RADIO RECEPTION

Radio Record, Volume I, Issue 3, 5 August 1927, Unnumbered Page

RADIO RECEPTION

SUN MORT TO BLAME, THAN WEATHER. High correlation between radio reception and the weather is unlikely (says the ‘Scientific American’’), according to Dr. Greenleaf W. Pickard, who has studied the effects of the weather on radio since 1906, and his conclusions are that the activities of the sun and terrestrial magnetism are more to blame for poor reception than the weather, "One of the outstanding problems today is the nature and cause of those atmospheric charges which produce such diversified cflects as weather, magnetic storms and disturbances in radio receptiou,’? said Dr. Pickard. ‘The problem is meteorological. If the earth had no atmosphere there could be no weather and ort an airless planct there could be no long-distance radio communication. Radiation from Sun, "The only known important force which acts upon the -atmosphere is the complex radiation and emission from the sun, Changes in this force are caused in two ways; first, by the movements of the earth with respect to the sun, and second, by the actual variations in solar radiation. If the sun maintained a constant radiation, we should have only to consider the earth’s rotation on its axis, which gives us night and day, and its movement is an orbit around the stn,

which, by the changing angle of the solar rays, gives us the seasons. If these movements were the only factors involved, weather, terrestrial magnetism, and radio reception would follow the calendar to a far greater extent than our measurements indieate," said Dr. Pickard. Sun Affects Weather. "But in the scheme of things wé find that weather does not go according to the calendar, nor does ,radio reception. The visual evidence of sunspots, faculae, and prominences tells us that tlie sun is periodically disturbed, and measurements of the light and heat received by the earth have shown that this varies in genera correspondence with the — visible changes on the sun’s disc, in fact, definite relations have been established between solar changes and weather, which have already been usefully applied to weather forecasting."