Abstract
WITH commendable promptness, the fiftieth Pheno-logical Report of the Royal Meteorological Society, covering 1940, has just been issued despite war-time difficulties making it impossible for the executive committee to meet since the last report. With the exception of a small amount of introductory text, the report consists of a series of tables and diagrams, as has been its increasing trend in recent years. It has the observations of 288 phenological observers in the British Isles, compared with 385 in 1939. The publication of full meteorological details is still restricted, but it includes the events of the historic cold spell early in 1940, probably the coldest January for a hundred years and the sunniest for fifty years. The marked lateness of plants and insects caused by the cold opening of the year gave place to considerable earliness which mainly persisted from the end of April, with a succession of warm, mild spells, and the beauty of spring and early summer was enhanced by the simultaneous occurrence of normally early species which had been retarded and the normally later species which were brought forward.
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Phenology of 1940. Nature 147, 802 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147802b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147802b0