“But I know ladies by the scoreWhose hair, like seaweed, scents the storm;Long, long before it starts to pourTheir locks assume a baneful form.”—Hebert
“But I know ladies by the score
Whose hair, like seaweed, scents the storm;
Long, long before it starts to pour
Their locks assume a baneful form.”
—Hebert
At the end of August, 1954, when the hurricane named “Carol” devastated Long Island and the southern coast of New England, it did a tremendous amount of property damage, principally on the shores of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. There was sharp criticism of the weathermen and the hurricane hunters. People claimed that the warning came only a few hours ahead of the big winds and the high storm tides. The weathermen answered that there really was no delay on their part in giving out the warning. They said that the hurricane hunters had been tracking Carol for several days and everybody had been warned that it was on the way. The hurricane simply started to move with great rapidity during that final night and there was no wayof getting the warning to large numbers of people that early in the morning. It was after daylight when they got out of bed and turned on radio and television.
Of all the criticism, the sharpest and most prolonged was about the name of the hurricane. A newspaper in Massachusetts—the New BedfordTimes—ran an editorial saying that it was not appropriate to give a nice name like Carol to a death-dealing and destructive monster of this kind. Other newspapers and many citizens here and there around the country joined in, partly in complaint and partly out of curiosity and the wish to get into the argument. A New Orleans woman wrote to the editor of the New BedfordTimesthat she would rather a storm would hit her house nameless than to run a chance of having it named after one of her husband’s old girl friends. Other women were incensed because storms had been called by their given names. The weathermen had a good explanation, but not many people seemed to sympathize with them. Persons who suffered losses of property were the most critical, saying that the name Carol gave the impression that the storm was not dangerous and that its winds and tides would not be much out of the ordinary.
The hurricane hunters were amazed by this reaction. Use of names for storms was not new. For a great many years the worst of the world’s storms have been given names, some before they struck with full force, but mostly afterward. Many were named after cities, towns or islands that were devastated. Others had gotten their names from some unusual weather that came with them or from ships that were sunk or damaged. One of them, as already has been related, was named “Kappler’s Hurricane” after a weather officer named Kappler who discovered it.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a New Englander, Sidney Perley, collected all the available recordsof storms and other disasters, together with strange phenomena in New England, starting with a big hurricane in 1635, when there were only a few settlers, and continuing down to 1890. His book,Historic Storms of New England, was published in Salem, in 1891. He listed floods, earthquakes, dark and yellow days, big meteors, eclipses, avalanches, droughts, great gales, tornadoes, hurricanes, and storms of hail and heavy snow. Prominent among them were the “Long Storm” of 1798, the “September Gale” of 1815, and the “Lighthouse Storm” of 1851.
The “Long Storm,” as the name suggests, was of long duration. It began on the seventeenth of November and continued with terrific gales and heavy snow until late on the twenty-first. This violent weather was unprecedented so early in the winter. From Perley’s account it seems that the center of the storm crossed Cape Cod. A great many vessels were lost and there was much suffering among the people.
The “September Gale” of 1815 became famous because of a poem written in later years by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was six years old at the time of the big gale. Holmes remembered and lamented the loss of his favorite pair of breeches, in part as follows:
“It chanced to be our washing day,And all our things were drying;The storm came roaring through the lines,And set them all a flying;I saw the sheets and petticoatsGo riding off like witches;I lost, ah! bitterly I wept,—I lost my Sunday breeches.”
“It chanced to be our washing day,
And all our things were drying;
The storm came roaring through the lines,
And set them all a flying;
I saw the sheets and petticoats
Go riding off like witches;
I lost, ah! bitterly I wept,—
I lost my Sunday breeches.”
Holmes entitled the poemThe September Galeand so this became the name of the storm. Actually, it was a hurricanequite like those that struck New England in 1938, 1944 and 1954. Years afterward, a New Haven man named Noyes Darling became interested in the storm of 1815 and traced its course by a collection of newspaper accounts from many places and by the logs of ships which had been in the western Atlantic when the hurricane passed. In 1842, he plotted all this information on a map and was able to figure its course. This was rather remarkable, for a study since that time shows that the tracks of hurricanes which do great damage in New England must adhere closely to one path—far enough eastward to clear the land areas as they go northward and far enough westward so that they do not go out into the ocean before they reach the latitude of Nantucket. Those which strike shore to the southward may reach New England but passage over land causes them to lose much of their fury on the way. Darling’s plotted path was correct according to experiences since that time.
The “Lighthouse Storm” of 1851 commenced in the District of Columbia on Sunday, April 13, reached New York on Monday morning, and during the day struck New England. It came at the time of the full moon and so the storm-driven waters joined with the high tides, and the sea, rising over the wharves at Dorchester, Massachusetts, came into the streets to a greater height than had ever been known before. All around the coasts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire there was much property damage. The event which gave the storm its name was the destruction of the lighthouse on Minot’s ledge, at Cohasset, Massachusetts. It was wrecked and swept away. At four o’clock the morning after the storm some of the wreckage was found strewn along the beach. Two young men, assistant light keepers, were killed. Since this was a very dangerous rock and many vessels had been lost there, a new lighthouse was erected at the same point soon afterward.
