Tonight, we’ll read excerpts from “Meteorology, The Science of the Atmosphere” by meteorologist Charles Fitzhugh Talman, published in 1922. This episode first aired in April of 2021.

The word meteorology, stemming from the Ancient Greek, means "the study of things high in the air."

Though study of meteorology dates back millennia, significant progress did not occur until the 18th century. Prior attempts at prediction of weather depended on historical data. It was not until after the elucidation of the laws of physics and more particularly, the development of the computer, allowing for the automated solution of a great many equations that model the weather, in the latter half of the 20th century that significant breakthroughs in weather forecasting were achieved.

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