Case, T: Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, Vol. 5

Excerpt from The Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, Vol. 5: 1882-3

The rainfall, it is to be noticed, depends rather upon local conditions, as the greater or less humidity which the winds possess from passing over areas of snow or bodies of Water. It frequently happens that a wind partially saturated receives sufficient additional moisture to produce precipitation over a damp dis triot, which would be inoperative over a dry one.

The normal action of an area of low barometers seems to depend upon its free passage in the line of its natural direction. If this course IS Interrupted, as by the opposition of a body: of air of greater pressure, so that its movement is delayed or wholly arrested, the tendency is to narrow its dimensions, sometimes to turn it aside, and generally to increase its destructive cyclonic tendencies, while not infrequently a second area is developed at some distance to the south, which moves obliquely to join it. The contrary effect of a dissipation of a marked area results when Opposition to its movements becomes removed. Its force is then expended in a lateral expansion.

Perhaps this dissipation is the result of a secondary formation, which causes a transference of direction of pressure, for if We look at the line of a track of low barometer we cannot fail to be struck by its valley-like line. It is as if it were the track of a marble among shifting elevations of an agitated soil.

Whatever electrical in¿uences may accompany the passage of a storm area their accessory nature seems quite well proven. Their intensity is certainly associated with peculiar conditions Of the atmosphere rather than with variations in its pressure, as indicated by the barometer, and if it can be shown that the mechanical action of the winds is the chief element of these disturbances there will be renewed the extraneous and con¿icting theories which now distant the gathered facts and prevent accurate formulating of simple mechanical causes for their results.

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