Page 186 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

9
and to “keep a diary of the weather.” For the next six decades, the Army Medical
Department continued its support for meteorology by observing, recording, and
analyzing airs, waters, and places for the protection of the health of the troops. In
the 1830s, the U.S. Navy also initiated a program to collect meteorological data
at navy yards and aboard its ships. As discussed earlier, the army and navy sup-
ported James Espy’s storm studies in the 1840s and 1850s while simultaneously
downplaying his weather control eccentricities. Not long after, Charles Le Maout
and Generals Edward Powers and Daniel Ruggles developed their notions about
cannonading leading to disturbed weather and enhanced rainfall.
Between 1870 and 1891, the U.S. Army Signal office administered the national
weather service, providing daily weather reports and forecasts for the benefit of
commerce and agriculture. Linked to Washington by military and commercial
telegraph networks, the weather service served as a national surveillance force
reporting to the government on a variety of threats to the domestic order, such
as striking railroad workers, Indian uprisings on the frontier, locust outbreaks,
10
and natural hazards to transportation, commerce, and agriculture. In World
War I, meteorology took on new roles in warfare. Knowledge of lift, lob, and loft
was needed for planes, shells, and poison gas, all of which rode the air currents.
Meteorologists developed principles of battlefield climatology as they advised on
how to launch and possibly survive poison gas attacks. In the newly minted field
of aeronomy, or the study of conditions in the upper atmosphere, data collection
from balloons, airships, and airplanes supported reconnaissance flights, the siting
of aerodromes, and computations of the ballistic wind needed for long-distance
artillery shelling. one proposal suggested using wind currents to carry balloons
over enemy territory so that they might drop propaganda leaflets. As discussed
earlier, with the rise of aviation, a desire to alter the weather, especially fogs, for
the benefit of pilots got under way under military patronage. 11
During World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy trained
approximately 8,000 weather officers, who were needed for bombing raids, naval
task forces, and other special and routine operations worldwide. Personnel of the
army’s Air Weather Service (AWS), an agency that was nonexistent in 1937, num-
bered 19,000 in 1945. Even after demobilization, the AWS averaged approximately
11,000 soldiers during the cold war and Vietnam eras. In 1954 a National Science
Foundation (NSF) survey of 5,273 professional meteorologists in America revealed
that 43 percent of them were still in uniform on active duty, 25 percent held Air
Force Reserve commissions, and 12 percent were in the Navy Reserve. Thus almost
a decade after World War II, 80 percent of American meteorologists still had mili-
tary ties. Postwar meteorology also benefited from new tools such as radar, elec-
tronic computers, and satellites provided by or pioneered by the military. 12

WeatHer WarriorS | 169