We have now reached the point in our story when a vast number of meteorological observations were being made and registers of the weather kept in many places in Europe with a view to discover some empirical rules to determine the changes of the weather. The supposition was that these changes obeyed some regular, though as yet unknown, laws. However, whilst significant advances had been made in the study of other natural sciences, following the collection and analysis of observations, similar progress was not so readily forthcoming in meteorology. Nevertheless, despite the inability to make any major impact on understanding, let alone predicting, day-to-day variations of the weather, it was still believed that a sustained programme of systematic observing would eventually bring to light regularities in atmospheric behaviour.

The difficulty was that although many of the daily weather reports made in Europe during the 1780s were periodically examined at the collecting centres of Mannheim and Paris, effective methods of transmitting and coordinating the data so as to obtain meaningful representations of current weather conditions had yet to be developed. Nonetheless, several notable investigations into the nature of storms had indicated the way in which future advances were to be made. For instance, in 1704 Daniel Defoe suggested in his essay The Storm that storms of wind and rain might be integral parts of migratory weather systems. In this work he made a detailed study of the disastrous storm which affected the British Isles on 26-27 November 1703 (Old Style) which, he thought, had originated near the south coast of North America, had travelled eastward across the Atlantic to affect England, Denmark and the Baltic, and finally disappeared in the Arctic region.