CHAPTER XIII
ORGANIZED METEOROLOGY
No other branch of science is so dependent upon the constant systematic cooperation of a multitude of workers as meteorology. There are, to be sure, some kinds of atmospheric phenomena that can be studied advantageously by the individual meteorologist, with no further aid from his scientific confrères than the same sort of interchange of ideas that prevails in all departments of knowledge; but the widespread processes that constitute weather and climate require for their observation—whether the purpose in view be weather forecasting, or the collection of climatic statistics, or the assembling of data from which to deduce the laws of atmospheric movements—a veritable army of colaborers, equipped with standardized instruments and keeping their records according to a uniform plan.
Probably few people, in looking at the charts portraying the climates of the world that are found in reference books, realize how many observers have contributed to the preparation of such charts or the number of separate instrumental observations upon which they are based. In the United States alone there are something like 6,000 meteorological stations, at which upward of two and a quarter million observations are made every year—and a climatic chart is, of course, the fruit of many years of observations. At the beginning of the present century it was estimated that there were 31,000 meteorological stations in operation throughout the world. The present number is doubtless much greater. At some of these stations observations have been made regularly, once, twice or three times a day, for 100 or 150 years. In round numbers one may say that, during the last few decades, meteorological observations have been made, the world over, at the rate of ten million a year, and the total number, since the keeping of regular weather records began, runs far up in the hundred millions.
Organized meteorological observations were not unknown to antiquity—we have mentioned elsewhere the early rainfall measurements in India and Palestine—but the present era of such undertakings dates back only to the middle of the seventeenth century. In the year 1654 the Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Tuscany, through his chaplain and secretary, Luigi Antinori, secured the cooperation of several observers in Italy and the adjacent countries, to whom were distributed instruments and forms for maintaining daily records of the principal meteorological elements. Antinori and most of the observers belonged to the Jesuits, an order which has displayed extraordinary zeal in the furtherance of meteorology down to the present day. The observations thus inaugurated appear to have been kept up until about 1667, but unfortunately few of the records have been preserved. Several undertakings of similar character were launched during the next hundred years in France, England, and Germany. The most notable of such enterprises, however, antedating the foundation of the present official weather services, was the international system of observations maintained by the Meteorological Society of the Palatinate, founded at Mannheim in 1780 under the auspices of the Elector Karl Theodor. The chief credit for the epoch-making work of this society is due to its secretary, J. J. Hemmer. The society distributed standard instruments to its observers, who were widely scattered over the world; viz., fourteen in Germany, two in Austria-Hungary, two in Switzerland, four in Italy, three in France, four in Belgium and Holland, three in Russia, four in Scandinavia, one in Greenland, and two in North America (at Bradford and Cambridge, Mass.). The very detailed observations of this network of stations down to the year 1792 were published in twelve large volumes.
Although the activities of the Mannheim society came to an end in the troublous days of the French Revolution, the records that it had collected served as the groundwork for fruitful studies during the next generation. There are two distinct uses that can be made of statistics of this sort. First, they can be digested in such a way as to bring out the characteristic features of the climate at each of the localities included in the collection, and likewise to illustrate the distribution of climates over the globe. Second, the data for individual days from the various stations can be charted separately, so as to illustrate the instantaneous distribution of barometric pressure, wind and weather, and, by a comparison of the charts for successive days, to provide a sort of moving picture of the atmospheric machinery in operation.
Charts based on approximately simultaneous observations showing the state of the atmosphere at a particular moment of time over an extensive area of the earth are called synchronous charts, or sometimes synoptic charts, though the latter term is also applicable to charts showing average values for a particular month, year, etc. Synchronous charts, as used nowadays for the purpose of making forecasts, are prepared from data collected by telegraph; but the same kind of charts can be prepared in a more leisurely manner from the statistics gathered at any previous time, and such charts were frequently made for the purpose of study before the days of telegraphy. The pioneer in such undertakings was the German physicist, H. W. Brandes, who, about 1820, utilized the observations collected by the Meteorological Society of the Palatinate, together with some others, in compiling a series of daily synchronous charts of Europe for the year 1783.
Very similar studies were carried out in America, a few years later, by J. P. Espy, W. C. Redfield and Elias Loomis. Early in the nineteenth century a copious fund of meteorological observations had already accumulated in this country. The first undertaking in the nature of a meteorological organization, foreshadowing the present Weather Bureau, was due to Josiah Meigs, Commissioner of the General Land Office, who in 1817 established a system of tri-daily observations at the various land offices. At an almost equally early period the Surgeon General of the Army inaugurated regular weather observations at the military posts throughout the country. Local systems of observations were established by the authorities of New York State in 1825 and Pennsylvania in 1837, and systems of broader scope by the Patent Office in 1841 and the Smithsonian Institution in 1847. Experiments in collecting weather reports by telegraph for the purpose of forecasting storms were undertaken by the Smithsonian Institution as early as 1849. At about the same period Lieut. M. F. Maury, of the navy, was gathering meteorological reports from mariners and laying the foundations of marine meteorology. Finally, in 1870, Congress was induced to establish a full-fledged telegraphic weather service, similar to those that were already in successful operation in Europe. One of the great promoters of this enterprise was Dr. I. A. Lapham of Wisconsin; it had been repeatedly advocated by Maury; and a convincing object lesson in its behalf was furnished by the local service of reports and forecasts conducted by Prof. Cleveland Abbe, at the Cincinnati Observatory, with the aid of the Western Union Telegraph Company, in 1869 and 1870. During the first twenty years of its existence, from 1870 to 1890, the Federal weather service was under the Signal Corps of the army. Since 1890 it has been a branch of the Department of Agriculture, as the United States Weather Bureau, though the name “Signal Service” stuck to it, in popular speech, long after it ceased to belong to the army.
In this country weather forecasts are—or once were—said to emanate from “Old Probabilities,” or “Old Probs.” Our first “Old Probs” appears to have been Professor Abbe, who has explained the origin of this name in an account of his pioneer forecasting experiments at Cincinnati. He says of the initial Cincinnati Weather Bulletin, issued September 1, 1869: