Abstract
Royal Meteorological Society, Dec. 14. C. S. DURST: “The thermal balance of a water drop or ice particle suspended in the atmosphere”. From the examination of the long wave radiation received and given out by a water drop or ice particle, it is shown that such a particle will lose heat if it is above a certain critical temperature and gain heat if it is below, from which it follows that if a particle exists in the stratosphere it will gain heat. It is assumed that the base of the stratosphere is saturated and consideration is given to the conditions under which particles could be formed. If a small air mass were raised in the stratosphere the particles formed in it would be melted in a very short time and the temperature of the air would once more be that of its surroundings, the entropy of the air having been increased in the process.—E. W. BLISS: The tabulation of world weather (5). (Discussion by Sir Gilbert Walker.) (Mem. Roy. Meteor. Soc., 4, No. 36.) In order to form more definite ideas regarding the oscillations named the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, and the Southern, series of figures have been derived to express the variations of each, and from these have been obtained their relations with pressure, temperature, and rainfall over wide regions as well as the relations of the three oscillations with each other and with sunspots. The southern oscillation in the southern winter is extremely persistent, and its departure has a correlation coefficient of 0.84 with that of the following summer.—C. S. DURST: “The breakdown of steep wind gradients in inversions”. On certain occasions when inversions have formed, a violent eddying arises, which is shown on an anemometer as an abrupt change in the type of trace. This change over occurs when the wind gradient becomes great. On the ground that the eddies formed in these circumstances are different in character from those formed with an adiabatic temperature gradient, a suggestion is put forward for the mechanism of the diurnal variation of wind.
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Societies and Academies. Nature 131, 35–36 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131035a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131035a0