FORECASTING TROUBLE
How Canada’s first chief meteorologist took on the nerve-racking task of predicting the weather.
George T. Kingston was something of an accidental meteorologist. Having grown up in Portugal and Britain, he moved to Toronto in 1855 to take a promised university chair in natural philosophy — only to find that the position had been given to his brother-inlaw. As a consolation, he was offered a job teaching meteorology and directing the University of Toronto’s Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory, take it or leave it. He took it and was this country’s premier meteorologist for the next quarter century.
Following Confederation in 1867, Kingston called for the creation of a national weather service. A number of European countries already had such agencies, after all, and when the United States established one in 1870 Kingston lobbied all the harder. He envisioned a service that would maintain a cross-Canada network of weather stations, compile daily observations, and, over time, improve understanding of Canada’s weather and climate. It would have Toronto as its headquarters and, of course, himself as its head.
Kingston promoted his idea to several departments of the federal government, including Agriculture, because of the importance of weather to farmers, and the Secretary of State, because weather — and modern weather science — transcended national borders. It was Marine and Fisheries that, in the spring of 1871, accepted the proposal and committed $5,000 to it. This resulted in the establishment of the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), which celebrates its sesquicentennial this year.
Marine and Fisheries had one condition: The funds would be given “with a view of ultimately establishing storm signals” — in other words, predicting when and where storms would hit. The stipulation was understandable. The year before, 335 vessels had gone down in the Great Lakes or along the coasts, and 235 people had died. Canadian mariners, and indeed all Canadians, needed to know not just what the weather was but what it would be. The European and American weather services were already experimenting with weather
forecasting, so it seemed only natural that a new Canadian service should do the same.
Kingston strongly disagreed. He knew just how much work went into weather forecasting. It would require a system of trained observers, largely volunteer, taking precise measurements on calibrated instruments at the same time across Canada. That information would be forwarded by telegraph to the Toronto observatory, where it would be compiled and plotted on weather maps by “computers” — that is, young assistants — so that Kingston and his deputy could analyze the data, generate a forecast, and telegraph it across Canada. Then they would have to do it all over again, day after day.
It was a job of unrelenting public pressure: Some people would attack him for asserting foreknowledge of God’s intentions, while many others would put their lives in his hands. Kingston would have been well aware that the British creator of the weather forecast, Robert FitzRoy, had killed himself in 1865. The Dutch meteorologist Buys Ballot concluded sadly at the time that “anyone who has to forecast the weather ... is in great danger of going off his head through nervous excitement.” Kingston warned Marine and Fisheries bluntly that it would be “suicidal” for the new MSC to attempt weather forecasting before it built up sufficient expertise.
Nonetheless, he agreed to head the new service. In the first years, Kingston focused on building up an extensive national network and setting up a primitive storm-warning system, while holding off calls for more general forecasting. He oversaw the purchase and distribution of more than seven hundred meteorological instruments for observers who, until then, had for the most part used their own. He coaxed and cajoled ordinary Canadians in strategic places throughout the country to make daily weather observations — favouring lighthouse keepers, telegraph operators, and others with government positions who could be convinced to do the extra work for little or no extra payment. As Canada spread westward, Kingston ensured that the Meteorological Service did too. By the time he hired fifteen-year-old Robert Frederic Stupart as a “map drawer” in the Toronto office in 1872, the MSC network already involved more than one hundred weather stations. By the time Stupart himself resigned as MSC director fifty years later, there were almost eight hundred.
What finally pushed Kingston into weather prediction was what, until then, had allowed him to defer it: the United States Weather Bureau’s more developed forecasting system. At the MSC’s creation, there had been some hope that the two services would rely heavily on one another for weather data. But geography and the prevailing movement of weather systems meant that Canada simply needed the Americans more. For example, while the Maritimes benefited from knowing New England’s weather, New England had no need for similar information from the Maritimes. For a time, Kingston forwarded storm warnings coming out of Washington to relevant Canadian locations. But he worried that the constant cost of telegraph communication to and from the United States would break the MSC’s budget — and that the obvious utility of the American information might lead Canadians to think the MSC was redundant.
So, in the summer of 1876, the Meteorological Service of Canada began issuing its own “weather probabilities” for the next twenty-four hours. By that autumn, newspapers throughout Ontario and Quebec were publishing them. They seem to have been an immediate hit. The Toronto Globe carried an editorial admiring the new feature. Forecasting the weather, the writer stated, required an impressive blend of scientific knowledge and practical experience. With time, the editorial opined, “the probabilities will still further approach certainty.” It is now 150 years since the founding of the MSC, and forecasts have gotten much more accurate while offering longer-range predictions. But they are still only approaching certainty.
As for Kingston, his doctor advised him in 1874 to take a sick leave from the strain of developing the meteorological network. But he persevered, retiring only in 1880 when his health deteriorated further. Unlike the unfortunate FitzRoy, when Kingston died some years later it was of natural causes.