Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Haugen & Dahl ·
The Report on Lingering Weather
A weather station's readings continue past the end of the year under a printed heading for a month the calendar does not carry.
- filed: "at the year's close"
- reference: "HD/WF/12"
1. This is the final report of the Haugen-Dahl weather station for the year, compiled under the standard schedule, which requires the officer in charge to rule the closing summary on 31 December and certify the register closed for the twelve months just ended.
2. The register is not closed. Readings have continued without a break past 31 December onto the continuation sheets bound at the back of the standard register book. The sheets are the station's own printed stock, ruled and boxed like every other month in the book, and the printed heading at the head of the column reads THE OPEN MONTH. There is no such month on the calendar in use at this station, nor in the instructions to observers, nor in the almanac the station buys its office times from. The book is bound in the ordinary buckram and carries the year's number on the spine.
3. The dates run from the 1st to the 31st under that heading. Observers sign the watch lists in the ordinary way: Marfleet keeps the night watch to the office, Dunmore the office watch to noon, and the officer in charge the afternoon and the rounds. Pay vouchers were drawn to the thirty-first, passed at the pay office without query, and paid. So far as the station's money is concerned, the month exists.
4. The readings themselves are unremarkable, which is the difficulty. Pressure, humidity, visibility, and the screens: all within bands; instruments check against one another at each comparison; the equinox swings were run again through the extending weeks and returned nil correction. The Open Month has not yet used the qualification column once. Weather that will not do anything worth a note, thirty-one days running, is the hardest thing there is to file.
5. The closing summary is unfinished by no instruction that has reached this station. In every previous year of the station's life the summary carries a printed line, SEASON CLOSED, ruled over the signature. The line is present this year. It is unruled. In the margin, in the officer's own hand, stand two words: carried forward. The register therefore remains open at the moment of filing, and this final report is being filed inside a book that has not been finished.
6. The station cannot explain one feature, and sets it down as found. The continuation sheets were bound into the book when the book was issued, before the year began, and the heading THE OPEN MONTH was printed on them then. There is no other stock of that heading at the station, at the county store, or anywhere on the stationery schedule, and the stock ledger carries no order line for such a heading in any year of the station's life. The month was printed before the year that contains it, and nobody ordered it that this station can discover.
7. Instruction is requested: whether the register may be closed at the end of the Open Month, or held open against a further continuation, or ruled closed as at 31 December with the Open Month carried as an appendix outside the year. The report is filed at the year's close, with the register open, pending that instruction.
8. The question left standing is the one the printed line will not take: when the year ended on the thirty-first of December, did the weather agree to stop, or is the year still running on somewhere the calendar does not reach?