Now a days in many parts of the world you can get some idea of what the weather will be today through full costs which depending on where you are can be remarkably accurate So when did Martin weather forecasting begin and what is the science behind it I'll be joined by 2 historians and a forecaster all of them weather experts so stay with us here on the b.b.c. World Service with me Richard Kandel after the news. I'm Stuart Macintosh with the b.b.c. News Hello President Trump has begun a visit to South Korea that's dominated by worries over the North nuclear threat Mr Trump on a tour of East Asia said he and the South Korean president Mon Jay in would work out a strategy for dealing with Pyongyang from Seoul Here's Robin Brant it's a brief visit but perhaps the most symbolic on Donald Trump's 5 country tour of Asia he's already sat down for lunch with some of the American troops stationed here there are over 30000 tomorrow here dresses politicians in this country's national assembly it's all aimed at demonstrating the resilience of a military alliance that has long protected South Korea strength in unity is the message they want to send to Kim Jong un just across the border in the north but there are strains to the President Trump has labeled his South Korean counterpart and a piece the 2 men disagree over a free trade deal the White House wants to renegotiate low here events are being held in Russia to mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution members of the Communist Party now in opposition are celebrating the armed uprising by Lenin's Bolsheviks with a March and rally in Moscow but President Vladimir Putin and his government are playing down the significance of the revolution there are no special events at the Kremlin on what is an ordinary working day. The u.s. Air Force has said it failed to report that Kevin Devon Kelly the man accused of shooting dead 26 people at a church in Texas had a conviction for domestic violence u.s. Officials have also revealed that he sent threatening text messages to his mother in law in the days before the attack James Cook reports Devon Kelly should not have been able to buy a gun because of a conviction for beating his wife and fracturing his stepson skull while in the Air Force and 2012 the Pentagon this investigative we have patent failure to pass on that information to civil authorities the murders in Sutherland Springs and Kelly's suicide after the gun fight and chase ended a life time of violence and anger Investigators say the killer had a grudge against his 2nd wife family some of whom were parishioners at the church a wealthy Japanese woman nicknamed The Black Widow has been sentenced to death for murdering 3 men including one of her husbands Roger Walker reports in a case that gripped Japan prosecutors at Kioto district court accused just sucker caca high 70 of using cyanide to kill her and others she amassed nearly $9000000.00 in payouts some insurance policies she'd made them take out she was said to have had relationships with mostly elderly or sick men always insisting they must be rich and childless caca high refused to speak at the start of her trial but later stunned the court by admitting that she killed her 4th husband in 2013 I was Roger Walker I'm still at McIntosh in London with the world news from the b.b.c. . Reports are coming in of an attack in Afghanistan on a private satellite television station in the capital Kabul I witness says say the men threw grenades and fired guns as they entered the Shamshad t.v. Headquarters they were thought to be more than 100 employees inside the building gunfire is reportedly still being heard there's no information about casualties more than 60 people are now known to have died in Vietnam in the worst flooding the country's seen for years about 20 others are missing floodwaters caused by a typhoon dumping heavy rain of damaged tens of thousands of homes and washed away some roads along Vietnam's south central coast in the town of a UNESCO World Heritage site the floods reached head height the Supremes courts in Papua New Guinea has rejected an application by asylum seekers to restore food supplies water and power to an Australian run detention center which officially closed last week Howell Griffith reports water food and electricity supplies were cut off at the man the center last week with the astray and government insisting the 600 men who remain there should move to alternative centers but the detainees have refused to go insisting they feel unsafe in Papua New Guinea and application on their behalf to resume basic services at the center has now been rejected by the p.m.g. Supreme Court he's trailing government has repeated its demand for the men to move calling on those who've had their asylum claims rejected to return to their home countries scientists in the United States are developing a new method of testing for malaria using a prototype breathalyzer it could offer a cheap and easy alternative to blood tests the breath samples of people with malaria give off a distinctive odor which allows detection of the disease researches say more development is needed but the breathalyzer could become a reliable means of early diagnosis helping to prevent deaths b.b.c. News how did we get from this February we may expect some showers of rain this month or the next. Well the next day after that. Or else we will have a better drive spring to this 15 hours g.m.t. Tomorrow in the village of East Hackney been 80 percent chance of rain temperature of 16 degrees Celsius with an added 2 degrees wind chill humidity of 93 percent and the u.v. Index of one how did we get from not having any reliable way of predicting the weather to an accurate tailor made for cost to replace a small Isabella. I'm Bridget Kendall and today on the forum from the b.b.c. World Service will be tracing the history of weather forecasting. With me a 3 x. But here to share their thoughts on different aspects of Michelle religion with the science of weather forecasting Christine Hopper is a former u.s. Navy Commander in naval oceanographer and now a history professor at Florida State University many of our publications focus on weather forecasting in America Peter gapes was a meteorologist with the British Antarctic Survey on the metal fence here in the u.k. Before becoming one of the best known where the fuel cost has on b.b.c. Radio and television and Peter Moore is a writer and historian with a particular interest in weather discoveries of the 19th century his book The Weather experiment traces the early stages of a scientific understanding of the Earth's atmosphere where. Graeme Badland there are a number of moments in history which could be seen as starting points for the modern scientific weather forecast but for the English sea captain Robert Fitzroy that moment might well have been the arrival of a brief for a shit storm off the coast of modern day Argentina in 829 Peter Moore you describe this moment in your book piece would you read it for as Fitzroy so. Lightning rain and hail almost at once the fragile bark one of a class ridiculed as Coffin Briggs by