“I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain
And laugh as I pass in thunder.”
—Hebert
At first thought, most people would say that fighting hail has nothing to do with hunting hurricanes, but in one instance it did. It is an interesting story which shows how men will take risks in trying to control the weather. The story ends with one man giving up his life in a sensational adventure with a mysterious conclusion.
Destructive storms are not very frequent in any one place but most people are under the impression that they are. They are apt to remember bad weather and forget about the good. Losses of life and property and failures of plans and business enterprises are caused by storms or the wrong kind of weather and such things are impressed on their memories. When rain is needed, it may fail altogether or come in such 225 quantities that fields and roads are washed out and there are floods in the rivers. A thunderstorm brings rain but sometimes hail comes with it, destroying crops and damaging property.
People have tried to overcome these bad effects of the weather in many ways. Irrigation has long been practiced in regions with scanty rainfall. Air conditioning affords relief from excessive heat. In many other ways, some foolish and some dangerous, men have tried to influence the weather. An interesting case of this kind which appealed to the imagination of people in many countries started near the beginning of the present century. It was an international battle against hail. Its origin was in the vineyards of Italy. Hail had done great damage there year after year, and finally an Italian got the idea that he might destroy hailstorms by shooting into them when they were just beginning.
In those years, cannon were used in battle. Loaded with big charges of gunpowder, these cannon hurled solid, heavy balls at enemy cities, forts, fleets, and troops. In time of peace, there were many of these old cannon around, serving no useful purpose, and the Italian had no trouble in getting one to try on hailstorms. But he was not permitted to use a cannon ball. It might have crashed into a neighbor’s house or killed somebody in the vineyards. So he loaded it with gunpowder and fired it at the storm cloud, hoping it would create a disturbance in the atmosphere and weaken the hailstorm.
It is an amazing fact that the vineyard of this Italian was damaged far less by hail than those of any of his neighbors, and the next year others tried firing a cannon with similar success. They became expert at it and learned how to load a cannon so that it cast a big, whirling smoke ring into the thunderstorm cloud. The news spread to other countries and in two or three years there was a lot of hail shooting in 226 different parts of the world. So they held an international hail-shooting congress where they exchanged ideas and narrated their experiences. By the time the second world congress on hail was held, a great deal of uncertainty had developed. It seemed that the first hail shooters had begun work at a time when it just happened that there was much less than the usual amount of hail. Also, there were explosions and people were hurt. One man was killed and another had an arm blown off. After a few years, all the hail shooting ceased.
Even today, there is a good deal of mystery about the formation of hail and many people think there are ways of preventing it or causing the storm to make little hailstones instead of big ones and thus having much less destruction. Hail causes many millions of dollars worth of damage every year in the United States and almost any effort to reduce the losses seems to be justified.
Scientists believe that hailstones are very small in the beginning but grow in size as they go up and down several times in the thunderstorm clouds. Even in hot weather, it is very cold in the top layers of one of these great clouds. Raindrops freeze and in falling gather more water or snow in these high regions. Soon they are caught in rising air currents and carried up into freezing temperatures again. On each trip up and down, another layer of water or snow gathers on the outside and is frozen. At last the multi-layered stones become so heavy that they fall to the ground, in spite of rising currents, and as they leave the cloud they come down with great rapidity and may beat crops to the ground, batter automobiles, break glass and bruise and sometimes kill livestock. A hailstone the size of a baseball falling many thousands of feet is a very dangerous thing.
For many years after the hail-shooting experiments, it was thought that nothing could be done about it except to carry 227 hail insurance. Then, shortly after World War II, scientists of the General Electric Company announced that they had conducted some successful experiments in controlling the weather and this led to efforts to control rainfall, prevent hail, and stop hurricanes.
The man who started this new effort at weather control was Vincent Schaefer. He observed the weather on top of Mt. Washington, in New Hampshire, a place where it is very cold and windy in winter. The observatory is fastened to the solid rock of the mountain top by steel cables, to keep it from being blown off. Vast quantities of ice accumulate on the building. Snow comes down in great quantities at times but is generally carried by high winds which have reached terrific speed, on one occasion going up to 231 miles an hour. Conditions there are in some respects like the weather in the top of a big thunderstorm.
