Shuman, Frederick G.

Office note (National Meteorological Center (U.S.)) ; 198

National Weather Service (NWS)

"Today's large electronic computers are absolutely essential to modern weather forecasting. Not only did the era of modern weather forecasting open with the invention of the stored-program electronic computer, but the subsequent developments of public weather forecast services were paced by advances in computer technology and continue to be. On June 10, 1952, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., announced the successful development of the first stored-program electronic computer. John Louis von Neumann had designed the logic of the system, whose fundamentals are still to be found in today's large computers. Three years after the public announcement of von Neumann's computer, the U.S. Government acquired one of the first commercial stored-program electronic computers, an IBM 701, and by the summer of 1955 was producing numerical weather predictions on an operational twice-daily schedule. Rapid development of this new scientific discipline followed. It remains a field of rapid advances, and has revolutionized the public weather forecast services"--Introduction.