March winds are ideal for kite flying, not just for fun but also for meteorological purposes. The first experiments with kites were carried out in Glasgow in 1749, when two students used them to measure the temperature at high altitudes.
Benjamin Franklin's 1752 kite experiment with lightning is well known, but weather kites became popular for the less hazardous and more mundane task of daily data gathering for many years. Of course balloons were also used to carry instruments aloft, but kites are cheaper, simpler and much easier to handle in high winds.
By 1899 the US Weather Bureau had 17 kite stations, each of which regularly lifted instruments to 8,000ft using a train of several kites joined together. The standard "moderate wind" kite was about 2 metres by 2 metres. Light wind kites were used when the breeze was less than 8mph, and heavy-duty ones when it was above 30mph.
The kites were of a box design, made of spruce with cambric cloth. Piano wire was used for kite string, and kite trains needed to be hauled back with a steam-powered windlass, housed in a reel house mounted on a turntable to face into the wind. Each kite train carried a meteorgraph, a combined instrument package which recorded temperature, wind velocity, humidity, and barometric pressure.
While weather kites have been largely superseded, they still have their uses, and are still employed by the British Antarctic Survey.