12 



NATURE 



[March 6, 1919 



D' 



Warnes (Common Commodities and Industries Series). 

 —iohn Wiley and Sons, Inc. (New York), and Chat- 

 man and Hall. LW.— Mechanical Drawing, J. S. Reid. 

 Miscellaneous. 

 Oxford University Press.— The Bantu and the 

 Semi-Bantu Languages : A Comparative Study, Sir 

 Harry H. Johnston; Slavic Europe: A Selected 

 Bibliography in the Western European Languages, 

 R. J. Kerner; World Power and Revolution, E. 

 Huntington; Some South Indian Villages, by a 

 number of Indian Students, the first volume of Econ- 

 omic Studies, edited by Prof. G. Slater, illustrated. 



METEOROLOGY DURING AND AFTER 

 THE WAR.^ 

 |URING the past four years and a half of hostili- 

 ties meteorology has, like many other branches 

 of knowledge, been utilised in naval and military 

 operations to a far greater extent than ever before. 

 Consequently, there are now a large number of officers 

 m the Services who have had practical experience of 

 the value of meteorological information when it has 

 been prepared from sufficient data, and by men who 

 have been thoroughly trained in the subject. It is, 

 therefore, highly desirable that full advantage should 

 be taken of the experience which has been gained 

 during the war in order to meet, as adequately as 

 possible, those demands which will be made upon 

 meteorology in the general reconstruction which is 

 now beginning. 



In some ways the conditions which prevailed during 

 hostilities were favourable to advances in the subject. 

 Special facilities were given for the rapid transmission 

 of reports; kite-balloons could furnish series of ob- 

 servations at various heights; aeroplanes were avail- 

 able to observe the temperature in successive layers 

 of the atmosphere up to 12,000 ft. or 14,000 ft. ; the 

 velocity and direction of air-currents up to even 

 25,000 ft. were determined by the bursting of shells 

 fired at high angles; pilot-balloons at perhaps a 

 hundred stations were observed four or more times 

 daily. In these and other ways a vast store of in- 

 formation has been amassed w'hich has already been 

 utilised, but remains available for much more 

 detailed study in the immediate future; and not the 

 least difficult problem will be to reduce the mass of 

 information to a manageable and orderly arrangement. 

 There were in 19 14 in this country the State 

 Meteorological Service (the Meteorological Office) and 

 a Naval Meteorological Service, which had been 

 formed in 19 13 to meet the needs of the Royal Naval 

 Air Service. Besides these, a private institution, 

 the British Rainfall Organisation, collected and dis- 

 cussed observations of the rainfall of the British Isles 

 and studied all questions connected with rainfall ; also 

 two scientific societies — the Royal Meteorological 

 Society and the Scottish Meteorological Society--- 

 speciaily devoted themselves to the advancement of 

 meteorological science. It will be seen, therefore, that 

 only the State service could provide a career for any- 

 one desiring to take up meteorology as a profession, 

 and as the staff of this service was comparatively 

 small, it is scarcely surprising that the great majority 

 of meteorologists were amateurs in the sense that they 

 studied the subject from their interest in it, outside 

 their ordinary occupations. 



In the Meteorological Office the policy for some 

 years had been to bring in men who had had a 

 thorough scientific education at a university and to 

 encourage them to devote it to the study of the many 

 problems which meteorology had to offer. This was 



1 From a paper read before the Royal Societv of Arts on January 2J by 

 Col. H. G. Lyons, F.R.S., Acting Director of the Meteorological Office. 



NO. 2575, VOL. 103] 



a great advance from the empirical treatment of the 

 subject, and has been amply justified by the success 

 obtained when this policy has befen tested under the 

 conditions of active service. 



For the general public current meteorology was 

 mainly represented by the daily forecasts and the 

 weather summaries which appeared in the Press, and 

 the cases in which these failed to describe accurately 

 the weather in the reader's immediate locality usually 

 impressed him more than their general accuracy as 

 tersely worded descriptions of conditions which were 

 likely to prevail over an extended area, such as south- 

 eastern England, but those who had only been brought 

 into contact with meteorology in this superficial way on 

 the outbreak of hostilities soon found that the weather 

 affected their preparations and their operations at 

 every turn. It was scarcely to be expected in 

 these circumstances that all Staff officers would at 

 once realise what information trained meteorologists 

 could provide, or to what extent their reports and 

 warnings could be relied upon in practice. 



In the course of the last two decades investigations 

 have been • extended from the surface of the earth • 

 into the air by means of kites and balloons, and our 

 knowledge of the conditions prevailing up to ten, and 

 even fifteen, miles above the earth's surface has 

 thereby been steadily increased. Self-recording instru- 

 ments continuously registering the pressure, tempera- 

 ture, and humidity have been carried up through the 

 lower seven miles (11 kilometres), the troposphere — 

 the region in which the temperature falls with in- 

 creasing height — and far into the stratosphere above 

 it, sometimes to heights of i2| miles (20 kilometres) 

 or more. In this way the remarkable fact of the 

 differentiation of the atmosphere into the lower tropo- 

 sphere and the overlying stratosphere has been estab- 

 lished, and further investigations indicate the great 

 importance of these upper regions of the atmosphere 

 in the solution of many problems relating to the 

 weather. 



With the) gradual introduction of balloons and air- 

 craft into the Army, and the subsequent formation of 

 the Royal Flying Corps, meteorological establishments 

 were formed at South Farnborough in 1910 and at 

 Upavon in 1913, where the study of the upper air 

 was carried on regularly. In this way, and with the 

 material furnished by the meteorologists of other 

 countries, a very large amount of information had 

 been collected, and, to a large extent, discussed and 

 utilised, before the outbreak of war, but this was, for 

 the most part, known and appreciated only by those 

 who were especially interested in the subject, and 

 the bearing of the results obtained had not reached the 

 wide circle of those who were later to become 

 acquainted with them under the exacting conditions 

 of active service. 



On the outbreak of hostilities some lines of work 

 had to be abandoned, and new lines taken up at 

 once. Many of the staff of the State service joined 

 the .\rmv in those early days who would have been 

 very profitably employed in' the meteorological units 

 which were formed later, or even in the Office itself, 

 where the work became ever increasingly heavy, while 

 the task of replacing those who went on service 

 became constantly more difficult. 



On the outbreak of war in August, 1914, meteoro- 

 logists were at first considerably handicapped by the 

 reduction of their supply of information. Wireless 

 reports from ships ceased; weather telegrams from 

 Germany and Austria were no longer available; and 

 Central Europe became a blank on the working charts 

 of the Meteorological Office. The censorship over all 

 inward and outward telegrams disorganised the supply 

 of meteorological information from Allied and neutral 



