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Who was the real Irving P Krick of Pressure?

Who was the real Irving P Krick of Pressure?

In the Operation Overlord drama Pressure, Chris Messina stars as American meteorologist Irving P Krick, working on weather forecasts for the 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy. Confident and charismatic, Krick delivers his predictions with pizzazz – yet some of his colleagues doubt that he knows what he’s talking about. Does this unflattering picture reflect the real man, asks Jonathan Wright?

A person in a suit sits at a desk holding a rolled sheet of paper, with documents and drawings spread out in front of them.

Jonathan Wright

Published: May 29, 2026 at 6:00 PM

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The embodiment of “oversexed, overpaid and over here”, American meteorologist Irving P Krick – certainly as portrayed in D-Day drama Pressure – knows how to command a room. It’s a useful skill but, as the movie explores, it may be that his well-honed patter masks the true character of someone who is glib, insufficiently rigorous in questioning his own work and, ultimately, seeking glory.

If that’s true, it would be of vital importance to those planning Operation Overlord in the 72 hours leading up to the invasion of occupied France.

Soldiers in helmets and military uniforms run through shallow surf on a beach, rifles in hand, under a cloudy sky.

Basing his forecasts on patterns from the past, Krick – played with breezy charm by Chris Messina (Air) – declares that the weather will be fine on Monday 5 June. Dour Scottish scientist James Stagg disagrees strongly. The success of D-Day rests on who is correct.

Who was the real Irving P Krick?

Krick was born in 1906 to a comfortably wealthy family in San Francisco. In 1928, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a BSc in physics. Having worked in the nascent airline industry, Krick’s career began in earnest in 1934, when he gained a PhD in meteorology from the California Institute of Technology, where he later worked as a professor.

His work attracted attention when he wrote a paper claiming the 1933 crash of the helium-filled airship USS Akron on errors in a forecast made by the US Weather Bureau.

With the outbreak of war, Krick was recruited into the United States Army Air Corps by aviation pioneer Hap Arnold, a military pilot who had been taught to fly by Orville Wright and who rose to be a five-star general. Arnold loathed uncertainty and, though Krick’s forecasts were often wrong, he effectively became Krick’s patron. So it was that Krick came to be one of the meteorologists working on forecasts ahead of Operation Overlord – the Allied invasion of German-occupied Normandy in 1944.

Did Krick really play the piano in the workplace, as portrayed in Pressure?

Certainly Krick was an accomplished pianist, and his mother hoped that he might become a professional musician. Krick’s own assessment, as reported in Victor Boesen’s Storm: Irving Krick vs the US Weather Bureaucracy – a book many weather historians see as reflecting Krick’s own perspective – was that “he wasn’t good enough to make it to the top in music”.

A conductor with white hair stands on a podium directing an orchestra, with musicians and their instruments filling the stage and an audience visible behind them.

The NBC Symphony Orchestra pictured in the 1940s. Irving P Krick reportedly performed with the orchestra before the Second World War | Credit: Alamy

Nevertheless, he did perform with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. By all accounts, he was certainly a showman. He also worked in radio, at the Oakland station KTAB, and taught piano in Los Angeles.

Did Krick boast about working in Hollywood?

In one scene in Pressure, Krick makes much of having predicted the weather for the producers of Gone with the Wind. Well, you wouldn’t want to film the burning of Atlanta on a wet or windy day.

This tallies with the historical record. Krick always liked chasing and making money. To quote John Cox, the author of Storm Watchers: The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin’s Kite to El Niño, “Weather forecasting was his product line, although, like many a great salesmen, his number one product was himself.”

Read more | Is Pressure a true story? Here’s the real history behind the D-Day drama

Did Krick clash with other meteorologists working on forecasts ahead of D-Day?

Yes. As Pressure suggests, Krick forecast that the weather on Monday 5 June would be fine. He routinely based his predictions on old weather maps that showed conditions in previous years, tracking charts for conditions on subsequent days in those years to suggest what was likely to happen.

Using that approach, known as analog forecasting, Krick claimed that he could predict the weather weeks in advance. Meteorologists working for the British, including James Stagg, disagreed. To quote The Forecast for D-Day: And the Weatherman behind Ike's Greatest Gamble, they thought that “the idea was pure bunkum.”

A man in a military uniform speaks to a seated man at a desk with a typewriter in a vintage office lined with files and a large wall map.

British meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott) clashes with American counterpart Irving P Krick (Chris Messina) in Pressure | Credit: Alex Bailey/Focus Features/ STUDIOCANAL © 2026 All Rights Reserved

They had a strong point. On 5 June 1944, contrary to Krick’s predictions, Normandy was buffeted by stormy weather.

Krick isn’t emerging as an especially sympathetic figure. Were there any mitigating circumstances?

When taking the part, Chris Messina told director Anthony Maras: “I think Krick is Salieri to Stagg’s Mozart.” If you were to take a charitable view, there’s something in this idea. Krick was working in an era when far less data was available than today. Nevertheless, he well understood, for instance, the dangers of different fronts of warm and cold air colliding. Moreover, he learnt his trade studying the weather patterns in continental North America rather than in the British Isles, commonly buffeted by capricious Atlantic storms even at the height of summer.

However, the historical record frequently shows Krick behaving badly. In particular, as portrayed in Pressure, he had a disregard for the chain of command, often trying to go above his superiors with his ideas. At one point, for instance, it’s said he even tried to interest Franklin D Roosevelt in a plan to shift bombing operations to Siberia based on his own – flawed – long-range forecasts.

A seated person holds up a large illustrated sheet while another person stands beside the desk, looking at it in a wood‑panelled office.

After the war, meteorologist Irving P Krick, pictured (right) in 1954, set up a business focusing on weather forecasting and cloud-seeding | Credit: Getty Images

What happened to Krick after the Second World War?

Caltech, where he was a professor, closed its meteorology department in 1948. Krick then set up his own firm in the private sector. In addition to forecasting, he became involved in cloud seeding, the practice of trying to force rainfall in dry areas. By 1951, his cloud-seeding business had 120 employees.

However, following a by-now familiar pattern, the meteorological establishment saw little scientific merit in Krick’s work. In 1990, he sold his company, and in 1996 he died of heart failure.

Pressure is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 9 September

Authors

Jonathan Wright