WEATHER FORECASTS IN AMERICA

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 89, 31 August 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

WEATHER FORECASTS IN AMERICA

In the United State of America the importance of weather forecasts based upon data gathered from a wide area is fully realised and adequately provided for. All over the country are weather bureaux, stuffed by expert observers, whose work is collated at the central office at Washington, and .forms the basis of telegraphic or telephonic distribution over the whole country. In all the commercial exchanges there are great maps of the United States, with the rainfall, the barometric pressure, and the temperature in the various centres marked in colored chalks, and from these figures the wheat brokers and other produce merchants gauge the probabilities of their operations. So important are the meteorological conditions to the commercial community considered to be that great eaie is exercised to ensure that no exchange gets the official information ahead of any other, and the figures are despatched simultaneously. In a lecture given at the Royal Institution by Professor Willis L. Moore, of the United States Weather Bureau, the lecturer said that the central bureau was able to forecast floods many days in advance, and commercial men could practically set their watches by its forecasts. When frost threatened the great orange groves of Florida and the fertile region to the north, as many as 100,000 telegrams or telephone messages were sent to growers in the districts, and it was estimated that ten million dollars' worth of property was saved as the result of one forecast. In the great fruitgrowing districts of Colorado the orchards were furnished with oil or coal stoves, or wood fires, sixty or eighty to the acre, and when the weather bureau detected the approach of frost to that region, warnings were issued, and the fires prepared, the local observer being cautioned to be ready to receive the final message at anv time. When the message arrived to say that frost was to be expected verv shortly, the information was distributed nil over the district, and clerks and shopkeepers and other dwellers in the towns dashed out into the orchards to get the stoves going, for by their means the temperature could be raised 14deg., and the disastrous effects of frost on. the whole State held off.