1 Weather Prediction by Numerical Process

Lewis Fry Richardson’s extraordinary book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, published in 1922, is a strikingly original scientific work, one of the most remarkable books on meteorology ever written. In this book—to which we will refer briefly as WPNP—Richardson constructed a systematic mathematical method for predicting the weather and demonstrated its application by carrying out a trial forecast. History has shown that his innovative ideas were fundamentally sound: the methodology proposed by him is essentially that used in practical weather forecasting today. However, the method devised by Richardson was utterly impractical at the time of its publication and the results of his trial forecast appeared to be little short of outlandish. As a result, his ideas were eclipsed for decades and his wonderful opus gathered dust and was all but forgotten.