Part 4 (1/2)
The barometer does not rise with wind from an easterly direction unless a s.h.i.+ft is imminent. In winter the air is so much colder over the land than over the sea that the air brought in by an easterly wind is soon condensed. Consequently with winds from the south or southeast, even if the barometer is 30.20 or 30.10 and falling slowly rain usually arrives (and rain of course is meant to include snow whenever the mercury is below the freezing point) within 24 hours. If the fall is rapid there may be precipitation within 12 hours, and the wind will rapidly increase and the temperature rise.
If the wind is from the east or northeast and the barometer 30.10 or above and falling slowly it means rain within 24 hours in winter. In summer if the wind is light rain may not fall for a day or so. If the fall is rapid in winter rain with increasing winds will often set in when the barometer begins its fall and the wind gets to a point a little east of north.
If the barometer is 30.00 or below and falling slowly with northeast to southeast winds the storm will continue 24 to 48 hours. If the barometer falls rapidly the wind will be high with rain and the change to rising barometer with clearing and colder will probably come within 20 to 30 hours.
If the barometer is below 30.00 but rising slowly the clear weather will last several days.
If the barometer is 29.80 or below and falling rapidly with winds south of east a severe storm is at hand to be followed within 24 hours by clearing and colder. Under the same conditions but with northeast winds there will occur heavy snow followed by a cold wave.
If these promises do not always bear fruit it is because they will have been interrupted by an unseen s.h.i.+fting of the atmospheric weights. But the barometer will record them. A rapid rise may be checked in ascent and the instrument may fluctuate like a stock-ticker. Its tale is of very unsettled weather conditions and consequently no particular brand of weather will last for very long at a time.
A sudden rise of the barometer may bring its gale of wind as well as a sudden fall. But the tendency will be toward clearing and much colder.
A fall of the barometer on a west wind is not common. It means rain. A rise on a south wind means fair. A low barometer and a cold south wind mean a change to west with squalls for a while. On the other hand, a high barometer with warmer weather means a s.h.i.+ft of the wind to southerly quarters and an imminent fall.
If the barometer rises fast and the temperature does, too, look for another storm. This is often noticed in summer.
There is a slight daily oscillation of the mercury, which, if other things are steady, registers highest at 10 A. M. and 10 P. M. and lowest at 4 A. M. and 4 P. M.
If this data confuses bear in mind the simple ordinary progress of the barometer in the usual storm: First, it will stand steady for a day or so at any point between 30.10 and 30.50. Then the gla.s.s will begin (for most storms) to fall gradually. As the center nears the fall hastens. After the lowest point has been reached a slight rise will be followed by another slight fall and then the final long rise will commence. The rain begins and ceases at different stages for different storms, depending upon the wind's velocity and direction.
For every 900 feet of alt.i.tude the height of the mercury is about one inch less. Do not complain that your barometer is inaccurate if you are living up in the mountains and your readings are not the same as the weather reports which are reduced to sea level. All the figures given in this chapter are for sea level and if your house is 1900 feet above you must move the copper hand of your aneroid 1.95 inches from the pressure hand. If the pressure hand would read 28.05 the adjustable copper hand would read 30.00 which is the sea level reading.
One good thing to remember is that a barometer falls lower for high winds than for heavy rain. A fall of two- or three-tenths of an inch in four hours brings a gale. In the ordinary gale the wind blows hardest when the barometer begins its rise from a very low point.
In summer a suddenly falling barometer foretells a thunderstorm, and if the corresponding rise does not at once take place the unsettled conditions will continue with probably another thunderstorm. If you see the thunderstorm first, that is, if the barometer is not affected by the approaching black cloud you may be sure that the storm will amount to nothing.
The man in the fields or along the sh.o.r.e has many natural barometers in animal life. But these natural barometers only corroborate; they do not foretell, at least very long before. Some are useful at times and among these the birds are foremost. The observant Zunis have incorporated this in one of their pretty proverbs, ”When chimney swallows circle and call they speak of rain.” As a matter of fact the swallows are circling most of the time after insects. If they are flying high it is because the bugs are flying high and that is because there is no danger of rain. As the rain nears the air gets moister, the bugs and the birds fly lower.
Whether they do this because their instinct is to avoid a wetting or because the lighter atmosphere of a cyclone makes flying more difficult, particularly at alt.i.tudes, I do not know. For weather purposes it is enough to watch their comparative levels. Wild geese are excellent signs, I am told, but it would be a dry country that waits for a sight of them for its rain.
Bees localize before a storm and will not swarm. Flies crowd upon the screens of houses when humidity is high, possibly because the appetizing odors from within are buoyed afar by the heavy air. Cuckoos seek the higher ground in fair weather and disappear into bottom lands before a rain. Although they are called rain-crows they are heard in all weathers.
