Malcolm Walker tells the story of the UK's national meteorological service from its formation in 1854 with a staff of four to its present position as a scientific and technological institution of national and international importance with a staff of nearly two thousand. The Met Office has long been at the forefront of research into atmospheric science and technology and is second to none in providing weather services to the general public and a wide range of customers around the world. The history of the Met Office is therefore largely a history of the development of international weather prediction research in general. In the modern era it is also at the forefront of the modelling of climate change. This volume will be of great interest to meteorologists, atmospheric scientists and historians of science, as well as amateur meteorologists and anyone interested generally in weather prediction.

This is a history of the UK's national meteorological service for meteorologists, atmospheric scientists, historians of science, amateur meteorologists.

A history of weather forecasting, and an animated portrait of the nineteenth-century pioneers who made it possible By the 1800s, a century of feverish discovery had launched the major branches of science. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy made the natural world explicable through experiment, observation, and categorization. And yet one scientific field remained in its infancy. Despite millennia of observation, mankind still had no understanding of the forces behind the weather. A century after the death of Newton, the laws that governed the heavens were entirely unknown, and weather forecasting was the stuff of folklore and superstition. Peter Moore's The Weather Experiment is the account of a group of naturalists, engineers, and artists who conquered the elements. It describes their travels and experiments, their breakthroughs and bankruptcies, with picaresque vigor. It takes readers from Irish bogs to a thunderstorm in Guanabara Bay to the basket of a hydrogen balloon 8,500 feet over Paris. And it captures the particular bent of mind—combining the Romantic love of Nature and the Enlightenment love of Reason—that allowed humanity to finally decipher the skies.