One suggestion that has been put forward by a number of different people in recent years is that a balloon be flown in the calm center and followed by radar or radio, thus keeping track of the storm’s motion. It is possible, of course, to fix a small rubber balloon (perhaps eight to ten feet in diameter) so that it will remain at the same height for a fairly long time. By one method the rubber balloon is partly filled with helium and covered loosely with nylon. The balloon expands as it rises, becoming less dense as the atmosphere gets thinner. It continues to rise until it fills the nylon cover and cannot expand further. After that, its density becomes the same as the air at some level previously chosen, and from there it drifts along without rising or descending.
It is the idea that the obliging balloon would drift here and there in the vagrant breezes of the eye, but when it came to the edge of the powerful wind currents around the outside of the eye it would be guided back in. No experiment has been carried out to prove that this would happen but such trials have been scheduled and will be made at the first opportunity. There is one difficulty. The question is how to get an inflated balloon into the center and release it under proper conditions. One of the men who has worked on a scheme of this kind is Captain Bielinski, the Air Force officer who broke his hundred-dollar watch in a typhoon and solemnly swore he would find an easier way to do it. He calls his device “Typhoon Homer.” He has worked on it for four years, spending much of his own time and money.
There are reasons to believe that, after a few experiments, a height could be found where the balloon would stay in the eye. So far as we know, birds trapped in the center are held there. After battling hurricane winds, they are so exhausted on getting into the center that they could not remainthere if the wind circulation tended to suck them out into the surrounding gales.
Bielinski concluded that the balloon could not be thrown out from a plane in even a partially inflated condition. The blast of air on leaving the aircraft would destroy it or put it out of commission. So he has an uninflated balloon and bottles of gas, a small radio transmitter, and a float, all attached to a parachute.
The bottles and radio would be thrown out, the parachute would open, and the gas would go through a tube from the bottles into the balloon. The float, with a long line to the balloon, would rest on the water and provide an anchor for the apparatus. The radio would send signals every hour, the operators on shore would figure its location by direction finding, and there would need to be no further aircraft flights into that storm. The device, according to Bielinski, would continue to operate for seven days.
Robert Simpson and others have had similar ideas, some favoring a device that could be followed by radar, but Simpson prefers the radio transmitter. To find out how the air circulation in the calm center would affect the balloon, he planned experimental flights in hurricanes to release a chaff made of a substance that could be followed by radar. He tried it in 1953 and again in 1954, but something happened in each case to prevent the experiment from being carried out. In one case, for example, nearly everything was in readiness for an experimental flight to take off when Edward Murrow of CBS arrived in Bermuda with his crew and apparatus to put Hurricane Edna on television, and Simpson was moved to the back of the plane. He and all others connected with it, including Major Lloyd Starret, who had been brought in from Tinker Air Force Base to work with Simpson, were glad to make way for a public service program. But this shows one of the reasons whydevelopments of this kind, which depend on opportunities in only a few hurricanes a year, take a discouragingly long time. There was no chance to test Bielinski’s device, or any other, for that matter. There have been laboratory experiments also on a device to deflect the air streams around the bomb bay of the aircraft so that a partially inflated balloon could be safely released in the eye of a storm.
These devices are mentioned here to show the trend of thought. Something similar to this may eventually serve to replace a large share of the hazardous aircraft flights, but even if the center is satisfactorily located in such a manner, much useful information on the size of the storm, the force of its winds, and other data will be determined in many cases only by aerial reconnaissance. With this in mind, both the Air Force and Navy are substituting bigger and better aircraft for this purpose.
The old B-29 Superfortress is being “put out to pasture,” as they say in the Air Force. The higher, faster, and farther flying Boeing B-50’s are replacing them, not only in hurricane reconnaissance but in the daily flying of weather routes to help fill in the blank spaces on the world’s weather charts. The B-50’s will go ten thousand feet higher than the B-29’s. Another advantage that appeals to the hurricane hunters who fly on these missions is the electric oven, standard equipment on the B-50, which will furnish hot meals at favorable times on the route, instead of sandwiches and thermos coffee. The Navy, not to be outdone, is coming out with the Super Constellation, which is being modified for hurricane reconnaissance to replace the P2V Lockheed Neptune recently used.
As each new season comes, the hunters are wiser and better equipped. The battle with the hurricane is joined. It is something to worry about, like war and the H-bomb. At the end of the 1954 season, the executives of the big insurancecompanies were in conference with grave faces. Property damage from Carol, Edna and Hazel had mounted upward to around a billion dollars. Reports had been circulated to the effect that the slow warming of the earth in the present century is bringing more hurricanes with greater violence and paths shifting northward to devastate areas with greater populations. There was speculation about the effects of A-bombs and H-bombs on hurricanes.
