Leaders | A spell of sunshine

The world’s poor need to know about weather disasters ahead of time

Three things need to be done to make the most of meteorology’s potential

A woman sits on the front steps of her home, next to wreckage after a powerful storm in Barre, Vermont
Image: New York Times/Redux/Eyevine

MANIAC, a computer designed at Princeton after the second world war, could perform a blistering 10,000 calculations a second. This extraordinary power was applied to two main problems: modelling thermonuclear explosions and the Earth’s weather. They were the two most consequential applications the machine’s creators could imagine.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Sunny spells”

From the July 29th 2023 edition

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