DOES GUNFIRE BRING RAIN?

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 160, 11 September 1916, Page 3

DOES GUNFIRE BRING RAIN?

It has been so cold and wet during May and June in many parts of England that many people believe the weather, or at least the rain, to be due to the abnormal gunfire of recent weeks. Does gunfire bring rain? Scientific meteorological opinion is divided

on this subject. "The rainfall during the past few days has been heavy,” said an official

of the Meteorological Office, "and wc know that in the North Sea, in the neighbourhood of ■ Czernovitz, and, nearer home, in the Ypres region, there has been a total of artillery explosion in the air without parallel in the world’s history.

“As long ago as .1847 an American observer noticed rainfall as an apparent result of artillery explosions.” The Eoyal Meteorological Society has in its records a treatise on the subject ■written during the present war. It is by Mr Charles Harding, F.E. Met. Soc. He says of certain months of the early part of the war: —“If one takes the figures it is not easy to see any other explanation for the ususual distribution of the rains.’’ Sir John Knox Laughton, .formerly Professor of the Naval Greenwich, wrote some time ago:— “Theoretically we can admit that a violent shock may throw large masses of the lower air to a considerable height so as to cause condensation of its vapour ’’

Dr H. R. Mill, the rainfall expert, opposes the gunfire theory. "I do not deny,P he says, “that the concussion caused by the detonation of high explosives may conceivably determine the precipitation of super-saturated vapour as rain. But it seems to me that such precipitation can only amount at most to a local shower, unless air currents bring in fresh supplies of vapour from a distance.”

It is reported in Wellington that some of the butter now on sale is no more than a poor imitation of the genuine article. “Butter, they call it,” exclaimed a lady who resides In the suburbs, yesterday. “It is not real butter. This article of daily consumption is prominent on the list of household commodities, and at present Is causing a certain amount of dismay among housewives, not only on account of the exorbitant price, but also on account of its vagaries, t absolutely refuses to blend with egjgs and sugar, but forms a curd-like substance instead. As for making that toothsome delicacy, butterscotch, it is quite impossible, the so-called butter calmly reposing on top of the mixture, in a yellow, oily, uninviting scum.”