Around 1900 two brothers in Ohio asked the weather service where they could find certain conditions so they build gliders like some guys in France they had read about. Kitty Hawk N.C. had a weather station and the right conditions.
When I read about them there was a kind of question in my mind that never quite demanded an answer. This article nailed it.
For those scanning through comments, the eponymous 'problem of American storms' was apparently an actual specific debate in the day...
>> The argument had arisen between William C. Redfield, a New York businessman, and a prominent meteorologist by the name of James Espy, and it centered on whether the motion of storms—hurricanes, blizzards, thunderstorms—in North America were rotational or centripetal in nature. This seemingly dry, theoretical debate had somehow blown up, generating a surprising amount of contention, ad hominem attacks, and national coverage as meteorologists in both the United States and Europe took sides, but definitive answers remained elusive.
... it fills me with satisfaction that people were still making ad hominem attacks on each other over matters esotetic in the early 1800s.
If anyone is going to get really upset and argue with someone to death over a hard technical issue in 1800s, they are likely of the same archetype who would do it in the 2023:
>One former Signal Corps officer recounted a story of an observer-sergeant who pawned off his meteorological equipment to pay his gambling debts—a dereliction of duty that came to light only when a Signal Office inspector arrived on-site unannounced to discover the field station abandoned and the sergeant working out of the pawnshop where his instruments had been relocated.
Its funny reading the descriptions of weather for the eastern US. I tried explaining to someone just last week that what GA and NY call "rain" is not what we see in Seattle. Such that, "does it really rain a lot" is tough to answer. In very real terms, what they think of as rain is a once a year thing here.
Man, it's true. I'd heard Seattleites bragging about not owning umbrellas despite the rain, and I thought they were hardcore until I visited and realized that it hardly ever really rains there. It's mostly a continuous, pleasant light mist, like you might spritz yourself with on a hot day. You can stay out for hours in a cotton hoodie and your hair won't get wet.
In the 30+ years I've been in the Seattle area I've used my umbrella at least two orders of magnitude less than I used it in my prior 4 years in the Bay Area, 10 years in the Los Angeles area, 10 years in the San Joaquin valley, and 10 years in Riverside county east of Los Angeles.
I quickly learned that
(1) actually staying dry all the time here was hopeless unless I carried the umbrella all the time, and
(2) most of the time if I forget it the rain just got me slightly damp which wasn't all that bad (except for my glasses), and
(3) when the rain was intense enough that I would not want to brave it without my umbrella, it usually only took a few minutes before it was back to the slightly damp kind of rain
and so really only needed it to keep the rain off my glasses.
That was easy to address with a hat with a brim that was a two or three inches wide. Occasionally the rain is accompanied by wind, which led to a second hat that had a wider brim (to deal with rain coming in at an angle) and a chin strap.
I just joined the hat-wearers club here in Portland. I wear glasses, so rain on my face is very annoying, but rain on the rest of me doesn't really bother me much. I have what I'd call an "Indiana Jones style hat" made of some sort of fake leather looking fabric that's done a decent job so far.
As someone who recently lived in north GA, now temporarily in Florida, it's quite different too.
What someone would call a rainy day in GA ('I wake up, it's raining, and it rains all day') FL gets... maybe 4 non-hurricane days a year?
In contrast, rain in FL terms ('It's sunny, then the sky opens up and pours for 30 minute intervals between 3-6pm, between and after which it's also sunny') is essentially most of the summer.
I moved to Seattle from Utah. I. Utah when it rains it's big fat drops that splash on your face. You almost want to wear sunglasses to see.
That is relatively rare in Seattle area. It is really more of a mist most of the time. Where I live there are so many giant trees that even when it's "raining" you often stay pretty dry.
Wikipedia says that it rains 39.34 inches annually in Seattle. Is that a lot?
EDIT: I looked up NYC and the precipitation (Wikipedia lists precipitation and snow) is 49.52 inches. (I thought of a similar conversation from many years ago on the NYC or some other East Coast city compared to Seattle.)
Seattle has 156.2 rainy days. Not listed for NYC. I guess a lot less.
Seattle is more 'grey' than rainy. Which means things don't dry out, and it's really rough on Vitamin D levels. But not necessarily a lot of actual precipitation.
The Olympic or Cascade Mountain Ranges that roughly bracket Seattle get most of the actual precipitation. Even Snoqualmie which is right next to Seattle but a little higher gets ~ double the actual precipitation. Snoqualmie Pass (only ~ 3000 ft) nearby gets ~ 100 inches of precipitation, and 400 inches of snow on an average year.
> Wikipedia says that it rains 39.34 inches annually in Seattle. Is that a lot?
The precipitation in seattle (mist) and the precipitation in nyc ( rain ) are two different animals. For example, pretty much everyone in nyc owns an umbrella. Pretty much nobody in seattle owns an umbrella. Why would that be if it 'rains' more in seattle?
It's probably true that seattle gets more precipitation because it's constantly misty for 6 or 7 months. You can go weeks without seeing the sun in seattle. In nyc, the precipitation is mostly in the form of actual rain and downpours. You can dumped on and the clouds clear. Maybe a system will bring downpours for a couple of days. But it always clears. You rarely get dumped on in seattle and if so, for a short time frame. And the skies never clear. It just remains and annoys you with mist.
> Seattle has 156.2 rainy days.
Nope. Not rainy days. Maybe 6 rainy days and 150 misty days.
In the northeast, you can actual weather. In the west coast, it's flimsy weather. I've no other word to describe it. People who experienced both will get what I'm trying to say.
As the other responses note, I'd say it doesn't rain that much here. Now, oddly, it often looks like it has rained for far longer. And, in general, our rain season is the dark season, which sucks for other reasons.
