Bergen School Synoptic Forecasting Program

From 1918, Vilhelm Bjerknes assembled a small group of researchers at the new Geophysical Institute in Bergen, Norway, and set them to work mapping surface weather at a much finer resolution than existing forecasting used, drawing on a denser network of Norwegian weather stations set up during the First World War when foreign reports had stopped arriving. Reading those finer maps, Jacob Bjerknes identified the frontal structure of cyclones in 1919, and the group published the polar front theory in 1922, replacing pattern-matching forecasting with a physical model of how storms form and move.