Smoke is as good an evidence of barometric pressure as anything except the instrument itself. On clear, still days it will mount; on humid days without wind it will cling to the hill. There is that difference. But it takes skill and many comparisons to gauge its angles in the wind. It becomes a test in observation and finally rewards one by becoming an excellent sign not only of air texture but of the direction of its currents.
No reference to barometers would be complete without mentioning spiders. They show a most delicate apprehension of changing conditions. If the day is to be fine and without wind they will run out long threads and be rather active. If the rain is nearing they strengthen their webs, shorten the filaments and sit dully in the center. Fresh webs on the lawn insure a clear day. But for the commuter, whose time is money, there is little leisure to consider the spider.
As a natural result of the variation in alt.i.tude affecting the barometer the words which are printed on the face become entirely useless. In some places it would be impossible for the needle to point higher than ”Very Stormy.” Even at sea level a sudden fall to ”Fair” would cause a rain, much to the indignation of the person who thought that he had purchased a self-registering weather prophet. Disregard the words but watch the needle and you will never be surprised at what the weather is doing next.
CHAPTER VI.
THE SEASONS.
Too great emphasis cannot be laid upon the futility, at present, of trying to forecast the weather for more than a very few days in advance. Long range efforts are not made by the Bureau because with its present limited knowledge of the factors that control seasons and with the present limited facilities for collecting data the process of looking into next month has not been perfected, and the attempt to investigate next winter's weather proves scientifically impossible.
As usual, fakers step in where science fears to tread. With goose-bones (not their own) and hickory nuts they prophesy with all their might. And if their prophecies come true, as sometimes they must, there is wide rejoicing in the newspapers and the cause of science is set back by just so much. But science cannot be thwarted in the end and every year new discoveries are made, new speculations proved true or forever false, and some time, doubtless, the weather will be predicted from year to year with the same 85% accuracy with which the 36 hour forecast is now made. Experimenting is worth the little that it costs, too, for to know when the summer is to be dry or wet, hot or cold will be a boon to everybody and to the farmer most of all.
One conclusion has already been reached by officials in the Weather Bureau and scientists generally. It has been decided by long search through creditable records, painstaking comparisons of averages coupled with the most accurate investigations for half a century, that, on the basis of ten years, our seasons do not change. That is, counting the decade as a unit, our weather keeps to the same level of efficiency through the centuries.
This statement comes always as a blow. It always provokes argument and citations of grandmother's blizzards. There is a great and universal hesitation in believing that our weather is as good to-day as it used to be. The good old times when there was a general debauch of snow and you could skate all winter on anything but the Atlantic Ocean certainly appear no more. As a matter of fact there has been a change, but it has been in our memories. In grandmother's youth the trains,--if they had trains then,--doubtless were stalled by a big snow for then they did not have rotary plows. In father's day they may have had an unbroken winter of sleighing. We couldn't now; sleighs are extinct. But in our time, in fact every year, some record is being broken and the records go back a respectable length of time.
For example in Philadelphia the most accurate records made by standard instruments have been kept for 43 years. During this time the highest wind velocity was recorded in 1878 (75 miles an hour). The greatest rainfall in 24 hours occurred in 1898 (5.89 inches). The lowest temperature was registered in 1899 (6 degrees below zero); the highest in 1901 (103 degrees). The greatest number of thunderstorms for any one year took place in 1905 when we had 51. As late as 1909 the heaviest snowfall ever recorded at this station, amounting to 21 inches, occurred. And just a few weeks ago (April 3rd, 1915) it snowed 19 inches in half as many hours. All these items do not indicate a climate decreasing in virility very swiftly.
But there is more evidence yet that Philadelphia is experiencing the same varieties of weather in about the same proportions. Diaries of observant men running back to 1700 show that almost any kind of memory could be founded on fact, that the same violent changes in temperature, the same deep snows and unseasonable seasons that we endure to-day were noticed then. To quote: ”The whole winter of 1780 was intensely cold. The Delaware was closed from the 1st of December to the 14th of March. The ice was from two to three feet thick.” We despaired of ever living up to this until three years ago when the same thing happened and sleighs crossed the river a little above the city. And despite the new ice-boats!
”The winter of 1779 was very mild, particularly the month of February when trees were in blossom.”
”On the 31st of December, 1764, the Delaware was frozen completely over in one night, and the weather continued cold until the 28th of March with snow about two and a half feet deep.”
”The winter of 1756 was very mild. The first snow was as late as the 18th of March.”
And so it goes. 1750 was mild; 1742 ”one of the coldest since the settlement of the country”; 1741 was intensely cold, 1725 mild, 1714 very mild after the 15th of January, 1697 long, stormy and severely cold. The upshot of it all is that February violets and April snows were just as well known to General Was.h.i.+ngton as they are to us.
[Ill.u.s.tration: NIMBUS.
Courtesy of Richard F. Warren.
