“It contained only a few observations telegraphed from distant observers and announced ‘probabilities’ for the next day. This bulletin, in my own hand-writing, was posted prominently in the hall of the Chamber of Commerce, but unfortunately I had misspelled ‘Tuesday,’ and I soon found below my Probabilities the following humorous line by Mr. Davis, the well-known packer: ‘A bad spell of weather for “Old Probs.”’ This established my future very popular name of ‘Old Probs.’” The name has, however, been more particularly associated with Gen. Albert J. Myer, who, as Chief Signal Officer, was the first head of the Federal meteorological service.
Desultory experiments in the collection of current weather reports and their use in constructing weather maps were first carried out in Europe at about the same time as the early undertakings of this character in America. Such reports were gathered and published by James Glaisher, with the cooperation of the British railways, in 1849. The existing national weather services of the Old World owe their origin to an episode of the Crimean War. In November, 1854, a violent storm wrought havoc among the French and British warships in the Black Sea and sank many vessels containing invaluable stores intended for the Allied armies in the Crimea. The French astronomer Le Verrier, director of the Observatory of Paris, collected information showing the progress of this storm across Europe, and the results of this inquiry were so significant that he submitted to the Emperor Napoleon III the plan of organizing an international system of telegraphic reports, by means of which timely warning could be obtained of similar atmospheric disturbances. The French Government, with the aid of other European countries, established such a system in 1855. Within the next two decades most of these countries organized their own services, and at the same time maintained an international exchange of observations by telegraph. Before the close of the nineteenth century nearly all the civilized countries of the world, including many colonial possessions, such as Canada, Australia, Algeria and the Philippines, had established meteorological services, entailing more or less extensive arrangements for collecting daily reports by telegraph and issuing storm warnings and weather forecasts. The chief exceptions were several of the Latin-American republics and the Ottoman Empire, in which such organizations are still lacking.
Meteorology is essentially an international science. The atmosphere knows no political boundaries, and the more it is studied the more strongly meteorologists are impressed with the fact that intimate relations exist between the atmospheric events of widely separated regions of the world. Thus, the great anticyclone that is built up every year over the cold interior of Siberia exercises an influence upon the weather of the United States; the behavior of the Indian monsoons has been found to have some connection with barometric conditions in South America; and fluctuations in the force of the trade winds are apparently of world-wide significance—whence these winds have been described as the “pulse” of the general atmospheric circulation. The French meteorologist L. Teisserenc de Bort called attention many years ago to the existence of what he called “centers of action”; viz., large permanent or semi-permanent areas of high and low barometric pressure, the variations of which correspond strikingly with the vicissitudes of wind and weather in countries thousands of miles distant. Last but not least, persistent attempts have been made to interpret all the weather happenings on our globe in terms of a fluctuating supply of radiant energy received from the sun.
Fortunately meteorology has possessed an international organization for a great many years. The International Meteorological Organization was founded at a conference held at Leipzig in 1872, and was perfected at a formal congress of meteorologists convoked at Vienna in the following year. The International Meteorological Committee, which is the permanent working body of the organization, was established at the Vienna Congress. Finally, the organization was reconstituted at a conference held at Paris, by invitation of the French Government, in 1919.
The International Committee consists of not more than twenty members, all of whom are directors of official meteorological services. It is supposed to meet at least once in three years. At less frequent intervals are held “conferences,” to which are invited representatives of all the meteorological services and the principal independent meteorological observatories of the world. Attached to the organization are several international “commissions,” which supervise and coordinate the work of meteorologists in various special fields. At the close of the year 1921 there were commissions on the following subjects:
Agricultural Meteorology, Weather Telegraphy, Marine Meteorology, Solar Radiation, Application of Meteorology to Aerial Navigation, Réseau Mondial, and Polar Meteorology, Investigation of the Upper Air, Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity, Study of Clouds.
Each commission includes in its membership at least one member of the International Committee, besides a number of experts, from different countries, in the particular subject with which the commission is concerned.
The resolutions adopted at the various international meetings of meteorologists have been collected in the “International Meteorological Codex,” the chief object of which is to secure uniformity in methods of observation, forms of publication, etc.
One of the most notable international undertakings in the history of meteorology was the plan of simultaneous observations, at Greenwich noon, both at land stations and on board ships, adopted by the Vienna Congress at the suggestion of General Myer, and carried out under the auspices and mainly at the expense of the United States Signal Service. The results of these daily observations, from 1875 to 1887, were published in detail, with charts, by the Signal Service. The many bulky volumes of this series, illustrating the meteorology of the globe (or mainly the northern hemisphere) day by day for a period of more than a decade, are the modern analogue of the “Ephemerides” issued a century earlier by the Meteorological Society of the Palatinate—which cover very nearly the same length of time. In recent years the efforts of meteorologists have been bent toward establishing a so-called “réseau mondial,” or world-wide network of stations, which will not only provide telegraphic reports for the use of forecasters, but will also send their detailed records to an international commission to be compiled and published. The telegraphic feature of this project now bids fair to be realized in a manner that was not contemplated when the plan was originally proposed; viz., by the broadcasting of weather reports from high-powered radio stations all over the world.
An effective “world weather bureau,” with permanent headquarters and staff, is at present the most urgent desideratum of practical meteorology. Such a bureau would not only tie together the national weather services of the world and greatly facilitate their operations, but would also digest the great mass of existing climatic statistics and provide for extending the climatological survey of the globe to regions where meteorological stations are scarce or lacking.