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History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

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Relocating meteorology 
 
 

Martin Mahony 
m.mahony@uea.ac.uk 

University of East Anglia 
 

Angelo Matteo Caglioti 
angelo.caglioti@eui.eu 

European University Institute 
 
 

 
 

 

Geographers, environmental historians, sociologists and historians of science have recently 
rediscovered the history of meteorology. They have recognized meteorology as a central, 
rather than peripheral discipline at the intersection of the relationship between science, 
environment, and society. Histories of nineteenth and twentieth century meteorology tell of 
great theoretical strides and pioneering individuals. However, they also increasingly focus on 
new questions, concerning, inter alia, the role of technology and material culture in 
meteorological knowledge production, the use of weather knowledges in the service of 
industrial, military, financial or agricultural interests, and the enduring significance of local 
cultures in the face of new emphases on global processes. Global and local at the same time, 
the history of meteorology is being re-articulated as the result of a plurality of histories that 
still offer a largely uncharted territory to historical inquiry. 

The field of history of meteorology is thus undergoing something of a renaissance. A 
number of recent works have shown how the disciplinary histories of the atmospheric 
sciences are germane not only to the practitioners and enthusiasts of those fields, but to 
wider, conceptual concerns across history of science and cognate disciplines. There is, no 
doubt, much to be said for the role of global anthropogenic climate change in bringing the 
political saliency and import of the atmospheric sciences to the attention of a broader 
readership. As projections of future climate invite increasingly radical societal action to avoid 
the worst consequences of environmental change, the complex imbrications of atmospheric 
science with politics, ideology and culture are being laid bare. Many are asking the question 
of how and why the atmospheric sciences became so ‘politicised’, while others embrace the 
observation that assuming a strict separation between science and politics a priori risks 
overlooking how these sciences have always been freighted not just with intellectual curiosity 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

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and a will to truth, but also with political ambition and a will to power. The new power of the 
atmospheric sciences to structure everyday experiences (such as through the banality of the 
weather forecast) and to shape political imaginations and decisions in an age of climate 
change is one side of an emerging analytical coin. The other seeks to understand the flow of 
power and influence the other way, from society into science – to understand how and why 
particular forms of meteorology and climatology emerged in particular places and times, how 
these disciplines reflect the preoccupations of the societies from which they emerge, and how 
they were enrolled into political projects of control, domination, and perhaps even 
emancipation. With this special issue, we aim to build upon these analytic moves, and to push 
the field of history of meteorology a little further around what we detect as an emerging 
‘spatial turn’. By ‘relocating meteorology’, we aim to crystallise emerging historiographical 
trends, broaden the geographical reach of our histories, and advance innovative concepts for 
the development of the field in the future. 

In this introduction, we lay out the intellectual rationale for this effort, and introduce 
how the subsequent papers in this issue contribute to the tasks which we see as currently 
sitting before the field. In the next section, we seek to deepen the question of why the history 
of meteorology suddenly appears so germane, and attractive to new students and researchers. 
In the subsequent section, we further sketch out the renewal of the field which we currently 
detect to be underway, before introducing how the papers which make up this issue 
contribute to the broader project of relocating meteorology. In the concluding section of this 
short essay, we reflect on where the field might go next, positing the project of relocating 
meteorology as a work in progress, but a work which can greatly contribute towards our 
understanding of the imbrications of space, knowledge and power in the atmospheric sciences 
and beyond.  

 

Why the history of meteorology matters today 

 

The most obvious place to start an account of why the history of meteorology matters, and 
matters now, is the growing prominence of climate as a source of cultural anxiety and 
political controversy. With concerns about anthropogenic climate change guiding the field, 
modern climatology “is burdened with the enormous challenge of delineating how climate 
relates to social and economic life”.1 This challenge is pursued through work which seeks to 
surgically isolate the elements of climatic trends which can be attributed to human agency, 
and through work which seeks to predict the impacts of future climatic shifts on the social 
and economic life of nations. Yet as a number of historians have shown, this confluence of 
thinking about climate and society is far from new. Indeed, the history of the sciences of the 
atmosphere suggests that studying climate “is always about studying society, vicariously or 
not”.2 Thus, in the current cultural and political atmosphere and in the face of the 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1 Fleming, J. R. and Jankovic, V. (2011) ‘Revisiting Klima’, Osiris, 26(1), p. 1. 
2 Fleming and Jankovic, ‘Revisiting Klima’, p. 10. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

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anthropocene, the history of meteorology is called upon to examine on the one hand the 
relationship between understandings of climate and society, and on the other how scientific 
evidence and truth-making claims about the weather are deeply entangled with broader 
cultural and political realms. 

