The Fun of It by Amelia Earhart

Author:Amelia Earhart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1977-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

“DOC” KIMBALL

THE man upon whom every house-party hostess depends, the man whose advice is sought by promoters of prize-fights and Salvation Army picnics and upon whose words farmers wait eagerly, their thoughts on corn and wheat, is the weather man. And there is a special guiding genius upon whose accurate information the lives of flyers often depend. It is as important to know what he says, as to know that a motor isn’t missing.

The guide, meteorological philosopher and friend of all flyers—the man who has had his hand in all the major flights originating in this country—does not fly himself.

But it is he who says “Go” to those who do.

“What’s the weather? What does Dr. Kimball say?”

That double-barreled question was asked countless times during the thirteen weary days at Tre-passey about which I have told you, as we poised on the verge of the transatlantic flight.

Returning to New York afterward, I met the “weather man” on whom we had so depended. I found him a middle aged person with a mop of grey hair topping a broad brow. He had friendly eyes, a thoughtful smile and a low, soft, southern drawling voice. The first thing he wanted to know was about the meteorological conditions met with on the flight.

“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 for long. Almost universally they move from west to east in the United States, just as prevailing winds on this hemisphere and over the Atlantic are westerly, primarily controlled by the revolution of the earth itself.

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