Evening star., 1937-04-29
SC|ENT|STSSTUDY
STORMS FACTORY
Preliminary Report on Man.
ufaCture Near North Pole
Is Made.

How storms are made in North
Americas Winter weather factory
near the North Pole is being investi-
gated by Weather Bureau scientists.
Preliminary reports on the studies
were made to the American Meteoro-
logical Society, meeting here, by H.
A. Wexler of the Weather Bureau
staff. All Winter long titanic masses
OF cold air, miles deep, form over the
Arctic Basin. Every now and then
one Of them breaks loose over the
continent, bringing storms and ex-
treme cold. The first part Of the
investigation, as described by Wex-
Ter, has been to determine how these
cold masses are built up to such great
heights.
Theoretical determinations have
been checked by airplane observa-
tions at Fargo, N. OAK; Fairbanks,
Alaska, and through the co-opera-
ton of the Canadian weather serv-
ice at Fort Rae in the Hudson Bay
territory. 1t is now possible, Wexler
said, to calculate the rates at which
such an air mass is cooled from the
earth upward to heights Of or S
miles.
Cause of Break.
The second phase of the investiga-
ton, still in the theoretical stage, is
to determine how such an air mass
breaks loose and runs amuck. The
old thnNry fhot ;r
the South was continually piling up
on top of the cold air close to the
surface of the ice and finally causing
1t to spill over the lowest points in
the Arctic periphery such as the
valley of the Mackenzie River or
Hudson Bay itself
This theory no longer is entirely
tenable, WeXler said, because such
air masses sometimes remain stag
nant for weeks in spite of the pres
sure on top of them. He pictured
the possibility of the air circulation
around the polar regions being in
the form of two great wheels of at
mosphere, one on top of the other
and Whirling in opposite directions
Close to the surface the air wheel
always is turning in an easterly di-
rection. At an altitude of about 2
| miles it is turning with varying rates
of speed, toward the west When
the speed and force of this westerly
circulation become great enough the
cold highs" are hurled southwark.
The investigation, it was explained,
, is one of those undertaken with funds
provided by the Bankhead-Jones act
for special scientific Investigations by
the Department of Agriculture.
Report by Larry Page.
| Results of intensive statistical
analysis of the relations between
| terrestrial weather and variations in
the radiation output of the sun-an-
other Bankhead-Jones act undertak-
ing-were reported by Larry Page Of
the Bureau of Agricultural Economics.
Page was engaged for some time un-
| der the direction of Secretary Of
Agriculture Wallace in an effort to
work out some system of long-range
weather forecasting.
His own analysis, he told the me-
teorologists, gave little support to
claims that solar radiation vagaries
result in cyclic weather phenomena
Recurrence of wet and dry periods
| in the United States for the past
century was reported by j. B. Kincer,
| chief Of the Weather Bureaus divi-
sion of climatology. The present
succession of drought years, he said,
will almost certainly be followed by
an abnormally wet period if the
weather of the past repeats itself.
No Regular Schedule.
Unfortunately for the forecaster,
Kincer stressed, these wet and dry
periods do not follow any regular
time schedule, so that it is impossible
to warn against them. There is no
question, he said, but that the ploW-