Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/442

Rh To illustrate the series of causes and effects we can take a long box or canal containing air at a certain temperature. Now if heat be applied at one end, it is evident that the air at that end is displaced in proportion to the amount of heat. The effect of heating the bottom of a column of air is to expand the lower layers of it and this produces less density in each of the lower layers, while at the same time the entire mass is lifted, provided the bottom rests upon a solid surface. Take water in a tube, heat the lower part of the tube, and the whole column will seem to rise in the tube, but the lower parts, being hotter, will necessarily have a smaller density. A common case of the power that can be produced by heat is seen in its effects in the steam engine. Similarly, the air when heated in certain localities, as over the tropics, begins to work practically like the steam engine. The air is expanded, the upper part is elevated and the lower part is rarefied. Now the effect of lifting a column which is heated in the lower part is to raise the isobar above the gravity level which is occupied before heating, and in the lower part the isobar is depressed below the position which it had before it was heated. It is now readily seen that isobars, instead of coinciding with the gravity levels, have a slope, the upper ones trending downwards towards the cold end of the canal, and the lower one sloping downwards to the warm end of the canal. Under the action of gravity a liquid or a fluid which rests on a slope of any kind tends to run down hill, just like water in a brook or a railroad train on a grade. The part which is above the gravity levels tends to get down to it, in order to destroy the slopes which nature abhors among its gravity levels. The force of gravity tries to make all the temperature and pressure levels coincide with the gravity levels, and in order to do that it is clear that currents of circulation are set up. In this way there is an effort to destroy the differences in temperature which have been produced by the sun's radiation and reduce them to a uniformity; that is, a uniform temperature at the same distance above the surface of the earth.

It becomes, therefore, a fundamental point in meteorology that the air over the tropics is heated in the lower levels by the action of the sun's radiation falling upon the earth, and that the air in the tropics is also lifted above its natural gravity position; hence, in the upper levels the air flows from the tropics towards the poles, and in the lower levels from the poles towards the tropics. We will not attempt to trace out this general circulation more fully until certain other conditions have been described.

If the heat is applied at the center of a canal, instead of at one end, the same principles operate, so that the lower part, being heated, has its isobars depressed in the middle, while the upper part is lifted so that the higher isobars are elevated above their original position. In this