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Discovery

The first indications of this phenomenon came from American professor Elias Loomis (1811-1889), when he proposed the hypothesis of a powerful air current in the upper air blowing west to east across the United States as an explanation for the behaviour of major storms. After the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, weather watchers tracked and mapped the effects on the sky over several years. They labelled the phenomenon the "equatorial smoke stream". In the 1920s Japanese meteorologist Wasaburo Oishi detected the jet stream from a site near Mount Fuji. He tracked pilot balloons ("pibals"), used to measure wind speed and direction, as they rose in the air. Oishi's work largely went unnoticed outside Japan because it was published in Esperanto, though chronologically he has to be credited for the scientific discovery of jet streams. American pilot Wiley Post (1898-1935), the first man to fly around the world solo in 1933, is often given some credit for discovery of jet streams. Post invented a pressurized suit that let him fly above 6,200 metres (20,300 ft). In the year before his death, Post made several attempts at a high-altitude transcontinental flight, and noticed that at times his ground speed greatly exceeded his air speed.

German meteorologist Heinrich Seilkopf is credited with coining a special term, Strahlströmung (literally " jet current"), for the phenomenon in 1939. Many sources credit real understanding of the nature of jet streams to regular and repeated flight-path traversals during World War II. Flyers consistently noticed westerly tailwinds in excess of 160 km/h (100 mph) in flights, for example, from the US to the UK. Similarly in 1944 a team of American meteorologists in Guam, including Reid Bryson, had enough observations to forecast very high west winds that would slow bombers raiding Japan.