It is easy to lay too much stress upon the unimportant aspects of weather. It furnishes a bit of conversation over the teacups; it accentuates the twinges of rheumatism; it spoils a holiday. All this, however, is mere byplay.
The real work of the weather—the work that explains the existence of costly weather bureaus, such as the one upon which our Government spends more than a million and a half dollars annually—is momentous beyond calculation. Consider such facts and figures as these:
The head of the British Meteorological Office recently declared that bad weather costs the farmers of the British Isles about one hundred million dollars a year. In our own country it has been estimated that a difference of one inch in the rainfall occurring during July in six States means a difference of two hundred and fifty million dollars in the value of the corn (maize) crop. The world over, the damage wrought by hail-storms is said to average about two hundred million dollars a year. In the city of Galveston a single hurricane once destroyed twenty million dollars' worth of property and six thousand human lives. Thus we might proceed indefinitely.
The fact is that man's welfare is conditioned to an enormous extent and in an endless variety of ways by the vicissitudes of the atmosphere; hence the study of weather—meteorology—is one of the most important of sciences. It is also one of the most strikingly neglected!
At the office of the Weather Bureau in Washington there is a meteorological library of some thirty-five thousand volumes. But meteorological libraries are rare; meteorological books are scarce in other libraries; and meteorologists are so uncommon that whoever declares himself one is likely to be asked, "What is a meteorologist?"
The "meteors" studied by the meteorologist are not shooting stars, but the phenomena of the atmosphere,—rain and snow, cloud and fog, wind and sunshine, and whatever else enters into the composition of weather and climate.
Entered as second-class matter, March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1916, by The Mentor Association, Inc.
THE ATMOSPHERE
The ocean of air in which human beings live, even as deep-sea fishes live at the bottom of the liquid ocean, is called the atmosphere. Unlike the liquid ocean, it diminishes rapidly in density from the bottom upward. At an altitude of three and one-half miles it is only half as dense as at sea-level. This is higher than the highest permanent habitations of man. Mountain-climbers and balloonists have attained greater altitudes; but above a level of about five miles the air is too greatly rarefied to support life. Balloonists who ascend still higher must carry a supply of oxygen with them. A little above the ten-mile level the air is only one-eighth as dense as at sea-level. The atmosphere extends at least 300 miles above the earth, at which height its density is computed to be only one two-millionth as great as at sea-level.
The weather with which human beings are concerned may be said to extend upward seven or eight miles; i.e., to the level of the higher clouds. The layer of the atmosphere lying between sea-level and the upper cloud level has certain characteristics that distinguish it from the air above it, and is known as the troposphere.