An area of high pressure, with its attendant system of winds, is called an anticyclone or high. An area of low pressure, with its winds, is called a cyclone—sometimes. The word “cyclone” was invented by Henry Piddington in the year 1848. Nearly all the early studies of cyclones were made chiefly for the benefit of mariners, and related to the severe revolving storms encountered at sea. Hence the word “cyclone” passed into the general vocabulary with a connotation of violence, which, in everyday speech, it still retains. Perhaps the early “cyclonologists” themselves hardly realized that a “gentle cyclone” was not a contradiction in terms.
Meteorologists are still so much under the influence of the popular idea of a “cyclone” that they hesitate to apply this term to a disturbance of moderate force, except in a few special phrases (such as “extra-tropical cyclone”), though the adjective “cyclonic” is used freely without reference to the force of the wind. British meteorologists speak mostly of “depressions,” while American meteorologists speak of “lows.” The status of the latter term, as well as that of the term “high,” is, however, paradoxical. Though both words have been used for years, they are nearly always printed with quotation marks around them, as if they had not yet been assimilated in the vocabulary. The Weather Bureau has lately taken to printing these words in capital letters. Neither of these practices will be followed in the present book.
Photo by Prof. Ellerman Showing Clouds or Fog Cascading Through Last Fork Cañon and into the Santa Anita Cañon. (Letter from F. A. Carpenter, May 29, 1919.)
Tropical cyclones are called “hurricanes” in the West Indies and the South Pacific, “typhoons” off the east coast of Asia, “baguios” in the Philippines, and “cyclones” in the Indian seas. They form in the doldrums, and generally take a long, sweeping course, curving westward and poleward, and sometimes passing into the temperate zones, where they either die out or increase in size, diminish in violence, and become similar to the storms originating in the higher latitudes. One of the curious features they often exhibit within the tropics is the calm center at the “eye of the storm,” to which Tennyson alludes when he writes of the blast (unknown to meteorologists) that drove a ship
Across the whirlwind’s heart of peace,
And to and thro’ the counter-gale.
These cyclones are the worst of all storms found at sea, and also exercise their destructive effects over islands and along continental coasts. The greatest disasters attending them have been due to the inundation of low-lying shores by the huge waves they generate, as in the Galveston hurricanes of 1900 and 1915 and in the far worse catastrophes that have occasionally visited the coast of India. Hurricanes of the West Indies occur chiefly from August to October, inclusive. The number varies from none to a dozen a year (with four as an average).
Copyright, Ewing Galloway