Before heading out in the morning, most of us first check the weather forecast. We have a one-time University of Michigan employee to thank for that convenience.
Cleveland Abbe, born in New York City in 1838, was a gifted mathematics and chemistry student who dreamed of studying the stars. After graduating from college, he wrote to astronomers across the United States, looking for opportunities to learn and work.
Franz Brünnow, the first director of U-M’s Detroit Observatory, invited Abbe in the late 1850s to study astronomy in Ann Arbor. To support himself, Abbe taught engineering and worked as a tutor at U-M, while researching under Brünnow at the observatory.
By 1860, Abbe had left Ann Arbor, taking with him all that he’d learned from Brünnow. During the 1860s, Abbe worked for the U.S. Coast Survey, the Naval Observatory, and the Russian Imperial Observatory near St. Petersburg. In 1868, he accepted a position as director of the Cincinnati Observatory.
It was at this point that Abbe shifted his focus from the stars to the weather. While at U-M, Abbe had noted limited knowledge of atmospheric refraction was impeding the study of astronomy. At Cincinnati, he saw an opportunity to improve that understanding by creating a system that studied the atmosphere and forecast the weather.
In late summer of 1869, he created a regional weather service, based in Cincinnati, and enlisted the help of weather observers across the Midwest who telegraphed daily weather observations, such as temperature, rainfall amounts, cloud types and wind direction.
On the second day of his weather project, the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper printed Abbe’s reports from three Midwestern cities. By the end of the month they were printing nine, and by the following summer, the newspaper weather bulletin carried reports from 69 cities. That early success led to a national weather service bill being proposed and passed into law Feb. 9, 1870.
In 1871, Abbe accepted a position at the National Weather Bureau (later known as the National Weather Service) and within a year, he was receiving telegrams from hundreds of weather observers across the country — including U-M’s Detroit Observatory. He began issuing forecasts for the broader United States, calling these daily reports “probabilities.” This earned Abbe the nickname “Old Probability.”
By the time of his death in 1916, Abbe had become one of the country’s best-known meteorologists — and checking the forecast had become a morning ritual for most Americans.
