September 2022 - Richard Whitaker: From Gods to Gigabytes - A Brief History of Weather Forecasting
Speakers
Richard (Dick) Whitaker is an Australian meteorologist and author. Whitaker is currently the Chief Meteorologist on The Weather Channel, following his esteemed thirty-year career as a meteorologist with the Bureau of Meteorology.
His presentation traces the fascinating story of humanity's love affair with the weather - together with the strong desire to predict it. Many different forecasting methods have been tried down the ages such as using prayer and sacrifice to the Sky Gods, observing the behaviour of plants and animals, looking at cloud patterns and in more recent times using science, technology and mathematics as the main forecasting tools.
Modern weather prediction is one of the more recent scientific endeavours. Mathematical weather forecasting is barely 100 years old and has made astonishing progress in such a short time. We can now predict the weather far more accurately than ever before and the story of how we reached this point has involved inspiration, communication and calculation. Dick enlightened us on this interesting journey - one of the great philosophical and practical triumphs of human achievement.