He erased a little section of the blue line, and drew in a red line at such an angle as to indicate a shallow wave. Then around the crest of the wave as center he drew a black line in the shape of a tiny football; this he labeled 1011, and inside it he printed, in minute letters, LOW. So much accomplished, he again surveyed his work, and smiled.

As a baby possesses the parts of the adult, so the baby storm displayed as in caricature the features of a mature storm. The red line symbolized the “warm front” along which the southern air was advancing and sliding over the northern; the blue line symbolized the “cold front” where the northern air was advancing and pushing beneath the southern. The black line shaped like a football was an isobar, indicating a barometric pressure of 1011 around the center of low pressure, symbolizing also the complete circuit of winds around that point. As a baby is without teeth, so also the storm was lacking in some attributes of maturity. But just as surely as a baby is a human being, so also was his new discovery a storm in charming miniature—provided always that he had rightly analyzed the situation.

For a moment he looked contentedly at his creation, and then glanced over the Pacific, considering the future. The general set-up seemed to indicate that in the next twenty-four hours the new storm would move rapidly eastward. As it moved, it could grow both in area and in intensity; its winds becoming stronger, its rains heavier.

Suddenly his fingers itched for a slide-rule. He remembered his training under professors who considered weather a branch of physics; his own thesis—almost entirely complicated equations—had won him High Honors. Such equations now flashed into his mind with photographic exactitude; they dealt with velocities and accelerations, with the Coriolis force, and frictionless horizontal rectilinear flow. They contained such delightful terms as ½Ait2, ΔT0,0, and 2mvω sin ϕ. To a well-trained mathematical meteorologist they were more beautiful than Grecian urns.

He shrugged his shoulders. The local Weather Bureau had to deal in immediate practicality; there was little need and no time for mathematical abstractions. And besides—he was forced to admit—with data supplied by a single ship and by weather stations two hundred miles from the center of activity, the application of highly refined methods was hardly warranted.