One of the peculiar things that happens up there on Mt. Washington and in the top of a thunderstorm is the formation of liquid water droplets, which are colder than freezing but they do not turn to ice. These droplets are said to be supercooled. Schaefer found in his experiments at General Electric that a small pellet of dry ice, the size of a pea, when dropped into air containing a cloud of supercooled water droplets could produce untold billions of small ice nuclei. So he carried some dry ice up in an airplane and dropped it into the top of a cloud with supercooled water droplets, and a trail of snow was seen falling from the bottom of the cloud. Many others tried the same experiment and some had similar results. The snow turned to rain as it came down to warmer levels, and the process was called “rainmaking.”
There is one disturbing fact. Before dry ice will work on a cloud, it must be very near the point of making rain without any outside help. But many of the rainmakers believe that dry ice makes more rain fall or causes it to fall sooner than 228 it would otherwise. Thus, as the cloud moves along, the rainmaker may be able to cause a shower in a certain place, whereas the cloud might have moved far away before it began to rain. In this story the important point is that some of the experimenters believe that dry ice or some other chemical will cause the rain to fall but will make it much less likely that nature’s process will develop to the point of producing hail.
The news of all this rainmaking in the West aroused intense interest on the part of a young man named Gordon Clouser. He thought he might be able to prevent hail, and if he succeeded, he might stop tornadoes. In the Midwest there is an old story about a farmer who knocked the life out of a tornado by hitting it with a two-by-four. On hearing this story, many people have gotten the idea that the government might destroy a tornado by gunfire. More recently there have been serious proposals that these vicious local storms with funnel clouds and violent winds be destroyed by guided missiles. There is no evidence that any of the plans offered so far would be successful in breaking up hailstorms or tornadoes, but they are extremely small when compared with hurricanes, and the government has received thousands of proposals that these great storms be wiped out or rendered harmless by gunfire.
Behind most of the suggestions for killing hurricanes is the idea that they begin as small whirls in the atmosphere and go through early stages of growth to the size of a tornado or a thunderstorm, and if they could be hit with great force in a vital place while small, they might die out. On this assumption, there have been a great many proposals that the Navy send battleships into the hurricane area to search for incipient hurricanes and fire broadsides into them. No test of this kind has been made for two reasons. The hurricane region is so large that the entire Navy would be 229 insufficient for such a patrol. On the other hand, there is not a shred of evidence that hurricanes begin as small storms like tornadoes or thunderstorms. Actually, they seem to develop as mildly disturbed weather over an area of thousands of square miles. The experts say that shooting at the weather in such a large region would certainly be futile. After the World War II, the atom bomb stimulated some new ideas and thousands of letters were written to the government about knocking a hurricane out with an atom bomb at the right time and place.
When the New Mexico atom bomb was exploded, the weather was bad, with rain in torrents, strong winds, lightning and thunder. Afterward, the weather was much better and this led to a lot of speculation. The fact is, however, that the scientists waited until the weather improved before they exploded the bomb; hence neither the bad weather nor the improvement could be attributed to the explosion.
Before the tests at Bikini in 1946 and Eniwetok in 1948, the scientists received numerous letters, warning them that the explosions would start storms and might cause a typhoon. But the effects of explosions of this kind are soon over, while the forces that maintain a hurricane or typhoon must be applied continuously day and night for a week or two, to keep one of these big tropical storms going in full fury. One of the scientists who witnessed these tests estimated that it would take a thousand atomic bombs at any moment to equal the energy of motion in a hurricane. No scientist has figured what would happen if one thousand atomic bombs were exploded at one time in a storm area!
After a year or two of rainmaking with dry ice and another chemical, silver iodide, the conviction grew that it would be possible to kill a hurricane by dropping some of this material in a vital spot. Some of the bolder students of weather control actually tried it. One of them was Gordon Clouser. 230 Just what he did when he flew into the storm and what happened to it afterward make a mystery, for he gave his life in the effort. It is a good example of the fearless activities of the hurricane hunters.
Gordon Clouser was born in 1912, in Gibraltar, Pennsylvania. He grew into his teens as an active, good-looking boy with many diverse interests. Quick to learn, he finished high school at fourteen. His family moved to New Mexico, where he worked several years as a surveyor, then took two............