Nimbus is any cloud from which rain is falling, and the important thing to know is how to judge from the formless thing how much longer it is to rain. The wind is the surest guide. In this picture the nimbus cloud is only that at the end of the cape. All the rest is torn stratus and c.u.mulus, which needs to condense a little further before it becomes nimbus. This will likely happen because the cloud at the left is very dark. The broken appearance denotes some wind. Rain does not fall from a mottled sky nor yet a streaky one; the nimbus is uniform in appearance. In summer a break in the nimbus will show a veil of cirro-stratus above. Just nimbus by itself will not support much of a storm. In winter if the nimbus is particularly seamless snow is about to fall.]
But though all facts point to the fact that the climate does not change in a decade or a generation or a dozen generations, there is some comfort for those who are not satisfied in knowing that it doesn't stay the same forever. During the carboniferous times the poles were as warm as the tropics and when the Ice Age came on it was very chilly everywhere. If one might only live an eon or two he might then well complain of the changing climate.
Climate, however, is one thing, weather another. The climate is the sum total of the weather. Climate is as enduring as our Const.i.tution, the weather is as changeable as our city governments. No matter how proud a scientist may be of the lasting qualities of the climate, he has to admit that our weather, taken day by day or even year by year, is versatile in the extreme. And the question he has set himself to solve is how to explain the variations of the seasonable weather. He wants to find out why all winters are not alike, and why no two successive springs are the same. Then he will be on firm ground at last and able to make scientific forecasts for the ensuing year.
The obvious thing was to find out as accurately as possible what had happened and science's keenest eye was focused on records in the hope of discovering fixed periods of warmth or wetness, cycles of cold and drought. So far no cycles have been discovered that are beyond dispute. Nothing has been found that cannot be contradicted successfully. This is discouraging.
One of the most frequent starting places for investigators is the spots on the sun. They found that periods of three, eight, eleven, and thirty-five years should bear some resemblance; 1901 was eagerly looked forward to. They wanted it to correspond with the remarkably cool summer of 1867. When it started off in July with a temperature of 103 degrees, the highest ever recorded in Philadelphia, they concluded that the sunspots were fooling them. A connection between sunspots and weather has not been established, therefore, although they are now known to affect the electrical condition of the earth's atmosphere. Longer periods of observation will permit comparisons that may yet define concurrent cycles of sunspots and weather.
A definite weather cycle has not yet been discovered, but one step in the way has been cleared up. We now are pretty sure of one cause for unusual single seasons of heat and cold.
There exist in winter great bodies of cold, dry air heaped up over Canada and Siberia, which are formed by the greater rapidity of radiation over land surfaces than over water. These mounds of cold air build up during December, January, and February and form great so-called permanent areas of high barometer. It is on the skirts of the Canadian high that the smaller highs form which sweep over our country, giving us our cold waves. Also in winter permanent lows form over the North Pacific and North Atlantic where warm currents afford continuous supplies of warm moist air. From the great Aleutian (Pacific) low spring most of the cyclones which swing down below the border of the Canadian high, make their turn somewhere in the Mississippi Valley, and then head for the Icelandic low.
It can be seen that if the Canadian high is a little stronger than usual and spreads a little farther south, then the northern half of our country will come more directly under its influence and we will experience an unusually severe winter. As the storms are pushed south and as the cold air pours into the northern quadrants the snow line is pushed south too. Hence all abnormally snowy winters are caused by a strengthening of the permanent Canadian high which may be central anywhere north of our Dakota or Montana borders.
Conversely, if this high is weaker than usual the cyclones can cross the country on a line farther north, there will be less snow, and the cold waves that follow will be less severe or even non-existent.
In summer the reverse occurs. Great oceanic highs are built up over the South Atlantic and South Pacific and a permanent low occupies the center of our continent. The character of the season is determined by the strength and position of these areas. The eastern states are affected especially by the slow movements of the South Atlantic low. The puzzle is why should these areas change their power and position, and if they must change why don't they do it regularly? The puzzle will undoubtedly be solved. These great centers of action will be plotted against and observed from every vantage point by a thousand observers. A fascinating field for scientific speculation opens.
At present our Government exchanges daily observations with stations in Siberia, Canada, and the West Indies. The great storm-breeder, the Aleutian Low, is watched from Alaskan sh.o.r.es. In the Atlantic the Bureau needs stationary s.h.i.+ps to record the growth and decline of the High over the Azores. Knowledge of the wind circulation from this would inform us whether our storms were to be shunted farther north and pushed somewhat inland. A storm which is pushed to the left of its normal track increases tremendously in intensity. Whereas a cyclone that limps slackly to the right of its normal line loses intensity at once. It misses coil. In this respect storms seem to resemble rattlesnakes.
The energy of the Azores High influences the number and destructiveness of the West Indian hurricanes: the larger the area is the closer do the hurricanes hug our sh.o.r.es and the more destruction do they accomplish.