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IX.—Principia Atmospherica: a Study of the Circulation of the Atmosphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2014

W.N. Shaw
Affiliation:
University of London
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Extract

Every science has two aspects or two stages in its development. In the first, the inductive stage, observations are made and compiled, and axioms or laws are laid down. In the second or deductive stage the laws are applied by syllogistic reasoning, mathematical or otherwise, to elicit conclusions which either disclose new facts or show the inevitable connection between facts already known, and, in either case, complete the claim of the study to the rank of a science.

Type
Proceedings
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1914

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References

page 84 note * The supersaturation of atmospheric air is discussed in Dr Alfred Wegener's Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre, Leipzig, J. A. Barth, 1911. Humidities, by the hair hygrometer, up to 107 per cent. are cited on p. 254 of that work.

page 92 note * See the paper in the Journal of the Scottish Meteorological Society already referred to.

page 101 note * Cambridge University Press, 1912.

page 107 note * See Journal Scottish Met. Soc., 1913, loc. cit.

page 108 note * See a note on the Perturbations of the Stratosphere in Publication 202 of the Meteorological Office.

page 110 note * The facts which are here represented are sometimes taken as indicating the formation of anticyclones over the Arctic and Antarctic land-areas. When those areas are represented by plateaus 10,000 or 15,000 feet in height, the surface anticyclone may become merely a hypothetical construction supposed to occupy the space which is really occupied by land and not by air at all. To a considerable extent the great Asiatic and American anticyclones depend upon the reduction of observations to sea-level under conditions which can have no real existence. The mountain slope might possibly operate, in the maintenance of a cyclonic circulation in the upper air, much like the hole in the bottom of a basin, and the actual land-surface at the high level might therefore be a region of cyclonic circulation.