Abstract
ACCORDING to a report which has been issued by Science Service, the United States Weather Bureau is making the experiment of having both aviation forecasts and general forecasts not specially suited to the requirements of aviation made by a single staff, in the case of the new district office of the Weather Bureau at Kansas City airport. Up to now, aviation forecasts have been made by special staffs at airports, while the other forecasts were made independently at Weather Bureau offices located in the different towns. If this experiment, which began on October 1, proves successful, it is intended to extend it to other stations of the Weather Bureau. The Kansas City district office programme includes also a new feature that has recently been introduced at Washington and Baltimore and which has proved very popular, namely, a ‘breakfast time’ broadcast forecast. It is expected that this will be extended to many other American cities in the near future. It is not stated what time is taken as ‘breakfast time’ for the purpose of these broadcasts, but presumably it is too late to make the forecasts meet the requirements of farmers, who must arrange what work shall be done during the day at an early hour and could only take account of correspondingly early forecasts. There was before the War a demand by British farmers for such ‘pre-breakfast’ forecasts; but an obstacle in the way of their realization is that an hour or two must elapse botween the taking of the observations on which the forecasts must be based and the time at which they are made, to allow the information to be collected, decoded, charted and critically examined, and a very large number of observers would have to begin their day's work at about 4 a.m.
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Weather Reports in the United States. Nature 144, 973 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144973a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144973a0