COMMERCIAL METEOROLOGY
It is a significant fact that the American Meteorological Society,
which was organized in 1919, has a Committee on Commercial Meteorology.
The appointment of this committee was one of the earliest tokens of
the fact that the applications of meteorology to business, always
recognized to be important and far-reaching, had at last been
segregated as a distinct field of inquiry. The time is near at hand
when this field will have its corps of specialists and its textbooks.
Courses in commercial meteorology will be given in business colleges,
and meteorologists will be attached to the staffs of large business
enterprises. The chamber of commerce of a wide-awake western city
already maintains a Department of Meteorology, with a former Weather
Bureau official at its head, and “consulting meteorologists,” now
practicing their novel profession in other parts of the country, find
their principal clientele among business concerns.
Weather not only influences most kinds of business, but is the
foundation of many of them. Plenty of illustrations of the latter fact
will be found in every large department store. Umbrellas, rubbers,
and mackintoshes are made and sold because of rain; their best market
is in countries with rainy climates, and their sale from day to day
fluctuates with the state of the sky. Electric and palm-leaf fans
are a drug on the market or the reverse, according to the readings
of the thermometer. Sleds and ice skates are sold where and when the
weather is cold. This list may be prolonged _ad lib_. If we leave the
department store and walk along any business thoroughfare, we shall
discover other striking examples of commercial undertakings that owe
their existence chiefly or entirely to the weather. Abolish cold
weather and you abolish the dealer in furnaces and heating stoves,
besides reducing the rank of the coal-dealer considerably below the
“baronial” level. Eliminate hot weather from the meteorological program
and the ice dealer will likewise tumble from his high estate.
All this is so obvious that it seems hardly worth while setting down;
and yet the paradox must somehow be explained that business men
have not, in general, paid much attention to meteorology, and that
they have made only fragmentary use of the official meteorological
establishments that were created, in part, for their benefit. Probably
this paradoxical situation is merely a case of mental inertia. During
the long ages of traffic before there were any weather maps, scientific
weather forecasts, or climatic statistics, the weather was necessarily
an unknown quantity in the mathematics of buying and selling. That it
is not so to-day is a fact to which the business mind has been very
slow in adjusting itself.
We have mentioned some of the obvious relations of weather to commerce,
but there are others that are not so obvious. Many of these are
indirect. Thus the effects of the weather on agriculture are nearly
always reflected in the commercial world. It is not the farmer alone
who suffers from a prolonged drought, for example. It has been
asserted that every severe financial panic in our history has been
closely associated with a protracted period of deficient rainfall, and
that there has been no period of protracted drought without a severe
financial panic except one that occurred during the Civil War. Mr.
H. H. Clayton, who published this assertion in 1901, has cited the
case of the wheat crop as illustrating the magnitude of the effect
that rainfall exercises on economic conditions in general through its
effects on agriculture.
“If,” he says, “the amount of wheat raised in the United States were
reduced one-half or even one-third by a year of deficient rainfall, it
is easy to imagine an enormous strain on the business of the country,
and with a succession of such years the effect might mean disaster.
Such a deficiency in the wheat supply, with wheat at 80 cents a bushel,
would mean for a single year a direct loss in wealth of more than
$100,000,000; it would mean that nearly all the wheat which is usually
shipped abroad would be needed at home; it would mean that thousands of
railroad cars and ships which ordinarily transport this grain would lie
idle, that thousands of men who usually handle this grain in transport
would be out of employment, that farmers in large numbers would be
unable to meet their obligations, and consequently that banks and
business of all kinds would suffer.” Recent prices of wheat give added
force to these statements.
In contrast to such broad relations of the weather to business, it may
be interesting to point out certain relations which are of so special
a character that, although familiar to hosts of business men, they
have generally escaped the attention of writers on economics. On this
subject Mr. John Allen Murphy says:
“Retail sales are influenced tremendously by the weather. This is one
factor that makes it impossible for a retailer to equalize the peaks
and valleys in his sales chart. Favorable weather will bring him a
rush of business. A bad day will keep patrons from his store. There is
nothing he can do to prevent it. Many merchants have tried the plan of
offering ‘stormy day specials,’ but at best such a scheme is only a
makeshift that seldom works. The weather also affects the buying moods
of people. A dark, dreary day in summer seems to influence humans to
take on the same cast as the atmosphere. They are grouchy and hard
to please. On the other hand, a cold day in winter has the opposite
effect. The warmth and cheer of the store is such a pleasant contrast
to the out-of-doors that shoppers like to linger over the wares and
indulge themselves more readily in the luxury of buying.
