TENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK-PART I 35 



At present the administration building at Mount Weatlier is well 

 equipped with apparatus for determining and automatically registering 

 the atmospheric pressure, direction and velocity of the wind, sunshine, 

 rainfall, temperature, and humidity; in short, it is equipped as a first- 

 class meteorological station, and the data secured are regularly tele- 

 graphed to the central office in Washington twice daily and used in all 

 forecasts for this part of the country. Besides this instrumental equip- 

 ment the administration building contains offices and several living 

 rooms, all well adapted to the needs of the place. 



The aerial department is provided with an engine and dynamo, an 

 electrolytic plant for generating the hydrogen used for the balloons, and 

 tanks for containing this gas, a liquid air plant to provide means for 

 standardizing instruments at the low temperatures to which they are 

 subjected at high altitudes, an instrument room where repairs can be 

 made, a room adapted to kite building, a computing and testing room, and 

 a kite storage room. It also has a small half round revolving structure 

 which contains the kite reel, and from which the kites are flown. 



Upper air data, as given by the self-registering apparatus carried by 

 the kites, are telegraphed to Washington daily and used in forecasting. 

 These data are also worked up in a very complete form and used in the 

 study of the general movements and condition of the atmosphere, and it 

 is already evident that in this way important information will be ob- 

 tained. 



Two small buildings are devoted to the proper housing of the magnetic 

 apparatus, where the magnetic condition of the earth with all its periodic, 

 its irregular, and its spasmodic changes, whether small or great, mild or 

 violent, are automatically recorded. 



The curious tracings are being studied in connection with solar and 

 terrestrial phenomena, and it is practically certain that important rela- 

 tions will be found, though it is difficult to decipher the writings of these 

 delicate magnets. 



The physical laboratory is now under roof, but is not sufficiently com- 

 pleted to be of any service. 



Solar physics is represented by only a small shelter, but a few feet 

 square, containing a pyrheliometcr for measuring the amount and intensity 

 of the solar radiation and the absorption of the earth's atmosphere. 



When the physical laboratory is finished and the solar-physical build- 

 ing put up, the Mount Weather Observatory, as contemplated, will be 

 complete. There will then be at this one place, so far as any one locality 

 and its equipment can provide them, facilities for investigating any and 

 every meteorological phenomenon, both directly by observation and in- 

 directly through experimentation. Its purpose is to be the helping friend 

 and not the competing rival of other places, whether public or private, 

 and therefore every investigator engaged in research of importance to the 

 Weather Bureau is invited to come and make use of its facilities for the 

 prosecution of his studies. The whole aim of the observatory Is the 

 discovery, no matter how or by whom, of fundamental truths of nature, 

 and of their application to human welfare. — (Bulletin of the Mount 

 Weather Observatory, Volume I.) 



