The Hurricane Hunters

by Ivan Ray Tannehill

Now as the hunters have begun watching hurricane centers close by on the radar, they see them changing shape and wiggling around. In fact, as stated in a few cases in earlier chapters, they have seen false eyes and have been confused by them until the true eye came into view on the radar scope. If the true eye describes a wiggly path and changes size, the hunters can draw the wrong conclusions about its direction of motion unless they wait a while to see if it comes back to the old path. The hurricane is a little like an eddy or whirl in water running out of the bottom of a bowl. It is a violent boiling eddy that twists and changes shape, and in a substance as thin as the atmosphere these motions are not steady to such a degree that the observer can reach a quick decision. At any rate, it is now apparent that the observers on ships and aircraft did not make as many errors as was thought several years ago.

There is another aspect that must be kept in mind. Radar shows areas where rain is falling around the center of a hurricane and so the center, having no rain, stands out as an open space on the radar scope. This is very good if the storm has rain all around the center, but some of them have very little rain on the southwest side, and in some cases there is none to return an echo to the radar. In such a case, there is only one side to the storm echo and the location of the center is not revealed. Of course, these facts are known to the experienced radar men, but they should be known to everybody interested in hurricane reports; otherwise they are likely to expect too much accuracy from observations of this kind.

For these and other reasons, the man on the aircraft has a very great advantage in daylight, for he can see clouds of all kinds, measure the winds and, by moving through the storm area at the speed of the modern plane, he can see a large part of it in a short time. To find a substitute for aircraft reconnaissance is going to be extremely difficult. But at night the situation is quite different. The airman is unable to see much without radar, except on a moonlight night and that is not very good.

One suggestion that has been put forward by a number of different people in recent years is that a balloon be flown in the calm center and followed by radar or radio, thus keeping track of the storm’s motion. It is possible, of course, to fix a small rubber balloon (perhaps eight to ten feet in diameter) so that it will remain at the same height for a fairly long time. By one method the rubber balloon is partly filled with helium and covered loosely with nylon. The balloon expands as it rises, becoming less dense as the atmosphere gets thinner. It continues to rise until it fills the nylon cover and cannot expand further. After that, its density becomes the same as the air at some level previously chosen, and from there it drifts along without rising or descending.

It is the idea that the obliging balloon would drift here and there in the vagrant breezes of the eye, but when it came to the edge of the powerful wind currents around the outside of the eye it would be guided back in. No experiment has been carried out to prove that this would happen but such trials have been scheduled and will be made at the first opportunity. There is one difficulty. The question is how to get an inflated balloon into the center and release it under proper conditions. One of the men who has worked on a scheme of this kind is Captain Bielinski, the Air Force officer who broke his hundred-dollar watch in a typhoon and solemnly swore he would find an easier way to do it. He calls his device “Typhoon Homer.” He has worked on it for four years, spending much of his own time and money.

There are reasons to believe that, after a few experiments, a height could be found where the balloon would stay in the eye. So far as we know, birds trapped in the center are held there. After battling hurricane winds, they are so exhausted on getting into the center that they could not remain there if the wind circulation tended to suck them out into the surrounding gales.

Bielinski concluded that the balloon could not be thrown out from a plane in even a partially inflated condition. The blast of air on leaving the aircraft would destroy it or put it out of commission. So he has an uninflated balloon and bottles of gas, a small radio transmitter, and a float, all attached to a parachute.

The bottles and radio would be thrown out, the parachute would open, and the gas would go through a tube from the bottles into the balloon. The float, with a long line to the balloon, would rest on the water and provide an anchor for the apparatus. The radio would send signals every hour, the operators on shore would figure its location by direction finding, and there would need to be no further aircraft flights into that storm. The device, according to Bielinski, would continue to operate for seven days.

Robert Simpson and others have had similar ideas, some favoring a device that could be followed by radar, but Simpson prefers the radio transmitter. To find out how the air circulation in the calm center would affect the balloon, he planned experimental flights in hurricanes to release a chaff made of a substance that could be followed by radar. He tried it in 1953 and again in 1954, but something happened in each case to prevent the experiment from being carried out. In one case, for example, nearly everything was in readiness for an experimental flight to take off when Edward Murrow of CBS arrived in Bermuda with his crew and apparatus to put Hurricane Edna on television, and Simpson was moved to the back of the plane. He and all others connected with it, including Major Lloyd Starret, who had been brought in from Tinker Air Force Base to work with Simpson, were glad to make way for a public service program. But this shows one of the reasons why developments of this kind, which depend on opportunities in only a few hurricanes a year, take a discouragingly long time. There was no chance to test Bielinski’s device, or any other, for that matter. There have been laboratory experiments also on a device to deflect the air streams around the bomb bay of the aircraft so that a partially inflated balloon could be safely released in the eye of a storm.

These devices are mentioned here to show the trend of thought. Something similar to this may eventually serve to replace a large share of the hazardous aircraft flights, but even if the center is satisfactorily located in such a manner, much useful information on the size of the storm, the force of its winds, and other data will be determined in many cases only by aerial reconnaissance. With this in mind, both the Air Force and Navy are substituting bigger and better aircraft for this purpose.