Meteorology: The Science of the Atmosphere

Every schoolboy has read how Benjamin Franklin, by means of his famous kite experiment, demonstrated the electrical nature of lightning, and how the same versatile genius invent...

Will-o’-the-wisp is proverbially elusive. It has thus far escaped the fate of the rainbow, deplored by Keats. We do not know its woof and texture, and it is not given in the dul...

_Climograph._--A diagram introduced by Dr. Griffith Taylor, of Australia, for showing the mean monthly values of wet-bulb temperature and relative humidity at any place, and for...

During the great war the British Government decided, in its wisdom, to establish a flying field in Scotland, at which aviators were to be trained in dropping bombs. The commissi...

The fact that a vast proportion of the conversations in which human beings engage begin with remarks about the weather has often been noted, but perhaps never fully explained. M...

When we look up into the sky on a cloudless day we behold a continuous canopy, the prevailing color of which is blue. This canopy is a veil that hides the starry hosts beyond, a...

The study of the movements of the atmosphere constitutes a rather formidable branch of science known as _dynamic meteorology_. This subject has engaged the attention of a number...

“Forecast”--with the stress on the first syllable when it is a noun, but often on the second when it is a verb--is a word that meteorology has made peculiarly its own. This fact...

Meteorologists have been in much perplexity over the naming and classification of the various deposits of atmospheric moisture known collectively as “precipitation.” The subject...

One of the things a tea kettle is good for is to provide, by means of the little cloud seen at its nozzle and erroneously called “steam,” an example of what happens when the inv...

Farmers have grumbled about the weather from time immemorial. The point of interest in this particular case is that the two grumblers do not agree about what is wrong. Farmer A...

The starting point in any study of the physiological effects of weather and climate upon humanity is the remarkable fact that, on the hottest days of summer and the coldest of w...

Two quite different conceptions of the substance called “air” are current in the world. One has prevailed from time immemorial. The other is wholly modern. One is the popular vi...

In the economic stress of our times much is heard about “natural resources.” This phrase suggests to most people’s minds the store of minerals, fuels, and oil locked up in the g...

Meteorologists, in their candid moments, have been heard to express disappointment over the amount of progress made in the art of weather forecasting during the past half-centur...

When the moralist reminds us that we are children of the dust and predestined to a dusty end, there is a grain of comfort in the discovery that modern science regards dust as on...

Some day the meteorologists of the world will join forces to produce a great encyclopædia of climate. No work of science is more sorely needed, but the magnitude that it would,...

Within the last few years the atmosphere has assumed a new and tremendous importance in human affairs as a medium that affords facilities for travel and transportation far super...

Though air is but one of an unlimited number of elastic substances that transmit sound, it is the one through which sounds ordinarily reach our ears. Hence the acoustic properti...

No other branch of science is so dependent upon the constant systematic cooperation of a multitude of workers as meteorology. There are, to be sure, some kinds of atmospheric ph...

That it behooves a sailor to be weather-wise has always been admitted, but there was a time, almost within the memory of men now living, when neither seamen nor landsmen had the...

It is a significant fact that the American Meteorological Society, which was organized in 1919, has a Committee on Commercial Meteorology. The appointment of this committee was...

One of the most astonishing paradoxes connected with the misapplication of human brains and energy glorified with the name of the “art of war” is this--that, while weather has a...

Nowadays, when we speak of a “meteor,” we generally mean a shooting star; but formerly this term was applied (and it still often is in technical literature) to a great variety o...