The Hurricane Hunters

by Ivan Ray Tannehill

Observations from the islands came in by cable and from the American coasts they came by telegraph. In some areas this information served very well, but far from land—in the open Atlantic, Caribbean, or Gulf—there was not much to go on. Along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, the last resort before putting up the red flags with black centers was the experienced observer who had an unobstructed view of the open sea. Even with the best of such reports, there was always a question as to whether it was a big storm with its center far out or a small storm with its center close by. This fact, plus the rate of forward motion of the storm, could make a vital difference. A big, slow-moving storm gave plenty of warning but a small, fast-moving one brought destructive winds and tides almost as soon as the warnings could be sent out and the flags hoisted.

Aside from these indications, the storm hunters depended heavily on the behavior of tropical storms in different parts of the season. They had average tracks by months, showing how storms had moved both in direction and speed, and much other information on their normal behavior. But all too often hurricanes took an erratic course, and now and then the center of a big one described a loop or a track shaped like a hairpin. A few of the storm hunters thought that some upper air movement—a “steering current”—controlled the hurricane’s path. The most obvious influence of this kind is the general air circulation over the Atlantic—the large anticyclone nearly always centered over the ocean near the Azores but often extending westward to Bermuda or even to the American mainland.

In the central regions of the Atlantic High, the modern sailor, unlike his predecessor in the sailing ship, is delighted by calms or gentle breezes and fair weather. On its northern edge, storms pass from America to Europe, stirring the northern regions of the ocean. On its southern edge, we find the trade winds reaching down into the tropics and turning westward across the West Indies and the Bahamas. A chart of these prevailing winds gives a fairly good indication of the ocean currents. Some of the surface waters are cold, some warm. And where they wander through the tropics as equatorial currents or counter-currents, they are hot and, other things being favorable, we find a birthplace of storms. In some other tropical regions, the waters are cold and no hurricanes form there.

Near the equator, the earth is girdled by a belt of heat, calms, oppressive humidity, and persistent showers. This belt is called the “doldrums.” The trade winds of the Northern Hemisphere reach to its northern edge, while the trades below the equator brush its southern margin. Tropical storms form now and then in and along the doldrum belt at certain seasons—just why, no one knows, for there are hundreds of days when everything seems right for a cyclone but nothing happens except showers and the miserable sultriness of the torrid atmosphere.

Stripped to his waist, the sailor sits on his bunk at night without the slightest exertion while perspiration descends in rivulets from his head and shoulders. Nothing seems capable of making any appreciable change in this monotonous regime. But eight or ten times a year on the Atlantic, in summer or autumn, a storm rears its head in this oppressive atmosphere. Its winds turn against the motions of the hands of a clock, seemingly geared to the edges of the vast, fair-weather whirlwind centered in mid-ocean. Around the southern and western margins of this great whirl the storm moves majestically, gaining in power which it takes in some manner from the heat and humidity—a power which would drain the energies of a thousand atom bombs. The crowning clouds push to enormous heights and deploy ahead of the monster—a foreboding of destruction in its path. Here is one of the great mysteries of the sea. Its heated surface lets loose great quantities of moisture which somehow feed the monster—that we know—but what sets it off is almost as much of a mystery as it was in the time of Columbus.

Until lately, the investigators trying to study the hurricane in motion across the earth were as handicapped as if they had been stricken blind and dumb when its great cloud shield enveloped them. The darkening scud and rain shut off all view of the upper regions by day and left them in utter darkness by night. No word came from ships caught in its inward tentacles until long afterward, when the survivors had come into port. Balloons tracing its winds disappeared in the clouds and were carried away. A method of following them above the clouds would have helped in the understanding of the upper regions in the same way that reports from sailing ships had helped in the study of the surface winds. This was the situation at the end of the Spanish War. But a new era was opening.

As the century came to a close, Marconi was getting ready to span the far reaches of the Atlantic with his wireless apparatus. Already the miracle of the telephone carrying the human voice by wire had become a practical reality, with more than a million subscribers in the United States, but it was not destined to be used across the ocean for many years. Even that accomplishment would not have afforded much help to the storm hunters. They had tried transoceanic messages for weather reporting when submarine cables were laid across the Atlantic. Some weathermen thought at first that it would be possible to pick up reports of storms on the American Coast and, allowing a certain number of days for them to cross the Atlantic, to predict their arrival in Europe. This failed to work, for many storms die or merge with others en route, and so many new disturbances are born in mid-Atlantic that it is necessary to have reports every day from all parts of the ocean to tell when storms are likely to approach European shores.

In 1900, Marconi was building a long distance transmitting station in England, and readable signals had been sent over a span of two hundred miles. No one then could foresee the strange roles that this remarkable invention would play in storm hunting but it was obvious that messages could be sent across long distances between ships at sea and from ship to shore. Already wireless had been used successfully between British war vessels on maneuvers. Actually, it was destined to be a powerful ally of the men who searched for hurricanes and reported their progress, but eventually this trend reversed itself and radio was the cause of tropical storms being found and then lost again in critical circumstances.

The spread of wireless across the oceans began while the American people still had vividly in mind the most terrible hurricane disaster in the history of the United States. The nation had been shocked by news of a “tidal wave” which had virtually destroyed Galveston, Texas, on the night of September 8, 1900, and killed more than six thousand of its citizens. Really it was not a tidal wave but a West Indian hurricane of almost irresistible force which had raised the tide to heights never known before and then topped it with an enormous storm wave as the center struck the low-lying island.

There was good reason to expect a disaster of this kind. A number of bad hurricanes had hit Galveston in the nineteenth century. The first of which we have any reliable record struck the island in 1818, when it was nothing more than a rendezvous for pirates, principally the notorious Jean Lafitte. It is known that he was in full possession there in 1817, and it was rumored that he and his pirate crews were caught in the hurricane of 1818 and had four of their vessels sunk or driven on shore.