Richardson’s Fantastic Forecast Factory - European Meteorological Society

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In 1922 Lewis Fry Richardson published a remarkable book, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, describing his attempt to forecast changes in the weather by numerical means. Richardson devised a method of solving the mathematical equations that describe atmospheric flow by dividing the globe into cells and specifying the dynamical variables at the center of each cell.

There are striking similarities between Richardson’s forecast factory and a modern massively parallel processor (MPP). Richardson envisaged a large number of processors – his estimate was 64,000 – working in synchronous fashion on different sub-tasks. The forecasting job was sub-divided, or parallelized, using domain decomposition, a technique often used in MPPs today.

FIGURE 1: “Weather Forecasting Factory” by Stephen Conlin, 1986. Based on the description in Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, by L.F. Richardson, Cambridge University Press, 1922, and on advice from Prof. John Byrne, Trinity College Dublin. Image: ink and water colour, c. 50 x 38.5 cm. © Stephen Conlin 1986. All Rights Reserved ´. (Courtesy: Hendrik Hoffmann, School of Mathematics & Statistics, University College Dublin)