Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/322

304 do not exceed, in intensity, the fiercest Atlantic hurricanes. The cyclone or typhoon of the U. S. steamship Mississippi, October 6, 1854, with that of the U. S. storeship Caprice, and the steamship Susquehanna, July 17 and 19, 1853, in Commodore Perry's Japan Expedition, are among the most memorable storms of history on any sea, and illustrate the magnitude and might of those atmospheric forces so characteristic of the Great Ocean, whose meteorology is now to be brought under strictly simultaneous surveillance and studied in its close causal connections with that of our own country.

As the investigation of the Pacific's meteorology is so important to America, the same system of observations applied to the Atlantic reaches to the roots of European meteorology. It is well known that the atmospheric conditions which shape European weather and climate are propagated over the French and British coasts from the Atlantic, so that every intelligent storm-warner and weather-forecaster in Europe casts a wistful eye to the western waters to catch some premonition of what is to befall his coasts. Propositions to buoy in the mid-Atlantic ships, equipped with self-registering barometers and weather-indicators and connected by telegraphic cables with the shore, which would flash reports of precursory changes to the central Signal-Office, were suggested by General Myer to meet a deeply-felt need. It has also been very seriously proposed to dispatch carrier-pigeons by the westward-bound English steamships, to bear back weather-reports from points two hundred or more miles at sea, in the hope that the London office might have data for more timely weather-warnings. "It is possible," says the Russian meteorologist Wœikof, "that in October Atlantic storms may reach as far as Yakutsk" (in northeastern Siberia) which is farther from the Atlantic than England is from the Pacific Ocean. "In Europe," Mr. Buchan tells us, "stormy weather is accompanied by a diminution in the atmospheric pressure, the center of which, after traversing more or less of the Atlantic, arrives on the coast of Europe." One weather-report from the Atlantic, if only made a few hundred miles from the British coast, would be worth, for all practical purposes of storm-prediction, more than dozens of continental reports. If, indeed, the international system does not supply the needed ocean-reports in time for the European work of daily storm-warning, its daily charts show the conditions which usher in the various weather-changes upon the European coasts. They show, moreover, the tracks which, at each season, Atlantic cyclones are wont to select and pursue as they approach Europe, and the rates at which they traverse these tracks. Given these mean data, deducible from the international weather-charts, and the chief elements are had for deciding any special question of weather that arises in the daily work of forecasting. As a late writer says: "The most abstruse discussion of meteorological data have hardly another object than the determination of the average conditions of the climate of each place, and of the amount