One last thing about this day in history...June 6, 1944 was what every school kid knows as "D Day," but it took a little reshaping of the plans at almost the last minute. And invading the French coast to save the world from the Nazis would have been risky in any weather, but too dangerous on a bad day.
According to the weather team at WFRV Local 5 in Green Bay/Appleton, Wisconsin, an accurate weather forecast saved the day, and that was long before AccuWeather and The Weather Channel and all the others. In fact, in those long-ago days, meteorology was just about a guessing game, based on achy knees that always hurt the day before it rained, and such spurious prognostications as this:
The code name for the D Day invasion was "Operation Overlord." US General Dwight Eisenhower was the man in charge, and he needed to tack down 1,001 tiny details to fit the big picture together. Of course, weather was key, if the Allies were to hit the beaches at Normandy and defeat the Nazi forces then and there. With no satellites and computers at hand as weather forecasters have now, Eisenhower's advisors had to make do with surface observations and educated guesses.
On June 4, 1944, a strong area of low pressure tracked over Ireland and Scotland. If that was headed for the French coast on the 5th (the original planned day for the invasion) it would likely have brought with it clouds, high winds, and precipitation.
The best minds in the weather business looked at the available data and saw a small window on the morning of June 6, and plans were changed to make the invasion happen then. It was actually Captain James Stagg, the meteorologist in charge for the British Royal Air Force, who advised General Eisenhower to postpone the invasion to June 6.
The weather wasn’t perfect to start that morning, but conditions lightened up. As Stagg predicted, the cold front moved away, and another front lingered off to the west just long enough to open the door for the liberators. As it turned out, the weather was not favorable for the next several weeks, so waiting would not have been favorable to success.
German forecasters did not have access to this data, and calculated that the Allies would hold off.
Wrong again, Hitler.
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