The first act of any prudent mariner is a check of the weather. You look up. You notice the clouds. You take in the wind on your face, it’s direction and force. You look at the water and compute the effect of waves against the vessel as you move away from the dock. Then you curse the weatherman for being all wrong. This ritual has existed since the dawn of time. It is the mariners right to curse the weather man. It says so right there in his contract!
The age of scientific discovery began with research into the nature of weather. In 1500, about the only tool man possessed to predict the weather was a good calendar. (Recall my recent article about the Arab navigator, Peri Reis, who wrote in his book the Kitab-i Bahriye:
“ A mariner shall note the day in which a storm has come, and marks it so on his calendar, and he will know that day is a day of storms.” Accurate weather prediction (a classic oxymoron) did not start until the late 1700’s. By then, two inventions were developed: the calibrated thermometer and the aneroid (“without liquid”) barometer.
Rude thermometers had existed for centuries. A drop of mercury in a glass tube was the device used by alchemists. A graduated, universally scaled thermometer was something altogether different. Both the French and the British developed their own. The Brits, ever different from the rest of Europe, used a system based on Fahrenheit measurements while the rest of Europe used Celsius. The aneroid barometer on the other hand was primarily a French invention. The aneroid measures the forces exerted by the pressure of the atmosphere on a partly evacuated thin metal element called a sylphon cell or aneroid capsule. The higher the pressure, the more the cell compressed. With a series of levers and a long pointer, highly accurate atmospheric pressure readings could be obtained.
Ben Franklin earned his reputation as a scientist primarily with his early research into weather. His famous kite-flying experiment was a just a small part of his research into what made weather and what weather does. Franklin set up the first weather recordings in the U.S. and proved the nature of lightning as an electrical discharge. Still, what Franklin could not do was accurately predict the arrival of major storms. No one could.
The problem was one of communication. Back when, storms moved faster than man had the ability to communicate over distances, but moved slowly by modern standards. A storm moving across the land at twenty-five miles an hour was moving rapidly. Today, twenty-five is the speed limit in a school zone. No man ever went faster than 25 mph until after the invention of the first steam powered boats and locomotives, arriving in history in the mid-19th century. Until then, storms simply outran man’s ability to communicate. Telegraphs helped, but not a whole lot. Weather systems were still not much understood and weather stations were too widely spaced to offer the kinds of information necessary for accurate weather predictions.
Early in our nation’s history, farmers relied on almanacs. The Farmer’s Almanac contained pages of weather guesses and home-styled prediction methods, which stories today we take as wonderful old wives tales, such as if a dog gets a thick undercoat in late summer, expect a hard winter; if the squirrels grow a thin coat, the spring will come early; if the groundhog comes out, plant your seeds; and of course as kids we all learned about the wooly caterpillars. But at the turn of the century almanacs were all farmers had to go on.
Sailors were a little better off, but not by much. Virginian Matthew F. Murray studied ocean currents, mapping the Gulf Stream using temperature variations in the ocean. He researched ships logs and managed to put together a fairly accurate seasonal description of the oceans, and when and where the winds came from for each month of the year. His early pilot charts were exceptionally accurate given the tools available around 1850.
However, all the tools necessary for rudimentary weather predictions existed by 1900 and communications through telegraph lines could pass information from one station to the next, yet accurate weather forecasting remained the stuff of dreams. Something else was needed, and that something came around 1920: the airplane. After WWI, American pilots began using airplanes to carry passengers and – more importantly – mail across the United States. As far as government was concerned, passengers could fend for themselves, but mail was an entirely different matter so small grass airstrips sprouted up all across the country. America’s imagination was captured by the daring-do of those pioneering aviators, flying their fragile wood and canvas biplanes over the wheat and corn fields. The speed of man soon reached over 100 mph, and by 1925, planes could fly across some entire states without ever landing.
But this created a problem for the federal government. The weather in Georgia was likely to be different from the weather in Virginia or, say, Texas. A plane carrying mail could fly into a violent storm and be lost, so It didn’t take long before many airstrips were connected by telegraph, then radio. Weather information was quickly disseminated and a system of charting weather information was developed, thus the first means of coordinated real weather prediction was underway.
Only in the last 75 years or so has man had the means necessary to accurately predict large weather patterns and only in the last 25 years have we been able to more accurately predict the motions of large “killer storms” like hurricanes. Weather satellites are the latest and greatest tools, broadcasting satellite photos received all over the world. At sea, weather fax and Navtex machines receive accurate forecast information and weather charts. Remember the scene in the movie The Perfect Storm, where captain Linda Greenlaw is yelling at captain Billy Tyne over the radio, “LOOK AT YOUR FAX, LOOK AT YOUR FAX, DAMMIT! YOU’RE HEADING RIGHT INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE MONSTER!!”. No large vessel goes to sea without such devices on the bridge, and captains study weather charts with regularity. Yet still, we’ve all seen videos of cruise ships unwittingly getting caught in violent storms and huge seas.
So why, with all the weather stations, weather prediction tools, computer models and satellites does the mariner still curse the weather man? Mostly because it’s his right to do so as long as men go to sea in ships. Perfection is still unattainable in weather forecasting. The variables are still just too great. Even with the massive super computers and weather models of today analyzing all the weather data that comes in, it’s still impossible to predict with total accuracy (think “Spaghetti Models”) if and exactly where an afternoon storm will form.
And always keep in mind the old captain’s and pilot’s meteorological credo: If it’s a question of go or don’t go, you don’t go.