 CHAPTER XV I wheeled the flail of the lashing hail and whitened the green plains under, and then again I dissolved it in rain and laughed as I passed 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 failure 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 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 hail storms 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 hail storms. 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 club, hoping it would create a disturbance in the atmosphere and weaken the hail storm. 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 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 hail stones 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 hail stones 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 at the top layers of one of these great clouds. Rain drops 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 stone becomes 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 into the ground. Batter automobiles break glass and bruise and sometimes kill livestock. A hail stone 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 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 Mount 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 mountaintop by steel cables to keep it from being blown off. Best 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 Mount 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 super cooled. 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 super cooled 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 super cooled 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 rain making. 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 rain makers believe that dry ice makes more rain fall or causes it to fall sooner than it would otherwise. Thus as the cloud moves along, the rain maker 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 rain making 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 these 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 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 and 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 in a We Talk 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 1000 atomic bombs were exploded at one time in a storm area. After a year or two of rain making 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. 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 14. His family moved to New Mexico where he worked several years as a surveyor, then took two degrees at the University of New Mexico. After that he had many activities, teacher, librarian, writer, and director of plays. He made a movie, composed music, wrote poetry, was in the Air Corps Reserve one year, taught meteorology and aeronautics at Boeing aircraft in Seattle for a year and a half. He learned to fly in Idaho and then was a teacher in junior college in Yakima, Washington. It was 1950 when Gordon became excited about the work that was being done in rainmaking in many parts of the country. By April of the next year he had moved to Plain View, Texas and had begun to organize airplane operations to prevent hail on the high planes of the state. Having developed his own secret formula for the chemicals to be dropped into thunderstorm clouds, he experimented in his car, in airplanes, and in the home freezer. Once he came home for dinner carrying some denim to be used in connection with an experiment and his wife discovered that he had taken all the food out of the freezer so he could drop chemicals in it to see what might happen in the atmosphere. When asked what they were having for dinner she replied, I guess it will be frozen denim. The year 1951 was not an easy one for Clouser. The thought of preventing hail was new to most people and he had some difficulty in getting enough money to finance the necessary plane operations. He asked farmers for 20 to 40 cents an acre for protection from hail and compared this cost with the much higher rates for hail insurance. But he argued the prevention of hail would lower the insurance rates which are based on the frequency of such storms in any area and the amount of damage done. To prevent hail Gordon and his pilots flew into and over thunderstorms to see if they contained hail in dangerous sizes and if so they dropped his secret chemicals into the tops of the clouds. This is called seeding by rain makers. Gordon was sure that he was preventing hail damage from the clouds they seeded. By 1952 he had nine planes at his command. In that year from June 1 to October 1 they checked 421 thunderstorms and found ice in dangerous sizes and 82 of them which were seeded. He reported to the farmers that there was no appreciable hail damage from any of them and there were no complaints on that score. During this time he was watching the reports of tornadoes and getting the weather bureau's forecasts and warnings. On May 26 he heard a prediction of tornadoes in an area which included the two counties where he was working to prevent hail. Without regard for the danger of flying among thunderheads and tornado weather his planes were in the air for a total of nearly 10 hours that day seeding clouds that looked dangerous. That night a half hour after the last of Gordon's planes landed the weather bureau issued an all-clear. There had been no tornadoes in either county. Gordon said we can't prove that we prevented a tornado, maybe none would have formed anyway but we do know that conditions were right for one and we changed those conditions. For a man of Clouser's adventurous spirit this was just a side issue. He occupied much of his spare time studying hurricanes and making plans for the day when he would be operating a large company to kill these storms before they reached the coasts of the United States. He hoped to have his main office in San Juan Puerto Rico with planes stationed also at Pensacola Florida on the coast of Mexico in Cuba and at two or three other strategic places. He would get the government reports, talk to the weathermen, and at the right time drop a mixture containing his secret formula into the eye of the storm or some other vital spot that he would find by flying above the storm clouds and studying the wind circulation. His wife Olive took this philosophically with their three children she was living at Norman near Oklahoma City. Like the wives of most adventurous pilots she knew that any one of these trips might be her husband's last. She encouraged him in his hail prevention but worried about tornadoes and especially hurricanes. She knew that they form and move over vast sea surfaces on which the winds impress violent motions, a deadly place for a man to land when in trouble. After Gordon flew into the tornado clouds in May he came to Oklahoma City by bus and called her on the phone to come and get him in the car. Instead of going home he asked her to drive him to the weather bureau office at the airport where he checked on the reports to see if they