Before the Forecast: The Royal Society’s Meteorological Archive as Prelude to the Met Office ☁️📜
Louisiane Ferlier of the Royal Society, London traces two key moments in the prehistory of the Met Office through the Society’s meteorological archives — fully re-catalogued and digitised in 2026 — asking whether forecasting was really a central preoccupation of the early archive, and which networks were included, or excluded, from it.
What to expect:
☁️ The collecting moment of 1839 — How the Royal Society consolidated observations submitted from around the world since the 17th century into a coherent “department” — in Sir John Herschel’s words — to serve the “computists of all ages”, quietly contradicting FitzRoy’s claim of a rupture with divinatory tradition
📜 The crisis of 1866-67 — Following parliamentary scrutiny that discredited FitzRoy’s forecasts and suspended the Met Office’s daily bulletins, the Royal Society Meteorological Committee took oversight to restore the institution’s credibility
🗂️ An archive for the future — How this digitised archive now serves both as historical evidence and raw material for retrospective forecasting and climatological analysis — part of a conference exploring continuity over rupture and the contested construction of meteorological expertise; all welcome and free to attend