Ivan Ray Tannehill

“ If Columbus had been lost in one of these monstrous storms—and he didn’t miss it by very much—it might have been many years before another navigator with a stout heart could have induced men to risk their lives in the uncharted winds of the far places in the Atlantic Ocean. Out there toward the end of the world, where increasing gales dragged ships relentlessly in the direction of the setting sun, sailors who ventured too far would drop off the edge of a flat earth and plunge screaming into eternity—so they thought. ”

“ Soon there are violent gales and the power of the storm is apparent in the roaring of the wind and sea.
And so it is easy to think of a plane in a hurricane as being like an oak leaf in a thunderstorm, except that the leaf is bigger in proportion but lacks the skillful handling of a youthful crew, alert, fearful and resourceful, straining desperately to keep it from rocketing steeply into the wind-torn sea below. For these reasons, the men who ventured in 1943 to probe tropical storms by air were exceedingly cautious about it. ”

“ At first they thrill to the crash of tremendous waves breaking on the coast and hurling spray high into the screaming winds. But when the rain comes in torrents, striking with the force of pebbles, and beach structures begin to collapse and give up their components to wind and sea, the curious spectator has had enough. Hurriedly he seeks refuge and begins to wonder fearfully if it will get worse. It does. He soon realizes that what he has seen is only the beginning. ”

“ Lieutenant A. N. Fowler, an experienced Navy pilot, was the man who said that a hurricane flight was like going over Niagara Falls in a telephone booth. Describing one of his most dangerous trips, he told a newspaperman:
“I have seen the hurricane-swept sea on many occasions, but it never fails to impress me in exactly the same way. It would be sheer turmoil, like a furious blizzard. While experiencing the jarring turbulence, the heat and drumming of torrential rain which seeps in by the gallon and tastes salty, the inside of a hurricane can be like a bad dream. ”

“ The warning brings to their minds raging seas and screaming gales, relatives and 6 friends lost in other great storms that have roared out of the tropics, ships going down and buildings being torn apart.
Ahead of the storm, the sea becomes angry. Huge rollers break on the beaches with a booming sound. In the distance, a long, low, angry cloud appears on the horizon. If the cloud grows and puts out scud and squalls, spitting rain, the warning flags flutter in the gusts and the big winds will strike the coast with terrible destruction. ”

“ The spread of wireless across the oceans began while the American people still had vividly in mind the most terrible hurricane disaster in the history of the United States. The nation had been shocked by news of a “tidal wave” which had virtually destroyed Galveston, Texas, on the night of September 8, 1900, and killed more than six thousand of its citizens. Really it was not a tidal wave but a West Indian hurricane of almost irresistible force which had raised the tide to heights never known before and then topped it with an enormous storm wave as the center struck the low-lying island. ”

“ Here at the bottom of the atmosphere the vapor absorbs the heat radiated from the sun. There is a swift drop in temperature as we go aloft. Moist air pushed upward becomes cooled and ice crystals, water droplets, snowflakes, are squeezed out. Clouds form, beautiful in the sunset, gloomy on a winter day, threatening as the summer thunderstorm shows on the horizon, fearsome as the winter blizzard takes command of the plains and valleys. Here is water vapor coming to the end of a long journey from the surfaces of distant seas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ So far as we know, the worst storm to devastate the British Isles was one of this kind. It was not a tropical cyclone. It was entirely unexpected, as were most of the big gales in England in the old days. Surprise was one of the elements of danger. The weather is seldom fine in the British Isles, over the English Channel or in the North Sea. Gloom, with fog or low-flying clouds, is the rule. Even on the best days, a damp haze hangs everywhere. It is like looking through a dirty window pane. Into this background of gloom many a big storm stole its way eastward from the Atlantic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So far as anyone knows, the most furious of the typhoons of the Pacific are no bigger or more violent than the worst of the huge hurricanes of the Atlantic and the West Indies. They belong to the same death-dealing breed of storms, but the typhoons come from the bigger ocean; they sweep majestically across these vast waters toward the world’s largest continent; and to the south and southeast lies a longer stretch of hot tropical seas than anywhere else on earth. ”

“ The water vapor that drew the curtain now releases energy alongside of which the A-bomb shrinks to insignificance.
Far below the sea surface, the solid earth trembles. Avalanches of water are torn from the ocean and hurled down the slopes of the gale. A colossal darkening storm begins to move across the ocean. It sucks inward the hot, moist lower atmosphere and brings it along with it, using the vapor to feed its monstrous, seething caldron. Down here at the surface of the earth, its winds are warm and humid. ”

“ Learning the secrets of the hurricane proved to be far more difficult than Redfield, Reid and Piddington had imagined. The world looked in amazement at the tremendous labors of a few men who collected enormous quantities of reports, interviews, and observations from mariners and tried to put the bits together, but there was a prevailing suspicion that the real facts were locked in the minds of men who had gone to their doom in ships sunk in the centers of these awful storms and the lucky ones who came back had seen only a part of their ultimate terrors. ”

