Willis L. Moore

Willis Luther Moore (January 18, 1856 – December 18, 1927) was an American meteorologist, author, and educator. He was chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, 1895–1913, and president of the National Geographic Society, 1905–1910.

Biography

Moore was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on January 18, 1856, the son of Luther T. Moore and Lucy E. Babcock. During his youth the family lived on a farm in the Susquehanna Valley in New York. His father served in Grant's army during the American Civil War, where the eight-year-old Moore joined him at City Point, selling newspapers to the Union troops. Moore received his early education in Binghamton, New York public schools.

At the age of seventeen, Moore went to work for The Republican, a New York newspaper, as a printer and reporter. After an attempt to seek gold in the Black Hills failed, he worked as a printer for The Hawk Eye in Burlington, Iowa. In 1876 he took the entrance exam for the meteorological training school of the Signal Service. He reached the grade of observer sergeant in 1886. By 1891, he was the Milwaukee, Wisconsin district weather forecaster, then a forecast official for the upper lakes region in Chicago, Illinois in 1893. Secretary of Agriculture J. Sterling Morton named Moore as chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1895, succeeding Mark W. Harrington.

During this period, long range weather forecasting was considered little more than quackery, and Moore worked aggressively to denounce this activity. However, by 1906 he announced that the Weather Bureau was about to begin forecasting the weather a month in advance using scientific methods. The Bureau began experimenting with weekly forecasts in 1908, then made them a standard release in 1910. However, despite some successes, these would remain as inaccurate as the older methods.