DOES GUNFIRE BRING RAIN?

Taranaki Daily News, 7 November 1916, Page 6

DOES GUNFIRE BRING RAIN?

It was so cold and wet dvring May and June tliat many people believed the weather, or at least the rain, was du" to the abnormal gunfire of that period. Does gunfire bring rain? Scientific meteorological opinion is divided on this subject. ''The rainfall during the early part of July was heavy,'' said an official of the Meteorological Office, "and we know that in the North Sea, in the neighborhood o f Ozernovitz, and nearer home in the Ypres region, there has been a total of artillery explosions in the ail' without parallel in the worfd's history.

"As long ago as 1847 an American observer noticed rainfall as an apparent result of artillery explosions." The Royal Meteorological Society has in its records a treatise on the subject written during the present war. It is by Mr. Charles Harding, F.R. Met. Soc. Ne Rajta of certain months of the early part of this war: "If one takes the figures it is not easy to see any other explanation for [lie .unusual distribution of the rains."

Sir .Tolm Knox Laughton, formerly Professor at the Xaval College, 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 vapor." Dr. H. R. Mill, the rainfall expert, opposes the gunfire theory. "I do not deny," he says, "that the concussion caused by the detonation of high explosives may conceivably determine the precipitation of super-saturated vapor 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 vapor from a distance."