naval men was helpless in the face of the assault her top masts and been was sheared off along with a 100 full of spiders at one terrifying moment she was pitched back on her beam ends in the rolling sea within a few degrees of capsizing it was only when Fitzroy cut away the best power and small bower anchors that she was brought to the wind and righted by 6 pm just 15 minutes after the storm had hit the worst had passed but not before a 2nd seaman had been lost overboard thank you please remove I'm Captain Robert Fitzroy was an important figure in the history of weather forecasting tell us a bit more about him why was he said he. Fitzroy to some is known as the founding father of British meteorology he was the 1st boss I suppose of the mater office when it was founded in 854 although it had a very different remit than the one it has today's best known probably in popular history is being Charles Darwin's captain on a much bigger kind of strutting character which belies I think more interesting reading of Fitzroy his life which was that he was a pioneering scientist he was a humanist to some extent he really really wanted to leave his mark on history as the pioneer of the weather forecast a term he invented and what is his job entailed the new Mr Logical Department to the Board of Trade which was to become known as the Met Office later what did it entailed he was hired originally really to send out old historical weather archives a to go to places like the observatory zing Greenwich or q. To look through the Naval records abductee and start compile Levy's win maps which would show where the wind blew to particular time during the year so that the merchant fleet really could plot more scientific reach rather than just sailing straight from one port to another and this systematic collection of data is clearly important but what was going on before he started doing this how did people manage to navigate their way through weather gauge what weather to expect weather at sea or sailors or farmers or anyone else well it was a large body of contemporary wisdom which goes from the behavior animals or the appearance of clouds and sky and whatnot and the idea that it could be a science at all was a challenge by some people you know this was the heavens And it just kind of went on as it did and it was capricious that was the weather so that was what Fitzroy was born into this idea of weather being chaotic. He was at the forefront of a movement to try and look for patterns and collect data and see some order if you like but Chris hope it's true isn't it that the new metal system in London where Fitzroy was wasn't the only place taking a more scientific approach in the mid 19th century in the United States to there was a move on the way to produce where the charts for shipping Well that's right Navy Officer Matthew fun tain Mori who unfortunately for him had been injured in an accident and could no longer go to sea had been stuck at a place called the Navy's depot of charts and instruments and this was not a place to be if you were going to be a successful naval officer let's just put it that way and so he needed something to do and so he started looking through the log books and compiling the information that was there that was recorded as as these ships were underway and based on that information he was able to make charts that showed what the prevailing winds were and the prevailing ocean currents were for different times of the year and then he could give these to ships captains and said Ok take a look at this and make sure that your path follows along so that you have winds that are that are blowing you there and that they will have winds that are blowing you back and by the way please bring me the information on how that worked out for you and then he would update his charts and eventually his ideas got to Europe where they were really taken in as being very important I have to tell you that Europeans look at Mori as being a big deal in meteorology more than Americans do they kind of consider him to be like Ok but it was very important to European meteorology and you think he was partly an inspiration to Fitzroy Peter. Really came before Fitzroy and I think what they wanted Fitzroy to do was replicate the success of the night in America a very Britain so this is a kind of very economic driven you know this is not because. People might think of the weather forecast as a humanitarian kind of thing this is the British government wanting to make more money because they want their merchant fleet to get to where they need to go faster though there was another technological advance around this time last night which was also important for the move towards weather forecasting and that was the development of the 1st electrical Telegraph Peter gets How did that help it's all about getting the big picture really I mean weather systems span hundreds of miles dynamic they're moving changing all the time to have any hope of actually predicting where they're going to go next how intense they're going to be you need to get an instance that shot of what the weather is doing at any one moment and that's exactly what the Telegraph allowed all these telegraph stations taking weather observations collating that to one center and then from that you could actually if you could see a storm coming from the west you could see it moving hour by hour you had some hope of warning people head of it of what was actually to come so Peter Moore How was it then that Fitzroy came up with the idea and the phrase weather forecast Well I think you could look back to the old phrases or the old let's call toolkit he had prognosticate which sounds very strange word to us today I mean I'd like to see Peter Gibbs whether probably last not a great deal of you said that would be really good or prediction or prophecy which is even what they were doing something new and they needed a new word to describe it I think it's interesting if you look back to Fitzroy his background as a naval officer and the front of the ship is called the fo'c'sle or the forecastle as it's pronounced I wonder if you just take the last 2 letters of forecastle you come up with forecast and I wonder whether Fitzroy the old sea captain might have been thinking in these terms because you want to something that sounded precise you wanted something which was about a projection into the future and you needed a new term and this was the word he settled on let's just try that one Chris as a former u.s. Navy Commander what you think about that idea Well certainly it would make sense from a navels. Standpoint or for from somebody who spent their whole life at sea which fits right basically had that is the leading edge of the ship and certainly when we're making a forecast we're trying to be at the leading edge of the atmosphere to give people a clue as to what's going on. Ok so that's the word but what was actually happening this was storm warnings here so you we've got the telegraph which appears you know in America and Europe and he 1840 is really kind of becomes more prevalent and it's a network which builds they want you've