was a Japanese

meteorologist A meteorologist is a scientist who studies and works in the field of meteorology aiming to understand or predict Earth's atmospheric phenomena including the weather. Those who study meteorological phenomena are meteorologists in research, while t ...

. Born in

Tosu, Saga is a Cities of Japan, city located in the eastern part of Saga Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Japan. As of February 28, 2017, the city has an estimated population of 72,755 and a population density of 1,000 persons per km2. The total area ...

, he is best known for his discovery of the high-altitude air currents now known as the

jet stream Jet streams are fast flowing, narrow, meandering thermal wind, air currents in the Atmosphere of Earth, atmospheres of some planets, including Earth. On Earth, the main jet streams are located near the altitude of the tropopause and are west ...

. He was also an important

Esperantist An Esperantist ( eo, esperantisto) is a person who speaks, reads or writes Esperanto. According to the Declaration of Boulogne, a document agreed upon at the first World Esperanto Congress in 1905, an Esperantist is someone who speaks Esperanto ...

, serving as the second Board President of the from 1930 to 1945.

Jet stream and Esperanto

He wrote the first official report from Japan's Aerological Observatory (written in 1926 and in the auxiliary language of

Esperanto Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communi ...

). In this report (''Raporto de Aerologia Observatorio de Tateno)'' data was stratified by season and used to produce the mean seasonal wind profiles. The profile for winter gave the first known evidence of the persistent strong westerlies over Japan that would later become known as the jet stream. In an attempt to reach an unresponsive foreign audience, Wasaburo Oishi published nineteen reports between 1926 and 1944, all of them written in Esperanto, in total 1246 pages. Wasaburo Ooishi was not only the director of Japan’s Tateno atmospheric observatory but also the head of the Japan Esperanto Society.

World War II

Wasaburo's studies on the jet stream enabled Japan to attack North America during World War II with at least 9,000 incendiary bombs carried by stratospheric

balloons A balloon is a flexible bag that can be inflated with a gas, such as helium, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, oxygen Oxygen is the chemical element with the symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group in the per ...

and then dropped by a timer mechanism on U.S. forests. Very few bombs in this bombing campaign, called Project Fu-Go, actually reached their targets. "Guided by Ooishi's wind charts, 9,000

Fire balloon An incendiary balloon (or balloon bomb) is a balloon inflated with a lighter-than-air gas such as hot air, hydrogen, or helium, that has a bomb, incendiary device, or Molotov cocktail attached. The balloon is carried by the prevailing winds to ...

bombs, called Fu-go, were unleashed by Japan between November 1944 and April 1945." Oishi's wind calculations were wrong, and instead of taking 65 hours to reach the US from Japan, it took 96 hours on average. As a result, most of the fire balloons fell harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean, instead of on the American mainland.Pearce, Fred. 2013. "Jet Extreme." New Scientist. Volume 220, issue 2940. 26 October 2013. Page 40.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oishi, Wasaburo Japanese meteorologists Japanese Esperantists 1874 births 1950 deaths