The Hurricane Hunters

by Ivan Ray Tannehill

The old B-29 Superfortress is being “put out to pasture,” as they say in the Air Force. The higher, faster, and farther flying Boeing B-50’s are replacing them, not only in hurricane reconnaissance but in the daily flying of weather routes to help fill in the blank spaces on the world’s weather charts. The B-50’s will go ten thousand feet higher than the B-29’s. Another advantage that appeals to the hurricane hunters who fly on these missions is the electric oven, standard equipment on the B-50, which will furnish hot meals at favorable times on the route, instead of sandwiches and thermos coffee. The Navy, not to be outdone, is coming out with the Super Constellation, which is being modified for hurricane reconnaissance to replace the P2V Lockheed Neptune recently used.

As each new season comes, the hunters are wiser and better equipped. The battle with the hurricane is joined. It is something to worry about, like war and the H-bomb. At the end of the 1954 season, the executives of the big insurance companies were in conference with grave faces. Property damage from Carol, Edna and Hazel had mounted upward to around a billion dollars. Reports had been circulated to the effect that the slow warming of the earth in the present century is bringing more hurricanes with greater violence and paths shifting northward to devastate areas with greater populations. There was speculation about the effects of A-bombs and H-bombs on hurricanes.

All this trouble comes from water vapor in the atmosphere. Without it, the earth would be a beautiful place but useless to man. Even over the tropical oceans it rarely exceeds five per cent of the bulk of the air. In other regions, it is much less. But it is this vapor, constantly moving from the oceans into the air and spreading around the world, that builds the stormy lower layer of our atmosphere—the troposphere—where clouds and storms, snow and ice and torrential rain, thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes thrive in season. Such tremendous energy is needed to carry billions of tons of moisture from the oceans to the thirsty land that all of these rain and storm processes are maintained on the borderline of violence.

Here at the bottom of the atmosphere the vapor absorbs the heat radiated from the sun. There is a swift drop in temperature as we go aloft. Moist air pushed upward becomes cooled and ice crystals, water droplets, snowflakes, are squeezed out. Clouds form, beautiful in the sunset, gloomy on a winter day, threatening as the summer thunderstorm shows on the horizon, fearsome as the winter blizzard takes command of the plains and valleys. Here is water vapor coming to the end of a long journey from the surfaces of distant seas. From here it goes to the land and begins another long journey, in the rivers and back to the oceans. But on the way to us, violence may be one of the principal ingredients. We can’t live without it and we have trouble living with it.

When this lush flow of water vapor from the tropical ocean to the atmosphere becomes geared in some special manner to swiftly-moving air from other regions, the process seems to get out of nature’s hands. Upward motion begins on a grand scale. Converging streams of air are twisted by the spinning of the earth on its axis. And just as men begin to see the picture, nature draws a veil by the condensation of water vapor. Under this darkening canopy, violence grows with startling swiftness. The water vapor that drew the curtain now releases energy alongside of which the A-bomb shrinks to insignificance.

Far below the sea surface, the solid earth trembles. Avalanches of water are torn from the ocean and hurled down the slopes of the gale. A colossal darkening storm begins to move across the ocean. It sucks inward the hot, moist lower atmosphere and brings it along with it, using the vapor to feed its monstrous, seething caldron. Down here at the surface of the earth, its winds are warm and humid. Its tentacles—octopus-like arms—reach out with gale-driven torrents of rain and begin picking everything to pieces. After hours that seem like days, the central fury of the earth-blasting storm begins its devastation of man’s possessions.

And as it has proved to be unquestionably true that no two hurricanes are exactly alike, so it is evident now that the same hurricane is subject to massive changes from day to day. It has a life history. Like the caterpillar that is transformed into the cocoon and then into the butterfly, the tropical storm goes through definite stages. The problems involved for the hurricane hunters in each of these distinct stages demand separate solutions. Like a living thing, the monster has infancy, youth, middle age and decline.

In infancy, its malevolent forces are directed vigorously toward the mysterious removal of large quantities of air from above its gale-swept domain. The excessive heat and moisture of its birthplace yield far more energy than is needed to keep its mighty low-level winds in motion.

In youth, it is extremely violent and the removal of air brings exceedingly low pressure into its center. Its outer parts become ominously visible through the condensation of moisture on a grand scale, cloaking its internal mechanism. Its destructive forces spread. In this stage, the removal of air in upper regions continues in excess of the inflow at the bottom in proportion to the horizontal expansion of the system.

In middle age, its violent forces are directed toward maintenance of the colossal wind system. The total energy it can derive from heat and moisture no longer produces an outflow above in excess of the inflow of air at the bottom. It expands in the vertical and its visible parts push against the stratosphere. As it moves farther away from its birthplace and the available energy begins to decline, it dies. For a few days nature’s processes for the transport of moisture from the oceans to the thirsty continents have run amuck. Life and property suffered while torrential rains fell.