knew what had happened to the tornadoes. Then she found out what he had been doing and heard him talking about hurricanes. Olive had something special on her mind. She wanted to paint the kitchen yellow but he was against it. She tried to get a compromise. If he was going to fly into tornadoes and other storms against her advice why not paint the kitchen yellow even if he didn't like it very much? He offered strong objections and she put it off for a while. In the meantime Gordon was in trouble. September of that year 1952 was very dry in Texas. The farmers in Floyd and Hale counties in that state got the idea that his agitations against Hale had prevented rain. Anyway he was out of work for as he said there is no point in a hail-busting business when there are no clouds. A delegation of farmers called on him to protest his activities. They said that he and his men had deprived them of rain and they were going to lose a lot of money. Gordon convinced them that his work on the clouds earlier in the year had nothing to do with the drought. He pointed out that only 82 out of 421 storms had been seeded. Therefore 339 of them had acted exactly as nature had intended. Besides that he showed them news reports that nearly all of Texas was dry. Some parts being much drier than the counties he was working. They went home satisfied but Gordon had time on his hands with no thunderheads or clouds to work on. So he gathered data on hurricanes and spent a good deal of time at home making experiments in the freezer. He wanted to work on big storms. The little ones in Floyd and Hale counties gave him trouble. All rain makers know that it is possible to seed a cloud and have rain on the farm or ranch of a man who refuses to pay for seeding and have no rain on a farm next to it owned by a man who had paid for the service. October came and it proved to be the driest month for the country as a whole since weather records began. All the rain makers were in trouble and the hailbusters were out of work. Gordon sat at home listening to the radio and working on his formula. He and Olive talked about many things but neither mentioned hurricanes or yellow kitchens. Then on Tuesday October 21 Gordon left for Plainview. The next day he heard a news report from Lubbock that there was a hurricane in Cuba moving toward the United States. On Wednesday he left for Florida in a Luscombe plane saying nothing to anybody except Bill and Pauline Sarp. Bill was not a pilot but Gordon had been teaching him to fly. Knowing nothing about the trip to Miami, Olive was having the kitchen painted yellow and wondering what Gordon would say when he came home from Plainview. That was on Thursday. On Sunday the 26th she and the children had a late breakfast but managed to get to Sunday school and remained for church service. During the hymn at the beginning of the service there was a long-distance call for Olive from Plainview. Gordon was lost at sea. Later in the day she heard the story in full. Gordon was not satisfied with the plane. When he reached Florida he tried to get one a better suited for storm work. He had plans for building a special plane for the purpose but now he was anxious to get into the hurricane. It might be the last one of the season he thought. It had done a great deal of damage in Cuba. He went to the Weather Bureau office in Miami and got the latest information on the position, strength and the movement of the storm. At 3.45 p.m. October 25 the center of the hurricane was about 75 or 80 miles east of Miami when Gordon took off in his last complaint. At 8.56 p.m. a radio station in Miami picked up a message from him saying that he was 50 or 60 miles east south east of Miami still in the edge of the storm. The radio station talked with him for 26 minutes as he flew toward Miami making poor headway against the winds. The last message was out of fuel, descending, give my love to my wife and family. The Civil Air Patrol and the ships and planes of the Coast Guard searched the area for 48 hours without finding any trace of the missing man. Olive went to Miami and did her best to keep the planes looking for him. Whether or not he had any effect on the storm will never be known for sure. The weather forecasters in Miami did not think so, but the hurricane soon afterward took an erratic course. It was destructive early on the 26th as it turned into the Bahamas, then lost force and turned northward. The official report of the Weather Bureau said that it moved northeastward thereafter as a disturbance of no great violence. The uncertainties and the tragedy in this case brought to mind the Savannah storm of 1947, which Gordon may have studied. It began far to the southward near the Isthmus of Panama early on the 9th of October. On the 11th it crossed the extreme western end of Cuba and on the 12th passed over southern Florida. From this time on its course was very unusual. Reconnaissance planes followed a going northeastward over the Atlantic until the night of the 13th when it was east of Wilmington North Carolina. Early on the 14th a plane got into the storm area and found it moving southwestward. With considerable force it struck Savannah, Georgia early on the 15th causing about two million dollars worth of damage. Citizens of Savannah and some of the city officials complained to the government for causing the hurricane to strike the city. At about the time or just before the hurricane changed its course abruptly to the southwest, military planes had carried out an experiment in dropping dry ice into its upper levels. There was a great deal of discussion in the press. At first it was said that the dry ice had caused the storm to take a new course, but after the Savannah complaints were heard little more was said by the military about the experiment and it remains something of a mystery. Few scientists believe that dry ice would have such an effect on so large a storm. Actually there were few observations in the storm area during the night of the 13th to 14th and precise information about the time and nature of the change of course was not available for an investigation. It belongs in the same class as the Clouser Storm. End of chapter 15. Chapter 16 of The Hurricane Hunters by Ivan Ray Tannehill. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 16. Carol Edna Hazel or Sagsby. But I know ladies by the score whose hair like seaweed ascents 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 way of 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 criticisms, the sharpest and most prolonged was about the name of the hurricane. A newspaper in Massachusetts, The New Bedford Times, 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 Bedford Times that 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 girlfriends. Other women were incensed because storms had been called by their given names. The weathermen had a good explanation but not many people seem 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 Kapler's hurricane after a weather officer named Kapler who discovered it. During the latter part of the 19th century a New Englander Sydney Perley collected all the available records of 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 17th of November and continued with terrific gales and heavy snow until late on the 21st. 