Abstract
METEOROLOGISTS generally recognise that as the sun's radiation heats the earth's surface, provides the energy of winds, and evaporates the water which falls as rain, so most of the variations from year to year in temperature, wind, and rainfall must be in some way caused by variations of solar radiation. The literature of the subject is immense, but is mostly directed towards discovering direct and simple relationships between solar radiation, especially as represented by Wolf's sun-spot numbers, on one hand and terrestrial weather on the other hand. With a few isolated exceptions, however, these efforts have met with little success, probably because a simple direct connexion rarely exists, the solar changes working rather through complex changes in the atmospheric circulation. In a recent paper,* Dr. E. Kidson approaches the problem, as it affects Australia, by studying the variations in the tracks and intensities of the moving anticyclones which traverse the country from west to east. The data employed were extracted from the Australian daily weather charts (usually including New Zealand) for the years from 1887 onwards; they are expressed in various ways, including the average latitude of the centres in different longitudes, the annual range in the latitude of the centres, the intensity, and the rate of travel, all of which give fairly concordant results.
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B., C. Periodicity in Australian Weather. Nature 126, 730 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/126730a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/126730a0