Toomey - Stormchasers : the Hurricane Hunters and their fateful flight into Hurricane Janet

Preface

Technology has a way of numbing us to history. It is easy to take for granted the comforts made possible by science and engineering, easy to forget the everyday hardships experienced by the human species during most of its existence. This cultural amnesia is perhaps nowhere more evident than in our relationship with the earths weather. In an era of satellite images, Doppler radar, computer models, and three-dimensional time-lapsed animations, in an era when anyone with access to cable television or the Internet can learn the five-day forecast for Kansas City or western Zimbabwe, it comes as a mild shock to realize that until the mid nineteenth century there could be no certain knowledge of whether it was raining or snowing at a location even a few miles distant. To be sure, there was a great deal of uncertain knowledge. Most preindustrial societies accumulated a wealth of meteorological folk wisdom, and a corresponding appreciation of natural indicators. Mackerel clouds, rings around the moon, red sky at morningall are traditional and fairly reliable signs of storms. The rippled altocumuli called mackerel clouds often precede steady rain or snow; those rings are reflections off cirrostratus clouds that often signal an approaching frontal system; and a red sky is made when the clouds of a storm system approaching from the west are illuminated by the rays of the rising sun.

It is true that our present insulation from the natural world has been purchased at the cost of such awareness. But it is also true that we have a tendency to romanticize prehistoric or preindustrial peoples, attributing knowledge of natural forces where there was only rumor and anecdote. For the preindustrial world, reliable weather forecasting was all but nonexistent. A practiced eye could see changes in clouds, and the barometer, in use since the 1660s, could hint at an approaching storm. But most meteorological knowledge was confined to conditions that were local and current. Matters began to improve greatly in the mid nineteenth century, when the telegraph made possible communication between weather stations at great distances. But it was only in the 1930s that the radiosonde allowed meteorologists a glimpse of atmospheric conditions at high altitudes, and only in the last forty years have Earth-orbiting satellites shown us the weather half a world away.

Among the more interesting periods in the history of our understanding of the atmosphere were the 1950s. In some ways, weather prediction was primitive. Graphical representations of weather systems were made with a marker pen on chart paper, and the most elaborate three-dimensional models of hurricanes were a few handfuls of cotton glued together to approximate the familiar anvil shape. Long-range airborne radar would have to wait for the next generation of aircraft, and the first televised picture from a satellite would not appear until 1960. It would be nearly a decade after that before the U.S. Navy would deploy its network of moored oceanic buoys, and forecasters would begin to detect wind speeds with Doppler radar. Although ground-based radar systems existed at some sites along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, the great majority of reports of developing storm systems came from ships that happened to be in their vicinity. Most events on the open ocean went unobserved.