From the early days of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, large computers have been used to simulate three classes of fluid dynamics problems: weapons explosions, plasmas in magnetic fusion energy machines, and stellar physics. A natural extension was another area of fluid dynamics: weather.

In the late 1950s, with the encouragement of Livermore co-founder Edward Teller, Chuck Leith constructed the world's first general circulation model. It simulated the growth, movement and decay of large weather systems based on the fundamental laws of physics. This model was the first in a series in which the Laboratory's computing capabilities were used to study atmospheric processes.

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