We just take them for granted that they're always there, gonna be there, always have been there. We look to them before we travel, turn to them when the skies turn dark during the day and joke about them being the only job in the world where you can routinely be 40% wrong.

Ulysses Grant
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Today is the anniversary of the date the U.S. Weather Bureau was formed.  Today in 1870 President U.S. Grant signed a congressional resolution “to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent and at other points in the States and Territories…and for giving notice on the northern [Great] Lakes and on the seacoast by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms."

Back in 1776 Thomas Jefferson thought it'd be cool to organize planters across Virginia to record and send posts (the early term for snail-mail) to him so he could detect and warn of emerging weather patterns to help farmers protect their crops when winter storms were approaching.

Golfer And Caddy Weather Vane
Bettmann Archive
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Prior to all this weather prognostication was basically limited to weather vanes for wind direction and 'red sky in the morning, sailors take warning, red sky at night sailors delight' old sayings.

At first, President Grants weather bureau was under the jurisdiction of the War Department, as the Army had in place a string of fortifications across the country, and it was believed only Army sergeants would have the discipline to dutifully and daily record their hourly observations, which they telegraphed to Washington.

Lightning
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So today in our area, it's going to be cool with a high in the lower 60's with a rapid warm-up from an onshore flow of moist air starting tomorrow bringing temperatures over the weekend back toward the mid 70's with that old familiar humidity hanging in the air.

Thank you Thomas Jefferson and U.S. Grant and Happy Birthday to the Weather Bureau - which by the way has a significant reporting/radar station in S Lake Charles at the airport.

PANAMA-FEATURE-RAINBOW
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