Meteorological Observations During the Year 1872

Meteorological Observations During the Year 1872 is a federal report by Henry Gannett, presenting weather and climatological data collected during the field season of 1872. Gannett, who would later become the chief geographer of the United States Geological Survey, was working during this period as a member of the Hayden Survey, one of the four major federal western surveys that operated in the post Civil War decades and that eventually merged to form the consolidated Geological Survey in 1879.

The report presents in tabular and summary form the meteorological observations made by Gannett and his colleagues during the survey season. The Hayden Survey was working in the Yellowstone region and surrounding territories during the early 1870s, in country that had not previously been systematically studied. The meteorological observations were a small but important part of the broader survey programme, which was producing the first scientific descriptions of the geology, geography, natural history, and climate of the northern Rocky Mountain region.

The observations include the standard categories of nineteenth century meteorology. There are temperature readings taken at regular intervals through the day, barometric pressure measurements, wind direction and force, precipitation, and various observations of cloud type and atmospheric conditions. The report includes monthly and seasonal summaries calculated from the daily observations, with notes on particular weather events of interest. The technical apparatus and the methods used are described with the careful detail that good federal scientific reports of the period typically supplied.

The report belongs to a substantial body of nineteenth century federal scientific literature that established the basic factual foundation for the modern understanding of American western climate and weather. The observations themselves are now of mostly historical interest, since modern climatology has long since developed methods and instruments far more sophisticated than those available to a field party in 1872. But the report is a useful document of how science was actually done in the field in the post Civil War period and of how the basic climatological knowledge of the American West was being established by patient federal field work over many seasons.

The report is mostly of interest now to historians of American science and to climatologists studying the long term record of western weather. It pairs naturally with the other Hayden Survey publications of the period.