got this creation of a data network and people start to use it for meteorology rather than using it things like long distance games of chess which was the 1st thing they used before they started to be able to spot the storms as they were coming Ok and then you have a moral obligation or at least you know if you know if you're the person at the end of the Telegraph as Fitzroy was because he did Clayton alist or especially as he being in the storms in the South Atlantic being installed is light and Tema now I think this is a really important point whether Tim was not an abstract thing he's someone who sailed you know for the Straits Miguel and he's had the wind through his hair he's seen how dangerous and how violent it could be this time a lot of people were dying around the British coast just because they had no warning of storms and so this is when you come into the crisis of the moral crisis I suppose which is if you have the information about a storm coming what should you do about it and Fitzroy was very much of the mind that he wanted to do something but Chris Hopper we should remember that Fitzroy wasn't the only one doing this was he Britain wasn't the only country starting to storm warnings I believe the Dutch got there 1st yeah the Dutch started in June of 1860 that was the real debt meterological Institute. I was doing that and I think if you look at Dutch topography which is pretty darn flat and with water coming up around the edges of the country there that it makes sense for them that they would have wanted to have put out warnings and you can contrast that with the French who at the same time were willing to put out observations no other words to report what had been reported to them but they weren't really ready to make forecasts yet well let's come on in the u.k. Then move to so we've had storm warnings for shipping and saying listen fisherman but then the next step is the weather forecasts for the general public do you know when the 1st one was published and why we do it was in the Times on the 1st of August in 1861 Ok And it's important you distinguish it between the storm warnings in the forecast because the storm warnings of course are very specific when there's a storm on the way and people can spot those forecasting as. You know as Chris and peace will tell you it is a lot more complicated and there was a big step from one to the next but I think Fitzroy is reasoning was that one should gathering all this data from your interpret to see whether the storm away but you might as well let the public know the results of your kind of interpretation anyway even if there isn't a storm on the way because then you can tell them you know it's going to be nice weather in Weymouth in the south of England or it's going to be bad weather and Aberdeen in the north that kind of thing and this happened yeah on the 1st of August 1861 well let's hear about 1st published forecasts the 1st time a government institution had issued a weather forecast to their ironically Fitzroy had no official mandate for this and acted purely on his own initiative Peter Gibbs please read it 1st. General weather probable in the next 2 days in the north moderate westerly wind fine in the West moderate southwesterly fine in the selfe fresh westerly fine but I think get away with that. Is you know I'm afraid I'm old enough that it reminds me of for cos I can remember when I was Smoove just shows what a long way things go on interest or in lifetime and actually still quite similar to the shipping forecast that we have in the u.k. Which is a bit of a national institution and still is in the simple form because people need to bear to hear it and actually act on it. One of the most powerful Atlantic storms ever recorded hurricane Amma has been battering the Caribbean Island 70 get you to and then the u.s. National Hurricane Center said winds on the recent Tarakan And of course being able to forecast extreme weather events has always been a priority because the damage they can do but the path towards understanding the science behind them has been anything but smooth these only weather forecasts were essentially trying to find patterns in my day trying to apply them to current situations but in 1004 all that changed when a Norwegian physicist called Bill him back nice published an article which called for a new approach using mathematical calculations to work out a forecast known as numerical weather prediction I mean Chris this was revolutionary wasn't it well it was because here you know us was actually a physicist the was in a meteorologists and he was a rather perturbed that the meteorologists spent a lot of time kind of waving their hands around and not looking to the physics that had to be behind atmospheric motion so he published this paper in $1000.00 No 4 and his suggestion was that if you could figure out what your conditions were at any given time spirit conditions on the Earth's surface so we're talking about air. Sure in temperature primarily at that point and then you could plug that information into the equations of motion that would govern how the air moved whether it's moving across the surface or whether it's moving vertically then you could get into write those equations and move it forward in time and then figure out what the weather was going to be in the future and so although he knew he couldn't do it at the time because they didn't really have the way to handle the equations they're not equations that you can just sit in Solve they have to be they have to be solved what we call numerically as kind of as a sophisticated way of doing guess and check I guess is the easiest way to say it and so consequently he did other graphical techniques to forecast the weather in Norway but that planted the seed for the idea that once they were able to solve these equations then we'd be able to forecast the weather into the future using equations alone the atmospheric processes of a mixed use of a physical mechanical nature. We can describe each of these processes with one or more mathematical equations we will have sufficient knowledge of the laws governing the development of atmospheric process is when we can write enough independent equations to calculate all the unknown quantities it might then be possible that some time in the future a technique of this sort could be put into practical daily weather service use the words of Bill Ham b. Ack nice written in 1004 and translated from the original German by Alan r. Greenberg and a few years later he together with his son Jacobi Arcturus and other scientific collaborators came up with another breakthrough theory in weather science using military terminology to describe what they called weather fronts which we hear a lot about these days not surprisingly is that terminology given this was the time of the 1st World War Peter get to tell us why this is important what we come here to decide day of competing and clashing air masses has an element of conflict and war to it there and what the Norwegians or the Bergen team realized was that all the weather action appeared to happen along that narrow zone where the