One of the most noted storms of the nineteenth century was “Saxby’s Gale,” which caused a great amount of destruction in New Brunswick on October 4, 1869. The amazing fact was that this storm was predicted nearly a year before by a Lieutenant Saxby of the British Navy. In November, 1868, he wrote to the newspapers in London, predicting that the earth would be visited by a storm of unusual violence attended by an extraordinary rise of tide at seven o’clock on the morning of October 5, 1869.
Saxby wrote the following explanation of his forecast to the newspaper:
“I now beg to state with regard to 1869 at 7 A.M. October 5th, the Moon will be at the part of her orbit which is nearest the Earth. Her attraction will be therefore at its maximum force. At noon of the same day the Moon will be on the Earth’s equator, a circumstance which never occurs without marked atmospheric disturbance, and at 2 P.M. of the same day lines drawn from the Earth’s centre would cut the Sun and Moon in the same arc of right ascension (the Moon’s attraction and the Sun’s attraction will therefore be acting in the same direction); in other words, the new moon will be on the Earth’s equator when in perigee, and nothing more threatening can, I say, occur without miracle. The earth it is true will not be in perihelion by some sixteen or seventeen seconds of semidiameter.
“With your permission I will during September next (1869) for the safety of mariners briefly remind your readers of this warning. In the meantime there will be time for the repair of unsafe sea walls and for the circulation of this notice throughout the world.”
It seems that Saxby had made other similar forecasts. Commenting on one of his predictions, a London newspaper, theStandard, said:
“Saxby claims to have been successful in some of his predictions,and he may prove either lucky or clever on the present occasion. As the astronomical effect will operate over the entire globe, it is exceedingly likely there will be a gale of wind and a flood somewhere.”
The extraordinary fact is that a citizen of Halifax, Nova Scotia, disturbed by Saxby’s prediction for October 5, 1869, wrote to the local newspaper the week before:
“I believe that a heavy gale will be encountered here on Tuesday next 5th October beginning perhaps on Monday night or possibly deferred as late as Tuesday night, but between these two periods it seems inevitable. At its greatest force the direction of the wind should be southwest, having commenced at or near south.
“Should Monday the 4th be a warm day for the season an additional guarantee of the coming storm will be given. Roughly speaking the warmer it may be on the 4th, the more violent will be the succeeding storm. Apart from the theory of the Moon’s attraction, as applied to Meteorology—which is disbelieved by many, the experience of any careful observer teaches him to look for a storm at next new moon, and the state of the atmosphere, and consequent weather lately appears to be leading directly not only to this blow next week, but to a succession of gales during next month.”
Actually the fourth began as a warm day in New Brunswick and later in the day the storm became violent, as predicted by the Halifax citizen, named Frederick Allison.
There were high tide and heavy rain at Halifax but the weather in general was a disappointment, for the citizens, after seeing the warning in the newspaper, had made many preparations about the wharves, moving goods to higher floors in warehouses, and anchoring boats out in the stream or securing them with lines in all directions.
Near by in New Brunswick, however, the storm on October 4 was severe. The gale rose to hurricane strength between8:00 and 9:00 P.M. The tide at St. John was above any preceding mark. Vessels broke away from their moorings and some were badly damaged. Buildings were flooded and in St. John and other cities and towns in the area, buildings were demolished or unroofed, tracts of forest trees were uprooted, and cattle were drowned in great numbers.
All of this was rather remarkable as the storm reached its height at about 9:00 P.M. on October 4th, which was actually after midnight by London time and therefore on October 5th. Regardless of these circumstances, this is an instance of a storm that had a name—“Saxby’s Gale”—long before it occurred and for years afterward. Some weathermen thought that it was of tropical origin and had been a hurricane in lower latitudes, but if so, it came overland in its final days, for it was felt at Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and in parts of New England on the third and early on the fourth, with heavy rains and gales in many localities.
A few hurricanes have been named for the peculiar paths they followed. One that was very unusual was the “Loop Hurricane” of October, 1910. It was an intense storm that passed over western Cuba, after which its center described a small loop over the waters between Cuba and Southern Florida. When it finally crossed the coast of western Florida, it caused tides so high that many people had to climb trees to keep from drowning. The “Yankee Hurricane” was so named by the Mayor of Miami. It was first observed to the east of Bermuda in late October, 1935, moving westward. On approaching the coast of the Carolinas, it took an extraordinary course, almost opposite to the normal track at that season, and went southwestward to southern Florida, with its calm center over Miami on the fourth of November. In the same year, another unusual storm known as the “Hairpin Hurricane” started in the western Caribbean, moved northeastward to Cuba, and then turned sharply southwestwardto Honduras, describing a track shaped like a hairpin. It caused one of the worst disasters of that region. Loss of life exceeded two thousand.
