A movie about weather forecasting doesn't sound all that exciting, until you realize that one forecast was the difference between life and death for an invading force, and even the course of the entire war. That's the premise of the movie Pressure that opened this weekend- the weather forecast for the D-Day Invasion of Normandy. Brendan Frasier plays General Dwight Eisenhower and Andrew Scott plays James Martin Stagg, the chief meteorologist of the Allied forces in Europe. The tension is between meteorologists who disagreed on what weather would greet the invading Allies, and whose advice Eisenhower would trust when he set the date.
The movie, as you might expect, plays around with the timeline and emphasizes relationships between characters that probably didn't happen as portrayed. But the competing forecasts are real. Stagg was actually a geophysicist and was surprised at his assignment. He had a different philosophy of weather forecasting that was often at odds with meteorologists, especially US Army forecasters led by Irving P. Krick. These forecasting methods as used for the D-Day decision are explained at Smithsonian. It contains movie spoilers, if you aren't already aware of what date the Allies invaded Normandy. -via Strange Company
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