FREAK WEATHER

Hokitika Guardian, 29 November 1929, Page 8

FREAK WEATHER

THE RECORD OF 1921).

ABUNDANCE OF SUNSPOTS,

IS THERE A WEATHER CYCLE?

The facts are patent to all. The weather all round the world has been on the rampage in 1929. Dr E. E. Free, writing in the New York Times, is inclined to blame solar activity, as shown in the abundance of sunspots. In his view the solar engine has just now more steam than is needed to furnish normal weather, and has been “blowing off,’’ with somewhat eccentric results. He goes on:—

“The world’s weather has been specialising in droughts. Over the eastern two-thirds of the United States damage is estimated as already at least 10,000,000 dollars. “Only two Julys in the past century were drier—lßs2 when the rainfall was .39in, and 1910 when but .23 in fell. This year the record was just under one inch.

“Great Britain has been similarly parched. Not only ' has agriculture been damaged severely, but the water supplies of many towns and villages have failed, some for the first time.. From the other side of the world, in South China, come reports of still severe droughts, with famine threatened and suffering already acute.

“The meteorological factor hack of this unusual weather would be observed, however, if one assumed that droughts are the only extremes that have been exhibited. Only recently central Connecticut experienced what what was probably the severest thunderstorm and hailstorm in its history. The streets of Hartford were inches deep, it is reported, in icy marbles as large as hickory nuts. Tn July 10 occurred the Colorado cloudburst, which caused" the wreck oT the Rocky Mountains Limited. Four days earlier a similar storm swept seven people to their deaths at Moselle, Missouri.

A RECORD IN VIOLENCE. “Elsewhere in the world the weather’s record of violence is even morestriking. Early in July torrential floods swept Eastern India and Coch-in-China, with stories of hundreds of elephants floating helplessly to drown. Four hundred human beings were drowned by Persian floods on July If) and 11. Turkish floods two days later caused more than 500 deaths. On July 5 there swept across Central E.uro[C a storm of thunder, wind, and hail, unexcelled in violence or damage since the unforgotten record hailstorm of July 13, 1778, said to be the most terrific storm of the sort in weather history. In Japan, threefourths of the average month’s rainfall fell within 18 hours in the violent downpour of May 23, causing millions of yen of damage to railways, and a score or more of fatalities.

“During January and February of last winter Europe experienced the greatest cold in over two centuries. Trains snowbound for two weeks in the Balkans. Rome was snowcovered, and ice-crusts formed on Venteians canals. Hungry wolves appeared in villages in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Spain. ‘The Flame ol Remembrance in Paris,’ intended to be eternal, went out because the gas froze up. The Registrar-General ascribed more than 60,000 extra deaths in England to the weather. “Droughts, crop failures, and forest fires are reported from Europe, from the West Indies, from Australia, and elsewhere in the southern hemisphere. India and South Africa report the severest hailstorms there on record. In Yugo-Slavia in the early months of the year, over 100 people were killed by lightning.” Dr Free runs briefly over accessible accounts of freak weather in the past, and notes that most of the extreme records come from more than threequarters of a century ago. A part of this, he thinks, may be due to less accurate measurement, but that can scarcely bo all. He believes that New York weather, changeable as it still is, is now less than a century ago. He goes on: “Some students believe that weather records disclose a cycle of about 99 years, this period corresponding to the recurrence of certain astronomic events. It is not inconceivable that there is a cycle of greater and lesser weather variabilty of about this length. The unusual variability of the weather in. 1928 anil 1929 may presage this cycle’s return. “In this mechanical age it is legitimate to mix mechanical metaphors, so one may say that all the earth’s weather, from blizzard to sunstroke, and from Egypt to the Poles, is dealt out by a gigantic engine—the moving atmosphere. The power is the sunlight, including, of course, the invisible heat-rays. “A simple example of how this solar powerhouse acts is one of the small, whirling ‘dust devels,’ which occasionally arise even on city streets in the summer. Greater examples, the tv'hc.'uis of the China Sea or the

tropical hurricanes of the West Indies, are believed to be created in a fashion much the same. More power is available to feed these giaid oceanic whirls, for they are -supplied with water evaporated from the ocean. This is what makes a hurricane so devastating, as Florida and Cuba know all too well.

YAIUAWI/ITY OF THE SUN. ‘Loss violent kinds of wonUior art* dealt out to the rest of tlm world in ways springing from tire same solai

to li. It is one of the remarkable discoveries of modern science that the sun is variable. There is now no doubt that the intensity of daylightvaries slightly from day to day and from year to year. I n a general way this Variation corresponds with the cycle of the sunspots, solar heat being greater when there are many spots and less when there are few. “There is. however, still another way in which the sun varies, and this happens to he oven more important for the workings of earthly weather. Dr Edison Pettit, of Mount Wilson Observatory, proved by observations during tbe last sunspot maximum that the sun’s light not only increases' -slightly in • total intensity blit increases substantially in its contained percentage of ultraviolet rays.

“During the summers of 1927 and 1928 scientists predicted that sunburn would be severer and more easily acquired than in usual years. The prediction proved tru'd The reason was Dr Pettit’s proved excess of ultra-violet rays, but this excess did something far more important, to the earth’s gigantic weather engine. It provided it with' more stepm. What it did was to thicken the blanket which keeps the earth warm. “Ozone is one of the great heat catchers. Plain air is, a poor beat catcher, for the heat leaks out through it like a blanket of sheet it etui on a bed. “Unfortunately, the ozone molecules change back spontaneously, into ordinary oxygon. To keep the earth warm, new ozone continually must be created. This is a duty of the ultraviolent rays from the sun. Presumably their excesses created more than the usual amounts of ozone in the upper air.”