In article ,
Martin writes:
|
| The satellite data allowed a guess at the water vapour content and
| upper air temperatures, plus probably other important figures, which
| changed the feasibility of using computers.
|
| Yesterday was exactly 11 years since the launch of the last Meteosat first
| generation satellite, a satellite cobbled together using flight spares and in
| one case a part rescued from a museum

But the Meteosat series was not the first - see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_satellite

The Nimbus series demonstrated that enough data could be collected,
and it was the successors of that which were used to make the change
from human to computer forecasting.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.