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Your weather app began in 1950s at Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland

Women scientists were key members of groundbreaking team using ENIAC computer developed during WWII. Via Smithsonian – “A weather app is a nifty tool that predicts your meteorological future, calculated with the strength of radar, algorithms and satellites around the world. Today, computerized weather prediction—like moving pictures or flying by plane—is so commonplace that smartphone-users don’t give it a second thought. But at mid-century, the idea that you might be able to forecast the weather days or even weeks ahead was a tantalizing prospect. One of the most important breakthroughs in weather forecasting took place in the spring of 1950, during an experiment at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. For over a month straight, a team of scientists and computer operators worked tirelessly to do something meteorologists had been working toward for nearly a century: predict the weather mathematically…The original ENIAC programmers—Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, Ruth Teitelbaum, and Frances Spence—were all women who taught themselves how to program the vast machine. Most if not all of the computer operators working on the 1950 weather experiment (who were merely thanked in the paper’s acknowledgements for their “help in coding the problem for the ENIAC and for running the computations”) were also women…”

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