Abstract
I INCLOSE you a cutting from the Manitoba Weekly Free Press of December 14, 1878, containing a record of what I cannot but think is a phenomenon unsurpassed in the annals of meteorology. For a month to exceed its average temperature by the amount of twenty-five degrees is scarcely credible even in such a continental climate as that of Manitoba. An editorial paragraph from the same paper which I also inclose will show that the fact has not been overlooked by the Manitobans, and that their attention has also been drawn to the occurrence of the reverse characteristics in the weather over here. Surely the moral of all this is universal synoptic weather charts. The whole thing at present is worked on far too small a scale. The daily papers contain a weather chart which comprises scarcely a quarter of Europe, and of what goes on outside the limits of this we are practically ignorant, unless we hunt up reports when the atmospheric conditions they refer to are long past. Even granting the impossibility of drawing the daily isobars over the North Atlantic, except hypothetically, would it not probably have thrown much light on the proximate causes of, and probable duration of, our recent cold weather here, had we been able to secure a daily synoptic chart of the isobars over America, as well as those over our own islands and the countries immediately adjacent? Surely the valuable results which would follow such an extension of our present system would quite compensate for the extra outlay incurred.
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ARCHIBALD, E. American Weather. Nature 19, 266 (1879). https://doi.org/10.1038/019266a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/019266a0
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