This past summer I had the privilege to indulge simultaneously in two of my passions, meteorology and history. Liberal arts and the sciences often seem to be worlds apart, and in many respects they are. However, there is at least one area in which these two fields overlap: history of science.

Before I talked to several members of the meteorology faculty, I never would have guessed that there were people who chronicled the history of science beyond the general outlines you can find in a high school history or science text. But, believe it or not, there is even the International Commission on History of Meteorology (ICHM), a small but growing organization of scholars and students who share a common interest in the study of the history of meteorology and related sciences. ICHM was created in 2001 and currently has a membership of 221 people from 43 nations.

In July 2004, I attended a conference held by ICHM in Polling, Germany, a small town to the southwest of Munich. The majority of the conference took place in the library hall of an old monastery. There were some exciting side events, including a field trip to Hohenpeissenberg, the oldest continually operating weather observatory in the world.

During the five days of the conference more than eighty members attended the conference and over fifty papers were presented. The thing that amazed me the most was the wide variety of papers, in terms of both the topics and the time periods. There is something of interest in the field of “history of science” that can appeal to anybody interested, from biographies of individual scientists to chronicling the evolution of a concept or an equation to researching something as specific as what we can interpret about past climate using ice core data from places like Antarctica and Greenland.

If you’d like to learn more about who to talk to within the department, email me at fmk111@psu.edu. For more information on ICHM, visit the Commission’s website at http://www.meteohistory.org.