FIDO (Fog Investigation Dispersal Operations) petrol burners are ignited on either side of the main runway at Graveley, Huntingdonshire, as an Avro Lancaster of No. 35 Squadron RAF takes off in deteriorating weather, 28 May 1945. Guy Callendar helped devise the FIDO system.
- This is part two of a two-part post. Read part one here.
In November 1943, the British Royal Air Force used a new secret weapon in anger for the first time. Called FIDO, or Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation, it was a system of petrol burners that cleared fogbound airfields by raising their temperatures several degrees. It let the Allies launch and land warplanes safely when their enemies were still grounded by poor visibility. Newspapers billed it as near miraculous, crediting it with shortening the war and saving the lives of 10,000 airmen. But for one of the engineers behind it, Guy Callendar, it was just another way to combine his interest in weather and climate with his heat expertise.
From 1922-1941 Guy had worked on the Callendar Steam Tables, which he filled with data to help other engineers and scientists working with steam equipment. But after a decade carefully measuring the interaction between temperature, pressure and other properties in steam, his thoughts turned increasingly to climate. By 1938 he had stood up in front of a room of sceptical meteorologists, telling them that the world was warming, and burning fossil fuels was the cause. And while that marked a key turning point in identifying and understanding global warming, his later work in collecting evidence for that argument may have been still more important.
With his CO2 theory getting a frosty reception, and with his steam work winding down, Guy scoured scientific papers for evidence to back his argument. Since scientists like Svante Arrhenius had first suggested an important role for CO2 in climate in the 19th century and even earlier, physics had made some important advances. Earlier scientists knew that gases like CO2 absorbed infrared radiation but in the 1920s they made leaps forward in understanding why.
The frequency of the wave of infrared radiation, the number of oscillations it goes through per second, matches motions in the gas molecules that absorb it. For example, if the molecules spin at a similar frequency to the radiation’s oscillations, they can absorb the its energy. Also, atoms such as oxygen and carbon in the molecule can move, pushed by thermal energy and pulled by chemical bonds between them. That creates a vibration, and if the frequency of the vibration matches that of the infrared radiation, the vibration can absorb the radiation’s energy Read the rest of this entry »
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