The astonishing development of computer technology since the mid-20th century has been accompanied by a corresponding proliferation in the numerical methods that have been developed to improve the simulation of atmospheric flows. This article reviews some of the numerical developments concern the ongoing improvements of weather forecasting and climate simulation models. Early computers were single-processor machines with severely limited memory capacity and computational speed, requiring simplified representations of the atmospheric equations and low resolution. As the hardware evolved and memory and speed increased, it became feasible to accommodate more complete representations of the dynamic and physical atmospheric processes. These more faithful representations of the so-called primitive equations included dynamic modes that are not necessarily of meteorological significance, which in turn led to additional computational challenges. Understanding which problems required attention and how they should be addressed was not a straightforward and unique process, and it resulted in the variety of approaches that are summarized in this article. At about the turn of the century, the most dramatic developments in hardware were the inauguration of the era of massively parallel computers, together with the vast increase in the amount of rapidly accessible memory that the new architectures provided. These advances and opportunities have demanded a thorough reassessment of the numerical methods that are most successfully adapted to this new computational environment. This article combines a survey of the important historical landmarks together with a somewhat speculative review of methods that, at the time of writing, seem to hold out the promise of further advancing the art and science of atmospheric numerical modeling.
