Climate, Crops, and Capital: The U.S. Weather Bureau and Predictive Data in the West Indies, 1898–1902

This paper examines the U.S. Weather Bureau’s production of predictive climatological data in the West Indies during the American occupation of Cuba.  New imperatives for expansionism in American foreign policy and in the U.S. Weather Bureau converged in early 1898, when fears of Spanish naval attacks and tropical hurricanes loomed large within the federal government.  Such fears legitimated the creation of the Weather Bureau’s West Indian weather service, a meteorological infrastructure initially established to provide hurricane warnings and subsequently used to produce climatological and agricultural information for American investors in sugar cane and tobacco.  The Weather Bureau relied on local volunteer observers in Cuba and Puerto Rico to report on temperature and precipitation, data that was then aggregated into the Weather Bureau’s weekly and monthly Climate and Crop Reports for Cuban and American subscribers, yet the Weather Bureau considered the majority of the region’s inhabitants “primitive” and thus unaware of the reports’ value to modern agricultural practices.  This paper explores the contested production of predictive meteorological and climatological knowledge and how the value of such knowledge was calculated by U.S. government scientists, local observers and farmers, and American capitalists.  The work of the Weather Bureau’s Climate and Crop Reporting Service illuminates the role of government science in American empire as well as the technical and bureaucratic labors of quantification.