Dr. Max Margules

Gold, Edgar

doi:10.1038/106286a0

Cited by 3 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…In his own biographical notes, quoted by Gold (1954), Richardson says that the tendency of his mental machine almost to run of its own accord made possible . .…”

Section: Epiloguementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A more detailed account of Richardson's life and work is given in the obituary by Gold (1954), to which a complete list of publications is appended. (Arms and Insecurity, mentioned above, and a later book Statistics of Deadly Quarrels were available only on microfilm at the time of Ashford's note and Gold's obituary; they have since been published.…”

Section: Prologuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Among the papers listed by Gold (1954) there are four published in 1919 and 1920, including the famous paper "The supply of energy from and to atmospheric eddies." Since Richardson refers to each of these in Chapter 4, it is a reasonable inference that they are the "excrescences" which in the Preface he says were removed in 1919 for separate publication.…”

Section: Richardson's Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, after 1930 Richardson dedicated his life to a mathematical study of the causes of war. The nature of this dedication, which stemmed from strong moral conviction, is illuminated by the following paragraph from the obituary by Gold (1954), which contains extracts from Richardson's own biographic notes (made at age 71):…”

Section: Epiloguementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In an obituary, Gold (1920) said "The present writer was saddened to see him there [in retirement] in 1909 entirely divorced from the subject of which he had made himself a master. Meteorology lost him some 15 years ago, and is for ever the poorer for a loss which one feels might and ought to have been prevented.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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a retrospective view of Richardson's book on weather prediction*

Platzman

1967

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

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In 1922 Lewis F. Richardson published a comprehensive numerical method of weather prediction. He used height rather than pressure as vertical coordinate but recognized that a diagnostic equation for the vertical velocity is a necessary corollary to the quasi-static approximation. His vertical-velocity equation is the principal, substantive contribution of the book to dynamic meteorology. A comparison of Richardson's model with one now in operational use at the U. S. National Meteorological Center shows that, if only the essential attributes of these models are considered, there is virtually no fundamental difference between them. Even the vertical and horizontal resolutions of the models are similar. Richardson made a forecast at two grid points in central Europe and obtained catastrophic results, in particular a surface pressure change of 145 mb in 6 hours. This failure resulted partly, as Richardson believed, from inadequacies of upper wind data. Underlying this was a more fundamental difficulty which he did not seem to recognize clearly at the time he wrote his book: the impossibility of using observed winds to calculate pressure change from the pressure-tendency equation, a principle stated many years earlier by Margules. However, he did point in the direction in which a remedy was later found: suppression or smoothing of the initial field of horizontal velocity divergence. The 6-hr time interval used by Richardson violates the condition for computational stability, a constraint then unknown. It is sometimes said that this is one of the reasons his calculation failed, but that interpretation is misleading because the stability criterion becomes relevant only after several time steps have been made. Since Richardson did not go beyond a calculation of initial tendencies—in other words, he took only one time step—violation of the stability criterion had no effect on the result. Richardson's book surely must be recorded as a major scientific achievement. Nevertheless, it appears to have had little influence in the decades that followed, and indeed, the modern development of numerical weather prediction, which began about twenty-five years later, did not evolve primarily from Richardson's work. Shaw said it would be misleading to regard the book as “a soliloquy on the scientific stage,” but in fact that is what it proved to be. The intriguing problem of explaining this strange irony is one that leads beyond the obvious facts that when Richardson wrote, computers were nonexistent and upper-air data insufficient.

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“…In his own biographical notes, quoted by Gold (1954), Richardson says that the tendency of his mental machine almost to run of its own accord made possible . .…”

Section: Epiloguementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Prologuementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Richardson's Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Epiloguementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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