At the center of modern weather forecasting is weather forecast modeling. With the aid of computers, mathematical models provide the crucial link between data collection and weather prediction. Without models and the computers needed to work them, the accuracy and volume of modern data collection would effectively be wasted on casual predictions.

Forecasting models evolved from the discovery of regularities in atmospheric movement. In particular, new discoveries of air mass and frontal structures in the early part of the twentieth century, in turn a result of advances in communications and upper atmospheric research, showed that there were causes and effects in weather that could be translated into more accurate forecasts. By repeated data analysis of certain localities over given lengths of time, and analysis of the characteristics of air masses in general, calculations can give a meteorologist an accurate idea of what might happen...