In the mid-nineteenth century, the new science of weather forecasting
was fraught with controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. In the
United States, a bitter dispute about the nature of storms had raged for
decades, and forecasting was hampered by turf wars then halted by the
Civil War. Forecasters in England struggled with the scientific
establishment for recognition and vied with astrologers and other
charlatans for public acceptance.
One of the voices in this struggle was Stephen Saxby, a British naval
instructor who thought he had found a sure-fire way of forecasting
storms. He championed a popular but somewhat eccentric theory that
weather disturbances are linked to stages in the moon's orbit of the
earth.
Saxby got lucky. One of his well-known long-range predictions--for a
serious storm on October 4, 1869--was right on the button. On that very
day, a deadly hurricane caused massive floods along the eastern seaboard
of the United States then barrelled ashore at the Canadian border. The
timing of the storm could hardly have been worse. Coinciding with an
extremely high tide, the resulting storm surge breached centuries-old
dykes at the head of the Bay of Fundy.
In The Discovery of Weather, author Jerry Lockett traces the early days
of weather forecasting, the background to Saxby's prediction, and the
drama of the storm itself.