe noted in The need of more reports from the West Indies, especially during the hurricane season, was very deeply felt in , and the establishment of regular stations, manned by enlisted men of the Signal Service, was very exceedingly desirable; but this invasion of foreign countries, and especially the transmission of cipher dispatches presented many objections which could only be overcome by international courtesy.

Jamaican magistrate Maxwell Hall had tried unsuccessfully to establish a volunteer International West Indian Service, so the United States relied on hurricane and storm warnings from Havana's Belen College Observatory, and, in the late s, on observations from U. Weather Bureau's network in the early s did not extend throughout the West Indies, and the dissemination of the information it did collect was limited. In , the Bureau's Washington, D.

The Bureau also benefited from an agreement with the Bahamas that allowed free exchange of daily weather reports from Nassau to Jupiter, Florida. Although unpredictable but inevitable hurricanes have been central to the history of the Caribbean—and appeared more numerous after the advent of improved data-gathering in the late eighteenth century—it was not until the late nineteenth century that new methods for hurricane forecasting emerged. Forecasters then used cloud movements to project storm tracks relative to these observations.

It should be clearly understood what is meant by such an expression. The prediction of a hurricane weeks or months before its formation is clearly a thing impossible in the present state of our knowledge. All that can be done is to ascertain the existence and predict the probable course of a cyclone already existing. Weather Bureau's republication of his theories in their own bulletins, but not universally accepted. Especially Those of Porto Rico and St. Kitts , published in Weather Bureau bulletins, not all Bureau officials endorsed his laws of hurricane motion.

As head forecaster E. Reprinted from William H. Government Printing Office, , 19— Weather Bureau official William H. Alexander, stationed at St. Kitts and Puerto Rico at the turn of the century, published a bulletin in in response to widespread demand among navigators for a chart of the typical paths of hurricanes and a set of guidelines for anticipating and navigating storms.

Weather Bureau, , Garriott, the head of the U. Two prominent Cuban residents offered their expertise as the Bureau was beginning to establish its institutional presence: While Gangoiti and Carbonnell were vying for recognition, the Weather Bureau was preparing to build an information network that would rely on local expertise but ultimately locate its authority in its Washington, D. The Weather Bureau's relationships with Gangoiti and Garcia y Carbonnell revealed the imperatives of a centralized bureaucratic order that privileged a distant rather than local authority, while at the same time complicating the framework of imperial power and local resistance, as Cuban elites sought to become part of a new American meteorological infrastructure.

Carbonnell had been making weather observations in Cuba since , and by he was transmitting hurricane season reports from Santiago de Cuba and San Juan to the United States without charge. Beyond recording and transmitting weather observations, Carbonnell offered to broker the purchase of instruments from Spain, hire a local forecaster, and help implement an experimental program involving the use of carrier pigeons to transmit weather data. Carbonnell's major competition was Father Lorenzo Gangoiti of Havana's Belen College Observatory, who made two formal overtures in the winter of , appealing first to fellow Jesuit J.

Buy Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology ( Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology) on Amazon. com ✓ FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders. From Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Weather by the Numbers. The Genesis of Modern Meteorology digital computer; earlier attempts at numerical weather prediction had foundered on the human inability.

Hagen of the Georgetown College Observatory, and then to Moore. For the political interim, Gangoiti proposed that Belen College be designated an official U. Weather Bureau station, citing its many advantages: This competition between local experts posed a logistical and epistemological problem for the Weather Bureau. As head meteorologist Cleveland Abbe wrote to Moore,. The latter is a popular Cuban institution, but the two others … have not the popular support.

Moore's dismissal of Gangoiti reflected the Bureau's imperative for standardization and centralized control of its weather network. Uncertain about the Weather Bureau's role in Cuba under U. The Weather Bureau's Kingston headquarters would be moving to Havana under the oversight of former Kingston forecast official H. Dunwoody and the daily management of Bureau official William B.

The Weather Bureau encountered a range of obstacles—environmental, bureaucratic, and geopolitical—in building its West Indian meteorological infrastructure. The telegraphic cable linking West Indian weather reporting stations was itself a contested entity, given the political geography of the islands. At first the Weather Bureau encountered resistance from a few telegraph company managers who insisted upon prepayment for cables. Another problem involved coordinating the operating hours of West Indian cable offices, most of which closed before 6 p.

The Bureau shifted its evening observation one hour earlier but still could not convince the West India and Panama Telegraph Company to remain open later than 7: He listed the various individuals and institutions that circulated weather reports and hurricane warnings, including sixteen reporting stations under Carbonnell's direction during Spanish rule, the Belen College Observatory, as well as private forecasters and other educational institutions.

Weather Bureau officials in the West Indies relied on reports of local observers to produce forecasts and storm warnings, but, just as they had done in the United States from the s well into the twentieth century, attempted to suppress competition from private forecasters who challenged the Bureau's authority by policing their own infrastructure, the press, and the circulation of unofficial forecasts.

Of course no weather service, however comprehensive or authoritative, can prevent storms, and when hurricanes did form, the Weather Bureau produced predictive storm warnings and retrospective calculations of damage sustained and avoided. Although the Bureau regularly published testimonials to the value of forecasts and storm warnings, hurricanes brought the greatest threat to human life and property and thus the most visible occasion for demonstrating, and sometimes debating, the efficacy of a government weather service.

To take one example, the hurricane that swept from Puerto Rico to Florida between September 28 and October 2, , was preceded by Weather Bureau advisory messages and storm signals from Key West to Norfolk, Virginia. The storm made landfall between Jacksonville and Savannah on October 2, causing widespread damage and loss of life, as crops, livestock, farmland, boats, railroad track, and telegraph lines were destroyed.

Bessey's words would ring true again approximately two years later, when the deadliest hurricane in U.