Climatological Atlas of India

Abstract

THE Indian network of meteorological observations is the greatest individual organisation within the tropics, and it has, therefore, attained the greatest importance in the pursuit of meteorology and climatology. Founded in the year 1875, it can now look back upon more than thirty years of uninterruptedly successful activity, having during this period had the peculiarly good fortune to be presided over by two distinguished meteorologists—Henry F. Blanford and Sir John Eliot. From the commencement the author of this review has followed with sympathetic interest the development and the active work of the organisation, has been in constant association with its director, and has also, as far as possible, made use of the immense volume of information. In no meteorological organisation in the world are ther such comprehensive records, as well of a statistical as of a scientific nature, as in the Indian one; only the much older Russian one can compare with it. Beginning with the smaller, but very valuable, scientific essays of Blanford in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of lengal, it grew into the huge folio volumes of the Indian Meteorological Memoirs, of which the seventeenth volume is completed and published. Then came monographs relating to individual cyclonei, Blanford's “Indian Meteorologist's Vade Mecurn” (Calcutta, 1877), and especially the five volumes of cyclone memoirs by Sir John Eliot, and his “Handbook of Cyclonic Storms in the Bay of Bengal” (second edition, Calcutta, 1900).

Climatological Atlas of India.

Published by the Authority of the Government of India, under the Direction of Sir John Eliot. Pp. xxxii + 120 plates. (Issued by the Indian Meteorological Department, 1906.) Price 36s.