All this trouble comes from water vapor in the atmosphere. Without it, the earth would be a beautiful place but useless to man. Even over the tropical oceans it rarely exceeds five per cent of the bulk of the air. In other regions, it is much less. But it is this vapor, constantly moving from the oceans into the air and spreading around the world, that builds the stormy lower layer of our atmosphere—the troposphere—where clouds and storms, snow and ice and torrential rain, thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes thrive in season. Such tremendous energy is needed to carry billions of tons of moisture from the oceans to the thirsty land that all of these rain and storm processes are maintained on the borderline of violence.
Here at the bottom of the atmosphere the vapor absorbs the heat radiated from the sun. There is a swift drop in temperature as we go aloft. Moist air pushed upward becomes cooled and ice crystals, water droplets, snowflakes, are squeezed out. Clouds form, beautiful in the sunset, gloomy on a winter day, threatening as the summer thunderstorm shows on the horizon, fearsome as the winter blizzard takes command of the plains and valleys. Here is water vapor coming to the end of a long journey from the surfaces of distant seas. From here it goes to the land and begins another long journey, in the rivers and back to the oceans. But on the way to us, violence may be one of the principalingredients. We can’t live without it and we have trouble living with it.
When this lush flow of water vapor from the tropical ocean to the atmosphere becomes geared in some special manner to swiftly-moving air from other regions, the process seems to get out of nature’s hands. Upward motion begins on a grand scale. Converging streams of air are twisted by the spinning of the earth on its axis. And just as men begin to see the picture, nature draws a veil by the condensation of water vapor. Under this darkening canopy, violence grows with startling swiftness. The water vapor that drew the curtain now releases energy alongside of which the A-bomb shrinks to insignificance.
Far below the sea surface, the solid earth trembles. Avalanches of water are torn from the ocean and hurled down the slopes of the gale. A colossal darkening storm begins to move across the ocean. It sucks inward the hot, moist lower atmosphere and brings it along with it, using the vapor to feed its monstrous, seething caldron. Down here at the surface of the earth, its winds are warm and humid. Its tentacles—octopus-like arms—reach out with gale-driven torrents of rain and begin picking everything to pieces. After hours that seem like days, the central fury of the earth-blasting storm begins its devastation of man’s possessions.
And as it has proved to be unquestionably true that no two hurricanes are exactly alike, so it is evident now that the same hurricane is subject to massive changes from day to day. It has a life history. Like the caterpillar that is transformed into the cocoon and then into the butterfly, the tropical storm goes through definite stages. The problems involved for the hurricane hunters in each of these distinct stages demand separate solutions. Like a living thing, the monster has infancy, youth, middle age and decline.
In infancy, its malevolent forces are directed vigorouslytoward the mysterious removal of large quantities of air from above its gale-swept domain. The excessive heat and moisture of its birthplace yield far more energy than is needed to keep its mighty low-level winds in motion.
In youth, it is extremely violent and the removal of air brings exceedingly low pressure into its center. Its outer parts become ominously visible through the condensation of moisture on a grand scale, cloaking its internal mechanism. Its destructive forces spread. In this stage, the removal of air in upper regions continues in excess of the inflow at the bottom in proportion to the horizontal expansion of the system.
In middle age, its violent forces are directed toward maintenance of the colossal wind system. The total energy it can derive from heat and moisture no longer produces an outflow above in excess of the inflow of air at the bottom. It expands in the vertical and its visible parts push against the stratosphere. As it moves farther away from its birthplace and the available energy begins to decline, it dies. For a few days nature’s processes for the transport of moisture from the oceans to the thirsty continents have run amuck. Life and property suffered while torrential rains fell.
So it is clear that in life the monster thrives on heat and water vapor. Down at sea level it is a warm phenomenon. Only the heated air of the tropical regions can hold enough moisture to feed the giant.
But up above, the full-grown hurricane is not a warm storm. Hunters perspire at low levels but not in the top of the storm. There are icy corridors through currents of air robbed of their heat by the monster below. Pillars of supercooled water push upward into the thin atmosphere. Snow flies with the shuddering winds at the top of the troposphere. It is colder up here above the tropics than it is above the poles. The fingers of the gale tremble with the cold andseem to make gestures in defiance of the sun shining through the stratosphere. Water vapor in great quantities has been carried high in the atmosphere and nature seems powerless to bring equilibrium until land or cold water at the earth’s surface below shuts off the abundant supply of energy. And when it does, the monster dies as it was born, hidden behind a veil produced by lingering cloud masses derived from the vapor that gave it life.
