Stellar scintillation and meteorological phenomena.

Abstract

Amplitudes of scintillation were available on a hundred nights spread over four years. They have been compared with the Weather Bureau radiosonde data concerning the lower 30 km of the atmosphere. No aspect of the distribution of scintillation harmonics could be fully correlated with any specific feature of the wind and temperature distributions. Statistically, however, scintillation amplitude correlates with wind-speed observed at any level in the region eight to sixteen kilometers high. The best correlation is with maxlmum wind-speed, taken irrespective of height. The maximum wind-speed does not appear at sharply defined layers. It is rather the fastest point of a broad distribution of unidirectional winds which generally extend fairly uniformly from the low speeds near the surface of the earth to the low speeds found in the stratosphere. There is poor correlation of scintillation, or of maximum wind-speed, with the heights of the tropopause, other temperature inversions, or temperature mlnlma. These data suggest a hypothesis whereby scintillation develops because of a large depth of isotropically turbulent atmosphere, rather than because of a few thin layers of special disturbance. U. S. Naval Observatory, Washington D. C.