“ Scarcely had these observations begun when the radar weather men discovered an amazing fact. On the radar, a tropical storm looks like an octopus with a doughnut for a body and arms that spiral around the body as if the creature had been caught in a whirlpool. These arms are bands of squally weather, oftentimes violent turmoil. Between the bands (or octopus arms) the wind is furious, of course, but there is less turbulence and cloudiness, and here the aircraft is in much less trouble than in the squall bands. ”

“ When this lush flow of water vapor from the tropical ocean to the atmosphere becomes geared in some special manner to swiftly-moving air from other regions, the process seems to get out of nature’s hands. Upward motion begins on a grand scale. Converging streams of air are twisted by the spinning of the earth on its axis. And just as men begin to see the picture, nature draws a veil by the condensation of water vapor. Under this darkening canopy, violence grows with startling swiftness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Usually he is a man of long experience who has worked up from crew chief. He adjusts power to fit the fuel load. If an engine catches on fire, he knows how to put it out. If a bail-out is imminent, he is the man on the job. Sitting behind the second pilot, he has his restless eyes concentrated on the mechanical equipment. All of these men on the plane work as a team, any of them being ready to help somebody else in an emergency, and alert and resourceful to take quick action when the unexpected happens, and it often does. ”

“ Tracking and predicting hurricanes is an exciting job, often a dangerous one. But it is not a one-man job; it requires the co-operation of many people. A tropical storm of hurricane force covers such a vast area that all of it cannot be seen by one person. Its products—gales with clouds and rain—and its effects—destruction of life and property and big waves on the sea—are visible to people in different parts of the disturbance. ”

“ The winds spiral in such a broad arc around the storm center that there is no noticeable change in the wind direction within a distance of many miles. It was like the curvature of the earth. Any circle around the full body of the earth is so enormous that it seems to be a straight line, and men were deceived for centuries into believing that the earth is flat.
The crews of fast modern aircraft can fly through the main part of a hurricane in two or three hours, at most, and they can immediately see changes of the wind as they go along. They have no reason to question it. ”

“ One was how the crew could find out where they were in latitude and longitude or in distance and direction from some point on an island or on the coast after they found the center of the storm. After all, the weather observer, navigator, and the radio man might figure out how to get in the eye, and the plane might get into it, but if they failed to get their position accurately, the information was of doubtful value. This nearly always depended on radio signals from distant shore stations, for it was seldom that they could get a celestial fix as a mate does on a ship at sea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is an amazing fact that there are men who want to come down to the airfield when a big storm is imminent and “thumb a ride.” Mostly, they are newspaper reporters, magazine writers, photographers, civilian weathermen, and radio and television people. Usually they are accommodated, if they have made arrangements in advance. Some of these rides have been quiet, like a sightseer’s trip over a city, while others have been “hairy.”
One of the first newspapermen to take a ride into a full-fledged hurricane was Milt Sosin of the Miami Daily News. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Archer came on deck and found Sir Hyde there. “It blows terribly hard, Archer.”
“It does indeed, Sir.”
“I don’t remember its blowing so hard before,” shouted Sir Hyde, striving to get his voice above the roar of the wind. “The ship makes good weather of it on this tack but we must wear her (to turn about by putting the helm up and the stern of the boat to the wind) , as the wind has shifted to the southeast and we are fast drawing up on the Coast of Cuba.”
“Sir, there is no canvas can stand against it a moment. We may lose three or four of our people in the effort. ”

“ For many decades the people of the Far East struggled valiantly against the typhoon menace without much interest on the part of the Western World. Native observers reported them when they showed their first dangerous signs and then came roaring by the islands in the Pacific, including the Philippines, as they swept a path of devastation on the way to China or Japan. Men on ships equipped with radio sent frantic weather messages to Manila, Shanghai or Tokyo as they were being battered by monstrous winds and seas. ”

“ On passing Havana harbor, Sir Hyde looked in and was astounded to see Solano’s Spanish fleet at anchor. He hurried around Cuba into the Caribbean, to take the news to the British fleet.
At Kingston, Jamaica, the crew of the Phoenix found three other men-of-war lying in the harbor and they had a strong party for “kicking up a dust on shore,” with dancing until two o’clock every morning. Little did they think of what might be in store for them. Out of the four men-of-war not one was in existence four days later and not a man aboard any of them survived, except a few of the crew of the Phoenix. ”

“ Now it is abundantly clear that the hurricane hunters are looking for many important facts aside from the location of 262 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. ”

“ Inspired by this report of the Charles Heddles in the hurricane, Piddington suggested, for the first time in history (1845) , that ships be sent out to study hurricanes. He wrote:
“Every man and every set of men who are pursuing the investigation of any great question, are apt to overrate its importance; and perhaps I shall only excite a smile when I say, that the day will yet come when ships will be sent out to investigate the nature and course of storms and hurricanes, as they are now sent out to reach the poles or to survey pestilential coasts, or on any other scientific service.” ”