Intellectual histories of climate have shown how the concept has always been 
imbricated in discourses about the nature of human difference and about the ideal 
organisation of social life.3 Crucially, these observations have started to inform work on the 
historical development of meteorological knowledge-making. Yet until recently, research into 
the intellectual genealogies of ‘climate’ and into the history of the atmospheric sciences had 
tended to proceed in some isolation by following individual theorists, national case studies, 
and isolated achievements. Following a broader transformation in the history of science and 
Science and Technology Studies (STS), the focus has shifted from scientific theories about 
the weather to meteorological practices, spaces, material and instrumental cultures. In short, 
new scholarship is showing more directly how the conduct of meteorology and climatology is 
deeply entangled with society.4  

This journal issue intends to contribute to the reshaping of the historiography of 
meteorology by highlighting some of its most advanced current trends. The new 
interdisciplinary approach of science studies in recent decades has turned the history of 
meteorology into an ideal contact zone between the history and philosophy of science, 
geography, environmental history, anthropology and sociology of science. Such cross-
fertilization is dramatically renewing the historiography of meteorological studies broadly 
conceived, to build a more inclusive history of meteorology that encompasses usually 
overlooked actors and sites of knowledge-production. The focus on pioneering individuals 
and institutional archives has been supplemented with a new interest in the wider co-
evolution or ‘co-production’ of atmospheric science and society.5  

Thus, understanding meteorology and climatology as co-produced with the social 
world adds a new answer to the question of why studying the history of meteorology matters 
today. If meteorology and climatology are not just sites where the rather arcane study of 
weather and climate has been pursued in quiet isolation from societal concerns and cultural 
forces, they become a mirror of the making of the modern world as an interconnected 
network of information, data and conceptual and anticipatory knowledge. While 
environmental historians might find it more intuitive to state that there is no history outside of 
the atmosphere that surrounds us, and that this atmosphere is by definition already global, the 
history of meteorology is newly discovering how we came to conceive of the “climate” as a 
global phenomenon, whose study required the involvement of central observatories, 
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
3 Ruth A Morgan, “Argument, Authority and Anxiety in the Atmospheric Sciences,” History of Meteorology 6, 
no. January (2014): 14–16. 
4 David N. Livingstone, “Race, Space and Moral Climatology: Notes toward a Genealogy,” Journal of 
Historical Geography 28, no. 2 (2002): 159–80; James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate 
Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Mike Hulme, Weathered: Cultures of Climate (London: 
SAGE, 2016). 
5 On science-society co-production, see Sheila Jasanoff, ed. States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science 
and Social Order, (London: Routledge, 2004). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

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expansive networks of observations, and vast intellectual communities. Meteorology – as 
theory, practice, and intellectual or institutional concern – connected local savants, imperial 
intermediaries, indigenous communities, and scientific instruments. Ideas about the climate 
were shaped by this global endeavour. In short, the history of meteorology and climatology 
provide a crucial avenue to understand the social fabric of the making of the modern, 
globalised world. 

In the past, meteorology was considered an ancillary science in the history physics 
and mathematics. Its relevance was apparent only once its techniques had been perfected, and 
predictive skill secured. Rather, the scientific disciplines concerned with the study of 
atmospheric phenomena are increasingly being seen as mirrors of the societies in which they 
have been embedded at different points in time.  Rather than being singled out as a pitfall as 
in the past, the instability of the weather and the fluctuations of the climate make 
meteorology stand out because it exposes the “limits” of Enlightenment rationality and of 
human control over nature.6 Thus, this new approach to the history of meteorology stands in 
close consort with our current sensitivity and understanding of how we transform the natural 
world through anthropogenic climate change, while humanity as a whole remains exposed to 
both the vehemence and fragility of the global atmosphere.  

Studying the history of meteorology and climatology can provide important and 
consequential insights into societal attitudes to nature, into the cultural politics of human 
difference, and into the changing place of scientific knowledge and foreknowledge in the 
organisation of society and politics.  

 

New spaces: “relocating meteorology” in new geographies of meteorological knowledge  

 

This themed issue emphasizes the interdisciplinary, social, and spatial turn of emerging 
scholarship in the history of meteorology. It interrogates how ideas about the weather and 
climate intersected geographical spaces, scientific practices, and were shaped by the social 
world. The title of the issue “Relocating Meteorology” was inspired by Kapil Raj’s 
influential work Relocating Modern Science, in which he called for a historiographical 
revolution in how we deal with the development of ‘western’ sciences, appealing for a shift 
in focus from processes of diffusion from metropole to periphery, towards models of 
circulation and intercultural encounter in the production of inherently hybrid forms of 
knowledge.7 

We would suggest that historians of meteorology can profitably view the challenge of 
‘relocating meteorology’ as both a call to question the geographical boundaries of our 
historical inquiries, but also as an invitation to examine various ‘relocations’ of meteorology 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
6 See Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
2007).  
7 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and 
Europe, 1650-1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

