Discovery
After the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, weather watchers tracked and mapped the effects on the sky over several years. They labelled the phenomenon the "equatorial smoke stream". In the 1920s, a Japanese meteorologist, Wasaburo Oishi, detected the jet stream from a site near Mount Fuji. He tracked pilot balloons, also known as pibals (balloons used to determine upper level winds), as they rose into the atmosphere. Oishi's work largely went unnoticed outside Japan. American pilot Wiley Post, the first man to fly around the world solo in 1933, is often given some credit for discovery of jet streams. Post invented a pressurized suit that let him fly above 6,200 metres (20,300 ft). In the year before his death, Post made several attempts at a high-altitude transcontinental flight, and noticed that at times his ground speed greatly exceeded his air speed. German meteorologist Heinrich Seilkopf is credited with coining a special term, Strahlströmung (literally "jet streaming"), for the phenomenon in 1939. (Modern German usage is "Strahlstrom".) Many sources credit real understanding of the nature of jet streams to regular and repeated flight-path traversals during World War II. Flyers consistently noticed westerly tailwinds in excess of 100 mph (160 km/h) in flights, for example, from the US to the UK.
Read more about this topic: Jet Stream
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“The discovery of the North Pole is one of those realities which could not be avoided. It is the wages which human perseverance pays itself when it thinks that something is taking too long. The world needed a discoverer of the North Pole, and in all areas of social activity, merit was less important here than opportunity.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)