Weather is a fascinating subject. Probably because we have so much of it. Everybody talks about it. Few people really understand it. But the old-fashioned weather prophet who sticks his nose in the air and whiffs, is more than likely "right as rain" when he solemnly announces what comes next.

For weather of all kinds is only the mixing of this gas we call air, hot and cold, moist or dry. From these variables come fog or wind, rain, snow, sleet and hail. Or perhaps those glorious bright blue days that airmen and all others glory in.

During our recent cold weather, with prolonged low temperatures, haven't you noticed how "nice" the days have been, even though we were having unusual "weather?" Nearly always after a cold front--a mass of cold, dry air--passes through, we can expect stable weather, clear days. Just the opposite is true when a "warm front" --warm, moist air, moves in. Then we can expect turbulence, clouds, rain or snow, winds, as two opposites fight.

Today (Friday) a warm, moist low pressure area from Mississippi is moving upwards across Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio and into Michigan by tonight.

 

This brings fog and ice, warmer temperatures. Complicating forecast, however, is another cold front moving our direction from the northwest. The two, the high and the low pressure areas, may meet and mix about tomorrow (Saturday) which should result in more snow, about Saturday, perhaps Friday night. If the cold front from the west overtakes the low pressure area from the south, by Sunday, it will be cold again and that should be followed once again by some more stable weather. (Maybe.) Let's watch and see.

In the beginning, cold dry air is more stable than warm, most air. Cold air is more condensed, heavier. Warm air is lighter, expanded. It whoofs and poofs easier and more often. Ask any airman. He can tell you his airplane has more lift on cold days. He can also remember hot summer days when the air seemed so thin it wouldn't lift the normal load in his plane.

He will also remember tummy tingling down-drafts and sudden up-drafts. Years ago people used to call them "air pockets" and "holes in the air". In the summer time or on warm and sunny winter days even, hot air will move upward from a shiny cement pavement. Cooling air will move downward. Cooling air will move down ward toward a shady river, a cool lake. In effect this is mild wind blowing straight up or straight down.

These updrafts form clouds at the top of their ascension because they cool fast enough to form visible moisture in the air. The "wetness" was there all the time. Warm air, like a hungry, expanding sponge, will support more moisture in gas form than cold air, so at the time of the upshot--air cools the higher it goes--the sponge begins to shrink, the air condenses and squeezes the moisture out until it becomes visible as clouds. If it cools a little more it rains or snows.

When a warm front and a cold front meet, sometimes along a line hundreds of miles long, boy do we have "weather" then, while each fights for supremacy. It is then the weatherman tears his hair out and examines his maps of "highs" and "lows" of barometric pressure and attempts to make a guess as to the winner. He tries to give you inside dope on which way the winner will stamp his victory march and to what corner of the country the loser will steal, angry, resentful, taking his spite out in wind, rain and unpleasantness. If he misses that guess, we cuss him. You know, just like the referees.

On the airways, radio reports pilots listen to, do not try to forecast. They quote the ceiling (clouds), wind direction and velocity (how fast the stuff is moving and in what direction), the dew point (relation between present temperature and the actual temperature that would cause rain), and the visibility. These fellows are cagey as can be. They give you reports like that from stations in a big circle hundreds of miles in diameter. Then you make your own forecast.

This is really a highly accurate method of pre-determining the weather, for the reports are very recent, very complete and do not attempt to tell in three lines what weather is going to do over thousands of square miles. The guys that forecast for newspapers, trying to make one forecast stick for three or four states, are kidding you and themselves. It cannot by done with reasonable accuracy.

Give that same fellow up-to-date airways reports and ask him what is going to happen six hours from now, three miles south of Monoquet, in one spot--and he'll tell you. What's more he will be right.

Goshen is the nearest airways broadcasting station in Kosko-land. If your radio will tune to 320 kilocycles you can hear these reporters give your weather data to airmen, ever half hour on the quarter-hour. Tune in any time day or night. Try your hand at amateur forecasting.

Today, we will have weather. tomorrow, we will have weather. We'll have weather of one kind or another every day. So we might as well learn something about it instead of cussing it.

Warsaw Daily Times Fri. Feb. 13, 1948

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