The Hurricane Hunters

by Ivan Ray Tannehill

The family went through the back yard, 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 wheel-chair, 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 guts of the THING. When Milt Sosin lurched into the center of the big storm in 1947 in 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 twenty-eight to thirty thousand feet, according to the theorists and the textbooks, but they broke out just below forty thousand, still one hundred 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 there loomed from time to time ghost-like structures rising like huge white marble monuments through the cirrostratus fog. Actually these were shafts of supercooled 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 rime 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 gage. 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 bit sheepish about the whole thing. After all, hadn’t Vincent Schaefer, of General Electric, just a few months earlier demonstrated in the laboratory that water vapor could be cooled to a temperature of -39° 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 rime 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 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!

Most important in the 1947 storm was the fact that conditions at a height just below forty thousand 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 tail wind of ninety 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 twenty to thirty thousand 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 forty thousand feet in this case. And up at this height the air is so thin that it is almost inconceivable that it could 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.