United States. A terrible blizzard on January 12, 1888, a relatively warm day on the Great Plains of America, suddenly dropped temperatures by 30 or 40 degrees Celsius, bringing an unexpected snowstorm. The population and the government thus realized the usefulness of weather forecasts, especially for agricultural purposes. On January 12, 1888, the National Weather Service was transferred to the Department of Agriculture. President Ulysses Grant had signed a congressional resolution in 1870 authorizing the Secretary of War to establish the National Weather Service. Grant had assigned it to the War Department both because he believed that only military discipline was capable of gathering the necessary data and making predictions, and because he believed that such an effort was justified only during a war.
