For centuries our only real guide to future weather was folklore, but with the introduction of the first weather forecasts and maps in Victorian times, attempts were made to give some warning of the weather to come.
Until relatively recently, these forecasts could be wildly inaccurate - consider Michael Fish's denial that a storm was on its way on the eve of the Great British Storm of 1987. This was due to the mathematically chaotic nature of weather systems, first discovered in the 1960s, the understanding of which would transform forecasting from the 1990s onwards and see meteorologists become some of the first users of supercomputers.
Weather Science (2024) explores the science behind weather patterns, the role of mathematical chaos in weather forecasting and the use of supercomputers in meteorology.
