How We Measure The Weather: A Brief History And Where We’re Going Next

Since the enlightenment time period, scholars have been recording how the weather changes and developing better instruments for more precise measurements. During the industrial revolution, manufacturers made the availability of weather instruments affordable to a larger number of observers, thus basic automatic recording systems became available. In the early-mid 20th century, spurred by the data available from weather stations, advancements in weather forecasting grew, as did the importance of forecasts and accurate data for the efficiency of society. In the past 50 years, instrumentation technology has been mastered to a degree that makes accurate weather instrumentation and weather stations ubiquitous. But with that ubiquity comes data accuracy uncertainty and the loss of humans, who are willing to diligently monitor the instrumentation. In this presentation, we’ll talk about the history of weather instrumentation and data, why we are losing the continuity of some of our most valuable datasets, how we’re moving the monitoring of weather from analog to digital, and the challenges and risks associated with that process. We’ll also look to the future and see how distributed networks, coupled with global monitoring from aerial and space based assets, can help fill in the gaps and create a global weather monitoring framework.