Klara Dan von NeumannAdded : Tuesday at 14:30 Introducing you to Klara Dan von Neumann. You've probably never heard of her, but it was her work which resulted in numerical weather forecasting and probably the reason we are sitting here writing this article on Metcheck today.
![]()
She was born in August 1911 in Budapest, Hungary. She was educated in Hungary and demonstrated an early aptitude for mathematics and science. At 14, she became a national champion in figure skating. Then, in 1938 she married John von Neumann who was instrumental in developing a computer called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) which was used to calculate the trajectory of ballistic missiles.
When they moved to the USA Klara played a major role in the development of numerical weather forecasting. Using punch cards which fed into the system, Klara would use her mathematical skills (she enrolled in calculus at Princeton in 1947) to translate mathematical instructions into a language the computer could understand. To do this she would look up "codes" - numbers that correspond to instructions for the computer. This is the origin of the word "coder".
ENIAC was big! By the end of its operation in 1956, ENIAC contained 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed more than 30 tonnes, was roughly 8 ft tall, 3 ft deep and 100 ft long!
![]()
After the second world war John von Neumann used ENIAC to calculate thermonuclear reactions using equations. The data was used to support research on building a hydrogen bomb.
Klara then collaborated with meteorologists such as Jule Charney, Carl-Gustaf Rossby, and other scientists. Together, they developed and ran some of the first successful numerical weather prediction models, demonstrating that computers could be used to produce short-term weather forecasts.
To do this they used basic physics equations to model the atmosphere. This is how it looked from a programming point of view :-
![]()
Klara also knew that by slightly altering the start conditions and rerunning the model she could see the averages. This is the birth of modern day ensemble forecasting. It was called the Monte Carlo method. These days we use Stochastic equations to alter the starting points.
Klara also worked on the Manhattan Project and devised a way to store and compute progamming languages in binary code, which is the precursor to modern day computers and computing.
John von Neumann died in 1957 and Klara married oceanographer and physicist Carl Eckart in 1958 and moved to La Jolla, California. In 1963, after hosting an evening with friends, she drove from her home in La Jolla to the beach and walked into the surf and drowned. The San Diego coroner's office listed her death as a suicide.
Klara Dan von Neumann, Metcheck salutes you! Without your work we wouldn't be writing this and you probably wouldn't be reading this either.
METEOROLOGIST : MARSH |