THE SNOW GAUGE 



from the motor-car were connected with a cable from 

 the hut to the screen, but the power was not sufficient 

 to give a satisfactory light. 



In addition to the meteorological screen, there was 

 another erection built on the top of the highest ridge 

 by Mawson, who placed there an anemometer of his 

 own construction to register the strength of the heaviest 

 gusts of wind during a blizzard. We found that the 

 squalls frequently blew with a force of over a hundred 

 miles an hour. There remained still one more outdoor 

 instrument connected with weather observation, that 

 was the snow gauge. The Professor, by utilising some 

 spare lengths of stove chimney, erected a snow gauge 

 into which was collected the falling snow whenever 

 a blizzard blew. The snow was afterwards taken into 

 the hut in the vessel into which it had been deposited, 

 and when it was melted down we were able to calculate 

 fairly accurately the amount of the snowfall. This 

 observation was an important once, for much depends 

 on the amount of precipitation in the Antarctic regions. 

 It is on the precipitation in the form of snow, and on 

 the rate of evaporation, that calculations regarding the 

 formation of the huge snow-fields and glaciers depend. 

 We secured our information regarding the rate of 

 evaporation by suspending measured cubes of ice and 

 snow from rods projecting at the side of the hut, where 

 they were free from the influence of the interior warmth. 

 Inside the hut was kept a standard mercurial barome- 

 ter, which was also read every two hours, and in 

 addition to this there was a barograph which registered 

 the varying pressure of the atmosphere in a curve 

 for a week at a time. Every Monday morning Adams 

 changed the paper on both thermograph and barograph, 

 and every day recorded the observations in the meteoro- 

 logical log. It will be seen that the meteorologist had 



203 