Examples of storms named after ships are “Racer’s Storm” in 1837, named after a British sloop of war which was caught in its hurricane winds in the Yucatan Channel. Another one of great violence was called “Antje’s Hurricane,” because it dismasted a schooner of that name in the Atlantic in 1842.
In Puerto Rico, a hurricane may be given the name of the saint whose feast is celebrated on the day on which it strikes the island. The most famous are: Santa Ana, July 26, 1825; Los Angeles, August 2, 1837; Santa Elena, August 18, 1851; San Narcisco, October 29, 1867; San Felipe, September 13, 1876; San Ciriaco, August 8, 1899; and the second San Felipe, September 13, 1928.
Doubtless the worst hurricane during the twentieth century was the one in 1928, “San Felipe.” It caused damage estimated at fifty million dollars in Puerto Rico, and later struck Florida, causing losses estimated at twenty-five million dollars. Puerto Rico lost three hundred lives, Florida nearly two thousand.
One of the well-known storms of the West Indies was the “Padre Ruiz Hurricane,” which was named after a priest whose funeral services were being held in the church at Santa Barbara, Santo Domingo, on September 23, 1837, when the hurricane struck the island, causing an appalling loss of life and property destruction.
Before the end of the nineteenth century, a weatherman in Australia named Clement Wragge had begun giving girls’ names to tropical storms. Down in that part of the Southern Hemisphere, hurricanes are called willy-willies. They come from the tropics on a southwest course and turn to the south and southeast on approaching or passing Australia. Their winds spiral inward around the center in a clockwise direction—theopposite of the turning motion of our hurricanes.
Wragge was the government meteorologist in Queensland, and later ran a weather bureau of his own in Brisbane. A tall, thin, bewhiskered man who stammered, he was known all over Australia as a lecturer on weather and similar subjects. Australians of that time said that, as likely as not, when due to talk about big winds, he would arrive at the lecture hall with “too many sheets out” and fail to keep on his feet during the lecture. Though his name was Clement, he was better known in Australia as “Inclement.”
Storms which did not come from the tropics were called by men’s names. Generally, Wragge called them after politicians who had earned his disfavor, but for some reason he used girls’ names for the willy-willies. As an illustration for his weather journal called “WRAGGE,” he had a weather map for February 2, 1898, with a willy-willy named “Eline.” He predicted nasty weather from a disturbance named “Hackenbush.”
E. B. Buxton, a meteorologist for Pan American Airways, went to the South Pacific in the late thirties and, after hearing about Wragge and his names for willy-willies, adopted the idea for his charts. He recalled particularly using the name “Chloe” for hurricanes.
With few exceptions, the hurricanes of the twentieth century went unnamed in the United States until 1951, although some were referred to in terms of place and date; for instance, the “New England Hurricane of 1938.” Unofficially, a few had names of people. In 1949, while President Truman was in Miami addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the first hurricane of the season was called “Harry,” and a little later a bigger one which the newsmen said had greater authority struck southern Florida and it was called “Hurricane Bess.”
In sending out advices and warnings of West Indianstorms, it was not considered necessary to have names, as it was seldom that more than one was in existence at the same time. In 1944, when aircraft reconnaissance began, it became customary to get reports by radio-telephone and voice was used increasingly in other ways by the hurricane hunters. But this gave no particular trouble until September, 1950, when there were three hurricanes in progress at the same time.
Two were in the Atlantic, one north of Bermuda and the other north of Puerto Rico. The third appeared in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. When aircraft were dispatched into these storms and began reporting, there was increasing confusion. Other communications and public advices became mixed and there was much uncertainty as to which storm was meant. Use of letters of the alphabet to identify them was no help, for letters B, C, D, E, and G sound much alike by radio-telephone; also A, J, and H. Numbers were no better because weather reports are sent by numbers and the advisories issued on each storm are numbered, so that the number 3 could be the number of the storm, the number of the advice, an element of the weather, the hour, etc.
The agencies involved in weather and communications in connection with hurricanes met early in 1951 and decided to identify storms by the phonetic alphabet, which gave Able for A, Baker for B, Charlie for C, etc., in accordance with the following table:
AbleBakerCharlieDogEasyFoxGeorgeHowItemJigKingLoveMikeNanOboePeterQueenRogerSugarTareUncleVictorWilliamXrayYokeZebra
Able
Baker
Charlie
Dog
Easy
Fox
George
How
Item
Jig
King
Love
Mike
Nan
Oboe
Peter
Queen
Roger
Sugar
Tare
Uncle
Victor
William
Xray
Yoke
Zebra
In the 1951 season, this worked very well in the communications and the public began to speak of hurricanes by these names. At the start of the 1952 season, the agencies began to use the same list of names, starting with Able for the first storm, but soon ran into difficulty. A new international alphabet had been introduced as follows:
AlfaBravoCocaDeltaEchoFoxtrotGolfHotelIndiaJolietKiloLimaMetroNectarOscarPapaQuebecRomeoSierraTangoUnionVictorWhiskeyExtraYankeeZulu
Alfa
Bravo
Coca
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Joliet
Kilo
Lima
Metro
Nectar
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Union
Victor
Whiskey
Extra
Yankee
Zulu
Some of the agencies had begun using the new alphabet in their communications, while others stuck to the old one. So the third storm of the season was “Charlie” part of the time and the rest of the time some wanted to call it “Coca.” At the end of the season there was no agreement as to which phonetic alphabet should be used and there was criticism for having continued an alphabet which was obsolete internationally.
