SMH Home
Home   >   Entertainment   >   Books   >   Article  

Storm Watchers; The Invention of Clouds

Reviewed by James Woodford
February 22 2003

Out of all we know about weather, the only real certainty is its unpredictability.

STORM WATCHERS: The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin's Kite to El Nino
By John D.Cox
John Wiley, 252pp, $44.95

THE INVENTION OF CLOUDS: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies
By Richard Hamblyn
Picador, 291pp, $40

As Canberra burned in January, I was on a remote beach on the south coast of NSW. Swimming in icy water, turned almost algae green by the weird light, I saw clearly that a rare weather event was unfolding - the sky was broadcasting a story of horror from the national capital. For days there had been so much smoke in the atmosphere that the shadows of clouds had been cast not only on the ground but up in the air, looking like strange grey smudges. That afternoon the sun shone like a sick, pink bauble, as did the moon that night.

It is no wonder humans are obsessed by the weather and feel so small when extreme weather strikes. Even on normal days it is our climate that decides what we can do and wear. When the sky loses its temper, however, it can slam jumbos down to earth as if they were toys hurled in a tantrum, fan flames that incinerate more than 500 homes in a few hours, and send a barrage of hail so fierce that more than a billion dollars worth of property can be destroyed in a few minutes. As a new generation of Australians has learnt over the past few years, weather is the original weapon of mass destruction.

If the skies were always kind then they would be boring. But they're not, which is what makes a book like Storm Watchers so engrossing. It contains 28 essays by the author, John D.Cox, and is most fascinating because he details the process of meteorological discovery rather than focusing on the science. Cox reveals how important personality seems to be to each modern breakthrough in the understanding of weather.

In an age where meteorologists have access to supercomputers and full-disk satellite images that show one side of the Earth in its entirety, it is hard to imagine what a revelation it was to discover that hurricanes rotate and storms move.

After the Great September Gale hit New York in 1821, a merchant and naval engineer, William C.Redfield, took a journey across New England. Cox writes: "Redfield happened to observe an interesting detail about the ravaged forests and fields across the landscape. It was there for anyone to see, of course, but it was not something that anybody had ever noticed before about the wreckage of such storms. In the apparent chaos was a large-scale pattern in the orientation of the trees blown down on September 3. Near his home in Middleton, Connecticut, the fallen trees were generally facing one direction, toward the north-west, and, in western Massachusetts, less than 70 miles distant, the trees were facing the opposite way.

"Only someone of an especially astute and open frame of mind was likely ever to see it: in the pattern of debris was an imprint of the shape of the storm ... What Redfield envisioned was an enormous progressive whirlwind, a violent flow of air rotating counterclockwise around the axis of a centre that was travelling from the south-west to the north-east with the prevailing winds."

The author also deals succinctly with another breakthrough in the understanding of weather - Luke Howard's classification of clouds in 1802. "Every meteorologist in every country of the world would learn to speak Luke Howard's Latin: cirrus, cumulus, stratus, nimbus," Cox writes.

Richard Hamblyn, in The Invention of Clouds, dedicates an entire book to the subject of Howard. Where Cox's book is like a buffet meal, full of delicious morsels, Hamblyn's is more like being forced to eat an oversized plate of stew. The idea of a book dedicated to how one man came up with some Latin names for clouds is better than the result.

In Hamblyn's book, there are indeed great moments and some wonderful insights into philosophy and 19th-century England. But you encounter too many sentences where the author seems to be trying to convince his audience of the greatness of Howard.

Of the night Howard presented his paper "On the Modification of Clouds", Hamblyn writes: "Everyone in the room was struck by the realisation of their presence at a moment of clarity, a moment when the world seemed suddenly to have been pulled more sharply, more richly, into focus. It was a moment of unparalleled insight: in naming the clouds, in bestowing their language over the course of an evening's lecture, Luke Howard had presided over a defining event in a new kind of natural history."

Hamblyn seems hell-bent on convincing the reader that their attention for 253 pages is justified. More than 100 pages later, he is still telling the reader how important Howard is.

By contrast, Cox deals with Howard in just four elegant pages before continuing his tour through meteorology. As Cox's book is as much about character as tempest, one of its themes is that a serious obstacle to weather forecasting has been jealousy and political manoeuvring.

There is no better example than the tragic tale of Mark W.Harrington, the first civilian chief of the US Weather Bureau. Regarded as a gifted scientist, Harrington ran up against Julius Morton, the agriculture secretary.

Morton, whom Cox describes as "immaculate of science", set about the long, slow professional torture of his weather bureau chief. The harassment of Harrington culminated in presidential intervention, which bought the scientist some time, but no reprieve from Morton. Eventually, the president agreed to Harrington's dismissal.

In 1899, Harrington left home and disappeared for a decade. He was found by his wife in 1908, a John Doe in a mental asylum.

Meteorology has more than its fair share of drama and scientists who have put their lives on the line for their research. In April 1924, for instance, Clarence Leroy Meisinger was in a balloon sailing through a thunderstorm above Illinois when he was fatally struck by a bolt of lightning.

There is the pivotal drama of the weather forecasters struggling to advise on the conditions likely to prevail for the D-Day landings during World War II. There is El Nino, thunderstorm downbursts and detailed descriptions of the people who developed the technology that brings us the weather report each evening.

For all the distance forecasting has travelled, perhaps the most important insight gained by scientists is that weather, in its detail, is chaotic.

No matter what science throws at the sky, anyone who tries to see more than a few days into the future is doomed to fail. As the discoverer of the chaos of weather, Edward Lorenz, said: "To the often-heard question: 'Why can't we make better weather forecasts?' I have been tempted to reply: 'Well, why should we be able to make any forecasts at all?"'

James Woodford is a Herald writer and the author of The Secret Life of Wombats (Text).




Also in Entertainment

Artists put human face of tragedy in new light

Wild man

Hollywood hits

A director pleased by any stretch of the audience's imagination

Lauded play casts snootiness aside

Peace petals and military chic - fashions for a season of war

Jacko wins round one

Harry Potter writer gets Simpsons role

Britney not that innocent, says Limp Bizkit front man

La Cenerentola