Abstract
THE development of radio communication and radar during the War emphasized the fact that the propagation of metre and centimetre waves was greatly influenced by the meteorological conditions in the lower atmosphere. The subject was of such importance that a large-scale investigation of the phenomena involved was organised in Great Britain as a co-operative effort between the staffs of several radio research establishments and of various sections of the Services. The Navy, Army and Air Force, the Ministries of Supply and Aircraft Production, the Meteorological Office and the National Physical Laboratory, and also the Research Laboratories of the General Electric Co., Ltd., each played an important part in this work. The experiments were conducted over both land and sea paths, along which both the radio transmission characteristics and the meteorological conditions were measured simultaneously. The installations at one end of each path comprised a radio-sending station emitting a known amount of radiation towards the receiving station at the other end of the path, where the field strength of the arriving waves was measured and continuously recorded. In the case of one of the oversea paths the meteorological conditions, temperature, pressure and humidity, were measured at various heights along the path by flights of aircraft between the sending and receiving stations. These observations were supplemented by other measurements made from a captive balloon attached to a ship located along the path. In the case of other paths, the meteorological conditions were largely deduced from the normal daily weather charts, supplemented by observations at the terminal points.
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SMITH-ROSE, R. Meteorology and the Propagation of Radio Waves. Nature 161, 145–146 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161145a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161145a0