Cyclone

“ Even as I pointed my camera over the rail, and opened the shutter, my brain was working with a preternatural avidity, drinking in a thousand uncanny sounds and echoes that seemed to come upon me from every quarter, brutally distinct against the background of the cyclone's receding howling. There were the harsh, bursting, frightening, intermittent noises of the seas, and, mingling with these, the shrill, hissing scream of the foam; the dismal sounds, that suggested dankness, of water swirling over our decks, and the faintly-heard creaking of the gear and shattered spars ”

“ And so, hour by hour, the wind increased as the vortex of the cyclone—the 'death-patch,' as it has been called—drew nearer and ever nearer.
Night came on early, or, if not night, a darkness that was fully its equivalent. And now I was able to see how tremendous was the electrical action that was going on all about us. There seemed to be no lightning flashes, but, instead, there came at times across the darkness queer luminous shudders of light. ”

“ Add to these the storm-king:—traversing the air, he thrusts in the whirlwind or sends forth the cyclone, the tornado, and the hurricane to stir up and agitate, to mix and mingle the whole in one homogeneous mass. By this perpetual stirring up, this continual agitation, motion, mixing, and circulation, the airy covering of the globe is kept in that state which the well-being of the organic world requires. ”

“ This bit of a breeze that we're having now'—and he gestured to windward with his elbow—'is only fluff—nothing more than the outer fringe of the advancing cyclone! Keep your eye lifting to the North-East, and keep your ears open. ”

“ They watch the clouds to this day, as they would some fell demon hovering over them, and the more timid ones early rush to their caves. Many outlandish lies have been written about the power of the cyclone, but the cold fact, the bare truth is more wonderful than any stories man can invent. One only needs to come here and talk with the people about the cyclone to be convinced that their experience for a few minutes was as terrible as that of a great battle, and I was as fascinated with their stories as I ever was talking with old soldiers. ”

“ A cyclone, I venture to remind your gracious Majesty, is a mighty whirlwind, accompanied by the most startling meteorological phenomena, such as electrical disturbances, floods of falling water, darkness and so forth. It moves with great speed, sucking up everything and reducing it to powder. ”

“ The changing of the wind in a cyclone.—But, returning to the cyclone theory: though the wind be blowing around in spirals against the hands of the watch, yet, from the fact that the centre about which it is blowing is also travelling along, the changes of the wind, as observed by a vessel over which the storm is passing, will not, under all circumstances, be against the sun in the northern, or with the sun in the southern hemisphere. ”

“ The Doctor spoke in broken sentences, for the wind cut short his words, but I understood him; the word cyclone carried its explanation with it.
It is well known that these whirlwinds, called hurricanes in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, tornadoes on the coast of Africa, simoons in the desert, and typhoons in the Chinese Sea, are tempests of such formidable power, that they imperil the largest ships. ”

“ It drops into the southeast corner of this cyclone and there you are! It generates a tornado and That is the Thing that rends the Universe."
[28] Seth had listened to these stories undismayed; for what had they to do with his ranch and the Magic City upon which it was to be built?
A cyclone would never come to the forks of two rivers. The Indians had said so.
Tradition had it that an old squaw whose name was Wichita had bewitched the spot with her incantations, defying the wind to touch the ground on which she had lived and died. ”

“ The effect of each.—Hence it appears that in a storm the wind may shift from any one of three causes, and we are not entitled to call it a cyclone unless the wind shift more than 180°. If the change of direction be less than 90°, the shifting may be due to diurnal rotation alone; if it be less than 180°, the shifting may be, and is probably, due to (1) and (2) . The sailor has therefore no proof to show that he has been in a cyclone unless the wind during the storm changed its directions more than 180°. Cyclones, there is reason to believe, are often whirlwinds in a storm. ”

“ A third name for them is ‘cyclone’; and as this threatening sky seems to remind Dunn so powerfully of a Chinese typhoon, depend upon it we are going to have a taste of a West Indian hurricane, or cyclone. I have read somewhere that they frequently originate out here in the heart of the Atlantic.”
“If we’re agoin’ to have a typhoon, or a hurricane, or a cyclone—whichever you likes to call it—all I say is, ‘The Lord ha’ mercy upon us,’” remarked Dunn. “Big ships has all their work cut out to weather one o’ them gales; so what are we agoin’ to do in this here open boat, I’d like to know?” ”

“ Those terrifying outbursts which now and then cause so much destruction in our own country seem to be the concentration of the prodigious force of an immense ocean cyclone within a small space, which renders them resistless.
A writer in the N. Y. Herald gives some interesting facts regarding these scourges of the air. While the cyclone, as we have shown, may have a diameter of hundreds of miles, the track of a tornado is often limited to a few hundred feet, and rarely has the width of half a mile. ”

“ The cyclone is the center of rhetorical disturbance, and inky clouds of misuse and abuse gather about it, since, as a parent of storms and as a weather-breeder of no mean type, the cyclone plays the dramatic leading rôle in American meteorology. It is not only itself capable of great development of storm energies in the winter, early spring and late autumn, but in its milder summer moments is particularly likely to be the parent of specific local disturbances. ”

“ The lightning is continually playing, and I shouldn't be surprised if we are on the edge of a cyclone, but with a big ship like this, and a captain who knows his business, there is nothing to be afraid of. These cyclones, which are called typhoons in the China seas, are curious storms which twist round and round in a circle, all the time progressing onward too, and the danger is in getting into the middle of one, for there, as you may imagine, the wind comes from all quarters at once, and the waves are piled up on all sides like huge overhanging pyramids. ”