“A stormy day or a series of them always helps the mail-order business.
In such weather people are inclined to stay at home. In passing the
time, they are likely to thumb the pages of such catalogues as they
have and thus see in them articles that they want. On the farm,
especially in the bleak days of winter, it is often the custom to order
garden seeds, incubators, tools, and many other things that will be
needed as soon as spring opens up. On a bad day traveling salesmen find
it easier to get the ear of a merchant. Not being busy with customers,
he is prone to be more lenient toward the ‘boys with the grips.’”
Another writer on this subject, Mr. F. C. Kelly, says:
“In a large city, the business of a department store is seriously hurt
by rain in the forenoon, but rain in the early afternoon is usually
a big help. Most customers of a big-city department store are women,
and nearly all of them live some distance from the store--at the edge
of the city or in the suburbs. If it rains along about eight or nine
o’clock in the morning, the woman who had planned to go shopping
that day is quite likely to change her mind, even though she did not
intend to go until afternoon. The rain not only suggests discomfort in
getting about, but diminishes her desire or immediate need for certain
articles, and drives the shopping idea out of her head. On the other
hand, if it is bright and clear in the morning, but clouds up about
noon for a heavy downpour which lasts most of the afternoon, it is
the best thing that could happen for the department store, because
shoppers get in and cannot comfortably get out. They shop all over the
store, buy luncheon there, and shop some more. While the rain is thus
helping the department stores, it may hurt the smaller shops, because
many customers who would otherwise look around are obliged to do their
buying all under one roof.”
No aspect of business more faithfully reflects the weather, or, in
a somewhat less degree, the weather forecasts, than advertising. So
important is it, in many lines of business, to make advertising fit
the weather that one might expect merchants to be, as a class, as
weather-wise as sailors and farmers. A page of advertising in a great
metropolitan newspaper is a costly investment. If, for example, it
invites the public to pay a Sunday visit of inspection to some haven
for homeseekers in the suburbs and Sunday turns out to be the kind
of day that converts building-lots into bogs, the advertiser will
perhaps be led to inquire whether there is not some means of avoiding
another such fiasco; and he may thus make the surprising discovery that
meteorology is not entirely a theoretical science. The conjunction of a
conspicuously advertised sale of rubbers and a soppy week-day morning
may be either a lucky accident or the result of studying the weather
map. In the former case, supposing the business to be conducted in
the northeastern United States, where dry weather is about twice as
common as wet, the odds would be two to one against the occurrence even
of light showers on the day the advertisement appeared, and three or
four to one against the occurrence of such weather as would make the
advertisement decidedly _à propos_.
These remarks about newspaper advertising are, to a great extent,
applicable also to the dressing of windows and the display of goods
inside the shop. In both cases a moderate amount of foresight in the
matter of weather will result in placing before the customer the right
goods at the right time. One of the minor ways in which the merchant
can turn the science of meteorology to advantage consists of using
meteorological instruments and the official weather forecasts and
bulletins for the purpose of attracting attention to his windows or
to his stock-in-trade. The drug-store thermometer is the illustration
of this process that comes first to one’s mind. There is no reason
why, with the progress of civilization, this celebrated instrument
should not be made a trustworthy index of temperature as well as an
effective advertisement. In continental Europe weather instruments are
displayed along with miscellaneous advertising matter in many of the
street “weather columns” (_Wettersäulen_), which furnished the idea of
the meteorological kiosks installed by the Weather Bureau in American
cities.
One of the most important branches of commercial meteorology relates
to the effects of weather upon transportation. This is a many-sided
subject. In the first place, the railway and steamship companies,
and other concerns engaged in the transport of goods and passengers
have their manifold weather problems, among which one may mention,
at random, that of dealing with the snow blockades of railways,
precautions against the skidding of taxicabs in wet weather, the
avoidance of iceberg-infested routes at sea, and the selection of
climatically favorable sites for aerodromes. The shipper has a somewhat
different, but overlapping set of weather problems.