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itself – the processes and practices through which meteorology ‘travelled’, found new 
audiences and users, and was woven into new social and environmental projects of world-
making. In doing so, historians of meteorology can build on the spatial turn in the history of 
science, which has generated an important strand of scholarship on the historical geographies 
of science, concerned with the spatiality of the production and circulation of scientific 
knowledge.8  

Such work has showed how scientific knowledge derives meaning and authority not 
through its forcible detachment from context, but through a number of mutually sustaining 
interactions with local, national or regional cultures and political formations. While much of 
this work has focused on the history of the life sciences where, for instance, the cultural 
conditioning of responses to the challenges of evolutionary theory provides clear illustration 
of the geographical thesis,9 this analytical approach is yet to fully make its mark in the history 
of the atmospheric sciences. As Livingstone remarks, a “fully fledged historical geography of 
the science of climate and climatic discourse more broadly construed…is a real 
desideratum”.10 Emerging work is starting to show more clearly how the sciences of weather 
and climate “cannot be divested from the circumstances surrounding its production, as 
regionalism, cultural difference, and local senses of belonging define vectors of research and 
even the basic meaning of climate”.11 Work by Jankovic12 and Naylor13 has done the most to 
develop these points. Emerging work on the practices and poetics of weather observation as a 
form of landscape dwelling, “where love of locality, prolonged residence, and a sense of 
parochial duty paid epistemic dividends”,14 can deepen this spatial turn, and trouble 
distinctions between professional science and amateur pastime.15 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
8 See for example David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge 
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Simon Naylor, “Introduction: Historical Geographies of 
Science – Places, Contexts, Cartographies,” The British Journal for the History of Science 38, no. 1 (2005): 1–
12; Richard C. Powell, “Geographies of Science: Histories, Localities, Practices, Futures,” Progress in Human 
Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 309–29; Diarmid A. Finnegan, “The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the 
History of Science,” Journal of the History of Biology 41, no. 2 (2008): 369-388. 
9 See David N. Livingstone, Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with 
Evolution (Baltimore, MD: JHU Press, 2014). 
10 David N. Livingstone, “Reflections on the Cultural Spaces of Climate,” Climatic Change 113, no. 1 (2012), p. 
92. 
11 Fleming and Jankovic, ‘Revisiting Klima’, p. 11. 
12 Vladimir Jankovic, “The Place of Nature and the Nature of Place: The Chorographic Challenge to the History 
of British Provincial Science,” History of Science 38, no. 1 (2000): 78–113; Vladimir Jankovic, “Science 
Migrations: Mesoscale Weather Prediction from Belgrade to Washington, 1970–2000,” Social Studies of 
Science 34, no. 1 (2004): 45–75. 
13 Simon Naylor, “Nationalizing Provincial Weather: Meteorology in Nineteenth-Century Cornwall,” The 
British Journal for the History of Science 39, no. 3 (2006): 407–33; Simon Naylor, “Log Books and the Law of 
Storms: Maritime Meteorology and the British Admiralty in the Nineteenth Century,” Isis 106, no. 4 (2015): 
771–97. 
14 David N. Livingstone, “Reading the Heavens, Planting the Earth: Cultures of British Science,” History 
Workshop Journal 54, no. 54 (2000), p. 237 
15 Lucy Veale, Georgina Endfield, and Simon Naylor, “Knowing Weather in Place: The Helm Wind of Cross 
Fell,” Journal of Historical Geography 45 (2014): 25–37; Endfield, G. H., & Morris, C. (2012). Exploring the 
role of the amateur in the production and circulation of meteorological knowledge. Climatic Change, 113(1), 
69–89.  



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

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The project of ‘relocating meteorology’ entails also placing European meteorology in a 
broader, international, imperial, and global context. A great many histories of meteorology 
have focused on developments in various meteorological metropoles, and historians often 
remain prisoners of the boundaries of the nation-state and its centralized archives. Elapsing 
the distinction between colonial and metropolitan science, as recently emphasized in Hellen 
Tilley’s Africa as a Living Laboratory, historians have started paying more attention to forms 
of hybrid, creole, and vernacular meteorology.16 Katharine Anderson and Deborah Coen have 
also highlighted the importance of meteorology in the culture of Victorian England and the 
geographical imagination of the Austro-Hungarian empire respectively, indicating important 
new directions for an analysis of how the study of the weather was always part of much 
broader cultural phenomena.17 The papers in this themed issue point to a qualitative shift in 
the history of meteorology, as they select local and national case studies as part of broader 
international and imperial transformations. Some of this work is starting to examine histories 
in locations more distant from the centres of western wealth and power, to highlight the 
centrality of such places to understanding both the power of locality, and the contingency of 
globality, in the history of meteorology.  

