Abstract
IN the domain of world meteorology, that is, the comparison and discussion of meteorological data of widely distributed stations over the earth's surface, Prof. H. Hildebrand Hildebrandsson has, during the last decade or so, been making some very important communications. He has clearly emphasised the fact that the laws which rule the general movements of our atmosphere will never be found if observations are only made in civilised countries on the earth's surface. Our atmosphere is a mass of air resting both on the continents and the oceans, and modern researches have shown that a large perturbation at one time in one area may be intimately associated with a perturbation of an opposite nature in the antipodal part of the world. Although several workers many years ago intimated the positions of isolated areas which behaved in a reverse or see-saw manner meteorologically, it was Prof. Hildebrandsson who first directed attention to a great number of such areas. In more recent times these isolated instances of barometric see-saws have been found to be part of really one general law applying to the movements of our atmosphere. This general law has yet to be more minutely investigated, for it is, as Prof. Hildebrandsson states, “une verite1 avec des grandes modifications.” There is little doubt, nevertheless, that world meteorology has made a considerable advance since the discovery of these simultaneous reverse-pressure changes, and one is now in a much better position to state where on the earth's surface observations should be made.
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References
NATURE, vol. Ixxv., p. 536.
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Researches on the Action Centres of the Atmosphere . Nature 81, 467–468 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/081467a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/081467a0