March 11, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



393 



ing seven days. Considering the difficulty of 

 the problem, the forecasts have been remark- 

 ably successful. While the percentage of 

 accuracy of these forecasts has naturally not 

 been so great as the high standard reached 

 and maintained by the daily forecasts, a good 

 beginning has been made. Doubtless the re- 

 searches carried on at Mount Weather, espe- 

 cially the upper-air investigation, are already 

 beginning to bear fruit. Meteorological re- 

 search under the auspices of the United States 

 Weather Bureau is still in its infancy, and no 

 one can tell what may be learned when it has 

 progressed a few years longer. The upper-air 

 investigation gives promise of most desirable 

 results. The daily kite flights under the direc- 

 tion of Dr. William R. Blair have been very 

 successful, the average height obtained being 

 great, while the world's record for height 

 reached by a kite is still held. Since in these 

 experiments the data obtained include tem- 

 peratures only, it is to be hoped that the other 

 meteorological conditions at the kite may also 

 be obtained. Sounding-balloon experiments 

 have been instituted with fair success by the 

 bureau during the past summer, Omaha and 

 Indianapolis having been selected for the 

 work on account of their central location. It 

 is probable that more of this valuable work 

 will be carried on during the coming year. 



As to what may be accomplished for meteor- 

 ology by men who are thoroughly interested in 

 the science, the history of the Mount Rose 

 Weather Observatory is a striking example. 

 The history of this project is the history of the 

 zeal of a professor of Latin, Professor J. E. 

 Church, Jr., of the University of Nevada, and 

 that of a few of his colleagues whom he in- 

 terested in the work. The observatory is an 

 automatic one, located upon the summit of 

 Mount Rose, a mountain 10,800 feet in alti- 

 tude, situated sixteen miles southwest of Reno, 

 Nevada. Begun in 1905, when maximum and 

 minimum thermometers were placed there to 

 obtain further data on summit temperatures 

 in the Sierra Nevada in winter, it was discov- 

 ered soon afterward that "frost forecasts 

 could be made with considerable certainty 



from the mountain top in advance of instru- 

 mental indications below." This discovery led 

 the Nevada Agricultural Experiment Station 

 in June of the following year " to offer a pro- 

 visional appropriation of $500 under the 

 Adams Act to supplement the independent ef- 

 fort of the faculty of the university." Follow- 

 ing this the work formally became and has 

 continued to be the department of meteorology 

 and climatology of the Nevada Agricultural 

 Experiment Station, with Dr. Church the co- 

 operative observer. Owing to the extremely 

 hazardous transportation, the work of con- 

 struction proceeded with difficulty, but before 

 the advent of winter the building was com- 

 pleted and some instruments installed. Of 

 the latter the most interesting was a precipi- 

 tation tank thirty inches in diameter and four 

 feet high with an intake pipe eight inches in 

 diameter and thirty feet long. This instru- 

 ment was of great value in ascertaining the 

 total amount of snow falling during the winter 

 season, making it possible to estimate the 

 probable amount of water available for irri- 

 gation purposes during the following summer. 

 Considering the inaccessibility of the observa- 

 tory, the records obtained have been fairly 

 complete and are extremely interesting. The 

 instrumental difficulties encountered are sum- 

 med up by Dr. Church in his last report in 

 which he says : " The perfecting of an auto- 

 matic meteorograph which will successfully 

 record the weather conditions at high altitudes 

 is the necessary antecedent to a more thorough 

 knowledge of mountain meteorology, and it is 

 at present the most important problem of the 

 observatory." To overcome this problem, Mr. 

 S. P. Fergusson, of the Blue Hill Observatory, 

 who designed and constructed the meteorograph 

 placed by Harvard on El Misti, Peru, was en- 

 gaged to build a somewhat similar one for the 

 Mount Rose Station. This was completed in 

 due time and, after having been tested at the 

 University of Nevada, it was permanently in- 

 stalled upon the summit of the mountain. 

 While progress was handicapped awaiting 

 the completion and installation of the neces- 

 sary apparatus, investigations were carried on 

 based upon the records already obtained on 



