Every 6.6456 Days

Ever since he was a boy on a New Hampshire farm, Charles Greeley Abbot has pooh-poohed the almanacs' weather forecasters. "We used to get a farmers' almanac," he says, "and it would say something like: 'About this time, look for a frost.' It didn't pin down the area, or the day, and people took it in three or four states. How in the world could it miss?"

Last week Dr. Abbot laid himself wide open to pooh-poohs by all professional weather forecasters. Like the almanac makers, he had made some broad weather forecasts, and he had projected them a full year ahead.

Most meteorologists believe that the weather is a product of the workings of the earth's atmospheric temperatures and pressures and its rotation. Abbot, while head of the Smithsonian Institution's -As-trophysical Observatory (1906-27) and then as the institution's secretary, got the idea that the weather on earth also reflects what is happening on the sun. Since his retirement in 1944, he has worked as a research associate in an eleventh-floor retreat in the Smithsonian's 102-year-old tower, which was reclaimed from bats and owls to give him working quarters.

Two Theories. Looking down with a kind of tolerant detachment on U.S. Weather Bureau headquarters, Dr. Abbot has been working on two theories. The first: the earth's precipitation is related to the rotation of the sun. This theory is still in its infancy. His other theory, which Abbot considers just about full-grown: temperature variations (from the average, on given dates) are related to another specific solar cycle. Almost once every week (every 6.6456 days, to be exact), Abbot believes, the amount of heat and light radiated by the sun builds up to a maximum; then it declines to a minimum.

Dr. Abbot does not hold that earthly temperature changes are directly geared to these solar variations. But he is sure that both follow the same cycle. This, says he, "is so strikingly obvious . . . that no one could doubt that it is both real and a major element in weather." To prove his point, he made a forecast at the beginning of 1948. His prediction named the 55 dates on which his solar cycles would begin, and stated that on those days the temperature in Washington would probably be below normal. In between those days, the temperature would rise by an average of y.iDEGF. Dr. Abbot had this forecast locked in the Smithsonian's safe.

A Cool Fourth. This year the Abbot forecast was taken out and dusted off. Dr. Loyal B. Aldrich, now head of the Observatory, reported: "On.48 occasions, warmer dates occurred between the dates specified, and . . . the mean excess found thus was 6.96DEG F."

To Abbot, a trim, slim, energetic 76, and ready to take on all doubters, this was conclusive proof of his theories. Instead of locking his 1949 predictions in the safe, he has published them. (He says that the Fourth of July will be relatively cool in Washington; Christmas Day will be warmish.) But the Weather Bureau professionals think they see loopholes in Abbot's defenses. To prove their point, they have turned his theory upside down. Taking his 55 dates in 1948, they have found that besides the warmer days in between, there were also cooler intervening days in 45 cases. "The Bureau," concluded a spokesman, "is conducting an investigation."

Dr. Abbot was not dampened. Last week, when his "minimum day" turned out to be an 86DEG scorcher, he laid it to a time-lag effect, waited for the next day to be cold. It was.

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