Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/324

306 put upon the weather-charts of the past. How much more light will they derive from the new international "simultaneous" weather-maps! While the scientific world is despairing of finding adequate mechanical means of mooring a floating weather-station in mid-Atlantic to cable its reports to land, the necessity for such a station is being gradually superseded by the development of researches which if studied will supply adequate rules for weather-forecasting without mid-Atlantic reports. The immediate value of every means which offers any approximation to correct storm-warnings for the British and French coasts—frequented by the navies and merchant marines of every flag—is beyond calculation in dollars and cents.

The ultimate value of the temperature and rainfall statistics obtained by this research, especially in their application to agriculture, can not be questioned. Even if such data were of no avail for the general work of weather-forecasting, they reach into the sphere of all farming operations, and are utilized by all classes. One of the most striking exemplifications of this fact has been furnished by Governor Rawson, of the island of Barbadoes, who, in an official paper, has used the rainfall reports "in calculating the probability, or expectation, of coming seasons as respects the yield of the sugar-plantations."

The long-protracted and often torrential precipitation that drenched the British Islands and large portions of western Europe last summer (1879), had been preceded by long-protracted and abnormal chilling of those countries, whose crops were blighted or dwarfed for want of sunshine and ruined by too frequent down-pours. Now, it is a fact worthy of deep reflection that on June 12th, before this dreary and desolating summer had set in, the English journal of science, "Nature," published a summary of thermometric data from ninety-two stations, which demonstrated that "the cold weather, for the six months ending May 1, 1879, exceeded in intensity" (that of) "any other past period of cold weather in these islands of like duration, of which we have an exact and authentic record." Great Britain on the 1st of May was then abnormally refrigerated; these islands, and we may add the adjacent continent, were ready to act as powerful condensers of the tropical and North Atlantic vapor wafted over them in enormous volumes by the southwest or "anti-trade" winds, which especially prevailed in summer. But more significant still were the barometric conditions prevailing over Iceland, which so greatly affected the weather of the British Isles. The spring of 1879 was unusually cold, and the international weather-charts, prepared by our Signal-Service, show unusually high pressures throughout April, 1879, over Iceland, just as occurred in July, 1867, when there was a memorably cold spell in Great Britain—owing to the fact, as Mr. Buchan explains it, that "the pressure being low in Norway and countries surrounding the Baltic, and high in Iceland, Scotland was thus placed in the cold Arctic current which set in from Iceland toward the Baltic."