Page:Lawhead columbia 0054D 12326.pdf/117

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for weather forecasting, while the question of how the Earth’s changing axis of rotation contributes to ice ages is clearly a question for climatology—but many questions will be of interest to both disciplines, and there is bound to be significant overlap in both topic and method.

It is worth pointing out, as a brief historical aside, that this reunification is a relatively recent event. Until recently (as late as the middle of the 20th century), the study of climate fell into three largely independent camps: short-term weather forecasting, climatology, and theoretical meteorology. Practical forecasting and climatology were almost purely descriptive sciences, concerned solely with making accurate predictions without concern for the mechanisms behind those predictions. Weather forecasts in particular were devoid of any theoretical underpinnings until well into the 20th century. The most popular method for forecasting the weather during the first part of the 20th century involved the use of purely qualitative maps of past weather activity. Forecasters would chart the current state to the best of their ability, noting the location of clouds, the magnitude and direction of prevailing winds, the presence of precipitation, &c. Once the current state was recorded on a map of the region of interest, the forecasters would refer back to past charts of the same region until they found one that closely resembled the chart they had just generated. They would then check to see how that past state had evolved over time, and would base their forecast of the current situation on that past record. This turned forecasting into the kind of activity that took years (or even decades) to become proficient in; in order to make practical use of this kind of approach, would-be forecasters had to have an encyclopedic knowledge of past charts, as well as the ability to make educated guesses at how the current system might diverge from the most similar past cases[1]. Likewise, climatology at the time was

  1. For a detailed discussion of the evolution of the science of forecasting, see Edwards (2010)