“—the whirlwind’s heart of peace.” —Tennyson
After the White House conference in 1937 about sending ships into hurricanes, some of the Weather Bureau forecasters expressed the idea that the best method of tracking hurricanes would be by airplane. What they had in mind was flying around the edge of the storm and getting three or more bearings from which the location of the center could be accurately estimated. Nothing came of the idea at the time but after World War II broke out in Europe, the talk about use of planes increased. It was the Weather Bureau’s plan to contract with commercial flyers to go out and get the observations on request from the forecasters. But no one seriously considered sending planes into the centers of hurricanes. No one knew what would happen to the plane. There was no very definite information as to what the flyer would encounter in the upper layers in the region around the center.
Of course, it was known that at the surface of the earth or the sea there was a small calm region in the center—an 76 oddity in the weather, for no other kind of large storm has such a center. The tornado may have, but it is a very small storm in comparison with a hurricane. Its writhing, twisting funnel at the vortex is hollow, according to the testimony of a few men who have looked up into it and lived to tell about it. In the tropical storm, however, nothing was known about the central winds in the upper levels. There was no proof that strong winds did not blow outward from the center up there and a plane would be thrown into the ring of powerful winds around the eye. The only way to find out was to fly into it and have a look, but there was no one at the moment who wanted to venture into it.
On the outer fringes of the hurricane, where light, gusty winds blew across deep ocean waters, stirred at the surface by giant sea swells, the hurricane hunters were fairly well satisfied with their findings. In the middle regions, where deluges of rain slanted through raging winds and low-flying clouds, the grim fact was that they knew amazingly little about what was going on in the upper layers. Their balloons sent up to explore the racing winds above were lost in thick clouds before they had risen more than a few hundred feet.
On beyond, somewhere in that last inner third of the whirlwind, the increasing gales rose to a deadly peak and torrents of rain merged with the spindrift of mountainous wave crests to blot out the view of the observer. Within this whirling ring of air and water lay the vortex. When the mariner entered, sometimes slowly, but more often suddenly, the wind and rain ceased and usually there would be no violence except the rise and fall of the sea surface, like a boiling pot on a scale which was huge in fact but small in proportion to the extent of the storm itself. The entire whirling body of air would likely be bigger than the state of Ohio; the calm central region might be the size of the city of Columbus.
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Here in this inner third were the mysteries. Where could all this air go—streaming so violently around and in toward that mysterious center but never getting there? It must go up, the storm hunters argued, for what else could produce all this tremendous rainfall if not the upward rush of moist air to be cooled in the upper levels? And then, why no rain or wind in the central region? Some argued that the air must descend in the vortex, growing warmer and dry in descent, but why the descent? And finally, if the air was moving upward in all this vast area outside the calm center, what finally became of it?
Even if the storm hunters were unable to answer these questions, they could render a service of enormous value if they could track the storm and predict its movements. But they knew that the only sure way to track a hurricane over the ocean was to find its center and follow it persistently and accurately from day to day. Tests had shown that it was not practical to send ships into the storm to find its center and report by radio. Ships couldn’t move fast enough. If the storm hunters had known enough about it, they might have concluded that a plane could enter the storm in the least dangerous sector and find its way swiftly to the calm center through some upper level without being hurled into the angry sea. If it reached the center of the vortex—usually called the “eye of the hurricane”—the navigator might be able to see the sky and the sun by day, the stars by night. Here the pilot might be able to figure out his position, as an ocean-going vessel does on some occasions, and that would be the location of the storm to be placed on the charts of the storm hunters in the weather office. But nobody took it seriously until after the United States got into the Second World War.
When the request for funds to hire commercial flyers in hurricane emergencies was presented to the Bureau of the 78 Budget, the examiners asked why the Weather Bureau didn’t try to get the co-operation of the Army and Navy. Why couldn’t they have their pilots carry out the flights as needed? There was some talk about it in 1942, but at that time there were no experienced Army or Navy pilots to spare.
