A directory of member stations, daily logbooks, and inter-station correspondence — twelfth circulated volume — summer of 1908.
We are forty-seven member stations now, and growing by the month. What follows is the working directory of twelve stations whose entries this season have been particularly careful, particularly generous, and particularly worth the postage they cost us. Every reading here was taken by hand, on the hour, by an observer who chose to keep the watch. Pick a town. The keeper there has something to show you.
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Member Stations · Continental Map
Click any station marker to open its logbook.
Letters circulate between member stations by ordinary post, sometimes daily, sometimes after a notable sky. Below is a working selection from the summer's mailbag. Click any letter to read it through.
The Network gladly accepts observation notes from non-member readers. If you have watched a sky lately worth recording, leave the entry below. We will read it.
Working Protocols of the Network
Adopted at the spring meeting, Pittsburgh, March 1908. Updated as circumstances warrant.
Three readings daily — sunrise, solar noon (local apparent), and one hour after sunset — at minimum. A fourth, before retiring, is encouraged.
Mercury column to be tapped lightly with the back of the fingernail before each reading. Aneroid units to be compared against a mercury reference at least monthly.
Cloud forms reported by Howard's classification (cirrus, stratus, cumulus, nimbus) with modifying compound terms as needed. Hildebrandsson's 1896 atlas is the authority where Howard is ambiguous.
Wind direction is the direction from which the wind blows. Sixteen-point compass acceptable; thirty-two preferred.
Rain gauges to be sited at least four feet from any vertical surface and at least eight inches above ground. Snow boards level and clear of drift.
Anomalous phenomena to be described in plain narrative prose before any attempt at classification. Describe first, name second.
Postage on inter-station correspondence is borne by the writing party unless a reply is solicited, in which case the soliciting party encloses a stamped return.
No reading is too small. No watcher is in this alone.
On the Daily Reading
From the instructional plates of Cresswell & Sons, Cloud-Watch Apparatus, Hartford, Conn., 1906 edition.
"I have read the column at this same window for thirty-one years, and I will tell you what I have learned. The reading is not the weather. The reading is the sentence the weather has consented, this once, to speak. The instrument is the room in which that sentence is allowed to be heard. We are not measuring the sky. We are sitting still long enough that the sky thinks we are not in the room, and lets a true word fall.
I have been asked, often, what is the point of so many of us, so many separate columns in so many separate towns, all writing down the same numbers. The point is that the sky is bigger than any one window. To know what it is doing one must have many windows open at once. Each of you is a window. The Network is the room. We are sitting still together. That is the point.
Keep watching. The work is not small."
— C. F. Marvin, observer at Mt. Weather, in a letter to the Network, May 1908.
