14 OCEANOGRAPHY IX THE UNITED STATES 



a very faithful picture of the formation of the storms. We can see the 

 spirals in a hurricane as I will show later. We can see the differences 

 in the configuration and forms of clouds along fronts so that we can 

 fix the boundaries between cold and warm air masses and it is, of 

 course, along these boundaries that our weather and storms occur and 

 they are ver}^ significant. This is an idealized picture of how North 

 America looks. Here is the system of clouds, rains, with one front up 

 over the Mississippi Valley and extending up over Nova Scotia and 

 the other lying off the Pacific coast as it is this morning. They have 

 been catching some weather out there in the last day or so and we have 

 very much the same situation with the front lying along the coast and 

 the warm, moist air moving up the frontal slope and precipitating its 

 moisture. 



The meteorological satellite can give a great deal of very important 

 information. 



I mentioned the heat budget during the earlier testimony. The 

 satellite can measure reflected radiation from the clouds and the earth 

 to see how much the earth is absorbing and how much it is reflecting 

 back into space to be lost. It can show the form of clouds, the type, 

 height, and layers, the rain, thunderstorms, and there are good indica- 

 tions that we can develop equipment that will give the total carbon 

 dioxide, ozone, and water vapor content. This is not just academic 

 information. The carbon dioxide and the ozone and to some extent 

 the water vapor has the same effect in the atmosphere that the glass in 

 a greenliouse has in keeping in the heat. It lets the short waves from 

 the solar radiation go through, but the longer waves that are reflected 

 from the earth are kept in. 



The ozone and other things are opaque to the longer wave radiation 

 so that it is very important to know about changes in the ozone 

 content of the atmosphere. In fact, one of the theories about ice 

 ages is based primarily on large changes in the carbon dioxide and 

 ozone, or ozone content of the atmosphere. 



We are looking forward with a great deal of, I thmk, justified 

 anticipation to what the satellites can give us when they are perfected. 



This is the last chart and it gives an idea of what we see from a 

 satellite. This was actually taken from a rocket fired from White 

 Sands and this is the picture. 



This is Texas. Here is Mexico, Houston, Del Rio. Here is the 

 spiral in the clouds denoting a hurricane, a mild hurricane. This is 

 the way it looks when this slant picture is resolved into a vertical 

 picture. 



The interesting thing about this is that until this rocket picture 

 was given to us 2 or 3 months after the event, nobody knew that 

 there was this hurricane in the upper air. There had been a moderate 

 disturbance over the gulf. We had foUowed it thinking it might 

 develop into a hurricane but there was no evidence either on our 

 surface weather observation chart or on the upper air sounding 

 network. Again, the data were too sparse. There was no evidence 

 whatsoever of this kind of a storm. However, Texas did have much 

 heavier rain than we could account for. In other words, the forecast 

 was wrong and we did not know where it came from until we saw this 

 storm. 



How often this kind of thing goes on between the gaps in our net- 

 work we have no way of knowing, but it is logical to think that it 



