Storm Watchers The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin’s Kite to El Niño • john d. cox John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 01 cox part 1 6/20/02 11:16 AM Page 12 00 cox fm 6/20/02 11:16 AM Page i Storm Watchers The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin’s Kite to El Niño • john d. cox John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 00 cox fm 6/20/02 11:16 AM Page ii To my mother and father, elizabeth cox and ernest y. cox Copyright © 2002 by John D. Cox. 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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Cox, John, date. Storm watchers : the turbulent history of weather prediction from Franklin’s kite to El Niño / John Cox. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-471-38108-X (hardcover) 1. Weather forecasting—History. I. Title. QC995 .C79 2002 551.63'09—dc21 2002005222 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents • Introduction 1 part i A Newborn Babe 1. Benjamin Franklin: Chasing the Wind 5 2. Luke Howard: Naming the Clouds 13 3. James Glaisher: Taking to the Air 19 part ii American Storms 4. William C. Redfield: Walking the Path of Destruction 27 5. James P. Espy: “The Storm Breeder” 33 6. Elias Loomis: Mapping the Storm 41 7. Joseph Henry: Setting the Stage 51 8. Matthew Fontaine Maury: A Storm of Controversy 57 9. William Ferrel: A Shy Genius 65 part iii The Main Artery 10. Robert FitzRoy: Prophet Without Honor 75 11. Urbain J. J. Le Verrier: Clouds over Crimea 85 12. Cleveland Abbe: “Ol’ Probabilities” 91 13. John P. Finley: Down Tornado Alley 101 14. Mark W. Harrington: Civilian Casualty 109 15. Isaac Monroe Cline: Taking Galveston by Storm 117 iv • Contents 16. Gilbert Walker: The Southern Oscillation 125 17. C. LeRoy Meisinger: Death by Daring 135 part iv Together at the Front 18. Vilhelm Bjerknes: The Bergen Schoolmaster 147 19. Lewis Fry Richardson: The Forecasting Factory 155 20. Jacob Bjerknes: From Polar Front to El Niño 163 21. Tor Bergeron: A Gifted Vision 171 22. Carl-Gustaf Rossby: Conquering the Weather Bureau 179 23. Sverre Petterssen: Forecasting for D-Day 189 part v Suddenly New Science 24. Jule Gregory Charney: Mastering the Math 201 25. Jerome Namias: The Long Ranger 211 26. Edward N. Lorenz: Calculating Chaos 219 27. Tetsuya Theodore Fujita: Divining the Downburst 227 28. Ants Leetmaa: Out on a Limb 235 Bibliography 243 Index 247 Introduction • Weather forecasting has become a kind of appliance science, part of the electric rhythm of life, absorbed and applied without a second thought to the mundane questions of personal comfort and convenience. How cold will it be today? Or tomorrow? Or how hot? Will I need a sweater? An umbrella? A hat? Depending on the medium, its presentation can be brief and stylized to the point of wordless icons, or extended and elaborate, colorfully por- trayed with animated and entertaining visual effects. These productions relate knowledge that is different from the rest of the daily information stream. This is the future, the telling of atmospheric motions and events that have not happened yet. Weather forecasting is the product of meteorological science that comes from the edge of our most advanced capability, quantifying cir- cumstances of turbulence and chaos that are at the limits of probability. It is the numerical modeling output of some of the most powerful com- puters on the planet. This knowledge of the future is costly and difficult to acquire. It is so costly, in fact, its raw material so extensive, its reach so global, and its processing so computationally demanding that only governments can provide it. Day in and day out, weather prediction is more accurate and more useful than ever, more objective and more thoroughly scientific, although this trend of continuing improvement is not commonly recognized. So generally reliable is this prediction of the future, in fact, that its accuracy is taken for granted, like a public utility or a civil right. When it proves to be inaccurate, the occasion is widely remarked upon and not quickly forgotten. The daily weather forecast is a marvel of digital electronics, a set of facts that is intensely modified by computer from the first assimilation of raw data to its final graphical output on a screen. Routinely employed are data from sophisticated instruments aboard satellites, automated weather stations, radio-equipped balloons, airliners, ocean buoys, and 1 2 • Storm Watchers ships at sea. Its advanced and most accurate form, Numerical Weather Prediction, would not even be possible without the incredible speed and sophistication of supercomputers. Notwithstanding all of this artificial intelligence, the science of fore- casting weather is a triumph of human intelligence—the work of people. While modern weather science is the work of many, it is founded on the work of a relative few. These are the stories of some of the men who dis- covered how the atmosphere works and how to foretell its behavior. Their science has saved and continues to save many lives. An ancient dream of accurately predicting weather has been fulfilled. The storm watchers deserve to be remembered, many of them as heroes. part i A Newborn Babe • Knowledge of the weather is very old information on the human scale, and fear of it is older still. Was there ever a time when humans were not thinking about it one way or another, offering sacrifice or prayer, or pass- ing around advice? Scientific study of the weather, however, is a fairly recent turn of events, hardly more than two centuries old. The term mete- orology goes all the way back to Aristotle’s Meteorologica, written about 340 b.c., meaning the study of things that fall from the sky, although really nothing of the science comes down from that treatise. Weather science is young because it is so demanding. For most of his- tory, motions of the atmosphere defied accurate description. Although the primary instruments for measuring atmospheric changes—the thermo- meter, the barometer, and the hygrometer—go back 400 years and more to Galileo, Torricelli, and other European savants, understanding the use- fulness of these instruments was a long time coming. Meteorology had to wait for other sciences to define its basic principles and forces: relations of energy and mass, gravity and friction, thermodynamics, and the behav- ior of gases. At every step along the way, it seems, students of the atmos- phere underestimated the difficulty of the problems they were trying to solve, the depth of their mysteries. Progress has been irregular and fre- quently disappointing. Cobbling this principle to that law borrowed from physics or astronomy or chemistry, people who studied weather were gen- erally taking time out from more reliably fruitful pursuits. Many years would pass before weather gained sustained attention 3 4 • Storm Watchers from scientists. In its early stages from the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury to the middle of the nineteenth century, the study of weather was the avocation of learned gentlemen and natural philosophers, people with secure reputations in other fields. Every advance carried the burden of displacing other, more venerable explanations of the ways of the winds and the causes of storms. Doubters outnumbered supporters. The early weathermen were individuals who saw things differently than most peo- ple of their time. What they had in common was a special talent for obser- vation and an intuitive sense that discerned patterns and processes where others saw only randomness and tumult. When the science was young, the study of weather was an act of sturdy independence and courage. 1 Benjamin Franklin Chasing the Wind • It is typical of the history of meteorology that the modern study of storms should begin with the description of a spoiled astronomical event.