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 britches 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 aflying. I saw the sheets and petticoats go riding off like witches. I lost, ah, bitterly I wept, I lost my Sunday britches. Holmes entitled the poem The September Gale and so this became the name of the storm. Actually it was a hurricane quite 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, reaching 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 Cahasset, 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 19th 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 center would cut the sun and moon at 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 16 or 17 seconds of semi-diameter. 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 seawalls 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, The Standard, 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 a 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 4th 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 and warehouses, and anchoring boats out in the stream or securing them with lines in all directions. Nearby in New Brunswick, however, the storm on October 4th was severe. The gale rose to hurricane strength between 8 and 9 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. Tracks 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 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. Sax bees gale long before it occurred and for years afterward. Some weathermen thought that it was of tropical origin and had it 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 3rd and early on the 4th, with heavy rains and gales and 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 tide 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 4th of November. In the same year, another unusual storm, known as the Airpin Hurricane, started in the western Caribbean, moved northeastward to Cuba, and then turned sharply southwestward to Honduras, describing a track shaped like a hairpin. It caused one of the worst disasters of that region. Loss of life exceeded 2,000. Examples of storms named after ships are Racers Storm in 1837, named after a British loop 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 18th, 1851, San Francisco, October 29, 1867, San Felipe, September 13, 1876, San Sergio, August 8, 1899, and the second San Felipe, September 13, 1928. Doubtless, the worst hurricane during the 20th century was the one in 1928, San Felipe. It caused damage, estimated at $50 million in Puerto Rico, and later struck Florida, causing losses estimated at $25 million. Puerto Rico lost 300 lives, Florida nearly 2,000. One of the well-known storms of the Westendays was the Padre Ruiz hurricane, which was named after a priest whose funeral services were being held in the church at Santa Barbara, Santa 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 19th century, a weatherman in Australia named Clement Ragh 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 turned to the south and southeast on approaching or passing Australia. Their winds spiral inward around the center in a clockwise direction, the opposite of the turning motion of our hurricanes. Ragh was the government meteorologist in Queensland and later ran a weather bureau of his own in Brisbane. A tall, thin, bewiskered 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, Ragh 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 Ragh, he had a weather map for February 2, 1898, with a willy-willie named Eileen. He predicted nasty weather from a disturbance called Hackenbush. E. B. Buckston, a meteorologist for Pan-American Airways, went to the South Pacific in the late 30s, and after hearing about Ragh 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 20th 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 newsman said had greater authority, struck Southern Florida, and was called Hurricane Bess. In sending out advices and warnings of West Indian storms, 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 increased 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 three could be the number of the storm, the number of the advice, an element of the weather, the hour, and 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. Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, Howe, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nan, Oboe, Peter, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tear, Uncle, Victor, William, X-Ray, 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 ran into difficulty. A new international alphabet had been introduced as follows. Alpha, 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 have 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 book Storm by George R. Stewart, which was published in 1941. In this book, a fictitious Pacific storm is traced to the United States, and 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 Mariah. Also, there was rags use of girls' names for Willy Willis in Australia, and Pan American Airways practice in connection with hurricanes as early as 1938. At any rate, with these Pacific precedents, the weatherman and hurricane hunters adopted the following list for 1953 for hurricanes in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico. Alice, Barbara, Carol, Dolly, Edna, Florence, Gilda, Hazel, Irene, Jill, Catherine, Lucy, Mabel, Norma, Patsy, Queen, Rachel, Susie, Tina, Una, Vicki, Wallace. 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 the middle 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 50 to 80, 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 cited 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. 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. End of Chapter 16. Chapter 17 of The Hurricane Hunters by Ivan Ray Tannehill, this Liberbox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 17. The Gears and Guts of the Giant 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 teletype writers raffle with the international language of weathermen, the most cooperative 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 report 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 a 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 determined 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 Reel 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 a hundred and sixty 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 SWAT operation and fast communications are vital. In fact the record was so good at the beginning of World 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 dire flow 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 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 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 and sending a series of messages from Washington to stop them at midnight and began 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 coastal cities on the west gulf and it was several weeks before the criticisms 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 ponds. Around noon the worst of us 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 send a 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 200 were drowned. Down on Chaperall 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 donuts. 