It is no coincidence that several papers focus on the entanglement between meteorology 
and European empires. European colonies are increasingly attracting the attention of 
historians of meteorology, permitting examination of trans-national networks of intellectual 
exchange, and of how theories and practices changed, adapted, and hybridised as they spread 
from meteorological metropoles.18 In the spirit of Raj’s “Relocating Modern Science,” such 
work often overturns diffusionist models of the history of science, which view sciences of the 
colonial ‘periphery’ as pale imitations of metropolitan science.19 Following the pioneering 
work of Richard Grove,20 we are beginning to get a fuller picture of how the ‘infrastructural 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
 
16 Tilley, Helen. Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific 
Knowledge, 1870-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Cushman, Gregory T. “Humboldtian 
Science, Creole Meteorology, and the Discovery of Human-Caused Climate Change in South America.” Osiris 
26, no. 1 (2011): 16–44.  
17 Coen, Deborah R. “Imperial Climatographies from Tyrol to Turkestan.” Osiris 26, no. 1 (2011): 45–65. 
Anderson, Katharine. Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology, (Chicago, IL: 
University of Chicago Press, 2005). 
18 James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry, Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from 
Australia and New Zealand (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Fiona Williamson, “Weathering the 
Empire: Meteorological Research in the Early British Straits Settlements,” The British Journal for the History of 
Science 48, no. 3 (2015): 475–92; Martin Mahony, “For an Empire of ‘all Types of Climate’: Meteorology as an 
Imperial Science,” Journal of Historical Geography 51 (2016): 29–39; Angelo Matteo Caglioti, Meteorological 
Imperialism. Climate Science, Environment, and Empire in Liberal and Fascist Italy (1870-1940), PhD diss. 
(University of California, Berkeley, 2017). 
19 George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156, no. 3775 (1967): 611–22; Lewis Pyenson, 
Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830-1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 1993). 
20 Richard H. Grove, “The East India Company, the Raj and the El Nino: The Critical Role Played by Colonial 
Scientists in Establishing the Mechanisms of Global Climate Teleconnections 1770-1930,” in Nature & The 
Orient, ed. Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 
301–23. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

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globalism’21 of meteorology was built upon a polycentric geography of meteorological 
initiative, with the science shaping up differently in different places, according to thoroughly 
local concerns and pre-occupations.22 Further work in this vein can bring “into sharper focus 
the ways in which theory and practice, science and society, intellectual projects and imperial 
ventures have interpenetrated”, thus enriching not only the historiography of meteorology, 
but of science and empire more broadly.23 In the same way that European colonial empires 
helped create the world we inhabit today, meteorology became an infrastructural and 
networked science shaped by imperial interconnections. 

 

“Relocating meteorology” as opening new sites and discovering new actors  

 

The project of ‘relocating meteorology’ geographically opens a new set of opportunities for 
the study of both new sites and new actors. Early path-breaking work on the history and 
sociology of the natural sciences focused on the rarefied spaces of the laboratory.24 More 
recently, the field has come into focus as a new object of historical and geographical 
investigation.25 Robert Kohler’s work on the contested positioning of the field between 
landscape and labscape has been formative here, and has opened up a range of questions 
concerning how field sites are delineated, how their natural unruliness may or may not be 
tamed, and how they furnish their investigators with authority.26 While meteorology may not 
be classically understood as a field science, it is a science whose history illustrates several 
moments when the distinctions between observatory and field become blurred, or contested. 
Field campaigns and explorations of new territory usually involved meteorological 
observations, and prior to the establishment of extended, permanent observational 
infrastructures, meteorological knowledge production in colonial settings relied on the 
periodic forays of scientists, administrators or soldiers into the outside world. More 
conceptually, Simon Naylor has suggested that spaces such as islands have functioned as 
meteorological field sites, where scientific authority was gained through long periods of 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
21 Paul N. Edwards, “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism,” Osiris 21, no. 1 (2006): 229–50. 
22 Matthew Henry, “‘Inspired Divination’: Mapping the Boundaries of Meteorological Credibility in New 
Zealand, 1920–1939,” Journal of Historical Geography 50, (2015): 66–75; Chris O’Brien, “Deliberate 
Confusions,” History of Meteorology 6 (2014): 17–34; Gregory T. Cushman, “The Imperial Politics of 
Hurricane Prediction: From Calcutta and Havana to Manila and Galveston, 1839-1900,” in Nation-States and 
the Global Environment, ed. Mark Lawrence, Erika Bsumek, and David Kinkela (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 2013), 137–62. 
23 Livingstone, “Reading the Heavens, Planting the Earth: Cultures of British Science,” p. 240. 
24 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life 
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The 
Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 
25 See Isla Forsyth, “The More-than-Human Geographies of Field Science,” Geography Compass 7, no. 8 
(2013): 527–39; Robert E. Kohler and Jeremy Vetter, “The Field,” in A Companion to the History of Science, 
ed. Bernard Lightman (Oxford: Wiley, 2016), 282–95. 
26 Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology, (Chicago, IL: 
University of Chicago Press, 2002). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

