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The Weather
Through human history, weather has altered the march of events and caused some mighty cataclysms. Since Columbus did not know where he was going or where he had arrived when he got there, the winds truly deserve nearly as much credit as he for the discovery of America. Ugly westerlies helped turn the 1588 Spanish Armada away from England in a limping panic. Napoleon was done in twice by weather: once by the snow and cold that forced his fearful retreat from Moscow, later by the rain that bedevilled him at Waterloo and caused Victor Hugo to write: "A few drops of water ... an unseasonable cloud crossing the sky, sufficed for the overthrow of a world." In 1944 the Allied invasion of Normandy was made possible by a narrow interval of reasonably good weather between the bad. It was so narrow, in fact, that Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower later expressed gratitude to "the gods of war". Paganism dies hard.
Every year brings fresh reminders of the weather's power over human life and events in the form of horrifying tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. These leave behind forgettable statistics and unforgettable images of devastated towns and battered humanity that can only humble people in the face of such wrath. Farmers often suffer the most, from the drought and plagues of biblical times to the hailstorms or quick freezes that even today can wipe out whole crops in minutes. Icy assaults serve as reminders of the inescapable vulnerability of life and social well-being to the whims of the weather. And history is packed with reminders of far worse. The weather, for example, provoked a major social dislocation in the United States in the 1930's when it turned much of the South-west into the Dust Bowl.
No wonder, then, that man's great dream has been some day to control the weather. The first step toward control, of course, is knowledge, and scientists have been hard at work for years trying to keep track of the weather. The United States and other...