![]() The areas in which the wave recorders are set up serve as a testing laboratory in which to develop the method. In the countries bordering the North Atlantic, there is no need to turn to the waves for weather information, because meteorological stations are numerous and strategically placed. The experiments have several objects, among them the development of a new kind of weather forecasting. The Lands End recorder and those in California, as well as some on the east coast of the United States, have been in experimental use since the end of the Second World War. On the coast of California, wave recorders have detected swells from nearly as great a distance some of the surf that breaks on those shores in summer is born in the west-wind belt of the Southern Hemisphere. ![]() A few have rolled up from the southernmost part of the world, taking a great-circle course all the way from Cape Horn to Lands End, a journey of some seven thousand miles. Others can be traced to tropical storms on the opposite side of the Atlantic, moving through the West Indies and along the coast of Florida. Most of the waves that roll over the recorder at Lands End, he knows, are born in the stormy North Atlantic east of Newfoundland and south of Greenland. He learns where the waves were created by the wind, the strength of the wind that produced them, how fast the wind is moving, and how soon, if at all, it will be necessary to raise storm warnings along the English coast. The meteorologist in charge of this instrument learns the life histories of the waves that are rolling in, minute by minute and hour after hour, bringing their messages from far-off places. By the fluctuating pressure of their rise and fall, they tell this instrument many things about the Atlantic waters from which they have come, and their messages are translated by its mechanisms into symbols understandable to the human mind. As they approach the rocky point of Lands End, they pass over a strange instrument, known as a wave recorder, lying on the sea bottom. Over the shoaling bottom, they sweep landward, breaking on the Seven Stones of the channel between the Scilly Isles and Lands End, coming in over the sunken ledges and the rocks whose glistening backs are laid bare at low water. Moving shoreward above the steeply rising floor of the deep sea, from dark-blue water into troubled green, they pass the edge of "soundings" and roll up over the continental shelf in confused ripplings and turbulence. As the waves roll toward Lands End, at the westernmost tip of England, they bring a feeling of distant places of the Atlantic.
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