In the early 1950's, von Neumann, Charney, and Phillips collaborated to reinvent this most difficult computational problem of weather prediction to try out on the new technological invention called the "digital computer". In the quarter century since Richardson, meteorologists had learned how to filter out the error-transmitting effects of fast-moving sound wave, and a new breed of mathematician/scientist which we now call "a computer scientist" had figured out how to do all of those calculations on an electronic computing machine. The von Neumann-Charney-Phillips experiment worked marvelously and set the foundation for the new field of "numerical weather prediction". Incidently, the Eniac computer on which this calculation was done was still not fast enough to run an acceptably accurate forecast model faster than the weather itself evolved.

In 1996 (October 27, in fact), Mr. Jose Vegara, will run the pioneering weather forecast model of von Neumann, Charney, and Phillips on a desktop computer for everyone to watch. Well, we think he will probably run it in a web page! He might even show you how to run it in a web page too. You will have plenty of opportunity to watch this feat since, you see, Jose's model only takes a few seconds to run on our lightning-fast desktop computer. Jose Vegara is guilty of the most fantastic computational simulations of complex phenomena, including the weather, tornadoes, erupting volcanoes, and, so we hear, even a bubbling pot of Chilean chile. Mmmmmm!