AN OCEAN OBSERVING AND PREDICTION EXPERIMENT IN PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND, ALASKA

摘要

Systematic weather observations in North America have a long history dating to the eighteenth century and colonial times when the first country-wide weather organization was the U.S. Post Office and Benjamin Franklin was the Post Master General. In the nineteenth century, Matthew Maury of the U.S. Navy pioneered the collection and documentation of ocean weather and currents observed from ships so that mariners could use these data to shorten transoceanic voyages. The proliferation of the telegraph allowed terrestrial weather observations to be centralized, and newspapers distributed weather reports to the public. Technological innovations in the twentieth century, such as satellite imagery, telecommunications, powerful computers to drive numerical simulation models, and meteorological advancements, have provided a better mechanistic understanding of weather phenomena. Today there are thousands of weather stations reporting in near-