Word: weather
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...will steer it, into its orbit around the earth. When the satellite is established there, one of its most important jobs will be to keep track of the global movements of the white clouds far below. It will then be busy at the homely old task of forecasting the weather, doing in essence what a farmer does when he looks up at the sky and holds a wetted finger to the wind...
This attitude is slowly changing. The public still makes jokes about the weatherman from force of habit, but it relies on him too. Last year the U.S. public made more than 200 million telephone calls asking about the weather, and this year the score will be higher. Farmers called, hoping for rain. Vacationers, picnickers, soft-drink bottlers and garden-party hostesses called, hoping for clear skies. Every year more weather facts are demanded and supplied: sailing conditions for yachtsmen, rainfall on watersheds. Newspapers and TV feature weather maps. Industries, department stores, oil companies and airlines employ meteorologists. The armed services...
Fractious Cyclones. Meteorology of the weather-adage type is at least as old as the Bible ("The north wind driveth away rain"; Proverbs 25:23), and knowledge of atmospheric behavior has accumulated slowly through the centuries. In the early 19th century, for instance, it was known that large areas of low atmospheric pressure sweep across the North Temperate Zone roughly from west to east and are apt to bring stormy weather. But this knowledge was useless for weather forecasting. The stormy "lows" or "cyclones"* move much faster than letters carried by stagecoaches, so in those days countries lying in their...
...more than 50 years after Le Verrier, weather forecasting consisted principally of watching the cyclones as they drifted majestically, dragging the weather with them. Trouble was that the cyclones did not always behave. They were always ringed by counterclockwise winds, but the winds were sometimes gentle and sometimes violent. Sometimes the cyclones stood still, or even moved backward...
Fronts & Masses. About the time of World War I, Professor Vilhelm Bjerknes of Norway and his son Jacob decided that the fractious cyclones, though they may be 1,000 miles across, are only minor bit-players in the weather drama. The leading players are enormous masses of cold, dry air that sweep down from the polar regions at irregular intervals. The Bjerknes theory, emphasizing fronts and air masses rather than cyclones, lit up meteorology like a new sun rising, and upgraded it into a more exact science. It is still the basis of the familiar newspaper weather maps...