Page:The Fun of It.pdf/142

118 “When you have time—when you get through with this,” he said, indicating the crowd, “please tell me some day exactly what you encountered on the flight. After all, we’re able really to find out so little about over-ocean weather—and evidently what we predicted didn’t pan out.”

One day I visited Dr. Kimball at the Weather Bureau perched up at the top of the Whitehall Building in lower New York City. It was mid morning. Dr. Kimball stood at a high desk, and as we talked, the periodic delivery of telegraph flimsies interrupted our conversation. These mes­sages contained cabalistic figures from Manitoba, Kansas or Cuba, recording conditions at that par­ticular point—the barometric pressure, wind direc­tion and velocity, visibility and temperature, and whether rain, snow, fog or sunshine prevailed.

On the desk before him lay an outline map of the United States and the Atlantic. As the infor­mation trickled in. Dr. Kimball penciled swirling lines across it. In final form each swirl outlined specific pressure areas. Little pools and wide ed­dies of these lines, called isobars, gradually covered the paper, while on a companion map developed an­other picture puzzle of isotherms, lines designating temperatures.

Dr. Kimball and I talked of the interesting phe­nomena of weather movement—for it is the calculation of movement which is the basis of meteoro­logical prediction. The “highs” and “lows” (that is, fair weather and storm centers) are seldom static