Business Forecasting

Foreword

Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy is a man whom most people will not have heard of, but should have—for at least two reasons.

Readers would likely fail to name FitzRoy as the captain of HMS Beagle, the ship on which Charles Darwin sailed when Darwin was formulating his thinking on evolution through natural selection, thoughts that eventually saw the light of day in The Origin of Species.

What is even less well known is that FitzRoy was the man who founded what was later to become the British Meteorological Office. Furthermore, he was the one to coin the term forecast to describe his pioneering work. In The Weather Book, published in 1863, he wrote: “[P]rophesies or predications they are not; the term “forecast” is strictly applicable to such an opinion as is the result of a scientific combination and calculation.”

A century and a half later, the Met Office is still around and still involved in “scientific combination and calculation.” The intervening years have seen enormous advances in the understanding of the physics of weather systems, in the speed, quality, and quantity of data collection, in mathematical techniques, and in computational power. Today, organizations like the Met Office own some of the most powerful computers on the planet. As a result, weather forecasts are significantly more accurate than they were even 10 years ago.

Despite these advances, it is still not possible to forecast the weather with any degree of confidence more than a week or so into the ...