Naturally, the military pilots who thought about flying into the eyes of hurricanes wanted to know what it was like in the upper levels and in the center. Air Force pilots who expected to go on bombing missions to Germany thought it might be more dangerous flying into the vortex of a hurricane than over an enemy stronghold with the air full of flak and Nazi fighters rising on all sides. Nobody looked upon the assignment with any enthusiasm. One discouraging fact was that the reports of shipmasters who had been in the eyes of hurricanes didn’t agree very well. Few of them had the ability to describe what they saw. And those who had the ability told a story that was not reassuring. For example, one of the first was the master of the ship Idaho, caught in the China Sea in September, 1869, as a typhoon struck. With little of the precious sea room needed to maneuver, the ship soon was obliged to lie to and take it. Afterward, when by some miracle the ship had made its way to shore, the master calmly described his experiences while they were fresh:
“With one wild, unearthly, soul-chilling shriek the wind suddenly dropped to a calm, and those who had been in these seas before knew that we were in the terrible vortex of the typhoon, the dreaded center of the whirlwind. Till then the sea had been beaten down by the wind, and only boarded the vessel when she became completely unmanageable; but now the waters, relieved from all restraint, rose in their own might. Ghastly gleams of lightning revealed them piled up on every side in rough, pyramidal masses, mountain high—the revolving circle of wind, which everywhere inclosed 79 them, causing them to boil and tumble as though they were being stirred in some mighty cauldron. The ship, no longer blown over on her side, rolled and pitched, and was tossed about like a cork. The sea rose, toppled over, and fell with crushing force upon her decks. Once she shipped immense bodies of water over both bows, both quarters, and the starboard gangway at the same moment. Her seams opened fore and aft. Both above and below, men were pitched about the decks and many of them injured. At twenty minutes before eight o’clock the vessel entered the vortex; at twenty minutes past nine o’clock it had passed and the hurricane returned blowing with renewed violence from the north, veering to the west. The ship was now only an unmanageable wreck.”
For many years, the classic case was the obliging typhoon that moved across the Philippines with its center passing directly over the fully-equipped weather observatory in Manila. It happened on October 20, 1882. The wind which came ahead of the center was of destructive violence, reaching above 120 miles an hour in a final mad rush from the west-northwest before the calm set in. It was not an absolute calm. There were alternate gusts and lulls. The way the winds acted led the observer to think that the center was about sixteen miles in diameter. He said:
“The most striking thing about it was the sudden change in temperature and humidity. The temperature jumped from 75° to 88°. The air was saturated at 75° but the humidity dropped from 100% to 53% in the center and then rose to 100% again as the center passed. When the wind suddenly ceased at the beginning of the calm and the sun came out, many people opened their windows but they slammed them shut right away, because the hot, dry air seemed to burn the skin.”
For more than fifty years after this, there were arguments 80 about the reasons for these changes in temperature and humidity. Some scientists claimed that they were caused merely by the heating of the sun in a clear sky and that the air which preceded and followed the center was cooled and saturated by the rain. Some of the Jesuit scientists at Manila did not agree. One weatherman showed, for example, that if they took air at 75° and 100% humidity and heated it to 88°, the humidity would fall only to about 61% and that the air at Manila at that time of year had never had such a low humidity (53%), even when the sun was shining.
The general conclusion was that the air descends in the eye of the tropical storm. At least, they were convinced that it descended in the Manila typhoon. When air descends, it is compressed, coming into lower levels where the pressure is higher. This compression causes its temperature to rise and the air then has a bigger capacity for moisture. In other words, the air becomes warmer and drier. There never has been full agreement on this question. Certainly, in some cases, the air is not warmer and drier in the center.
In later years, typhoon centers passed over other observatories and had various effects. However, one struck Formosa on September 16, 1912, and the calm center passed over the observatory long after the sun had gone down. In this case, the temperature jumped from 75° to 94° and this could not be explained by the direct heat of the sun. But there were different results in other cases and in one instance the temperature fell a little.
All of these observations were confined to ground level and what the observer could see from there or from shipboard, where he was being bounced around by violent seas and sometimes was thoroughly drenched by the mountainous waves breaking over the decks. One example was the Idaho in the typhoon in 1869.
