The National Weather Service

Paper Summary:

This paper describes the important role played by the National Weather Service (NWS) and the crucial information it provides, not only to residents of the United States, but also to the airline industry, cruise industry, and major national concerns, such as NASA. The paper examines the different methods employed to forecast extreme weather conditions.

From the Paper:

"The National Weather Service (NWS) is a government agency that affects every resident of the United States in important ways. Because of its skill in predicting extreme weather such as hurricanes and tornadoes, potentially thousands of lives have been saved. However, most people don't realize that the NWS has a somewhat checkered history. Government leaders have been interested in predicting and recording the weather since shortly after the first colonists arrived in what would become the United States. A Swedish military chaplain living in what is present-day Delaware started keeping a weather diary in 1644. Such diaries were the main source of information about weather through the early 19th century (Waite, 2004). Many of the early Founding Fathers, including Franklin, Washington and Jefferson, recorded weather conditions (Waite, 2004). It wasn't until 1814, however, that the United States Government began to systematically gather weather data, a job assigned to the U. S. Army Surgeon General and his medical corps assigned to barracks and forts across the country (Waite, 2004)."

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