The Weather Bureau first becomes a civilian enterprise when it becomes part of the United States Department of Agriculture on February 9, 1890.

Under the oversight of this branch, the Bureau will begin issuing flood warnings and fire weather forecasts, and issue the first daily national surface weather maps; it will also establish a network to distribute warnings for tropical cyclones as well as a data exchange service that will relay European weather analysis to the Bureau and vice versa.

In 1870, the Weather Bureau of the United States had been established through a joint resolution of Congress signed by President Ulysses S. Grant with a mission to "provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent and at other points in the States and Territories...and for giving notice on the northern (Great) Lakes and on the seacoast by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms."

The agency had been placed under the Secretary of War as Congress felt "military discipline would probably secure the greatest promptness, regularity, and accuracy in the required observations."

Within the Department of War, it was assigned to the U.S. Army Signal Service under Brigadier General Albert J. Myer. General Myer gave the National Weather Service its first name: The Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce.

Cleveland Abbe—who began developing probabilistic forecasts using daily weather data sent by the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce and Western Union, which he had persuaded to back the collection of such information in 1869—had been appointed as the Bureau's first chief meteorologist.

In his earlier role as the civilian assistant to the chief of the Signal Service, Abbe had urged the Department of War to research weather conditions to provide a scientific basis behind the forecasts; he had continued to urge the study of meteorology as a science after becoming Weather Bureau chief.

While a debate had gone on between the Signal Service and Congress over whether the forecasting of weather conditions should be handled by civilian agencies or the Signal Service's existing forecast office, a Congressional committee had been formed to oversee the matter, recommending that the office's operations be transferred to the Department of War following a two-year investigation.