Meteors and Meteorology

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 459, 9 April 1948, Page 15

Meteors and Meteorology

_SOME recent developments in the science of weather forecasting were described by Ian Hamilton in a BBC broadcast a short time ago. "Making clear to the public what the weather is going to be like to-day or to-morrow -weather forecasting, in fact-has long been taken rather badly by the people of Britain, he said. "One reason is that, in weather forecasting, with the everchanging island weather we have in this country, it is human nature that we should keep in mind its shortcomings rather than its successes, "Another reason, and a more basic one, why weather forecasting sometimes falls: short is, of course, the great extent of the air, and the fact that, exe cept at ground level, very little is yet known about it. But radar is now coming to help in this work-and in two different ways. The first comes from the direct use of radar sets to follow, to

greater distances, the small balloons which are sét free from time to time at special weather stations; these balloons, of course, point out the movement of the upper air. With the use of radar it is now possible to follow these test balloons when it is impossible to see them. "The second development is newer; it is the use of radar to record meteors when they get into the atmosphere near the earth-at heights of, say, fifty to sixty miles. But the important thing here is not the meteor itself, but the drift, or the free movement of the trail which the meteor leaves behind it: Most of this trail does not last long; after a very short time it can no longer be seen, But there are times when it does last long enough to make it possible to record the rate at which it is moving; this, of course, represents the movement of the air at the height in question,"