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dwelling and watchful observation.27 Furthermore, while much historical analysis of field 
sites has focused on their definition and expansion on a horizontal plane, an emerging interest 
in the vertical as a dimension of vision, practice and mobility “takes us away from human 
habitation into depths and heights in which no one lives (for long) yet which are vital to 
global economy and polity”.28 It takes us into what Siobhan Carroll labels the ‘atopia’ of the 
atmosphere – a space of cultural-economic circulation and ambition, which nonetheless 
evades attempts at territorial control and domination; an example of Spivak’s ‘planetary’ 
spaces, radically other, which can freely “undo, arrest, deviate or destroy human systems of 
global circulation with which they become associated”.29  

In meteorology, engaging with the three-dimensional space of the atmosphere means 
engaging with objects and processes that are lively and highly mobile, rather than phenomena 
which are limited to particular places. The ‘field’ thus becomes something more akin to “a 
moving assemblage of people, place, and practice, rather than a static and well-defined arena 
of scientific surveillance”.30 Studies of the historical geographies of scientific knowledge are 
frequently presented in a register of horizontal movement: circulation, diffusion, migration, 
expansion; often coupled with the ‘flat’ ontologies of actor-network theory, or with the 
historiographies of European advance across two-dimensional maps of imperial geography. 
The vertical dimension, as both an object of knowledge and a space of practice, has been 
largely absent from this spatializing gaze.31 The history of meteorology is an ideal subject 
with which to explore not just the horizontal expansion and mobility of the sciences, but also 
their engagements, whether practical or conceptual, with questions of depth, height and 
volume. Recent moves in political geography and international relations to understand how 
power works through the production, delineation and control of three-dimensional 
atmospheric spaces points to an important role for historians of the atmospheric sciences in 
examining the co-production of three-dimensional knowledge and power.32   

Thinking beyond human actors can likewise offer new analytical possibilities. This might 
mean engaging more readily with the agency of flora and fauna in the development of 
knowledges of climate.33 Technology has of course played a crucial role in driving 
developments in meteorology, shaping new practices and opening new fields of atmospheric 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
27 Naylor, “Log Books and the Law of Storms: Maritime Meteorology and the British Admiralty in the 
Nineteenth Century,” p. 788. 
28 Kohler and Vetter, “The Field,” p. 287-8 
29 Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850 
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p.7; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a 
Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 
30 Martin Mahony and Samuel Randalls, “Weather, climate and the geographical imagination”, in Mahony, M. 
and Randalls, S. eds., Weather, Climate and the Geographical Imagination: Placing Atmospheric Knowledges. 
University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming.  
31 Michael S. Reidy, “The Most Recent Orogeny: Verticality and Why Mountains Matter,” Historical Studies in 
the Natural Sciences 47, no. 4 (2017): 578–87. 
32 See for example Stuart Elden, “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power,” Political 
Geography 34 (2013): 35–51. 
33 Kirsten Greer, “Zoogeography and Imperial Defence: Tracing the Contours of the Nearctic Region in the 
Temperate North Atlantic, 1838–1880s,” Geoforum 65 (2015): 454–64. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

9 

vision.34 Knowledges of weather and climate have also played key roles in the development 
of broader socio-technical systems, most notably perhaps in the case of aviation where, 
functioning as what Roger Turner calls an ‘infrastructural science’, meteorology quietly 
participated in the construction of the atmosphere as a traversable space, amid new practices 
and cultures of observation, forecasting, and risk management.35 There is however much 
more to be learned about these ‘hidden’ aspects of meteorology, and about the mutual 
transformations of meteorological science and broader socio-technical systems and spaces.  

The project of ‘relocating meteorology’ allows us to open out to new sites of knowledge 
production and to discover new actors in the history of the discipline. Theory-builders and 
institution-builders tend to dominate our histories of meteorology. Yet new questions are 
increasingly being asked, particularly in this journal, about how a broader range of actors 
contributed to the production of knowledge of weather and climate. How did agriculturalists, 
engineers, insurance clerks, colonists, military personnel, aviators, medics and others produce 
new forms of knowledge and put them to work?36 To what extent can we characterise 
meteorology and climatology as products of encounter and exchange between diverse social 
and cultural groups? And what do such questions mean for how we think about issues of 
authority and credibility in the history of the atmospheric sciences?37  

 

Renewing the field 

 

