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CHATS WITH THE WEATHEH MAN 



' R L C I- I 



* VlAY 11 1P31 * 

 RELEASE Fijiday . May 15. 1931 . 



NOT FOR PUBLICATION 



Speaking Time: 10 Minutes. 



ANNOUNCMENT : Your old friend, Ob. Server, seems to be all up in the air. He 

 has been having another of those chats with the weather men of the United States 



Weather Bureau. I guess it must be what they told him, that started him up 



How about it, Mr. Ob. Server? 



oOo 



Yes, Mr. Leroy T. Samuels, of the a^rological division of the United States 

 Weather Bureau, has been telling me about how our weather experts find out about 

 conditions in the upper air. 



By "upper air" we mean anything from 65 feet above ground on up as high 

 as there is any air. Of course, they haven't got the records th-^t high yet; but 

 it is surprising how high they have gone in some cases. 



It is not such a simple matter to get the -oiain facts about the temperatur 

 and the h-jmidlty, and the speed and direction of the wind way un aloft there. 



I guess the first man to make "upper-air" observations was some fellow 

 lying on his back watching the clouds go drifting by. The clouds give a simple 

 means of getting the direction of the wind at the level where they are. 



Of course, our weather experts hp.ve improved on that system of watching 

 the clouds. They have an instrument which is chiefly a black mirror mounted on 

 a level st?nd out in the open where the mirror will reflect as much of the sky as 

 possible. The motion of the image of a passing cloud seen in the mirror shows 

 the direction the cloud is moving; th-^t is, the direction of the wind. That 

 mirror is mounted in a frame marked in degrees, and there is a movable sighting 

 device, and Hr. Sa-nuels tells me that if they kno\'? the height of the cloud, they 

 can easily compute the speed with which it is moving, from the distance the cloud 

 image moves across the mirror in a given time. 



But that brings up the question; How are you going to know how high the 

 cloud is? 



Well, did you ever see a toy balloon get away from a baby on the way to 



the circus? Anyhow, as you may know, the weather men at our commercial air 



fields let loose little balloons to find the height of the clouds or "ceiling" 

 for air travel. The balloons are inflated to a certain size and rise at an even 

 rate. It is merely a matter of following the b-^lloon with the eye and timing it 

 ^antil it loses itself in the clouds to get a good estimate of the height of the 

 clouds . 