After a long discussion, military members of the conference suggested adoption of girls’ names, which had been used successfully for typhoons in the Pacific for several years. Just how this practice originated is not known, but it was thought by some persons to have come from the bookStorm, by George R. Stewart, which was published in 1941. In this book a fictitious Pacific storm is traced to the United Statesand its effects on the people are narrated in the style of a novel. A young weatherman at San Francisco, according to the story, called the storm Maria. Also there was Wragge’s use of girls’ names for willy-willies in Australia and Pan American Airway’s practice in connection with hurricanes as early as 1938. At any rate, with these Pacific precedents, the weathermen and hurricane hunters adopted the following list for 1953 for hurricanes in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico:
AliceBarbaraCarolDollyEdnaFlorenceGildaHazelIreneJillKatherineLucyMabelNormaOrphaPatsyQueenRachelSusieTinaUnaVickyWallis
Alice
Barbara
Carol
Dolly
Edna
Florence
Gilda
Hazel
Irene
Jill
Katherine
Lucy
Mabel
Norma
Orpha
Patsy
Queen
Rachel
Susie
Tina
Una
Vicky
Wallis
This list worked perfectly in 1953; the public was pleased; the communicators were happy about it; the newspapers thought it was colorful; and use of the same names began to spread in Canada and some of the countries to the southward. The same list was adopted with enthusiasm for the 1954 season.
In 1954, Alice and Barbara were minor hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, although Alice broke up in tremendous rains in the upper watershed of the Rio Grande, after moving inland over Mexico. There were floods which broke records for all time as the water moved down the river. The third storm, Carol, started a controversy in the press and many letters were written to the editors and to the Weather Bureau, some favoring the scheme or trying to get a little fun out of it, but most of them finding objections of one kind or another. It was almost impossible to change in themiddle of the season, even if the hurricane hunters had wanted to, so it was continued during 1954 and each new hurricane aroused further comment. Later Hazel came along about the middle of October, a very severe hurricane from the Caribbean Sea. It turned northward between Cuba and Haiti and caused terrible damage and much loss of life. Later it struck the coast of the Carolinas and crossed the eastern states northward to New York. Loss of life in the eastern states was variously estimated from fifty to eighty, and the damage to property, especially from falling trees, was enormous. There was another flood of complaints, this time about the name Hazel.
Before the argument was ended it threatened to be almost as stormy as some of the smaller hurricanes so named. Early in 1955 the Weather Bureau had a meeting with the Air Force, Navy and others interested in deciding the question. By that time the opinions received by mail were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing girls’ names. In the meantime, there had been a surprise. A storm having some of the characteristics of a hurricane was sighted in the Caribbean Sea in January and, in the absence of a decision on names to be used in 1955, it was called Alice from the 1954 list. Later, the names for others in 1955 were decided as follows:
BrendaConnieDianeEdithFloraGladysHildaIoneJanetKatieLindaMarthaNellieOrvaPeggyQueenaRosaStellaTrudyUrsaVernaWilmaXeniaYvonneZelda
Brenda
Connie
Diane
Edith
Flora
Gladys
Hilda
Ione
Janet
Katie
Linda
Martha
Nellie
Orva
Peggy
Queena
Rosa
Stella
Trudy
Ursa
Verna
Wilma
Xenia
Yvonne
Zelda
“he that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill”—Burke
“he that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill”—Burke
All through this book we have talked about hurricane hunters. By now it is clear that the crew on the plane that goes into the storm at the risk of destruction of the craft and death to the men is not really “hunting” a hurricane. It is the exception rather than the rule when they discover a tropical storm. The first hint comes from some distant island or a ship in the gusty wind circle where the sea and the sky reveal ominous signs of trouble. Somewhere in a busy weather office a large outline map is being covered with figures and symbols. Long, curving lines across a panorama of weather take shape as the radios vibrate and the teletypewriters rattle with the international language of weathermen—the most co-operative people in the world’s family of nations.
Hurricane hunting is done on these maps. Day after day, without any fanfare, the weathermen search the reportsspread across this almost boundless region where hundreds of tropical storms could be in progress if nature chose to operate in such an eerie fashion. Even the experienced observers on islands and the alert officers on shipboard might not see the real implications in the weather messages they prepare. In the enormous reaches of the belt of trade winds, where the tremendous energy of the sun’s heat and the irresistible force of earth rotation dictate that the winds shall blow as steady breezes from the northeast, somebody might put in his report, for example, that there was a light wind coming from the southwest. That fact alone would be enough. In season, the weathermen would know, almost with certainty, that there was a tropical storm in the area.