warm in the cold air actually came together a bit like the zone of trenches between opposing armies in the 1st World War So they called it a front so that's what the front but the crucial thing is as you mentioned the math and physics were actually attached to that so it did give us a working model a predictive model potentially of the life cycle of mid-latitude depressions which essentially something that survives to this day with modifications Yes but that's the basic model that is still used by forecasters and of course the blue and the red the cold and warm fronts you still see today on the t.v. Well the charts and they do really help us understand what's going on I can certainly say that as a non-expert But these equations that they're proposed for weather forecasting were too complicated for the time when they peter more but there was a British mathematician Louis Frye Richardson who during the 1st World War tried to . By the problem how did you get on. Libya is it an extraordinary character Louis for Richardson he worked at the Met Office in about $913.00 just before the war broke out and he was a Quaker and he he didn't want to be involved in the fighting say ended up serving in the ambulance corps I think so not like on the front line but not far away and he kind of exploited the free time that he had to put in process some ideas he had looked collated ideas about weather forecasting and the most interesting thing that you can say about prior Richardson is this vision he had of a forecasting factory and list a very visual architectural kind of imagine a Royal Albert hall filled with computers but not computers in Imax or anything like that computers being people in there all arranged in rows and the middle is the kind of forecaster like the conductor of an orchestra so everyone in the row has a sum to perform they do their arithmetic they pass on to the next person it's a process thing and this was this was Louis private should since idea for a forecasting factory which is not actually too dissimilar to the big sort supercomputers of today really and whilst he was on you know one of the trenches he want to put in practice his ideas for making one of these numerical weather forecasts and he looked back to some of the data that had been collected by the Norwegian school by big nests and he picked a date I think which was the 20th of May 910 and he sat down on his own and he wanted to perform the task of the entire forecasting factory himself and he had a go and it didn't work out but it was a really really interesting experiment. Well it took a couple of decades in another war to put the theories of bitterness and Richardson into practice the 1st big test came at the end of the 2nd World War when they all eyes were planning to land on the beaches of Normandy in fronts this is the b.b.c. Have a service here is a special bowl of him read by John's there. The day has come under the command of General Eisenhower allied naval port is supported by a strong El forces again landing Allied armies the morning on the northern coast the prop the D.-Day landings on the b.b.c. Peter Gibbs what route did the weather forecast play in this important military operation. Well the D.-Day operation was a credibly weather sensitive it needed days around the full moon to get the light it needed low tides coinciding roughly with Dawn so that the German coastal defenses would be exposed you wanted clear skies for aircraft operations and light winds and come see us for the naval operation particularly to be as landing so it was quite a big ass to get all those things together but clearly the weather forecast is going to be absolutely crucial and actually Eisenhower who was in charge of the D.-Day landings was actually fun of weather forecasts because he had had a very positive experience earlier in the war where a forecast actually helped out one of his operations to be successful but he was hedging his bets he had essentially 2 teams of forecasters with different methods one of European team using the Bergen method so the polar front theory another an American team using a very different method a comparative methods are very imperial So looking back in time to the last 50 years where the charts defined situations that were very similar to the ones that were occurring at that time and then you found the one that most matched the current situation and use that to suggest what would happen the next few days so as the day came closer the Americans decided under a very charismatic head of team Irving Crick who was a real big character apparently that history showed the settle Patten was going to continue that it would be fine they could go ahead with the invasion on the 5th the weather would be absolutely perfect but the European team said no no no no we can see out in the Atlantic the something developing that's going to come through on the 5th according to our theories you can have to wait it's going to ease off on the 6th and that should just about be Ok to go ahead so the chap that was overseeing all this Group Captain James stag Aria officer had the horrendous task of actually trying to pull this together and give the correct advice to Eisenhower he decided to go with the science over empiricism he advised a delay and they went on for 6 the weather wasn't perfect by any means but there were gales and heavy cloud cover the previous day so it would have been a disaster so they got away with it. Absolutely fascinating is breathtaking actually avoid by the success of the D.-Day prediction in the 2nd half of the 20th century numerical weather prediction seemed on track to produce a full cost that was 100 percent reliable but things didn't quite turn out that way find out why in the 2nd part of this forum from the b.b.c. World Service join us again after the summer. Distribution of the b.b.c. World Service of the us has made possible by American Public Media producer and distributor of award winning public radio content a.p.m. American Public Media with support from home advisors matching homeowners with background checks professionals for home projects for minor repairs to major remodels see homeowner reviews compare prices and book appointments at Home Advisor dot com. You know I drive junky car Hello this is Nina Totenberg when my husband and I were courting he was really scandalized by my very old Mazda 626 and when we were invited to a state dinner at the White House he said that I should rent a fancier car I review of course it's amazing to think that I kissed her and that dumped cards into my favorite programs go to k. R.c.c. Daughter worki for details. Still to come on the forum changes in weather forecasting in the 20th and 21st centuries the impact of supercomputers to help crunch through the world's weather data and the realisation that inherent unpredictability must be factored into the weather equation if the forecast is to stand a chance of being roughly right still with me our panel of weather historians and forecasters Peter Moore Chris Harper and Peter Gibbs will all be back after the new summary b.b.c. News with Jerry Smit President Trump is