6 Fishery Board for Scotland. 



session of the Meteorological Office, and collected during many years 

 by the captains of many Atlantic liners. These data have been 

 entrusted to me by the Marine Superintendent, Captain Campbell 

 Hepworth, E.N., C.B. 



2. For the Northern Atlantic, north of 60° N., I have relied 

 mainly on the data, also derived from captains of ocean-going liners, 

 which are set forth from year to year and from month to month, 

 in the charts published by the Danish Meteorological Office in the 

 Nautisk-Meteorologisk Aarbog. I have extracted and averaged these 

 data from the annual reports for the years 1903-1913. 



3. For the North Sea itself, I have depended almost wholly upon 

 the observations collected for us during the past twelve years by 

 various captains of passenger vessels trading between British and 

 continental ports. These observations have been frequently dealt 

 with in our North Sea Investigation Keports, and I have now collated 

 and averaged the whole of the available material in the hands of the 

 Fishery Board. I am well aware that other such observations are 

 in existence elsewhere, which are not yet published, and which I 

 have not been able to incorporate here. 



4. A very important contribution to all such work as this is 

 contained in Dr. H. N. Dickson's paper, published in 1899, on " The 

 Mean Sea Temperature of the Surface Waters of the Sea round the 

 British Coasts." * This paper contains, among other matters, the 

 mean monthly sea temperatures for over sixty stations round the 

 coasts of Great Britain and Ireland, based on observations made at 

 various lightships and coastguard stations during a considerable, but 

 varying, number of years. These data (transferred to the Centigrade 

 scale) I have reprinted at the end of the present paper. 



Some years ago, by the kindness of the Director of the Meteoro- 

 logical Office, I was entrusted with the more recent records from the 

 same stations, and I began the task of summing and averaging the 

 observations with a view of bringing the whole mass of temperature 

 statistics up to date. This task, however, I soon gave up, for it 

 was extremely laborious, and the addition of a few years to the 

 periods dealt with by Dr. Dickson gave mean values which were not 

 appreciably different from his own. I came, accordingly, to the con- 

 clusion that the number of years dealt with by Dr. Dickson was, in 

 general, long enough for the determination of means from which very 

 useful deductions could be drawn. But it is now sixteen years since 

 Dr. Dickson published his results, and there is no doubt that, wher- 

 ever observations have been continued steadily during all these 

 sixteen years, it would be well worth while to revise the whole 

 work and to make out a new table of mean values. 



5. For the English Channel I have received from Mr. E. C. Jee, 

 of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, a most useful series of 

 Mean Monthly surface temperature values, obtained during recent 

 years on three cross-channel passenger routes. 



6. Lastly, I have obtained from various sources data for the 

 surface temperatures at a number of continental stations. The 

 most important of these are the following : {a) Observations from 

 eight Norwegian lighthouses for the period 1874-1903, prolonged in 

 some cases to 1912. These were prepared by Mr. Axel S. Steen, of 



* Quarterly Journal of the Royal Scottish Meteorological Society, xxv. pp. 277-302. 