There are many things to watch for, in the array of elements at the surface, in the upper air, the clouds, sea swells, change of the barometer, faint earth tremors. A hint from this scattering of messages in the vast hurricane region starts the action. And the planes go out to investigate.
This is an extraordinary procedure. Looking at it as an outgrowth of the insistent demands of citizens along the coasts in the hurricane region for warnings of these storms, as the population increased and property losses mounted, it seems that the flight of planes into these monstrous winds is justified only until a safer method can be found. All other aircraft are flown out of the threatened areas, obviously because the winds are destructive to planes on the ground. The lives of men and the safety of the plane in the air should not run a risk of being sacrificed if it can be avoided. Of course, it is argued by some men that there is a possibility that a method may be discovered to control hurricanes by the use of chemicals or some other plan requiring planes to fly into the centers. And it is true, also, that for the time being at least there is certain information that can be obtained in no other way.
At the end of World War II, there was a grave requirement for more information about hurricanes. Little was known except in theory about their causes, maintenance, or the forces which determine their rate and direction of travel. Since that time, literally thousands of flights have been made into hurricanes and typhoons. Scientists have studied the detailed records of these many penetrations.
We have learned a great deal in these years but by no means enough. Herbert Riehl, a professor of meteorology at Chicago University, has examined as large quantities of the data as any man. Recently he said, “Our knowledge regarding the wind distribution within tropical storms and the dynamical laws that guide the air from the outskirts to the center of the cyclone is so deficient as to be deplorable.”
From the scientific point of view, remarks of this kind are fully justified, but progress in the issuance of warnings is quite another matter. Hurricane prediction for the present and the near future is an art and not a science. Very great progress has been made in recent years in sending out timely warnings. There are figures to show the facts. At the beginning of this century, a hurricane causing ten million dollars in property damage was likely to take several hundred lives. Twenty-five years later, the average was about 160 lives. Ten years later (1936 to 1940 average) the figure had been reduced to about twenty-five and was steadily going down. After men began flying into hurricanes, the figure was reduced to four (1946 to 1950). This is astonishing, not only in showing how the warnings were improving after hunting by air got started, but also the big gains shortly before that time, especially after the hurricane teletypewriter circuit was installed around the coast in 1935. Experience in prediction, on-the-spot operation, and fast communications are vital.
In fact, the record was so good at the beginning of WorldWar II that most forecasters despaired of their ability to keep it up. It had consistently been below ten lives for ten million dollars’ damage and one serious mistake could have raised this rate considerably for several years. For this reason, as well as many others, the forecasters were extremely grateful for the information from aircraft.
The main hope for greater savings in the future is that the solution of some of the mysteries of the hurricane will enable the forecasters to send out accurate warnings much farther in advance. In such an event, it will be possible to protect certain kinds of property and crops which are being destroyed at present. Heavy equipment can be moved and certain crops can be harvested in season, if plenty of time is available. These precautions are time-consuming and costly, and the advance warnings must be accurate in detail. And it will help to make sure that no hurricane different from its predecessors will come suddenly and catch us off guard and cause excessive loss of life. Now and then we have one which is called a “freak.”
One thing we have become increasingly sure of and it will stand repetition. No two hurricanes or typhoons are alike. Scientists may find some weather element that seems to be necessary to keep the monster going, and then are frustrated to find that not all tropical storms have it. If some can do without it, maybe it is not necessary, after all. And yet all of them fit a certain direful pattern; there is nothing else that resembles these big storms of the tropics. Like the explosion of an atom bomb, with its enormous cloud recognized by everyone who sees a picture of it, the hurricane has well-known features—unlike anything else—but of such enormous extent that no one can get a bird’s-eye view of the whole. Putting together what we know by radar, upper air soundings, aircraft penetrations and millions of weather observations in the low levels, we can draw a sketchy wordpicture. Looking down from space, we could see it as a giant octopus with a clear eye in the center of its body, arms spiraling around and into this body of violent winds around the eye—all of the monster outlined by the clouds which thrive as it feeds on heat and moisture. We feel sure of that much.
The birth of the THING has not been explained. There are plenty of times when all the ingredients are there. Nothing happens. Observation and theory flourish and swell into confusion. No scientist can say, “Everything is just right; tomorrow there will be a hurricane.”
Why it moves as it does is another grim puzzle. Ordinarily, the great storm marches along with the air stream in which it is embedded, changing its path with the contours of the vast pressure areas which outline the circulation of the atmosphere, but too often it suddenly changes its mind, or whatever controls it, or shifts gears, and comes to a halt, or describes a loop or a hairpin turn. Nobody can see these queer movements ahead of time. Going out there in an airplane to look the situation over does not help in this respect. It is a vital aid in keeping track of the THING and protecting life and property, but it ends there.
Where does all the air go? When the big storm begins out there over the ocean, air starts spiraling inward and the pressure falls, showing that the total amount of air above the sea to the top of the atmosphere is lessening, even as it pours inward at the bottom. For a hundred years scientists argued that it must flow outward at the top, that at some upper level the inflow of air ceases and above that there must be a powerful reversal of the circulation. Here again we have frustration. Going up with one of the investigators, we get the facts. Strangely enough, this is one of the men who want to get into hurricanes, who come down to the coast to look, and who finally “thumb a ride” with theairmen into the big winds. A brief of his story will illustrate.
