“When you have time—when you get through with this,” he said, indicating the crowd, “please tell me some day exactly what you encountered on the flight. After all, we’re able really to find out so little about over-ocean weather—and evidently what we predicted didn’t pan out.”
One day I visited Dr. Kimball at the Weather Bureau perched up at the top of the Whitehall Building in lower New York City. It was mid morning. Dr. Kimball stood at a high desk, and as we talked, the periodic delivery of telegraph flimsies interrupted our conversation. These messages contained cabalistic figures from Manitoba, Kansas or Cuba, recording conditions at that particular point—the barometric pressure, wind direction and velocity, visibility and temperature, and whether rain, snow, fog or sunshine prevailed.
On the desk before him lay an outline map of the United States and the Atlantic. As the information trickled in. Dr. Kimball penciled swirling lines across it. In final form each swirl outlined specific pressure areas. Little pools and wide eddies of these lines, called isobars, gradually covered the paper, while on a companion map developed another picture puzzle of isotherms, lines designating temperatures.
Dr. Kimball and I talked of the interesting phenomena of weather movement—for it is the calculation of movement which is the basis of meteorological prediction. The “highs” and “lows” (that is, fair weather and storm centers) are seldom static