A half-century later, two British destroyers were trapped 81 in the same region by an unheralded typhoon. Setting out for Shanghai in the early morning, they rounded the Shantung Promontory and headed across the Yellow Sea at fifteen knots, with sunlight gleaming on the water ahead. The weather looked favorable, barometer high, wind light, but it failed to stay that way very long. By ten o’clock there was a strong wind on the port beam, blowing gustily from the east, and an ominous rising sea. Reducing speed to eleven knots, the commander of the destroyer in the lead—called the Exe—found by dead reckoning that he was only about eight miles from land and, although he was running almost parallel to the coast, their situation was beginning to look dangerous. He had to make a decision as to his future course.
Among other disturbing factors was the design of the ships. These destroyers were of a new type, with a large forecastle which made it likely that they would drag their anchors if they tried to lie-to in a sheltered place on that exposed coast. The two ships held their course. By noon the visibility had dropped to less than a mile. The commander feared that he would be unable to identify any land he might see through the increasing gloom and concluded that his chances of finding a safe shelter among the rock-bound islands along the coast was fast becoming nil. So he signaled to the other destroyer to head fast for the open sea. In the next hour, the wind and sea mounted rapidly and he was certain that they were being overtaken by the dangerous sector of the typhoon. Now they were in real trouble!
His first lieutenant was the last of his officers out of school, so the commander asked him about the law of storms and the proper course under the circumstances. According to the latest books which the lieutenant had studied, they should have steamed toward the northwest but this would have thrown them onto a lee shore. The commander decided that there was no choice except to hold their course and run the 82 chance of going into the dreaded center of the typhoon. So they got busy, doubly securing all movable gear and seeing that all was snug for a frightening trip into the unknown. The commander was annoyed, not so much by the battering the ship was taking as by the cheerful attitude of the lieutenant, who seemed to be looking forward to this new experience.
In this miserable situation they fought heavy gales and towering seas for hours. The other destroyer had been lost from view but now appeared close on their beam. She assumed strange attitudes in the growing darkness. “At times,” the commander said, “she would be poised on the crest of a great wave, her fore part high above the sea and her keel visible up to the conning tower; the after part, also high in the roaring wind, leaving her propellers racing far out of the water. Then she would take a dive and an intervening wave would blot out this ‘merry picture,’ and then, to our relief as the wave passed, a mast would appear waving on the other side and then we would catch sight of her funnels and finally her hull, still above water.” As darkness closed in, the crew of the Exe were glad they could no longer see the other destroyer for it made them vividly conscious that their own little ship was going through equally dangerous contortions.
During this time the destroyer Exe had suffered much damage. The upper deck had been swept clear. Much water was getting below and the pumps were choked. The commander was weary from holding on to the bridge and trying to keep his balance. The crew was frightened more than ever by the increasing power of the storm and the inexorable approach of the unknown horrors in the center.
The awful night passed in this terrifying manner, with the barometer steadily going lower, and the quartermaster straining to keep the craft on course. With powerful winds full in his face and drenched by spray, he managed to hold 83 the ship most of the time and made the best use of her high bows. When he failed and allowed the ship to get a few points off course, the steep waves threw her on her beam ends and came crashing along the upper decks, making it a tough job to get her back with her nose against the elements, and the high bows as a sort of shield against the brutal sea. Besides, the compass light had been beaten out and in the blackness of the storm he had no way of judging the direction except by the crash of the wind and water in his face.
In a storm like this, the crew think that they are probably on their last voyage. They can feel tremendous masses of water strike with immense force and, after the shock, the vessel shivering as though the hull had given way, leaving them on the verge of diving toward the bottom of the sea. Sometimes the Exe was mostly out of water—they could sense it in the darkness—and then she took what they called a “belly-flopper” and every man felt sick, fearing the end had come and, after a moment, fearing just the opposite—that it would not be the end, after all, and they would have to take more of the same.
Now the lieutenant crawled out from below and, by a series of lurches between gusts, pulled himself to the side of his commander. “Things look better,” he shouted. “The barometer is up a little.” But soon after that he found he had made an error. He had read it an inch too high. Actually, it had dropped almost an inch in three hours, showing that the center must now be drawing near. Shortly the rain ceased and the wind dropped. At 7:00 A.M. they were passing into the vortex.
