This is part of the larger military and public assessment of the links between the large new waves of immigration, the environment, and illness, with a particular interest in identifying the roots of disease as they are connected to both environmental shifts and immigrant communities.

While the U.S. military had been collecting weather data for several decades, the Army Signal Corps is tasked in 1880 with creating a formal weather service. Shortly after, meteorology emerges as a field that is solely focused on predicting weather patterns.