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.