“ In cyclones that travel fast, I suppose there would be most rain in the after quarter; with those that have little or no progressive motion, I conjecture that the rainy quarter, if there be one, would depend upon the quarter whence that wind comes that brings most rain. The rain in a "cyclone is supposed to come from the moisture of that air which has blown its round and gone up in the vortex; then it expands, grows cool, and condenses its vapour, which spreads out at top like a great mushroom in the air, the liberated heat adding fury to the storm. ”

“ One should gain a clear idea of the difference between the movements of the air in the cyclone and the movement of the cyclone itself, or its translation from place to place; how the wind must blow into the front of the storm in a direction partly or wholly contrary to the movement of the storm itself, and into the rear of the storm as it passes away; how the wind increases in velocity as it spirally gyrates about the center and approaches nearer and nearer the region where it must ascend ”

“ If the cirrus plumes that radiate from the distant storm are faint and opalescent in tint, fading gradually behind a slowly thickening haze or veil, the approaching storm is an old one of large area; if of snowy whiteness, projected against a clear blue sky, it is a young cyclone of small area but great intensity. ”

“ A typhoon was described to me as a mighty wind of extreme velocity, covering a vast area, and resembling a blizzard ; but it has no fixed direction and moves over land or sea with the same ease and force. In a cyclone, of which the center is a vacuum, the suction is so powerful that it draws in birds, which have been known to drop down helpless on the decks of ships. A cyclone usually travels in one direction and its path is generally less than a half mile wide. ”

“ In the first place, the storm-wind blows in a circle, like a gigantic whirlwind; and in the second place this whole thing advances over the land and sea, very much as a top, while spinning on its own centre, will move slowly along the floor. A cyclone starting down near the equator will begin by moving westward ”

“ All over the rear, on the contrary, clouds take the rocky form known as cumulus; cirrus is almost unknown in the rear of a cyclone-center in the temperate zone.
In the exhilarating quality of the air we find the meaning of the proverb, "Do business with men when the wind is in the northwest. A northwest wind belongs to the rear of a cyclone, and improves men's tempers, as opposed to the neuralgic and rheumatic sensations in front of a cyclone, which make them cross. ”

“ The better developed the cyclone, the higher its velocity of progression, and the nearer its track lies to the station, the more emphatic and the more rapid are the weather changes it causes. On the other hand, the weaker the cyclone, the slower its rate of progression, and the further away its track, the less marked and the slower the weather changes. The probable track of a coming storm, and its probable rate of movement, therefore, need careful study if our forecasts are to be reliable. ”

“ It is found, by a careful study of different observations159 made upon the same storm, that cyclones in the northern hemisphere invariably sweep round the onward travelling vortex of disturbance in one direction, and southern cyclones in the contrary direction. If we place a watch, face upwards, upon one of the northern cyclone regions in a Mercator’s chart, then the motion of the hands is contrary to the direction in which the cyclone whirls; when the watch is shifted to a southern cyclone region, the motion of the hands is in the same direction as the cyclone motion. ”

“ Wherever there is a rapid decrease there is a steep gradient, and consequently a strong wind.
Defining the term cyclone, in its very widest acceptation, as indicating a region of diminished pressure, round and in upon which the air is moving along paths which are more symmetrical all round the center the more perfect is the circular form of the system, we must at once see that not every cyclone is accompanied by a storm. ”

“ The storm once engendered, no matter in what part of the world, may be stationary or progressive. There are well-authenticated instances of almost stationary cyclones and almost stationary typhoons, of which latter will be remembered the famous gale of the ship Charles Heddle—an Indiaman, carried round and round the storm-centre for five days—which progressed not more than ninety miles a day. Indeed, we may, as has been said, regard every wet-monsoon region as a stationary and semi-perennial cyclone. Such a meteor has been shown to resemble an eddy moving in the current of a rapid river. ”

“ Little more remains to be said of the cyclone. If the reader will take a last look at the diagram, he will see how it is, that the wind, which appears to him to change, has not changed in reality. The wind, from first to the last, is travelling around the circle, changing not at all. It is the passage of the circle over the ship—or over the observer upon the land—which causes it apparently to change. The Alabama lay still during the whole gale, not changing her position, perhaps, half a mile. ”

“ It will be convenient, therefore, to describe the weather in different parts of a cyclone, and the appropriate prognostics together.
First, to take those prognostics which depend on qualities common to the whole front of the cyclone, viz., a falling barometer, increased warmth and damp, with a muggy, uncomfortable feel of the air, and a dirty sky.
From the increasing damp in this part of a cyclone, while the sky generally is pretty clear, cloud forms round and "caps" the tops of hills, which has given rise to numerous local sayings. The reason is that a hill always deflects the air upward. ”

“ The experience of those who have studied cyclone tracks in northern Europe shows that in winter, on an average, a cyclonic disturbance visits some parts of those regions every fourth clay, so that, if a warning were announced once a week regularly, there would be nearly a certainty of some sort of a fulfillment. ”

“ The polar cyclone differs from the tropical cyclone, inasmuch as the one sets fire to every light, and the other extinguishes them all. The world is suddenly converted into the arched vault of a cave. ”

“ The direction of the air in a cyclone is opposite to that of the hands of a clock.
When the wind comes up from a southerly point, when high, thin clouds, gradually growing thicken, spread over the sky, and the barometer begins to fall, then it is known that a storm is corning. ”

“ The cyclone may cause moderate or high winds through a vast expanse of territory, while the tornado, with a vortical motion almost unmeasurable, always leaves a trail of destruction in an area infinitesimal in comparison with the area covered by the cyclone. ”