on a visit to South Korea Stahmann ated by worries over the North nuclear threat Mr Trump on the latest age of his tour of East Asia said he and the South Korean president moon j.n. Would work out a strategy for dealing with Pyongyang correspondence say both men are talking of unity but there are strains in their relationship an attack is taking place in Afghanistan on a private satellite television station in the capital Kabul I wouldn't say men threw grenades and fired guns at the Shamshad t.v. Headquarters reports say gunfire is still being heard shares in Japan have had their highest level for more than 25 years unless a markets have been encouraged by the Prime Minister Shinzo our base recent landslide election victory and confirmation of Japan's strong alliance with the u.s. During President Trump's visit low key events are being held in Russia to mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution members of the Communist Party now in opposition are celebrating the armed uprising by Lenin's Bolsheviks with a March in Moscow but President Putin and his government are playing down the significance the u.s. Air Force has acknowledged had failed to report the man accused of shooting dead 26 people at a church in Texas had a conviction for domestic violence this would have made it illegal to sell or give him a weapon. Campaigners are challenging the right of intelligence agents in Britain to harvest huge amounts of personal data from ordinary citizens the European Court of Human Rights will consider the landmark case. And a wealthy Japanese woman nicknamed The Black Widow has been sentenced to death for murdering 3 men including one of her husbands in a case that gripped Japan Prosecutors accused. Of using cyanide to kill her lovers amassing $9000000.00 b.b.c. News Welcome back to the forum from the b.b.c. World Service I'm Bridget cannot and today I'm joined by 3 weather experts to talk about the history of forecasting weather will have some shine or rain or perhaps even a storm tomorrow they are historians Chris Harper and Peter Moore and forecaster Peter Gibson. We followed the story until the end of the 2nd World War when scientists proved that mathematics is the key to an accurate weather forecast the next step in producing a better forecast was to get computers to crunch through all those equations and mountains of data gathered from where the office of patients the 1st successful computer forecast was produced in the United States in 1950 the computation time for a 24 hour forecast was about 24 hours that is we were just able to keep pace with the weather however much of this time was consumed by manual operations mainly by their breeding printing reproducing sorting and interviewing of punch cards. In the course of for 24 hour forecasts about 100000 standard punch cards were produced and $1000000.00 multiplications and divisions were performed with a larger capacity and higher speed machine than an arithmetical operations will be eliminated and the arithmetical operations before and more quickly so that one has reason to hope that Richardson's dream of advancing the computation faster than the weather may soon be realized and accept from the paper published by the team behind the 1st computer generated to cost reporting back out of the work of British mamma Titian Lewis fry Richard some $3.00 decades earlier which was the inspiration and he really was a team which included at least 4 meteorologists one celebrated mathematician Joan for Norman and also computer program as including one Norman's wife Klara Don Von Neumann in fact he was Klara the best known woman on the team who took the others how to use the computer but we don't hear much about it these days Chris Hopper why not well the people who were the programmers whether it was Clara or Norma Gelbard who was one of the other women programmers on the team basically faded into the background I mean the whole story revolved around making the model and not so much how it was coded and put together so consequently those people just became ancillary to the project when most of the histories were being were being run and all the focus was on the meteorologists who were figuring out which equations they could use and how much of those equations had to be in the model to make the answer come out the way they wanted it competing with these 1st computer fuel costs went actually well that could have a well I think you've touched on it in the exit the idea that there was so much manual work which had to go into producing these things I had done I think this is right the met office his 1st computer was. Borrowed from Jay lines t.v. Rooms believe it or not which must be a kind of peak English thing but even though the outcomes weren't so successful at this time a lot of the work that went into putting these programs together and running these models was fundamental to the science that we have today this was really really crucial think Peter Gibbs clearly the computing ability of these early machines was limited and therefore led to oversimplification for example I think this seems that the atmosphere was just one single lead to what was the point at which we started to have more realistic models you know I would say probably about the time that I came into forecasting in the early to mid eighty's that felt like about the time when numerical weather predictions were beginning to take over as the the main tool in the forecasters tool box but you know even then the Met Office supercomputer only had about a 5th of the power of the smartphone that's in my pocket today so it was still relatively limited but since then of course we've seen computer increase exponentially and that's allowed the models to get much much more complex as they have that's also been able to incorporate results from research to actually looking at how weather systems work booking at the fine detail of that if you can produce a more fine detail model then you can actually incorporate these more complex systems into it and the models are used today it's a whole Earth system simulation essentially things like soil type of vegetation cover going to it even things like whether the leaves are still on the trees are not because all that has an impact on the atmospheric water cycle which of course is what weather is all about is about water moving in the atmosphere producing clouds producing rain snow so fast forwarding today if you take the u.k. Met Office just how big and powerful and fast a computer do they need give us a sense of what are some of the numbers here because the metal has just taken delivery last year of a new toy supercomputer a Cray. X c 40 and it can do $14000.00 trillion calculations per 2nd that's more than $2000000.00 per 2nd for every man woman and child on the planet it's got going on for half a 1000000 processor cores so these are sort of fast the versions of the things you find in your average laptop and it has to store a vast amount of data as well so the storage capacity is equivalent to what you could store 100 years worth of h.d. Movies on is just mind boggling stuff and all that has