The entry says that the Advance Base worked as a weather station, and that the record is still in print. This piece goes through that record: what instruments the station had, what the single observer was asked to do with them, what the Weather Bureau’s compilers did with the sheets when they came home, and what the two volumes say the winter of 1934 was like a hundred geographical miles from the sea.

The station

The Weather Bureau’s description of the station is in William C. Haines’s introduction to the tables of 1939. The building had been made in the United States “to house the personnel and equipment of the secondary meteorological station,” and the intention was a station in the interior, “far away from the moderating influence of the Ross Sea.” It went where the tractors could put it in the time left before the night: “approximately 100 geographical miles south of Little America, which was much closer than had been originally intended.” Its position is given as latitude 80° 07′ 30″ south, longitude 163° 55′ west, and its height above the sea as 246 feet by one method of reckoning from the pressure and 280 by another. Little America was at 78° 34′ 06″ south, 163° 55′ 58″ west, 46 feet above the sea; the two stations were on the same meridian, 93 nautical miles apart in a straight line and 123 statute miles by the trail.

The instruments were “the usual instruments for registering and automatically recording temperature, pressure, wind direction, and velocity.” The mercurial barometer was broken on the way in, so pressure came from an aneroid and a barograph “carefully calibrated at Little America before being sent to the Advance Base.” Temperature came from spirit thermometers in a shelter of the Weather Bureau’s cooperative-observer pattern, a standard thermograph in the shelter, and, because the cold might stop the thermograph, a second recorder: “a distant recording Foxboro (Mass.) thermograph was used in which the temperature element, or bulb, was exposed in the instrument shelter and connected by tubing to the recording part inside the building.” Grimminger notes that this kind of element “is not very responsive to rapid fluctuations of temperature,” but that “the records seem quite satisfactory for the purpose for which they were intended.” Wind came from a vane and cups on a pole, “of the light airway type with unprotected wind-direction contacts,” feeding a battery-driven register inside the hut; the contacts rimed over and had to be cleared by hand. There was no maximum thermometer. There was no pilot-balloon equipment, because “the original plan for making pilot-balloon ascents there had to be abandoned after it had been decided that only one man would occupy the station.”

Two things about the siting are worth noticing. The shelter “was mounted on the roof of the hut there, and with certain wind directions it is possible that the temperature readings were influenced by warm air from the chimney which issued from the roof and was connected to a kerosene stove inside the hut. The roof of the hut was level with the surrounding snow surface and was usually covered with several inches of snow.” At Little America the thermometers stood about five feet above the snow; at the Advance Base they stood in a shelter on a roof that was level with the snow around it.

The schedule

At Little America the thermometers were read three times a day, at 8, 14 and 20 hours by the time of the 180th meridian, to a tenth of a degree. “At the Advance Base, thermometer readings were made twice daily, usually at 8h and 20h; and the readings were generally to the nearest degree, but sometimes to the nearest one-half degree.” Each reading meant climbing the ladder through the hatch to the shelter on the roof, reading the dry-bulb and the minimum thermometer and the barograph, noting the cloud and the wind by eye, and coming down to read the register. Hourly cloud was not observed at the Advance Base, so the summaries have no cloud table for it. The eye observations of wind were kept too, and they turned out to matter: “Considerable trouble was experienced with the wind vane contacts at this station, making the wind records difficult to interpret in some cases. In these instances use was made of the daily eye observations of wind direction, and it is thought that little, if any, error has resulted.”

Table 25 of the 1939 volume prints the eye readings: day, hour, station pressure, dry and minimum temperature, wind direction and velocity, cloudiness on a scale of 0 to 10, and remarks, from 27 March to 11 October 1934. It runs to a reading twice a day, every day, with a handful of exceptions. On 1 June and on 2 June one of the day’s two readings has no minimum temperature and no cloud; on 4 June one reading has no minimum; on 18 June both readings lack a minimum and a cloud figure; on the evening of 20 July and the morning of 21 July there is no minimum and no cloud, and the morning’s pressure and temperature carry the footnote “Values taken from automatic records.” Those are the days the entry describes from the other side. The remarks column is sparse and exact: “Bright moonlight.” “Ice crystals falling.” “Moon visible through thin overcast.” “Vis. good during afternoon.” After Table 25 come the hourly values, read off the barograph, the thermographs and the register and corrected against the fixed-hour readings: Table 29 for pressure, Table 32 for temperature, Table 34 for wind, each hour of each day from April to October.

21 July

The absolute minimum is in Table 30 of the summaries, with a footnote in Grimminger’s initials: “According to the thermograph records the lowest recorded temperature at Advance Base was −83° F. at 4h on July 21. Although there was no reading of the minimum thermometer at 8h on this date, the minimum thermometer reading at 20h of the same day is given as −78° F.; following the customary procedure, the recorded value of −83° F. has therefore been corrected to −78° F. (G. G.)” The customary procedure is the Weather Bureau’s: a thermograph is corrected to the thermometer, not the other way round, because a pen can drift and a column of spirit cannot. The table therefore gives July’s minimum as 78 below, on the 21st, at 4h; August’s as 77 below, reached on the 20th, the 21st and the 30th; September’s as 72.5 below; May’s as 72.5 below on the 20th; April’s as 62 below; June’s, the month of the warm spell on the coast, as 59 below. The lowest daily mean of the whole period was 77.1 below, on 21 July.

