Abstract
As strange as it may seem, Le Verrier was arguably as interested in meteorology as in celestial mechanics, and it was in this domain that he was able to fully utilize his organizational talents, despite difficulties of all sorts, including those inevitably produced by the rigidity of his character. Beginning with his arrival at the Observatory in 1854, he started to set up an organization that would plant the seed of the current Météo-France. The great innovation was that it had become possible, thanks to this service, to effectively predict the weather, something that had been envisioned well before Le Verrier but which had never been realized on a large scale. Let us first see what the situation had been at his arrival.
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Notes
- 1.
*Cotte, L.: Traité de météorologie. Imprimerie royale, Paris (1774); (1788) *Mémoires sur la météorologie, Paris, Imprimerie royale.
- 2.
*Lavoisier A. Œuvres t. 3 (1865), pp. 759–762.
- 3.
*Lavoisier A. Œuvres t. 3 (1865), pp. 765–771; this text was published in Literary Magazine, October 1790, but was read on 8 May 1765 before the Academy.
- 4.
From Fierro (1991), p. 93.
- 5.
*Arago F. Œuvres Complètes t. 8, pp. 25–82, 83–146 and 120–124.
- 6.
Cited by Fierro (1991), p. 96.
- 7.
*Arago F. Œuvres Complètes t. 8, pp. 1–24, see p. 1.
- 8.
Cited by Fierro (1991), pp. 104–105.
- 9.
*CRAS 1 (1835), pp. 380–410, or *Arago F. Œuvres Complètes t. 9, pp. 4–133, with an introduction.
- 10.
°Annales de l’Observatoire de Paris 1 (1855), p. 54 and following.
- 11.
*CRAS (1855) 41, pp. 1197–1204.
- 12.
Then aged 65, August in Cauchy, who filled with calculations many pages of the Comptes rendus of the Academy, was a very respected mathematician. One sees that Le Verrier, who probably did not know the visionary ideas of Pierre Morin, was already contemplating the possibility of numerical prediction of the weather.
- 13.
In his Historique des entreprises météorologiques of 1868.
- 14.
Le Verrier (1868) Historique des entreprises météorologiques,1854–1867, Paris, Gauthier-Villars. This paper collects and organizes the content of notes published in *CRAS 40 (1855), pp. 620–626; 42 (1856), pp. 1939–1942; 60 (1865), pp. 1317–1327; 61 (1865), pp. 136–144; 62 (1866), pp. 1045–1052 and 1107–1108; 66 (1868), pp. 227–230. All citations in this section come from this document, with some exceptions indicated explicitly.
- 15.
*CRAS 40 (1855), pp. 620–626.
- 16.
*CRAS 42 (1856), pp. 1939–1942.
- 17.
°Ann. OP, Observations 19 (1863), p. 84.
- 18.
Reproduced in Historique des entreprises météorologiques, pp. 15–18.
- 19.
See Javelle et al. (2000), pp. 101–103; it is following a wreck in 1859 that, like in France, this bureau was created.
- 20.
This service would work until 1875.
- 21.
Le Verrier writes in his Historique des entreprises météorologiques for 8 January 1862, p. 25: “We hope that one could obtain the concourse of the Navy for the establishment of a special bureau. […] The Navy would hopefully not consider us as strangers. The closest ties always existed between Navy and Astronomy, and the Imperial Observatory works at making them even closer. This call was not better received than the preceding ones.”
- 22.
For a list of these stations and details of how the international meteorological service was organized, see °Ann. OP, Observations 19 (1864), pp. 79–87.
- 23.
°Ann. OP, Observations 21 (1865), pp. 62–74.
- 24.
We could not find any mention of a balloon flight of Nadar in South-East France.
- 25.
Each French département is divided in several tens of cantons.
- 26.
Cited by Fierro (1991), p. 114.
- 27.
This school was founded by Victor Duruy in 1868 in order to promote research at the university and to develop practical teaching, hence its name which subsists today.
- 28.
Cited by Javelle (2000), p. 103.
- 29.
Cited by Fierro (1991), p. 197.
- 30.
Also, the meteorological commissions of the departments and the meteorological observations in the Écoles normales would survive for many years the death of Le Verrier.
- 31.
Brault (1880).
- 32.
- 33.
Herschel, J.W.: Transactions of the Geological Society of London 3, 2d series, pp. 293–299 (1832).
- 34.
*Arago F., Œuvres complètes, t. 8, pp. 206–213.
- 35.
Adhémar, J.A.: Révolution de la mer, Déluges Périodiques. Paris, chez l’auteur. 2d edition (1870) available on http://books.google.fr (1842).
- 36.
*Reynaud, J.: Philosophie religieuse: terre et ciel, pp. 409–425. Furne, Paris (1854).
- 37.
°Ann. OP 2 (1856), p. [29] (=350); see for the very technical discussion p. 149 à 185.
- 38.
Croll, J.: Philosophical Magazine 28, 121–137 (1864).
- 39.
See examples in Berger, A.: Rev. Geoph. and Astron. Astrophys. 26, 624–657 (1988). For calculations over a much longer time span (−20 Ma to +10 Ma), see Laskar, J. et al.: Astron. Astrophys. 270, 522–533 (1993).
References
Brault, M.L.: Le Verrier météorologiste. Gauthier-Villars, Paris (1880)
Fierro, A.: Histoire de la météorologie. Denoël, Paris (1991)
Javelle, J.-P., Rochas, M., Pastre, C., Hontarrède, M., Beaurepaire, M., Jacomy, B.: La météorologie du baromètre au satellite. Lausanne et Paris, Delachaux et Niestlé, Musée des arts et métiers-CNAM & Météo-France (2000)
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Lequeux, J. (2013). Le Verrier and Meteorology. In: Le Verrier—Magnificent and Detestable Astronomer. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 397. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5565-3_9
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