“In the building of railroads,” says Mr. E. L. Wells, “many phases of
climate are to be considered, including the probability of floods,
deep snows, high winds, sand storms, etc. It is not long since a
considerable length of railroad line in one of the Western States
was found to be practically worthless because of having been built
too near the bed of a stream and therefore being too much subject to
damage from floods, so it was replaced by a line built higher up. The
writer remembers two railroads entering the same town in one of the
northern plains States, one of which is seldom blockaded, while the
other is sometimes closed by snow for months at a time. In the former
case the cuts are parallel to the wind, while in the latter the wind
blows directly across the cuts. In operating railroads a knowledge of
the climate is essential. This is particularly true in the shipment
of perishable products, which may require icing or ventilation as a
protection against high temperature, or insulation against cold.
Not only is a knowledge of climatic conditions essential in taking
precaution against loss in transportation, but weather records are
playing an increasingly large part in the settlement of claims for
products and property damaged in transit. The claim agents of the
leading transportation companies and the traffic managers of the
commission houses and producers’ associations keep complete files of
climatological data, and a large percentage of claims for damaged
goods, whether they be for a trainload of chilled bananas or for a
traveling man’s samples ruined by rain, are now settled out of court on
the basis of the weather records. Claims for car demurrage are often
settled on the basis of the weather reports.”
Detailed information concerning the effects of temperature on all sorts
of food products, both in transportation and in storage, was collected
by the Weather Bureau some years ago and published as the Bureau’s
Bulletin No. 13.
While the domestic shipper can easily obtain from the Weather Bureau
detailed climatic statistics for all parts of the United States, as
well as the current weather reports for this country, and can profit
greatly by regulating his operations in accordance therewith, it
is not quite so easy for the shipper to foreign markets to obtain
the corresponding data of foreign countries. With the expansion
of our foreign trade, the demand for such data has grown to large
proportions. The Weather Bureau, which has an unrivaled meteorological
and climatological library in Washington, is naturally the place
where such data are most frequently sought, but the labor entailed in
extracting and digesting the information in response to individual
requests is often too great to be undertaken by a Government office,
where the time of the employees is absorbed in routine duties. There
is, therefore, a promising field here for the private commercial
meteorologist. Unofficial work in this line is already carried on to
some extent. Thus a great steel company in New York has a salaried
“consulting geographer” on its staff, who advises on meteorological
questions. One of the problems he has been called upon to solve was to
determine the proper dates for shipping steel from Atlantic and Pacific
ports of the United States to various places in India, so that it would
never arrive during the monsoon rains. Records of current and very
recent weather in distant countries are, in a great majority of cases,
unobtainable anywhere in the United States. The interchange of detailed
weather reports between the different meteorological services of the
world involves in the first place, with few exceptions, a painfully
slow process of publication, and then distribution by mail; so that,
for example, records of observations at some places in South Africa
or Australia, or even many parts of Europe, do not reach the Weather
Bureau Library, in Washington, until two or three years after the
observations are made. Undoubtedly the time will come--and probably in
the near future--when there will be a world-wide exchange of weather
news by wireless telegraphy.
One kind of business wholly dependent upon the weather, which we have
not yet mentioned, is weather insurance. There are several kinds, but
hail insurance and tornado insurance are those extensively practiced;
the former much more widely and systematically in the Old World than
in the New, while the latter is confined to America. Insurance
against frost is said to have been practiced in Germany, and there
appears to be an excellent field for it in the United States. The
insurance of outdoor events, such as games, shows, and _al fresco_
parties, against rain has been carried on for a good many years by
speculative underwriters at Lloyd’s, in England, and has more recently
been undertaken in this country. Of course the weather element enters
to a considerable degree into other kinds of insurance. Ordinary
marine insurance is, to a large extent, insurance against storms; fire
insurance is partly insurance against lightning; window and plate glass
insurance involves the risk of breakage by wind and hail; and even life
insurance is greatly concerned with the effects of weather and climate.