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 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 backyard 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 wheelchair 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 the guts of the thing. When Milt Sosen lurched into the center of the big storm in 1947 and 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 28 to 30,000 feet according to the theorist and the textbooks but they broke out just below 40,000 still 100 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 they're loomed from time to time ghost-like structures rising like huge white marble monuments through the cirrostratus fog. Actually these were shafts of super cooled 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 rhyme 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 icing was discovered that the shafts were too numerous to avoid. Pilot Eastburn punched me and pointed to the indicated airspeed gauge 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 little sheepish about the whole thing. After all hadn't been a chaffer of General Electric just a few months earlier demonstrated in the laboratory that water vapor could be cooled to a temperature of minus 39 degrees 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 rhyme 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 physicist may be exactly opposite to the truth. The results of years of study calculation and a 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 40,000 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 tailwind of 90 miles an hour and yet the students 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 20 to 30,000 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 40,000 feet in this case and up at this height the air is so thin that it is almost inconceivable that it could have 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 slightly 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 writer 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 the 13th 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 14th 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 1,000 miles in diameter with winds exceeding 100 miles an hour in an area more than 250 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 40 miles in diameter and circular. The massive cloud walls around the eye rose on all sides to 35,000 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 amount of clouds rising to about 8,000 feet an unusual feature but one that has been observed in other tropical storms. The crew spent 14 and a half hours in the central region of this huge typhoon getting data at levels from 500 feet up to 20,000. Down in the lower levels they found a horizontal vortex roughly 5,000 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 of the 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 is seismos and by putting a micro in front meaning very small we have the word micro-sizism and so the storm-caused little tremors are called micro-sizisms 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 micro-sizisms 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 a different earth block and this interferes with the indications picked up by the instruments. The fact is that micro-sizisms 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 micro-sizisms are being continued. For many years static on the radio, better known as atmospherics or just spherics, 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 spherics 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 spherics 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 been confused 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 airplane 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 moonlit night and that is not very good. 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 Bilensky, the Air Force Officer who broke his $100 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 remain there if the wind circulation tended to suck them out into the surrounding gales. Bilensky 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 Bilensky, 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 weather 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, a 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 Starrett, 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 why developments of this kind, which depend on opportunities in only a few hurricanes a year, take a discouragingly long time. There was no chance to task Bielanski's device or any other for that matter. There have been laboratory experiments also on a device to deflect the airstreams around the Bombay 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-50s 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-50s will go 10,000 feet higher than the B-29s. 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 P-2V Lockhead 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 insurance companies were in conference with grave faces. Property damage from Carol, Edna and Hazel had mounted upward to around a billion dollars. Reports have 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 shifted 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 5% 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 it 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 principal ingredients. 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 emotion 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 cauldron. 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 vigorously toward 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 transporter of moisture from the oceans to the thirsty continents have run amok. 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 super-cooled water push upward into the thin atmosphere. Snow flies with the shuttering 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 and seem to make gestures and 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. Biographical sketch in The Hurricane Hunters by Ivan Ray Tannehill This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Biographical sketch of 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 40 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. End of Biographical Sketch End of The Hurricane Hunters by Ivan Ray Tannehill