This story begins with the big Gulf hurricane of 1919. It came from the Atlantic east of the Windward Islands, moved slowly to the northward of Puerto Rico and Haiti and thence to the central Bahamas, a fairly large storm threatening the Atlantic seaboard. Then it took an unusual path, generally westward, with increasing fury. It was a powerful storm as its central winds ravaged the Florida Keys and took a westward course across the Gulf. It happened shortly after World War I and there was little shipping in the Gulf. The slow-moving hurricane, now a full-fledged tropical giant, dawdled in the Gulf and was lost; that is, lost as much as a monster of its dimensions can be, but its winds were felt all around the Gulf Coast and its waves pounded the beaches as it spent four days out there without disclosing the location or motion of its calm center.
Warnings flew all around the coast and the week dragged to an end with the people extremely tired of worrying about it and the weathermen worn out with continuous duty. Saturday night came and the center seemed to be no nearer one part of the coast than another. Late at night, an annoying thing happened. It was customary in those days for the forecaster, in sending a series of messages from Washington, to stop them at midnight and begin again early the next morning. It was the rule that no reports came in between midnight and dawn. The clerk sending the last message added “Good Night,” to let the coastal offices know that there would be no more until morning.
In this case, the forecaster ended his advisory with a notice putting all Gulf offices on the alert and the clerk added “Good Night.” And so the offices received a message ending with these words: “All observers will remain on the alert during the night. In case the barometer begins to fall and the wind rises, Good Night.” This created a furor incoastal cities on the West Gulf and it was several weeks before the criticism subsided. By Sunday morning, however, the gusty wind had not risen much and there was no great fall in the barometer, so the weathermen had no answer at daybreak. Soon afterward, however, the weather deteriorated rapidly at Corpus Christi, and hurricane warnings went up as big Gulf waves pounded over the outlying islands into Corpus Christi Bay and the wind began screaming in the palms.
Around noon the worst of it struck the city. The tide mounted higher than in any previous storm of record, except in the terrible Galveston hurricane of 1900. Much of Corpus Christi was on a high bluff above the main business section, but the latter and the shore section to the north were low. It was after church and time to sit down to Sunday dinner when the final rise of the water began to overwhelm everything. The police, sent out by the Weather Bureau, were knocking on people’s doors and telling them to get out and run for high ground. But these low sections had survived a big, fast-moving hurricane three years before, without nearly so high a tide, and most people thanked the police but determined to stay and eat. This decision was fatal in the North Beach section. The road was cut off and nearly two hundred were drowned.
Down on Chaparral Street lived a man named Clyde Simpson, with his wife and seven-year-old son Robert. The boy’s uncle and grandmother were there also. They were about to sit down to a big platter of chicken, and the boy had his eye on a pile of freshly fried doughnuts. They had been out standing with other nervous people to look at the great waves roaring across the beach, but after a little the storm waters had forced them back and covered the streets. Now the water was rising fast. Several houses had come up off their foundations. A large frame residence on the oppositeside of the street floated across, and, while they held their breath, missed them by a few feet, struck the house next door, and both collapsed. The elder Simpson said it was time to get out, dinner or no dinner.
The family went through the back yard, the nearest route to higher ground. The boy’s mother put the dinner in a large paper sack and held it above her head as she struggled through the water. The father carried the seven-year-old on his back and brought up the rear, swimming a little as the water continued to rise. The grandmother, an invalid strapped in a wheel-chair, was pushed and floated ahead by the uncle. The boy worried as his mother got tired and let the paper sack hang lower and lower. Finally it hit the water and the chicken and doughnuts sank or floated away. That scene was etched in Robert’s memory, along with the battering of the winds and the tremendous rise of the waters over the stricken city. The family survived.
Looking out of the windows of the courthouse on the edge of the bluff above the business section, the boy watched others struggling toward higher ground. Afterward the family returned to their house, smeared with oil and tar and by dirty water, floors covered with sand, mud, and debris. Robert saw death on every hand—dead dogs, birds, cats, rodents, and one neighbor who failed to get out.
In 1933, when one of the hurricanes of that year crossed the Gulf and threatened the lower Texas Coast, much like the big one in 1919, a young fellow drove all the way from Dallas to have a look at it. He was Robert Simpson. He never got it out of his mind. Finally, he joined the Weather Bureau, worked at hurricane forecasting offices and in 1945 “thumbed” his first ride into a hurricane. After that his enthusiasm and persistence annoyed some of the older weathermen and bothered members of the air crews who flew the big storms both in the Atlantic and Pacific.
