In 2022, Monthly Weather Review, the oldest continuously published meteorological journal in the world, will publish its 150th volume.  Starting in 1873, the U.S. War Department’s Army Signal Service began producing a monthly report on the weather across the United States.  The January 1873 issue amounted to a one-page written report and one chart (produced later) of the tracks of low-pressure centers during that month.  Eventually, this publication grew to include news items and research notes. Monthly Weather Review continued as a government publication with the transfer of the nation’s weather service from the military to a civilian organization—the U.S. Weather Bureau—in 1891, and its reorganization as the present-day National Weather Service, under the newly created National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1970. In 1973, NOAA stopped publishing the journal, which was transferred to the American Meteorological Society, who continues to publish it to this day.

Now, as the leading peer-reviewed journal for the publication of research related to theoretical, observational, and practical meteorology, Monthly Weather Review publishes around 5,000 pages a year.  Its list of contributing authors and editors includes many notable names from the pantheon of meteorology: Abbe, Beck, Bigelow, Bjerknes, Brooks, Humphreys, Köppen, Namias, Newton, Rossby, Simpson, and Wexler.  It has had three different publishers, it has been led by 49 different individuals, and it has evolved into an online format with its archive freely available across the globe.

This presentation will discuss some of the history of the journal and its impact on meteorology and related fields.  Monthly Weather Review was instrumental in the Wright Brothers choosing Kitty Hawk for their flights. On its pages, the new concepts of air masses and fronts imported from Norway were debated. Monthly Weather Review has also published highly cited, ground-breaking papers on numerical weather prediction, the defining scientific achievement in the field of meteorology. Other important articles published in its pages include the synoptic-climatology of the rapidly developing extratropical cyclone (known as a “bomb”), articles in turbulence and heat fluxes, and atmospheric teleconnections.  Looking back, the data published in the early issues have been used for a variety of applied research purposes, including the construction of historical records of upper-air data, the U.S. tornado database, as well as biologists interested in historical flooding in Colorado.  Monthly Weather Review continues to evolve as the modern publishing landscape has evolved with color figures, open-access articles, open data, and, in the near future, animations.  While the composition and content of Monthly Weather Review has changed dramatically over the past century and a half, it remains an important conduit for information, news, and research related to atmospheric science whose publication will continue to serve the meteorological for many years to come.