Timeline of meteorology

Early events

• 350BC – Aristotle wrote Meteorology.
• 25 – Pomponius Mela formalizes the climatic zone system.
• 1620 – Francis Bacon analyzes the scientific method in his Great Instauration of Learning.
• 1686 – Edmund Halley presents a systematic study of the trade winds and monsoons and identifies solar heating as the cause of atmospheric motions.
• 1686 – Edmund Halley establishes the relationship between barometric pressure and height above sea level.
• 1714 – Gabriel Fahrenheit creates reliable scale for measuring temperature with a mercury-type thermometer.
• 1716 – Edmund Halley suggests that aurorae are caused by "magnetic effluvia" moving along the Earth's magnetic field lines.
• 1735 – The first essentially correct explanation of global circulation was the study by George Hadley of the Trade winds.
• 1742 – Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, proposed the Centigrade temperature scale which led to the current Celsius scale.

19th century

• 1835 – Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis recognized that the rotation of Earth causes a small velocity-dependent force now called the Coriolis Effect.
• 1842 – Elias Loomis performed an experiment to gain insight into the wind speed needed to defeather a chicken. He loaded a cannon with gun powder and a chicken.
• 1860 – 500 U.S. telegraph stations are making weather observations and submitting them back to the Smithsonian Institution. The observations are later interrupted by the Civil War.
• 1869 – Joseph Lockyer starts the scientific journal Nature.
• 1890 – Weather Bureau is created as a civilian operation under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• 1898 – Weather Bureau established a hurricane warning network in the West Indies.

20th century

• 1900 – Hurricane strikes Galveston, Texas, killing over 6,000 people.
• 1920 – Milutin Milankovic proposes that long term climatic cycles may be due to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and changes in the Earth's obliquity.
• 1922 – Lewis Fry Richardson lays the mathematical foundation for numerical weather prediction.
• 1925 – "Tri-State Tornado" runs through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana killing 695 people.
• 1935 – Robert Watson-Watt and his assistant Arnold Wilkins published a report in February 1935, titled The Detection of Aircraft by Radio Methods.
• 1935 – The "Great Labor Day Hurricane" kills 408 people. It is rated as the most intense Category 5 Atlantic hurricane to make landfall.
• 1934 to 1937 – The Dust Bowl drought of the US plains region causes harsh economic damage.
• 1937 – Army Air Forces Weather Service was established (redesignated in 1946 as AWS-Air Weather Service).
• 1941 – Pulsed radar network is implemented in England during WWII.
• 1948 – First correct tornado prediction by R. C. Miller and E. J. Fawbush.
• 1950 – Hurricanes begin to be named alphabetically with the radio alphabet.
• 1951 – WMO World Meteorological Organization established by the United Nations.
• 1953 – National Hurricane Center (NOAA) creates a system for naming hurricanes using alphabetical lists of women's names.
• 1955 – NSSP National Severe Storms Project established.
• 1956 – The Weather Bureau creates the National Hurricane Research Project.
• 1957-1958 – International Geophysical Year coordinated research efforts in eleven sciences, focused on polar areas during the Solar Maximum.
• 1962 – Keith Browning and Frank Ludlam publish first detailed study of a supercell storm (over Wokingham, UK).
• 1969 – Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale created, used to describe hurricane strength on a category range of 1 to 5.
• 1969 – Hurricane Camille, the second Category 5 hurricane to make US landfall causes $1.4 billion in damage.
• 1970 – NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established. Weather Bureau is renamed the National Weather Service.
• 1971 – Ted Fujita introduces the Fujita scale for rating tornadoes.
• 1975 – The first Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES, was launched into orbit. Their role and design is to aid in hurricane tracking.
• 1980 – Mount St. Helens erupts explosively in Washington State.
• 1988 – WSR-88D type weather radar implemented in the United States. Weather surveillance radar that uses several modes to detect severe weather conditions.

21st century

• 2003 – NOAA hurricane experts issue first experimental Eastern Pacific Hurricane Outlook.