THE EFFECTS OF AN ICE STORM AT CANTON, N. Y.
March 25-27, 1913
It would require a book, rather than a brief essay, to describe all the vicissitudes of weather, and many books that attempt to do this have been written.[A] We have space here only to mention a few important features of the weather met with in our own country.
The southern and southeastern part of a cyclone, some hundreds of miles from the center, is a favorite breeding-ground for thunderstorms and tornadoes. Thunderstorms of the type known as "heat thunderstorms" also occur with no special relation to cyclonic centers in regions where the ground has been intensely heated. In either case the storm is built up by rapidly ascending air, which cools and condenses its water vapor, first into enormous clouds (cumulo-nimbus, or "thunderheads"), and then into rain, frequently accompanied by hail. It would be necessary to go to some length to explain the familiar electrical manifestations of the thunderstorm—some points, indeed, are not perfectly clear to meteorologists—but it should be stated that these are always the result, not the cause, of the storm. Lightning is an electrical discharge between cloud and earth, or cloud and cloud, and thunder is simply the violent soundwave set up by the sudden expansion of the heated air along the path of the discharge,—the same acoustic phenomenon that accompanies an ordinary explosion.
SUMMIT HOTEL AT SUMMIT, CAL.
On March 18, 1911. A three-story building whose first story is buried under twenty-six feet of snow
Courtesy of the Scientific American
A tornado (popularly miscalled a "cyclone") is an extremely violent vortex in the air, usually less than 1,000 feet in diameter. Besides its very rapid rotary motion, it has a progressive motion at a speed averaging forty or fifty miles an hour. Its position at any moment is marked by a black funnel-shaped cloud, which grows downward from the sky and does not at all times reach the earth. A waterspout at sea is an identical phenomenon, though usually less violent. Along its narrow path the tornado demolishes everything,—wooden houses are blown to splinters, trees uprooted or stripped of their branches, structures of heavy masonry laid in ruins. Something like a hundred lives are lost each year in these storms, on an average, and one of them (St. Louis, May 27, 1896) destroyed thirteen million dollars' worth of property.