The papers offered in this themed issue contribute to this broader renewal of the field in a 
number of ways. Rather than with centralized European observatories, we begin in the 
‘Middle Border’ region of the United States, with Joseph Giacomelli developing the notion of 
‘vernacular climatology’ to describe the product of ongoing “negotiations between 
academics, bureaucrats, technocrats, volunteer observers, agriculturalists, newspapermen, and 
others”, each concerned with contesting the legitimacy of the emerging sciences of weather 
and climate, and with questions of scale and locality at the heart of efforts to establish any 
semblance of scientific credibility.38 Pushing further west, Kelsey Matson examines the place 
of the Yellowstone region at the intersection of new concerns about atmospheric electricity, 
healthful climates and nationhood, crucially situating the human body as an historically 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
34 James R. Fleming, Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern 
Meteorology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 
35 Roger Turner, “Weathering Heights: The Emergence of Aeronautical Meteorology as an Infrastructural 
Science” (PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2010). 
36 James Kneale and Samuel Randalls, “Invisible Atmospheric Knowledges in British Insurance Companies , 
1830-1914,” History of Meteorology 6 (2014): 35–52; Vladimir Janković, “Working with Weather: 
Atmospheric Resources, Climate Variability and the Rise of Industrial Meteorology, 1950 – 2010,” History of 
Meteorology 7 (2015): 98–111. 
37 Morgan, “Argument, Authority and Anxiety in the Atmospheric Sciences.” History of Meteorology 6 (2014): 
14-16. 
38 Joseph Giacomelli, “Unsettling Gilded-Age Science: Vernacular Climatology and Meteorology in the ‘Middle 
Border’,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 15–34. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

10 

important instrument in sensing and registering meteorological phenomena.39 Thus, this 
paper opens new research directions in the history of meteorology by connecting it with an 
emerging interest in the history of the body as a site of knowledge production. 

Our attention then turns to north-west Europe – paradoxically perhaps, given the 
region’s centrality to extant accounts of meteorology’s history. Yet Kevin Donnelly makes 
the provocative case that despite its geographic centrality, the city of Brussels was decidedly 
marginal in terms of early nineteenth century scientific culture. He suggests that this 
marginality, and the peculiar political and economic context of Belgium, allowed Adolph 
Quetelet to position the city as a hub for a nascent meteorological internationalism, which 
endures in various forms to this day. The curiosities of Belgian society likewise provided the 
raw materials for Quetelet’s new approach to social statistics which, Donnelly suggests, was 
crucial in the emergence of a non-deterministic conception of a global climate system.40 
Thus, Donnelly highlights the making of nineteenth century internationalism as a new site 
and cultural infrastructure for the production of scientific knowledge, which allowed Quetelet 
to shake up the scientific hierarchies of positivist scientific culture. 

 We then move more concertedly into the ‘margins’ of European meteorological 
endeavour and its colonial frontiers. Meredith McKittrick offers an important new history of 
the trans-imperial circulation of the controversial idea of ‘reprecipitation’, which informed a 
number of colonial schemes to modify the dry climates of colonial possessions. While a lot of 
scholarly attention has recently fallen on apparent prefigurations of current concerns over 
climate change and modification, McKittrick points to the “limitations of reading the history 
of meteorology and climatology ‘backwards,’ by looking for the precursors of ideas that are 
now widely accepted”. Doing so risks obscuring “significant realms of scientific and popular 
debate from historians’ view”. Instead, she suggests that historians of meteorology pay equal 
attention to the progenitors of ideas which we may appear now as dead-ends or non-starters, 
in order to understand historically- and spatially-situated meteorological cultures in all their 
variety and fullness.41  

We subsequently turn to three case studies from the history of German meteorology 
from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century – a country which, despite boasting a 
number of meteorological pioneers and being the powerhouse of nineteenth to twentieth 
century continental Europe, has been underrepresented so far in English-speaking 
historiography. All three papers deal with the shifting imperial contexts which shaped the 
development of German meteorology. Robert-Jan Wille reconstructs the horizontal and 
vertical expansion of meteorological practice through Wladimir Köppen’s aerology, showing 
how the developing contours of German national and imperial power shaped the evolution of 
a world-wide network for studying the atmosphere in three dimensions. Penelope K. Hardy 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
39 Kelsey Matson, “The Ozone of Patriotism”: Meteorology, Electricity, and the Body in the Nineteenth-Century 
Yellowstone Region,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 35–53. 
40 Kevin Donnelly, “Redeeming Belgian Science: Periodic Phenomena and Global Physics in Brussels, 1825-
1853” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 54–73. 
41 Meredith McKittrick, “Theories of “Reprecipitation” and Climate Change in the Settler Colonial World,” 
History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 74–94. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

11 

picks up the baton to illustrate how in interwar Germany, with its empire taken away, 
national pride was re-asserted through oceanic expeditions which sought to re-inscribe 
German geophysical might onto the map of international and imperial science. Finally, 
Philipp Lehmann examines the terrestrial repercussions of Germany’s post-imperial moment, 
showing how the loss of colonial field sites shaped the evolution of climatological ideas, and 
contributed to a growing emphasis on regional particularity and ‘colonial revisionism’ amid a 
broader “postcolonial longing for the overseas field” within German geography.42 Together, 
these papers innovatively constitute an exemplary contribution of how to write global 
histories of national scientific communities, by placing the history of German meteorology in 
the imperial context of international competition. 

