Now that we’re staring at the weather picture from the depths of winter, perhaps you’ve been re-acquainted with how fronts make an impact on the weather. Fronts truly form one of the building blocks of meteorology. In the Air Force forecasting school I attended years ago, fronts were the very first topic that followed the two weeks of physics fundamentals. Most of the following six months of training built up from those basics.
Interestingly the importance of fronts was not recognized until exactly 100 years ago, when the Norwegian meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes and his peers built up a system of physical laws into a 3-D understanding of the atmosphere. Before that time, the weather maps were seen as a mosaic of highs, lows, and wind currents that were warm, cold, moist, or dry. Forecasters had developed a large array of rules of thumb in the early 20th century, and used mostly extrapolation on the fronts. These techniques gave inconsistent results and contributed to the dangers of early aviation.
