Timeline of meteorology

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Early events

• 350 BC - Aristotle wrote Meteorology.
• 25 - Pomponius Mela formalizes the climatic zone system.
• 1620 - Francis Bacon (philosopher) analyzes the scientific method in his Great Instauration of Learning.
• 1686 - Edmund Halley presents a systematic study of the trade winds and monsoons and identifies solar heating as the cause of atmospheric motions.
• 1686 - Edmund Halley establishes the relationship between barometric pressure and height above sea level.
• 1714 - Gabriel Fahrenheit creates reliable scale for measuring temperature with a mercury-type thermometer.
• 1716 - Edmund Halley suggests that aurorae are caused by "magnetic effluvia" moving along the Earth's magnetic field lines.
• 1735 - The first essentially correct explanation of global circulation was the study by George Hadley of the Trade winds.
• 1738 - Daniel Bernoulli publishes Hydrodynamics, initiating the kinetic theory.
• 1742 - Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, proposed the Centigrade temperature scale which led to the current Celsius scale.
• 1772 - Black's student Daniel Rutherford discovers nitrogen, which he calls phlogisticated air, and together they explain the results in terms of the phlogiston theory.
• 1783 - Antoine Lavoisier discovers oxygen and develops an explanation for combustion; in his book Reflexions sur le phlogistique, he deprecates the phlogiston theory and proposes a caloric theory.

19th century

• 1820 - John Herapath develops some ideas in the kinetic theory of gases but mistakenly associates temperature with molecular momentum rather than kinetic energy; his work receives little attention other than from Joule.
• 1822 - Joseph Fourier formally introduces the use of dimensions for physical quantities in his Theorie Analytique de la Chaleur.
• 1835 - Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis publishes theoretical discussions of machines with revolving parts and their effiency, for example the efficiency of waterweels. At the end of the 19th century, meteorologists recognized that the way the Earth's rotation is taken into account in meteorology is analogous to what Coriolis discussed: an example of Coriolis Effect.
• 1842 - Elias Loomis performed an experiment to gain insight into the wind speed needed to defeather a chicken. He loaded a cannon with gun powder and a chicken.
• 1843 - John James Waterston fully expounds the kinetic theory of gases, but is ridiculed and ignored.
• 1843 - James Joule experimentally finds the mechanical equivalent of heat.
• 1847 - Hermann von Helmholtz publishes a definitive statement of the conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics.
• 1849 - William John Macquorn Rankine calculates the correct relationship between saturated vapour pressure and temperature using his hypothesis of molecular vortices.
• 1850 - Rankine uses his vortex theory to establish accurate relationships between the temperature, pressure, and density of gases, and expressions for the latent heat of evaporation of a liquid; he accurately predicts the surprising fact that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam will be negative.
• 1860 - Robert FitzRoy uses the new telegraph system to gather daily observations from across England and produces the first synoptic charts. He also coined the term "weather forecast" and his were the first ever daily weather forecasts to be published in this year.
• 1860 - 500 U.S. telegraph stations are making weather observations and submitting them back to the Smithsonian Institution. The observations are later interrupted by the Civil War.
• 1869 - Joseph Lockyer starts the scientific journal Nature.
• 1890 - Weather Bureau is created as a civilian operation under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• 1898 - Weather Bureau established a hurricane warning network in the West Indies.

20th century

• 1900 - Hurricane strikes Galveston, Texas, killing over 6,000 people.
• 1920 - Milutin Milanković proposes that long term climatic cycles may be due to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and changes in the Earth's obliquity.
• 1922 - Lewis Fry Richardson lays the mathematical foundation for numerical weather prediction.
• 1925 - "Tri-State Tornado" runs through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana killing 695 people.
• 1935 - Robert Watson-Watt and his assistant Arnold Wilkins published a report in February 1935, titled The Detection of Aircraft by Radio Methods.
• 1935 - The "Great Labor Day Hurricane" kills 408 people. It is rated as the most intense Category 5 Atlantic hurricane to make landfall.
• 1934 to 1937 - The Dust Bowl drought of the US plains region causes harsh economic damage.
• 1937 - Army Air Forces Weather Service was established (redesignated in 1946 as AWS-Air Weather Service).
• 1941 - Pulsed radar network is implemented in England during WWII.
• 1948 - First correct tornado prediction by R. C. Miller and E. J. Fawbush.
• 1950 - Hurricanes begin to be named alphabetically with the radio alphabet.
• 1951 - WMO World Meteorological Organization established by the United Nations.
• 1953 - National Hurricane Center (NOAA) creates a system for naming hurricanes using alphabetical lists of women's names.
• 1955 - NSSP National Severe Storms Project established.
• 1956 - The Weather Bureau creates the National Hurricane Research Project.
• 1957-1958 - International Geophysical Year coordinated research efforts in eleven sciences, focused on polar areas during the solar maximum.
• 1962 - Keith Browning and Frank Ludlam publish first detailed study of a supercell storm (over Wokingham, UK).
• 1969 - Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale created, used to describe hurricane strength on a category range of 1 to 5.
• 1969 - Hurricane Camille, the second Category 5 hurricane to make US landfall causes $1.4 billion in damage.
• 1970 - NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established. Weather Bureau is renamed the National Weather Service.
• 1971 - Ted Fujita introduces the Fujita scale for rating tornadoes.
• 1975 - The first Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES, was launched into orbit. Their role and design is to aid in hurricane tracking.
• 1980 - Mount St. Helens erupts explosively in Washington State.
• 1988 - WSR-88D type weather radar implemented in the United States. Weather surveillance radar that uses several modes to detect severe weather conditions.

21st century

• 2003 - NOAA hurricane experts issue first experimental Eastern Pacific Hurricane Outlook.
• 2004 - A marked increase in tropical storm formations in the Atlantic and Caribbean basins.
• 2005 - Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita give devastating 1-2 punch to already hurting U.S. Gulf coast region from previous year's hurricane landfall damages.he:היסטוריה של המטאורולוגיה

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