The ocean now presented a fantastic spectacle. They could see for several miles—a cauldron of steep towering cones of water with spray at the crests—a brightening sky over a chaotic sea. Some of these columns of water would clash together on different courses and produce a weird effect. 84 The wind became light and a few tired birds sought haven on deck. This scene lasted only ten to twenty minutes and then the dreaded squalls ahead of the opposite semicircle of the typhoon began to hit the vessel. By 7:20 A.M. the full force of the most vicious gales was bringing new miseries to the exhausted crew.
After three hours, the typhoon began to abate and the commander was feeling a little easier about his damaged ship until one of the officers reported that they had sprung a leak. The compartment containing the fore magazines was flooded and soon filled up. “So the destroyer went her way,” the commander reported, “with her nose down and her tail in the air.” She made it to the mouth of the Yang-tse at 11:00 A.M. Up the river a distance they found their companion destroyer. Its commander had been much impressed by the blue sky and calm in the vortex, also by the large number of birds, mostly kingfishers, that came on board.
Examination of the Exe showed that a part of the bottom had been battered in, shearing the rivets and opening the seams. After thinking about his good fortune in coming through the typhoon, the commander wrote in his report: “When I recall (which I can without any trouble) those awful belly-floppers the craft took, and realized by inspection in dock what amount of holding power a countersunk rivet can possibly have in a three-sixteenth of an inch plate, I wonder that I am now in this world.” Actually, the commander of the Exe had escaped the worst of it. If he had missed the vortex and had passed through the right edge, where the forward drive of the typhoon was added to the force of the violent inner whirl, he might not have lived to tell the story. Many others have failed under similar circumstances.
Shanghai suffered severely from this typhoon. A flood in 85 the river and on a low-lying island drowned five thousand Chinese.
All these accounts agreed on one thing—the ring of gales around the center. Some were more violent than others but the ring was always there. On the eye of the hurricane, however, there was less agreement. A strange case was the experience on the American steamship Wind Rush, in October, 1930, off the west coast of Mexico. She was caught in a violent hurricane and the master suddenly saw that the ship had passed into the vortex. The second officer, in his report, said: “From 9 A.M. to 10 A.M. we were in a calm spot with no wind and smooth sea, and the sun was shining.”
There have been similar instances of vessels in the vortex of hurricanes without much disturbance of the sea, but these are exceptions. Most of them have reported confused cross seas, described as “pyramidal” or “tumultuous.” In November, 1932, the master of the British steamship Phemius, on a voyage from Savannah to the Panama Canal, was so unfortunate as to become entangled in the outer circulation of a late-season hurricane moving westward in the Caribbean Sea. It turned sharply northward and the Phemius was trapped by the ring of fierce gales in the central region. She rolled through an arc of 70° while the gusts came with such force that the funnel was blown away. The master put the wind at two hundred miles an hour. Hatches were blown overboard like matchwood, derricks and lifeboats were wrecked, and the upper and lower bridges were blown in. The ship was rendered helpless and was carried with the hurricane in an unmanageable condition.
Twice the Phemius drifted into the vortex, with high, confused seas and light winds. The second time the vessel was besieged by hundreds of birds. They took refuge in every part of the ship but lived only a few hours. Driving toward the coast of Cuba, the hurricane ravaged the town of Santa 86 Cruz del Sur, hurling a tremendous storm wave across all the low ground, engulfing the town, and drowning twenty-five hundred persons out of a population of four thousand. The Phemius was left behind in a helpless condition and was taken in tow by a salvage steamer.
The width of the eye of a hurricane commonly varies from a few miles to twenty or twenty-five. The smallest known was entered by a fishing boat, the Sea Gull, in the Gulf of Mexico, on July 27, 1936. The master, Leon Davis, was fishing a few miles east of Aransas Pass, Texas, when he became involved in a small hurricane. “Suddenly,” Captain Davis said, “the wind died down, the sun shone brightly and the rain ceased. For a space of about a mile and a half, a clear circular area prevailed; the dense curtain of rain was seen all around the edge of the circle; and the roar of the wind was heard in the distance.” On the other hand, one of the largest eyes yet known attended a big hurricane in October, 1944. It blasted its way across Cuba and entered Florida on the west coast, near Tampa. As it neared Jacksonville, the calm center was stretched out to the remarkable distance of about seventy miles. This was a kind of freak; some of the storm hunters thought that it had been distorted and finally drawn into an elongated area by its passage over the western end of Cuba.