 Similar imperial and colonial themes are present in Fiona Williamson and Clive 
Wilkinson’s paper on the development of meteorology in Singapore and Hong Kong in the 
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Their comparative analysis shows convincingly 
how the differential development of meteorology in different colonial settings was shaped not 
just by different atmospheric conditions, but by different political and economic contexts. 
The work contributes to a growing scholarship on meteorology in the region, where contact 
between different imperial and cultural formations shaped a set of unstable, rivalrous 
scientific networks, which nonetheless produced important contributions to meteorological 
theory and practice.43 We then fly south to another outpost of ‘British’ meteorology, with 
Matthew Henry examining the role of meteorology in the interwar development of Australia-
New Zealand air routes. Henry highlights the challenges of trans-colonial cooperation, as 
efforts were made to standardise practices and procedures, amid attempts to gain credibility 
amongst a crucial set of users of meteorological information – pilots. The paper is a further 
illustration of the often-unacknowledged centrality of meteorology in the production of three-
dimensional airspace, and contributes to an increasingly vibrant and sophisticated 
historiography of Australasian meteorology.44 

 Finally, we return to a major meteorological metropole, to illustrate how the project of 
‘relocating meteorology’ can inform and transform the study of major centres of political 
power and scientific influence in Europe. Janet-Martin Nielsen offers an important analysis 
of the significance of new technologies in relocating meteorology as a public- and service-
oriented science in post-war Britain. Focusing on the establishment of numerical weather 
prediction at the Meteorological Office, Nielsen describes anxieties to establish and perform 
the objectivity of meteorological science – to not just produce better predictions, but to 
demonstrate their basis in the machinic objectivity of the computer simulation. Nielsen’s is 
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
42 Robert-Jan Wille, “Colonizing the Free Atmosphere: Wladimir Köppen’s ‘Aerology’, the German Maritime 
Observatory, and the Emergence of a Trans-Imperial Network of Weather Balloons and Kites, 1873-1906,” 
History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 95–123; Penelope K. Hardy, “Meteorology as Nationalism on the German 
Atlantic Expedition, 1925-1927,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 124–144; Philipp Lehmann, Losing the 
Field: Franz Thorbecke and (Post-)Colonial Climatology in Germany,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 145–
158. 
43 Fiona Williamson and Clive Wilkinson, “Asian Extremes: Experience, Exchange and Meteorological 
Knowledge in Hong Kong and Singapore c.1840-1939,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 159–178. 
44 Matthew Henry, “Assembling the Weather: Expertise, Authority and the Negotiation of trans-Tasman 
Aviation Forecasts” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 179–201. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

12 

thus an important study of how notions of modernity, uncertainty and injurious subjectivity 
have shaped key transitions in meteorological practice, and have informed enduring concerns 
about the science’s predictive abilities and social utility which are laced through so many of 
the preceding analyses. As such, it is a fitting – if seemingly geographical paradoxical – way 
to conclude our efforts here to relocate meteorology.45  

 We are pleased to also include a special supplementary section offered by James R. 
Fleming.  His short text accompanies an historical film from 1960s Soviet Russia, which 
proffered a vision of a future 2017 where continental-scale climate control has re-shaped 
global environments and national fortunes.46 It is fitting to revisit such a vision in the year of 
its prophesised becoming, and to use it to point the way to other geographies and cultures 
which are as-yet underrepresented in the historiography of meteorology and climatology.   

 

What next? Relocating meteorology as a work-in-Progress 

 

As with all historiographical manifestos and intellectual projects, ‘relocating meteorology’ is 
more an open-ended frontier than an accomplished achievement. The selection of about ten 
papers can hardly do justice to the current renewal of the field nor saturate the future 
directions which may be pursued. There is still a lot of work to be done by historians willing 
to undertake new challenges of the field.  

