Stephanie Landman, South African Weather Service

People have always wanted to know what the weather is going to be doing, and it’s believed the Babylonians started paying attention to clouds and other phenomena like haloes in around 650BC. The Chinese and Greeks were also looking into this, and Aristotle had a number of theories about how rain, wind, and thunder occurred. But these efforts were largely hit and miss, and it was not until the turn of the 20th century when a US meteorologist called Cleveland Abbe and the Norwegian physicist Vilhelm Bjerknes thought that the laws of physics could be used to predict whether you needed to pack a jersey for the next day. It took until the 1950s for computers to produce simulations using numerical weather predictions.

Stephanie Landman, the lead scientist at the South African Weather Service (SAWS), says the computational abilities in the ‘50s could only produce crude simulations, but in the 1970s, the field “exploded”.