Aerial Navigation and Meteorology

Abstract

METEOROLOGY has been international ever since it became a science. From the first congress of directors of meteorological institutes at Vienna in 1873, meteorologists have been engaged in standardising methods of observation and exposure of instruments, and in devising codes for the transmission of observations by telegraph in order to compress as much valuable information as possible in the small space available for transmission at moderate cost. So the introduction of upper-air data, though strongly recommended by those who wanted to substitute calculation for “ule of thumb,” had to fight its way against other useful and more easily accessible info rmation of the older kind. The last international code, fixed at Rome in 1913 after long correspondence and discussion, kept the morning message at four groups of five figures, and allotted only one figure to upper-air data—direction of high cloud—in addition to the customary figure for weather or state of the sky. For the benefit of aerial navigation, the results of pilot-balloon ascents were telegraphed by many European observatories to the central station at Lindenberg. Funds for the telegraphic distribution of these data and of those of soundings of the atmosphere by means of kites or cable balloons were usually lacking.