In the last few years, men have had the courage to fly into these monsters. Some day, when other methods are used, people will look back in amazement at these brave events. Here they can see how it happened, how it was done, and feel admiration for the men who did it—the hurricane hunters.
IVAN RAY TANNEHILL
IVAN RAY TANNEHILL
was born in Ohio, where he obtained both his degrees in science at Denison University. While a boy in his early teens, he became intensely interested in birds, stars and the weather. After finishing college, he joined the Weather Bureau in Texas and a year later went through a vicious hurricane at Galveston.
This experience led Dr. Tannehill to study hurricanes for the next forty years. Twenty years ago he became chief of the marine division of the U. S. Weather Bureau, then he was chief of all the Bureau’s forecasting and reporting and finally was assistant chief of the Bureau, in charge of all its technical operations.
Dr. Tannehill is the author of several authoritative books on the weather, including a world-recognized classic,HURRICANES; THEIR NATURE AND HISTORY, now in its eighth edition. He has represented the United States at many world conferences on weather and served several years as president of the international commission on weather information. Citations, medals, awards and commendations have come to him for his work on weather, including the honorary degree of Doctor of Science, granted in recognition of his leadership in the study of hurricanes.
His hobbies continue the same as in his boyhood—watching the birds, the stars and the weather.
ByIvan Ray TannehillAuthor of “Hurricanes: Their Nature and History,” Etc.
Illustrated with Photographs
This is the lively account of the hair-raising experiences of the men who have probed by sea and air into the inner mysteries of the world’s most terrible storms. Here a world authority writes a vivid story of the hurricane hunters and the warnings going out to terrified people in the path of these tropical giants of the storm world—warnings which have brought comfort and safety in the midst of the terror, because the threat is no longer unknown and unchartered and defenses may be built up against it, thanks to our Weather Bureau.
Ivan Tannehill tells how thousands of lives have been saved and why enormous property losses, running into hundreds of millions of dollars, continue as a direful challenge to the hunters. Here is the first intimate revelation of what the human eye and the most modern radars see in the violent regions of the tropical vortex. The descriptions of the activities of these valiant scouts of the storms are taken from personal interviews with military flyers and weathermen who have risked their lives in the furious blasts in all parts of the hurricane.
The author has made a special study of hurricanes for over forty years. He has served with the Weather Bureau as chief of the marine division, chief of all forecasting and reporting and assistant chief of the Bureau, in charge of its technical operations.
JACKET DRAWING BY JAMES MacDONALD
ByJOHN SCOTT DOUGLASAuthor of “The Secret of the Undersea Bell,” “Fate of the Clipper Westwind,” Etc.Illustrated with sixteen pages of stunning photographs
$3.00
Through the pages of this stirring book move ever upward the colorful figures who have conquered the world’s great mountain peaks; and in it are graphically described the most celebrated ascents of nearly two centuries, from the Alps to the Andes and from the Himalayas to the Rockies. No other sport has attracted such notable figures, for the great mountain climbers include justices, members of Parliament, princes and many renowned scientists. Nor has any other sport proved so useful. Mountain climbers have contributed to many sciences; also to aviation by their pioneer study of oxygen deficiency, and thrillingly to our literature. In addition, mountaineers were among the first to explore the remote Alpine valleys, the Caucasus, East Africa, the Alaska wilderness, the Andes and the Himalayas.
John Scott Douglas makes us share in the very feelings of the intrepid men who have had that unquenchable urge to conquer the seemingly unconquerable, no matter what the hazards or physical hardships. His story ranges from the early days of the first ascent to the summit of Mont Blanc, when the climbing equipment consisted of alpenstocks and meat cleavers and an ordinary bed blanket was the only protection against the icy blasts during the nights spent aloft on the mountainside, to the up-to-the-minute scientific equipment, including oxygen feeders and insulated suits, used in the recent ascent of Mount Everest.
The author is an enthusiastic mountaineer himself. He has enjoyed “scrambles” in the Alps, the Andes, the Central American Cordilleras, Alaska, the Catskills and the Colorado Rockies, the Olympics, Cascades and High Sierras. He writes on a favorite subject with zest and informative accuracy. His book provides “high” adventure in more than one way!
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY