The story goes that when Jule Gregory Charney, at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, ran an early numerical weather prediction in 1953, he and his colleagues managed to correctly hindcast a big snowstorm that had hit Washington, D.C., the previous year (fooling forecasters at the time). The quotation above is what Charney apparently said in a late night call to Harry Wexler, research director of the U.S. Weather Bureau. The moment has come to be regarded as a kind of turning point in meteorological history.