to before it can even run a forecast incorporate vast amounts of observations because you have to have a starting point a picture of what the atmosphere is doing now to bear to run it ahead into the future it's that old adage garbage in garbage out if you don't have a good starting point you won't get a good forecast no matter how complex your models are no matter how big the computers are so that's a key part of the whole equation what we're talking about it lean in the early morning the last. Quarter and a. Chance to shower in the afternoon. With a very. Good of the week. But the story of weather forecasting interesting me isn't just a story of bigger and more powerful computers that can crunch more data in the 1960 s. Along came a development that put paid to the idea that the profit forecast was simply a matter of having an even bigger computer Chris Hopper tell us about the work of the mathematician Edward Lawrence in chaos theory well what Lawrence discovered one day while he was running a shorter version of a model on what we would call a laptop computer for a lack of a better term he discovered that just a slight change in an initial value produced a radically different solution to the atmospheric. Problem Now this was a severe problem for meteorologists because as Peter was explaining the whole idea was that you would have your initial values she would dump them into your model it would turn around all this information in the model and then it would give you the weather forecast that was going to be the accurate weather forecast and then Lorenzo said not so fast because if I can have a change in an initial value that is you know 4 decimal points to the right of what the answer was and that gives me something radically different we're never going to have observations that are that finely tuned and we're never going to have enough of them so as most everybody probably knows there isn't an observation station in everybody's backyard that's beaming information back to a central data repository they're scattered all over the earth and so consequently he had to remind people it doesn't matter necessarily how good your model is and it doesn't matter how big your computer is it's all going to depend on those initial value conditions and they're not always going to be perfect and since they're not always going to be perfect you're not going to get a perfect forecast at the end and this is what led to the Thomas core inflation not by him but by someone else in 172 the bus a fly effect wasn't it described this chaos theory I actually talked to Fessor Lorenzo about this a number of years ago and asked him you know how he did how he had come up with this idea and he said well I just want to tell you that in my 1st explanation I use eagle's wings and not butterfly wings and I said Ok well that's right remember that but essentially that that any small movement in the atmosphere will trigger could trigger a bigger movement someplace else and so he was he. It was addressing what if you had butterflies that all took flight somewhere in the Amazon basin would that have been a fact and his answer was actually it would because the atmosphere is chaotic Yes we can do things in a laboratory that are carefully controlled but the atmosphere is not carefully controlled it's a chaotic space and so any small movement someplace else could trigger a big result in another place and it might not be exactly what you want I think the talk that Lawrence gave in 1902 was called Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas that kind of encapsulates this in that you know it sure does so Peter Gibbs what do you mean forecast as to now then to get round this inherent uncertainty that he pinpoint it. Well try to get the starting conditions as close to reality as possible but even that doesn't solve everything we use a technique called ensemble forecasting So essentially you change the starting conditions vary slightly and you run the forecast again and then you change again a little bit and you've done it again and you do that perhaps 4050 times and you have a look at what results you get and sometimes all the results you get all look fairly similar even out to say $45.00 days ahead other times they all start to diverging really very quickly maybe even if after 2448 hours which means the the atmosphere is in a rather more volatile state. It may not sound that useful but actually what it does is allow you to assign a level of confidence to your full cast so if everything's looking similar to 5 days from your son before Cassie can say well you know worries me confident that this is how it's going to go even if things diverging wildly still useful to somebody to say the full custody is very uncertain you going to need to keep checking back on this one to see how it develops over the next couple of days. There are. Groups flying back over the building where a lot of robot homes that had just virtually word they were using program and when the tornado came through the ringer it would 3 push of a tornado in the United States and Chris for the United States Ali tornado warnings remain one of the holy grails of who crossing did they were why they say it difficult to predict if you're looking at forecasting tornadoes on a modeling basis models are put together so that there is information on a grid Ok so that if you're grid as being like a fishing net and that fishing net is built so that you can capture the fish that you want which tend to be the larger fish and the smaller fish slip through well unfortunately in weather forecasting tornadoes are really small compared to the model grid and so consequently they slip through and we really don't want the tornadoes to slip through we'd really like to be able to figure out when they're going to hit so the main problem is that we're never going to have a model with a small enough grid that it's going to be able to capture all of those points that would help us with the tornado forecasts me now we can we can look at overall conditions so we know for instance that if we've got colder air that's moving down across the central United States and we have warm moist air that's moving up from the Gulf of. Soko in those 2 things going to collide that will have really rapid upward movement and the development of clouds that can then spawn tornadoes so we're looking at it kind of on a larger scale the conditions that can spawn the tornadoes but then it's very difficult to figure out exactly where that tornado is going to touchdown but often across getting back to a more accurate I would say they are I mean they've been helped a lot by the presence of Doppler weather radar with the Doppler weather radar if we can look for something we call a hook echo and the hook echo is giving you a signature that there is turning in the atmosphere and that it's it it's likely going to be rapid turning and then we can spot those indications and then let people know Ok this line of really bad weather is moving into your area and it's likely to be there with them so many minutes and you need to take special precautions. Just. Not it's not everywhere