Whether −83 or −78 was the true air temperature on that morning nobody can now say; the entry’s title takes the Weather Bureau’s figure, as the Weather Bureau did. The press, which had the figures from Byrd by radio, said in August that “temperatures had reached as low as 80 degrees below zero, a record for the Antarctic,” and in October Murphy’s interview gave “a minimum temperature of 80 degrees below zero, the lowest on record in the Antarctic.” The first expedition’s lowest at Little America had been 72.4 below, and the lowest any Antarctic expedition had reported, 76 below.

What the interior was like

The summaries give the answer to Haines’s question in Table 23 and Table 25. The mean monthly temperatures at Bolling Advance Base were 31.9 below in April, 30.4 in May, 25.0 in June, 51.7 in July, 46.8 in August and 44.8 in September, and 38.1 below for the six months. The winter of June, July and August averaged 41.3 below, and the three coldest months 47.8. At Little America the same months were 15.7, 19.4, 13.7, 37.1, 38.6 and 34.2 below, and the dark season 26.6. The difference, Advance Base minus Little America, was 16.2 degrees in April, 11.0 in May, 11.3 in June, 14.6 in July, 8.2 in August and 10.6 in September, 11.5 for the season. “For the period in question, the mean temperature was always considerably less at Advance Base; and there can be no doubt that this is also characteristic of the other months of the year.” Table 31 gives the means of the daily extremes: a mean maximum of 27.7 below and a mean minimum of 48.2 below for the six months, with a daily range of about twenty degrees, much as on the coast in the same months.

The warm spell is in both records. At Little America the temperature rose above zero on all but one of fourteen days from the last week of May, touched 25 above twice, and made the men wonder whether the Antarctic winter was “depreciating”; Haines said he could not tell whether it was abnormal, since 1934 was only the third winter anyone had measured there. At the Advance Base the same air arrived: the table has 11 above on 31 May and 12 above on 4 June, and the June mean of 25 below is the warmest of the six months. The cold came back in July, the month with a mean of 51.7 below, and held into August: in the week ending 25 August, Poulter reported from the hut, the average was 62 below and the minimum 77.

What the record lacks

The station had been designed for three men and balloons, and the summaries carry the marks of what one man could not do. There are no upper-air soundings from the interior; the pilot-balloon programme at Little America was continued, and airplane temperature soundings began there as soon as the sun came back in September, but nothing went up from the Advance Base. There is no maximum thermometer, so no table of absolute maxima. There is no hourly cloud. The wind record leans on the eye observations wherever the contacts failed. The thermometer shelter sat beside a chimney. None of this is hidden: Grimminger wrote each limitation into the explanation of his tables, which is the Weather Bureau’s way of saying what a number is worth.

What the record has is five months of readings, twice a day, at a place where there had never been any, kept by a man who for most of June and the second half of July was, by his own account and Poulter’s, barely able to stand. Haines and Grimminger compiled Little America’s observations in 1935, before the ships left; Grimminger compiled everything, 377 pages of tables and 106 of summaries, over the next six years, “during his spare time” and with the help of a Works Progress Administration project in Massachusetts, and had the second volume out in 1941. The two supplements were scanned by the NOAA Central Library and are the sources for every figure in this piece.

Sources

• G. Grimminger and W. C. Haines, Meteorological Results of the Byrd Antarctic Expeditions 1928–30, 1933–35: Tables, Monthly Weather Review Supplement No. 41, United States Weather Bureau, October 1939: Haines’s introduction (the station, the instruments, the pilot balloons, the thermographs, the rime on the contacts); the explanation of the tables (the coordinates and heights); Table 25 (the observations, with the blanks and footnotes); Tables 29, 32 and 34 (hourly values). library.oarcloud.noaa.gov
• George Grimminger, Meteorological Results of the Byrd Antarctic Expeditions 1928–30, 1933–35: Summaries of Data, Monthly Weather Review Supplement No. 42, 1941: the introduction (occupation “alone by Admiral Byrd for 6 months,” the WPA project); the section on temperature (the Foxboro thermograph, the shelter and the chimney, the reading hours, the absence of a maximum thermometer and of hourly cloud, the wind vane contacts); Table 23 (monthly and seasonal means), Table 25 (differences), Table 30 (absolute extremes and the footnote on 21 July), Table 31 (mean maxima and minima). library.oarcloud.noaa.gov
• W. C. Haines and George Grimminger, A Brief Meteorological Summary: Byrd Antarctic Expedition II, 1933–1935, Little America, 1935. Little America’s daily observations for the winter. archive.org
• Evening Post, Wellington, 28 and 30 May, 4 and 11 June and 28 August 1934 (the 72.5 below of 20 May and the earlier records, the warm spell at Little America, Haines’s remark on it, the week at 62 below), and Evening Star, Washington, 13 August and 28 October 1934 (the 80 below reported by radio and repeated in Murphy’s interview). 28 May, 30 May, 4 June, 11 June, 28 August, 13 August, 28 October