https://www.iweathernet.com/educational/history-weather-forecasting

"The Weather Bureau, now known as the National Weather Service, was established on February 9, 1870 by the 41^st United States Congress and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant."  

Weather forecasters in the 19^th Century didn’t have computers, satellites, radar, or numerical prediction models. They relied solely on basic observations such as temperature, pressure, sky conditions, and experience. Without a sufficient understanding of atmospheric fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, their forecasts were short-term, vague, lacked technical detail, and were frequently inaccurate. Yet, the emerging profession was highly regarded."

“Perhaps some day in the dim future it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained. But that is a dream.”

-Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, 1922

"Ultimately, further efforts in numerical weather prediction came to a standstill, until the invention of the first electronic computer in 1946 (called the ENIAC or Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer).  In April of 1950, a group of meteorologists at New Jersey’s Institute for Advanced Study successfully produced the first weather forecast using the ENIAC and numerical prediction techniques. Although their first forecast was only for a 24-hour period, and the computer calculations took more than 24 hours to complete, their results were successful and marked the beginning of numerical weather prediction as we know it."

"Modern-day numerical weather models are run operationally on the NOAA/National Weather Service supercomputers in Maryland. NOAA supercomputers crunch over 200 trillion calculations per second. By October of 2015, the computing power will be increased tenfold, to quadrillions of calculations every second!  These upgrades will lead to more timely, accurate, and reliable forecasts. We’ve come a long way since 1870!"