in the world that the quality of weather forecasts this improving piece of Gibson parts of Africa is actually to to rage in recent decades hasn't Why's that. It's quite simply dense resources money essentially it's expensive to run observation network infrastructure for effect a full cost advantage for services as well the budgets just there I mean across the whole African continent there's only something like 300 reliable weather stations operating at the moment we have a similar number across a small country like the u.k. So it really is a serious gap in the data and that then feeds into less accurate wonderful concept it's a simple as that and yet the same time you have Africa which is hugely dependent on running Fed aquaculture it's mainly smallholder farmers. They don't have access to forecast information aid programs for house come along and help to set up infrastructures but it's time limited projects usually so the money runs out and then everything starts to revert to where it was so what's the best way to remedy this situation is it to build more weather station yes ideally and improve the infrastructure as far as communications is concerned as well but paradoxically the demand for weather data across Africa is actually increasing for commercial use We've got insurance companies we've got agribusiness renewable power mobile phone from corporations they're all looking for weather data and it's not there I'm actually working with a social enterprise called coup which is really for grow which is developed a robust automatic weather station which is being rolled out where there's a commercial requirement for the observations the profits then get plowed back into providing a simple forecast service for smallholder farmers which is usually through text messages but that commercial model means it's sustainable within a given area resilient but it's also done in conjunction with the national weather services so they benefit because they get weather observation networks it helps improve their forecast infrastructure as well and it's particularly important in terms of resilience to climate change because the seasonal rains are becoming more erratic farmers can be caught out by false starts the rain arrives no nothing falls again for a couple of weeks of the seeds just die when they come up or get washed out by to ensure downpours which they don't see coming either it's interesting we're seeing a lot of increased commercialization of weather services around the globe and particularly in developed parts of the world there's a company recently just launched its own fleet of weather satellites which it's selling the data from to the American national forecast service but I think the biggest game changer is that some of the big i.t. Companies like i.b.m. Panasonic and now developing their. Weather models to run on their own supercomputers so taking over the role that up to now has only been performed by national services by governments so it's really interesting to see where that's going to go what then is the official weather forecast when you have private companies producing stuff that is almost identical to what's being produced by National Weather Service says sadly this is all we've got time for here on the forum today but as the weather is always with us there's lots more to discuss and discover for instance if you want to find out how weather influences your health look for the crowd science program on b.b.c. World Service dot com But for me Bridget Kandel have a good day whatever the weather brings where you are. B.b.c. B.b.c. . B.b.c. World Service a new sporting witness today we're off to the 10 pin bowling alleys of the USA Now the story of the 1st woman to compete alongside men in the professional game Adrian Morehead has been talking to Kelly Kulick. It's 2006 and at the bowling alley in Maryville Indiana Kelly Kulick is trying to become the 1st female bowler to qualify for the men's professional told at the end of the day whether I qualified 1st or qualify Ken It did not matter to me all that mattered was that I had a chance to do my job for a year against the best bowlers in the world to come. I said in my career over time when it comes to beating everybody it's not beating girls it's not beating boys or men or women it's just I want to be the best at my level that I could possibly be Kelly Kulick grew up in the working class town of uni in New Jersey where her father run a car repair shop she remembers always being competitive I was what you would call a tomboy growing up anything really I saw that interest me I was want to conquer it and be great at it I basically just signed up for bowling on a Saturday as a whim and fell in love with it and you also helped in your father's carriage mainly it was just to build a closer relationship with my father and it's simple stuff Anderson bumpers I can rotate around tartan changed my own oil so that has some benefits I can definitely be one of the guys I just want to try to maintain my femininity I still want to come across as a professional athlete but also as a young lady as a young woman I still enjoy putting on dresses and walking in heels from time to time but I don't mind getting my hands muddy or dirty either Kelly bowled competitively at university before joining the American women's bowling talk where the talent was spotted by Jason Thomas of the. Special Bowlers Association you knew that she was going to be a star on the tour very shortly into her career the women's tour ceased operations so it basically took away her opportunity to kind of fill her destiny as one of the great bowlers in the sport but the demise of the women's tour proved to be a blessing in disguise a few years later the men's top agreed that women could join the circuit if they could get through a grueling week of qualification in 20042005 Kevvy tried but failed so I could see 1006 be the year to be 3rd time lucky it started to feel that white in early June when Kelly was on the long drive to Indiana. I put in a couple C.D.'s of just like Martina McBride Brooks and Dunn I was just trying to find some motivational music and the entire rest of the trip there I just visually saw myself making the tour Don't ask me how I came into that moment pacifically but those extra last few hours of driving in the dark and just keeping my mind focused on getting to Merrillville Indiana where the trials take place I was just seeing myself making it it was really grueling event basically if it was golf would be like playing on 5 different golf courses and so they competed for a week and the top 10 out of a field of about I think it was about 140 made it into the next year's tour. When you're bowling the pins to not recognize gender the playing field this is even for everyone in the bowling ball weight is the same the lane distance is the same there there's no difference within our sport other than males and generally stronger than females. With any negative reactions to women being given the chance to qualify in the men's 2 I think there was a little it's like in any sport there's there's a little bit of a battle of the sexes