Joe -
Saw this in the morning paper -- not sure if the cited reference may have that “European bias” that 
both Reid and I (and maybe even you) have found.  No mention of Henry’s operational weather 
maps from the Smithsonian in the 1850s.  
Ed

From Wis. State Journal (Thurs., 3 June 1999)
Weather Maps Haven't Always Been Tools

By Randolph E. Schmid
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Watching the daily weather map chart a hurricane edging toward the coast or 
hot, humid air spreading north or a blizzard crossing the Great Lakes, almost anyone can become 
an amateur forecaster.
	Easy to understand, the weather map on television or in the newspaper has become a 
comfortable part of daily life, taken for granted by millions.
	But like many modern conveniences, it hasn't always been there - indeed it wasn’t always 
obvious that mapping weather information would serve any useful purpose.
	Once someone tried it, the value quickly became obvious.  And that usefulness has increased as 
technological improvements enabled more data to be collected and delivered quickly to a central 
office.
	The first weather maps - published 180 years ago - brought new understanding to the science, 
but weren't much help at forecasting.
	Those first maps were compiled by Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes, a physics professor at Prussia's 
University of Breslau.  Today, Breslau is in Poland and known as Wroclaw.
	After three years' work, he published 365 daily weather maps in 1819, covering Europe's 
weather for the year 1783.
	That "hindcast" gave scientists new knowledge, revealing closed circles of low pressure that 
form storms and showing that the winds around these systems all seek to now inward, Mark 
Monmonier reports in his new book, "Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, 
Predict and Dramatize the Weather."
	Scientists had collected weather reports for centuries, but "it wasn't until about 1816 that 
people realized that you can take weather data and map them," said Monmonier, a cartographer at 
Syracuse University.
	"I was amazed by the fact that they had this organization in Germany, which had a very rich 
database, which they did not map because they had no clue that there was any relationship 
between space and (air) pressure and wind," he said in a telephone interview.
	But to make those maps a regular thing took a disaster - specifically a storm on Nov. 14, 1854, 
that sank several French and British ships during the Crimean War.
	After that, weathermen were able to reconstruct the conditions on maps and realized that it 
could have been predicted easily and warnings could have been sent.
	The result was the issuance of a daily weather bulletin from Paris starting Jan. 1, 1858.
	Britain began its daily forecasts Sept. 3, 1860, with its first storm warning going out Sept. 1, 
1861.

EOF