“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 reports 251 spread 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.
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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 World 253 War 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 word 254 picture. 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 the 255 airmen 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 in 256 coastal 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 opposite 257 side 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.
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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 the 259 icing 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 students 260 of hurricanes during the past century were sure that at some height well below that level the winds blew outward in a direction with the 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 on 261 the 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 ............