Eighty-one years ago today, Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, beginning the liberation of Western Europe. The scale of courage and sacrifice still staggers the imagination. I marked the anniversary a little differently this year—by hiking the very beaches where American, British, and Canadian soldiers landed on June 6, 1944.
Like many who visit, I tried to imagine the terror and resolve those soldiers must have felt. But I also found myself thinking about something less obvious: the weather forecast.
D-Day didn’t happen on June 5 as originally planned. A storm forced a delay. On the night of June 4, Group Captain James Stagg—Eisenhower’s chief meteorologist—predicted a narrow window of better weather on the 6th. Eisenhower took the gamble. German meteorologists forecast two weeks of storms and let their guard down. That break in the clouds changed the course of the war.
At the time, weather forecasting was almost mystical. There were no satellites, no supercomputers, and little reliable data. But Stagg and his team saw something others missed. That tiny technological edge—an accurate 48-hour forecast—saved lives, ensured supplies made it ashore, and helped secure the Allies’ foothold in Europe.
Fast forward 81 years: weather forecasts are so routine we barely think about them. But they’re still miracles of science. Government investment and decades of technological progress have taken forecasting from near guesswork to near certainty—and created billions in economic value.
This is the story of how innovation scales. At first, high-stakes bets by people with unlimited resources (like Eisenhower) push new technologies to their limits. If they work, the cost eventually comes down—and what once felt like science fiction becomes background noise in daily life. Weather forecasts. GPS. Cellphones. Cancer immunotherapies.
But we forget these miracles are fragile. They depend on long-term investment, scientific rigor, and the kind of quiet public institutions that are easy to ignore—until they’re gone. That includes places like NOAA, whose funding has already been slashed and whose future is uncertain under proposed budgets.
The lesson of D-Day isn’t just about bravery. It’s about what makes bravery effective: insight, planning, and the invisible tools that tip history's scales.
Let’s not wait for the next storm to remember that.
—Gautam
To read the full article, check out my piece on Bloomberg Opinion: https://lnkd.in/eDZEkrYa
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