VII 



ON THE PATHS OF PARTICLES MOVING FREELY ON THE 

 ROTATING SURFACE OF THE EARTH AND THEIR 

 SIGNIFICANCE IN METEOROLOGY 



BY DR. A. SPRUNG 



(Dated Hamburg, June, 1881) 



[Published (August 188 1) in Wiedemann's Annalen der Physik und Chemie 

 New series, Vol. XIV, 1881, pp. 128-14.Q. 



Translated by Thomas Russell and C. Abbe] 



Although the view expressed by Hadley in the year 1735 as to 

 the influence of the rotation of the earth on the currents of the 

 atmosphere has become very well known, especially through Dove's 

 writings, and has been treated of in all manuals of meteorology and 

 physics, still the actual construction of the path of a particle of air 

 has in general only seldom been carried out according to Had ley's 

 principle. There are, however, in this very "Annalen" three art- 

 icles 1 in which the problem of rigorously calculating the paths of 

 the winds is proposed either under the definitely expressed or readily 

 recognized assumption that the particles of air are to be considered 

 as freely moving points or elementary particles of mass. The ques- 

 tion treated in these articles is therefore a mechanical problem that 

 can be formulated exactly, namely, the free motion (motion due to 

 its inertia) of a material particle which is constrained to remain on 

 a rotating surface. Since the year 1858 a number of mathematicians 

 have busied themselves with this problem, and about the year 1861 

 a general theorem was enunciated by Coriolis 2 by which every prob- 

 lem of relative motion can be reduced to one of absolute motion. 

 From these analytical investigations it evidently follows that the 

 Hadlerian principle gives only very imperfect expression to the 

 influence of the rotation of the earth on motions parallel to its sur- 



1 Von Baeyer: Pogg. Ann., 104, p. 377, 1858. 



Ohlert: Pogg. Ann., no, p. 234, i860. 



Mbusson: Pogg. Ann., 129, 652, 1866. 

 8 Coriolis: Journ. de l'Ecole Polytechnique, XV, p. 142. 



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