On the Origin of "Forecasts"

The word forecasts, that is. From the BBC Magazine, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32483678:

One hundred and fifty years ago Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the celebrated sailor and founder of the Met Office, took his own life. One newspaper reported the news of his death as a "sudden and shocking catastrophe". Today FitzRoy is chiefly remembered as Charles Darwin's taciturn captain on HMS Beagle, during the famous circumnavigation in the 1830s. But in his lifetime FitzRoy found celebrity not from his time at sea but from his pioneering daily weather predictions, which he called by a new name of his own invention - "forecasts".

And quite apart from the origin of the term, the description of the early development of weather forecasting is fascinating.

[Thanks to Glenn Rudebusch for bringing this to my attention.]