element to it where men want to establish and keep hold of their suppose it's a period or 80 it's probably a very small group but it's a very vocal group. Many of the men at the qualification itself were very kind very generous it's not like I was somebody off the street that was bowling for the 1st time they knew who I was they knew how close I'd been in the past I think regardless of what their feelings were off the lanes everybody was was a good sport for the week of the week once all Kelly stayed in contention to qualifying for the final day so while I was actually in the top 5 going into the last day and on the last pattern I struggled immensely on it. When the strikes are coming you tend to get into that zone it becomes more freer becomes become more relaxed and you're able just to allow your muscle memory to take over and do what your body has done for 20 years to compare it to golf even if it's a 3 foot putt and you're trying to win the u.s. Open it's still a nerve racking but I managed to shoot a perfect game that day. By finishing 6th in a field of 140 mostly male competitors Kelly Kulick made sporting history for the 1st time in professional bowling a woman Bowl in every event 20062007 men's title. Really what I recall the most is driving home at the 10 hour drive back to Pennsylvania My boyfriend was driving and the amount of phone calls I received driving home and he looked over to me in the in the passion she goes to realize what you just did and nonchalantly I just said no not really am I I made the tour I I know what I achieved for myself I didn't realize globally what I achieved for women in general. Although Kelly continued to win the respect of male bowlers she did not have a successful season in the men's tool but in 2010 Kelly got another opportunity when she qualified for the elite tolerance of champions a 6 day competition featuring the best of the best and 10 pin bowling Thanks Rick for in Las Vegas Nevada at Red Rock wings and after the 1st game I think I was 2nd to the bottom but one of my other friends at home said you know when you got a bonus event you have nothing to lose no one's expecting you to do well no one to expect you to do poorly he just can go into this event with like hey this is a free event it was an automatic paycheck at the time go in and make the best situation you. Was I just started to get better to do what I do kind of getting in that zone and finding the routine and next thing you know I was climbing along the scoreboard scores are getting higher Jason Thomas was in the comments of the fact that I was covering the event for e.s.p.n. So I was in very close proximity to both Kelly and the fans. The fans clearly wanted Kellie to do well but I think there was this feeling that at some point in the tournament she was going to falter you know in bowling the fans are in very close proximity to the athletes and they're saying things like I hope she makes it but I don't think she's going to be able to do it and I just couldn't believe some of the things that they were saying and I also couldn't believe that Kelly couldn't hear them it was amazing to me to see her zone in and not have that affect her because she actually had to put on her best performance in the last couple of games just to make it into the t.v. Finals and that's when the pressure was at its greatest you know any other athlete probably would've folded I think still lots Kelly made it to the televised final of the Tournament of Champions she was matched up against former champion Chris Barnes and Kelly remembers the moment she made history for the 2nd time by not just competing alongside men but by beating them that last round of 8 when I started to make my move and to start bowling higher scores 242-7977 the energy in that room was unlike I have ever experienced before in a bowling center every shot I threw They threw with me every stroke I struck they struck with me it was it was magnifying. That victory to be at the show for the teen girl power in the audience I said you know Elaine that's a mash I said in the world of sports I mean in that that was magical. I would say in the come to votes when the j.c. There were quite a few yeah. For me it was more about. The idea that you could accomplish anything I just thought it was such an inspirational story but really deserved probably more attention than it even got Kelly enjoyed the moment the only woman in a field of 64 had beaten the greatest bowlers in the world I've made a career when as a woman you should have and I've still been able to make a living at it so it's been good to me I think women in general are still considered a small minority and I want to be treated fairly That's all that's all I look to to achieve is just to be respected and treated fairly. Talking to Morehead for sporting witness the program was a sparkler production for b.b.c. World Service You're listening to the b.b.c. World news on to Southern Colorado n.p.r. Station broadcast sun $91.00 f.m. From our studios in Colorado Springs Colorado you can also hear cares you see in the following communities 88.5 f.m. In West Cliff and Gardner 89 point one f.m. In La Hunter 89.9 f.m. In Lyman 90 point one f.m. 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World Service with Lawrence Pod And our top story this hour more revelations about how the rich and powerful shelter their wealth in tax havens around the world today we're looking at tech giant Apple Formula One star Lewis Hamilton and mining conglomerate also the British foreign secretary Forrest Johnson is facing mounting pressure to correct comments he made about a jailed British woman in Iran we've been speaking to her husband and conservationists are celebrating the arrival of a baby job and given We'll tell you why in this half hour I'm Larry King with the business news in the computer chip industry could be in line for a massive shake up of a proposed mega ahead and it's Moises set to attend the Premier League Management in the a.t.p. Apologizes over that. All of that coming up after the latest world news. Hello I'm Gerri Smith with the b.b.c. News President Trump has begun a visit to South Korea that is dominated by worries over the North's nuclear program Mr Trump on the latest stage of his tour of East Asia said he and the South Korean president moon j.n. Would work out a strategy for dealing with Pyongyang more from a limit Bo who's traveling with Mr Trump one of the major objectives of the whole of Donald Trump's lengthy Asia tour is to increase pressure on John Yang and no leg of it is meant to do that more than this but unlike the 1st part of this trip where Japan Shinzo are big gushed about his close relationship with Mr Trump and where there was obvious consensus about taking a tough approach to North Korea here matters a more delicate There is no the snow is about the u.s. President rattling of the North Korean cage and South Koreans will be hoping for a sense Donald Trump appreciates what's at stake for them and bluntly the lives could be lost here in any conflict shares in Japan have had their highest level for more than 25 years after.