Simpson made up his mind that he would use every opportunity to find out how the big storms were organized and what they were geared to in their movements, regular and irregular—the gears and guts of the THING. When Milt Sosin lurched into the center of the big storm in 1947 in a B-17 and looked up to see a B-29 high in the eye of the same hurricane, Simpson was up there with the men from Bermuda, trying to find out what steered the monster. And on this flight, with a B-29, they expected to come out on top at twenty-eight to thirty thousand feet, according to the theorists and the textbooks, but they broke out just below forty thousand, still one hundred miles from the center. From there the high cloud sheet should have sloped downward to the center, if they were to believe the accepted doctrine of circulation in the top of the hurricane. But they were shocked and chagrined to find that the high cloud sheet—the cirrostratus—sloped sharply upward in front of them, rising far above the extreme upper operational ceiling of the B-29.
And so the superfortress turned toward the center and rocketed into the high cloud deck with misgivings on the part of Pilot Eastburn and Simpson. The latter reported:
“Through this fog in which we were traveling at 250 miles an hour there loomed from time to time ghost-like structures rising like huge white marble monuments through the cirrostratus fog. Actually these were shafts of supercooled water which rose vertically and passed out of sight overhead as we viewed them from close at hand. Each time we passed through one of these shafts the leading edge of the wing accumulated an amazing extra coating of rime ice. This kind of icing would have been easy to shake off if the plane had been fitted with standard de-icing equipment. But it was not. We were so close to the center of the storm by the time theicing was discovered that the shafts were too numerous to avoid.
“Pilot Eastburn punched me and pointed to the indicated airspeed gage. It stood at 166. ‘At this elevation this plane stalls out at 163,’ Eastburn said, ‘and in this thin air there is no recovery from a stall.’ He continued, ‘We have got to get out of here fast!’ I nodded agreement, feeling a bit sheepish about the whole thing. After all, hadn’t Vincent Schaefer, of General Electric, just a few months earlier demonstrated in the laboratory that water vapor could be cooled to a temperature of -39° before freezing set in? But in the turbulent circulation of a hurricane—this was fantastic! Unbelievable! But there certainly was no guesswork about that six or eight inches of rime ice on the leading edge of the wing!
“We got out of there all right, and fast, but we had to do it in a long straight glide; the plane was simply too loaded with ice and too near stall-out to risk the slightest banking action.”
After all, the atmosphere is a mixture of gases and it obeys the laws of gases. If the scientists assume that the big storm has a certain structure and a certain circulation of air in its colossal bulk, there are definite conclusions to be drawn concerning the physics of this giant process in the tropical atmosphere. But if it turns out that the assumptions about the structure and circulation are wrong, the conclusions of the physicists may be exactly opposite to the truth. The results of years of study, calculation and discussion seem to be overthrown in one moment as a superfortress plunges into a vital section and the crew sees things that ought not to be there!
Most important in the 1947 storm was the fact that conditions at a height just below forty thousand feet were such as to go with a circulation against the hands of a clock at maybe 130 miles an hour. The plane going in that direction had a tail wind of ninety miles an hour. And yet, the studentsof hurricanes during the past century were sure that at some height well below that level the winds blew outward in a directionwiththe hands of a clock. In agreement with this conclusion, most of the scientists had made up their minds in recent years that the circulation in the lower part of these storms usually disappears at twenty to thirty thousand feet. And so, if we are to account for the removal of air in this great space extending down to the sea surface, it must have been done well above forty thousand feet in this case. And up at this height the air is so thin that it is almost inconceivable that it could blow hard enough to account for air removal in the average hurricane. On the other hand, this was a mature storm and it may be that at this stage no air was actually being removed from the system and that the gigantic circulation of the full-grown monster is self-contained.
While it would be extremely interesting to understand the magic by which nature so slyly removes the air from the hurricane under our very noses, the practical question is whether or not its escape at the top is geared in any way to the forward motion of the main body of the storm. The answer to the first question may give the answer to the second, and possibly also to the third question: what causes a hurricane to increase in intensity—to deepen, as the weatherman says, having reference to the fall of pressure in the center? He thinks of it as a hole in the atmosphere.
This 1947 hurricane illustrates the great difficulty of finding answers to our questions. But in any case, this was just one storm and all of them are different in one way or another.
But to go back to the story of the guest rider from the Weather Bureau, Robert Simpson, the story is not complete without a brief account of the flight into Typhoon Marge. It raised its ugly head in the Pacific in August, 1951, and onthe thirteenth had passed Guam, a storm not well developed but of evil appearance, showing signs of growth. That evening Simpson arrived from Honolulu, where he was in charge of the Weather Bureau office. He accepted an invitation from the Air Force to visit Marge and on August 14, six hours after he alighted from Honolulu, was airborne in a B-29 and on the way.
In a few hours Marge had grown into a colossus. It was nearly one thousand miles in diameter, with winds exceeding one hundred miles an hour in an area more than two hundred fifty miles in diameter. When the hurricane hunters entered the center and measured the pressure, it proved to be one of the deepest on record—26.45 inches at the lowest point. From plane level, the eye was perfectly clear above, forty miles in diameter and circular. The massive cloud walls around the eye rose on all sides to thirty-five thousand feet, like a giant coliseum. The west wall was almost vertical, with corrugations that suggested the galleries of a gigantic opera house.