All of the available records of this kind were consulted in due time by the men who were assigned to the perilous duty of flying military planes into the vortices of hurricanes in the West Indies and into typhoon centers in the Pacific. But one of the best of these reports—of weather and sea conditions observed on many ships caught at the same time in the central region of a big typhoon—was not available until long after it happened. The Japanese kept it secret for seventeen years.
The reason for keeping the data secret was the fact that 87 while on grand maneuvers, the RED Imperial Japanese Fleet was outmaneuvered by a pair of typhoons and was caught in the center of one of them and severely damaged. It happened in 1935 and was not reported for publication in America until 1952.
Just how this happened is not altogether clear. It was in the middle of September, 1935, when the first typhoon appeared, northwest of the island of Saipan. It increased in fury as it moved slowly toward Japan. On the twenty-fifth it crossed western Honshu and roared into the Sea of Japan, headed northeastward in the direction of the Japanese Fleet. Soon after this, it dissipated. Before it weakened, however, another typhoon had formed near Saipan and started toward Japan. It turned more to the northward than the first typhoon and missed Japan altogether. As it approached Honshu, late on the twenty-fifth, the RED Imperial Fleet was passing through the Strait of Tsugaru into the Pacific—squarely in front of the typhoon center.
The logical explanation for this apparent blunder is that the commanders wanted more sea room than was at hand in the northeast Sea of Japan to maneuver in the first typhoon and hoped to get well out in the open Pacific before they could be cornered by the second one. But it turned northeastward and went faster and farther out in the Pacific than they had expected. In fact, its forward motion was more than forty miles an hour in these last hours before its furious winds surrounded the fleet.
It was a bad calculation for the naval commanders and perhaps for the weather forecasters. Among the latter, H. Arakawa, one of the foremost typhoon students in Japan, was then on the staff of forecasters in the Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo. He was in part responsible for the predictions. In 1952 he made the report which was published 88 by the U. S. Weather Bureau early in 1953. Taking the view of the weatherman, Arakawa said that although the damage to the fleet was unfortunate, there was fortunately a magnificent collection of reports from the central region of the typhoon for scientific study.
The fleet was caught in the central part of the big storm on the twenty-sixth of September. Among the ships involved, many of them damaged, were destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, a seaplane carrier, mine-layers, transport ships, submarines, torpedo boats, and a submarine depot ship. The fleet suffered damage mostly from the tremendous waves in the right rear quadrant of the typhoon. Here the rapid forward motion of the storm was added to the wind circulation and the seas were driven to excessive heights. In his report, Arakawa had a footnote: “The bows of two destroyers, Hatsuyuki and Yugiri, were broken off as a result of excessive storm waves, and many officers and sailors were lost.”
In the calm center, the clouds broke and faint sunlight came through. The diameter of the eye was nine or ten miles. To the right of the eye, some of the waves measured more than sixty feet in height. The maximum roll of the ships in this area—the total angle from port to starboard—reached 75° on some of the ships. The wind was steadily above eighty miles an hour; the gusts were not measured but probably went as high as 125 miles an hour.
Many of the ships took frequent observations while in the typhoon and the data would have been extremely valuable if released to the storm hunters at that time, but when the report was published in 1953 a great deal of new data had been obtained by airplane, both at the surface—where Arakawa’s observations were confined—and at higher levels. It was a little more than nine years after this Japanese incident when the U. S. Third Fleet was caught in a typhoon east of 89 the Philippines and suffered at least as much damage as the Japanese in 1935.
One fact is clear. For many years the storm hunters had been gathering information about hurricane and typhoon centers from observations on land and sea but they knew very little of what went on there in the upper air. World War II brought a new era.