The history of meteorology remains a largely Euro-centric business, despite our effort 
to examine the making of meteorology amid the contact zones between European empires 
and the rest of the world. While the historiography of North America and the Caribbean is 
rapidly developing, we still do not have complete accounts of the history of meteorology in 
vast regions of the world, such as in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific World and the 
Middle East. There has been an emergent interest in the history of exploration of glaciers, 
poles, and mountains like the Alps in histories of European meteorology, but large parts of 
Europe itself remain overlooked, such as southern and eastern Europe. Even France has 
remained somewhat marginal, with the exception of Fabien Locher’s work.47 

A major challenge to a truly global history of meteorology is the national organization 
of meteorological archives in the twentieth century, which erases the international and 
interconnected nature of meteorology in the nineteenth century – and before. Hopefully, it is 
no longer a distant utopia to think of intersecting meteorological archives by building on 
emerging techniques in the digital humanities for the preservation and analysis of archival 
materials across the world. This could become an interesting arena of future development of 
the field at the intersection of digital and environmental humanities. 
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
45 Janet Martin-Nielsen, “Scientific forecasting? Performing objectivity at the UK’s Meteorological Office, 
1960s-1970s,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 202–221. 
46 James R. Fleming, “In the Year 2017: A Soviet Fantasy of the Future,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 222–
224. 
47 Locher, Fabien. Le savant et la tempête: étudier l’atmosphère et prévoir le temps au XIXe siècle (Rennes: 
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

13 

As work on the colonial histories of meteorology and climatology accelerates, it is 
vital that imperial narratives of the inexorable, beneficent spread of western science and 
technology are not simply reproduced. Few studies of colonial meteorology have yet offered 
full analyses of how European meteorological ideas and practices interacted with indigenous 
knowledge systems. In part this seems to be because the story was often one of European 
scientists simply ignoring local knowledges of weather and climate, often to the detriment of 
European agricultural fortunes.48 Efforts to manipulate the climate of European colonies have 
offered interesting insights into the status anxieties of meteorologists who sought to distance 
themselves from the ‘superstitions’ of both settler and indigenous populations.49 Yet tracing 
more subtle interactions between different knowledge systems, and recovering voices 
expunged from institutional archives, will require methodological innovation.  

A great deal of innovation in the history of meteorology can come from the 
intersection between environmental history and STS, two fields that are increasingly 
converging.50 In this respect, several questions remain to be answered: What was the role of 
natural environments in the processes of transmission and transformation of climate 
knowledge? What was the role of the circulation of standardised forms, instruments and data 
in the production of infrastructural networks and new environments? How did these systems 
become sites of contestation over scientific authority, trustworthiness and risk? Following the 
broader circulation of technologies, resources, and the intermediaries that made them possible 
may permit new answers to the question of the enduring importance of space and place in the 
history of meteorology. 

One such way into such dynamics may be to investigate the lives and careers of not 
only the institution-builders and the knowledge-leaders, but of those who were drawn into the 
ranks of those institutions from a range of cultural backgrounds, performing the monotonous 
work of observation and data processing, feeding local weather into the centres of colonial 
climatic calculation.51 Following the ‘traces’52 of such lives may offer a richer picture of the 
development of meteorology and climatology in the contact zones of European imperial 
expansion.53 And in order to develop a more expansive understanding of “meteorology,” a 
great deal of work is necessary to reveal the role of such cultural intermediaries, middle men 
and women, and their role in the broader development of meteorological knowledge. A truly 
“relocated” history of meteorology will not be complete until we fully understand how 
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
48 Chris O’Brien, “Imported Understandings: Calendars, Weather, and Climate in Tropical Australia, 1870s-
1940s,” in Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand, ed. James Beattie, 
Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 195–212. 
49 James Beattie, “Science, Religion, and Drought: Rainmaking Experiments and Prayers in North Otago, 1889-
1911,” in Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand, ed. James Beattie, 
Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 137–55. 
50 Sara B. Pritchard, Finn Arne Jorgensen, and Dolly Jorgensen, eds. New Natures: Joining Environmental 
History with Science and Technology Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).  
51 Such work would build upon extant literature on the role of the ‘technician’ in the history of science. See 
Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technician,” American Scientist 77, no. 6 (1989): 554–63; Rob Iliffe, 
“Technicians,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 62 (2008): 3–16. 
52 On biography in the archival margins, see Cheryl McGeachan, “Historical Geography II: Traces Remain,” 
Progress in Human Geography, 2016, 1–14. 
53 Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, 1991, 33–40. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017)
 

	
  
	
  

14 

European weather knowledge has been shaped by the wider forces of empire, race, gender, 
class and religious belief. The historical relocation of meteorology was not just a function of 
the expansion of formal state power. Religious bodies, missionaries, soldiers, medics and 
various others contributed to the expansion of meteorological networks, and further work is 
required to understand these groups, their interactions, conflicts, and ‘intermediaries’.54 In 
developing such work, we can continue to decentre the nation-state as the subject and unit of 
our analyses, to build a more inclusive and global history of meteorology. 

 

 

 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
54 Cushman, “The Imperial Politics of Hurricane Prediction: From Calcutta and Havana to Manila and 
Galveston, 1839-1900”; Jamie L. Pietruska, “Hurricanes, Crops, and Capital: The Meteorological Infrastructure 
of American Empire in the West Indies,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 4 (2016): 
418–45. 