In the center, below the plane, they saw a mound of clouds rising to about eight thousand feet, an unusual feature, but one that has been observed in other tropical storms. The crew spent fourteen and a half hours in the central region of this huge typhoon, getting data at levels from five hundred feet up to twenty thousand. Down in the lower levels, they found a horizontal vortex roughly five thousand feet in diameter, extending from the cloud wall of the eye like a tornado funnel, in which they encountered very severe turbulence. Another collection of data was added to the growing accumulation and with it the notes of unusual phenomena observed. Since that time Simpson has flown several hurricanes in the Atlantic.
Now it is abundantly clear that the hurricane hunters are looking for many important facts aside from the location ofthe tropical storm and a measure of its violence. There are many questions unanswered. Here in the warm, moist winds that blow endlessly across deep tropical waters there are mysteries that have challenged man for centuries. Turning to their advantage every discovery that science has pointed in their direction, the hurricane hunters have cheated the big storms of the West Indies of a very large share of their toll of human life. In struggling to solve the remainder of the problem, they have two virtues that will ultimately bring success—ingenuity and persistence. They push on tirelessly in several hopeful directions.
The Navy has taken advantage of the strange fact that when a tropical storm comes along it literally shakes the earth. There are little tremors like earthquakes but very much smaller. The Greek word for earthquake isseismosand by puttingmicroin front, meaning very small, we have the wordmicroseism. And so, the storm-caused little tremors are called microseisms or slight earthquakes. The instrument which registers these tremors is called a seismograph. When the earth moves, even a very little, a body on the earth tends to hold its position and the earth moves under it. In a small earthquake, a chair will move across the floor. This kind of motion can be registered by instruments.
In 1944 the Navy installed seismographs and began keeping records of the slight tremors caused by hurricanes and typhoons. These studies have shown that a tropical storm at a distance produces a small tremor which becomes stronger as the storm center gets nearer. No one knows exactly how the storm shakes the earth and causes the tremors. There are some strange things about this. It seems that these microseisms are carried along in the earth until they come to the border of a great geological block and then do not pass readily into the next block. So there are places in the Caribbean where the tremors weaken as they come to adifferent earth block and this interferes with the indications picked up by the instruments. The fact is that microseisms give signs of the existence of a tropical storm and sometimes serve to alert the storm hunters, but they are by no means good enough to replace the use of planes in tracking them. But the studies of microseisms are being continued.
For many years static on the radio, better known as atmospherics or just “sferics,” has been used in the endeavor to locate or keep track of storms. At first the Navy tried it on West Indian hurricanes. The instruments used will find the direction from which the sferics come when they are received in a special tube. In more recent years, the Air Force has used this scheme. It works to advantage in finding thunderstorms, but tropical storms are so big and the sferics are not found in any regular pattern around the central region. After years of trial, it has been concluded that this scheme is not good enough to replace other methods.
Of all the methods of this kind, radar is by far the best. But as the radar stations on shore and the radar equipment on aircraft have increased in numbers and have been improved to reach greater distances, some new troubles have arisen. For many years the hurricane hunters took it for granted that a hurricane has a clear-cut center which moves smoothly along a path that is a straight line or a broad curve, but in a few cases is a loop or a sharp turn. In other words, the center does not change size and shape or wiggle around. In the past, when an observer on a ship or on a plane reported a center of an odd shape or had it off the smooth path the hunters were plotting, they said the observer had made an error.
Now as the hunters have begun watching hurricane centers close by on the radar, they see them changing shape and wiggling around. In fact, as stated in a few cases in earlier chapters, they have seen false eyes and have beenconfused by them until the true eye came into view on the radar scope. If the true eye describes a wiggly path and changes size, the hunters can draw the wrong conclusions about its direction of motion unless they wait a while to see if it comes back to the old path. The hurricane is a little like an eddy or whirl in water running out of the bottom of a bowl. It is a violent boiling eddy that twists and changes shape, and in a substance as thin as the atmosphere these motions are not steady to such a degree that the observer can reach a quick decision. At any rate, it is now apparent that the observers on ships and aircraft did not make as many errors as was thought several years ago.
There is another aspect that must be kept in mind. Radar shows areas where rain is falling around the center of a hurricane and so the center, having no rain, stands out as an open space on the radar scope. This is very good if the storm has rain all around the center, but some of them have very little rain on the southwest side, and in some cases there is none to return an echo to the radar. In such a case, there is only one side to the storm echo and the location of the center is not revealed. Of course, these facts are known to the experienced radar men, but they should be known to everybody interested in hurricane reports; otherwise they are likely to expect too much accuracy from observations of this kind.
For these and other reasons, the man on the aircraft has a very great advantage in daylight, for he can see clouds of all kinds, measure the winds and, by moving through the storm area at the speed of the modern plane, he can see a large part of it in a short time. To find a substitute for aircraft reconnaissance is going to be extremely difficult. But at night the situation is quite different. The airman is unable to see much without radar, except on a moonlight night and that is not very good.