Rain in the PNW tends to be via a high number of days with very low-intensity rainfall. Grey, drizzly days are common but downpours are relatively rare.
Hi from Seattle. It's currently raining, and I wish I'd left my jacket at home. We get an almost constant drizzle of wet in winter.
Once or twice a year, it'll rain for 48 hours straight and dump three inches of water on us, but the rest of the time, it's like unpleasantly heavy fog
I've thought about buying a weather station that tracks barometric pressure, sunlight, wind speed, direction, etc. but my house is surrounded by tall trees so the numbers would not be accurate. Some of these stations can report to the National Weather Service to give them more data.
I really like my Ambient Weather system, they sell on amazon. You get a cool display and can also shoot data out to any api collector you like such as Windy or Weather Underground or your own database.
Every now and then I wonder about weather from a historical perspective. What I find myself most curious about is whether we have documented evidence of what Native Americans thought of tornadoes. For tribes that lived out in the open on the plains, how did they avoid them? What did they think they were?
Avoid? Odds are extremely good that, if you live in “tornado alley” and never take any measures to avoid tornadoes, you’ll still not get hit by one your whole life. Good chance you’ll never even see one.
High-wind thunderstorms with bad hail, yes, you’ll certainly get hit by a few of those, and I would be curious how they coped with them.
Anecdata: I grew up in southeastern Iowa and have seen more tornadoes than I can remember. Every single summer you'd go to the basement at least three or four times due to tornado warnings. The Iowa State mascot is a "cyclone."
Yeah, been in at least a couple warnings (not watches—for those not from the region, a warning means a radar-detected tornado signature or a sighting from a reliable source, heading your way) a year my whole life. Don’t even know many people who’ve seen one. Never seen one myself, despite being in the set who’ll go outside when the sirens sound, if it’s daytime and the visibility’s good.
They’re scary in theory, and in-fact if you have bad luck, but the acreage directly damaged by a tornado every year just isn’t that big, considering the size of tornado country.
I doubt the natives living here had any particular strategy for avoiding tornados specifically, though they may have had beliefs and practices concerning them and certainly must have had things they did to stay safe in severe thunderstorms more generally. Not because they were incapable of coming up with such (far from it) but because direct experience with a tornado (not just seeing it, but having one come near enough for avoidance or even sheltering strategies to apply, beyond what you’d do for any stormy weather) is fairly rare.
I've seen funnel clouds probably a half dozen times. The area I'm in now got hit in the last 10 years. There have also been a couple instances of stright-line winds in the last 15 years bad enough to tear huge oak trees out of the ground. The severely impacted area is fairly small, but it certainly would have been a concern for people loving in this area.
That is correct. I have lived in Tornado Alley for a half century. Serious tornadoes have landed all over my local area over the years, but I have also never even seen so much as a funnel cloud. They can be devastating though, but are also very localized and do not last long. That said, I do take tornado alerts seriously.
I've passed through neighboring regions only a handful of times in my life and rarely failed to see at least a funnel. Spookiest was a funnel at the edge of a dust storm: it dipped up and down like a spring toy and looked almost alive.
I've also witnessed two waterspouts: one large, thankfully at a distance, and another at about a half-mile.
Dust devils are also another thing. I’ve spent tens of hours driving in the southwest and mountain west and have seen several. Years and years living in, and hundreds of hours on long drives through, tornado ally and adjacent still-tornado-heavy areas, and I’ve never seen a tornado.
if "western" films have any accuracy, you push your horse to lie down, back to the storm, and you lie against him in between his feet, under a buffalo skin
Um, no. No horse is lying down during a hailstorm. They're under a tree or some kind of shelter. If they can't find shelter, they're standing up, butt to the wind, head down and ready to bolt at any second.
Horses are get spooked in zero wind by inanimate objects that they just saw the prior week, in the same spot.
Horses get increasingly skittish the higher the wind gets, even in "normal" conditions - I guess it makes it so they can't smell things downwind of them, so it's an evolutionary thing.
When wind gets high, horses get really spooked.
No way in hell would I put myself between or anywhere near horse legs during a tornado. That's just asking to die. From the horse, not the tornado.
The last 24 hours it's been very windy and raining hard. The same horse that I pull out for extra feed twice a day, every day for months saw me in a jacket with my hood up and refused to have anything to do with me until I pulled the hood down and then he figured "ok, I know that guy."
I once had the misfortune to be riding a horse when a hailstorm broke out. The horse closed his eyes and almost ran off a cliff; thankfully he hit a fence first and turned away from that.
you don't know it's a hailstorm till you're in it, prior to that it's just a storm you see coming across the plain. And while a singular horse does get skittish, the idea here I think is that the horse finds the calm presence of its owner to be soothing.
It does vary by tribe, this is just one I had bookmarked. I researched the topic a few years ago after the Derecho event.
Also, these storms are one of the reasons why a lot of north american tribes didn't really nail down agriculture or settlement-building like the Aztecs did. When you plan on a storm deleting your construction once or twice a year, you optimize for something else.
And because I know there are a ton of coastal US folks here, east-of-Rockies / west-of-Appalachians has storms of a whole different breed. In terms of ferocity and suddenness.
And multiple subregions too. I grew up in an area with 'lake effect' and currently live in the open plains. The storms on the plains are way more impressive even though they don't last as long. Nothing better than sitting on the porch when a huge system is rolling over.
FWIW, that question is itself very modern. You can find the seeds of it in many cultures and histories, and analogize it to certain folk stories, but you can very successfully navigate a world that simply "is" without all that "what" and "why" business we get intensely caught up in now.
Having some cultural wisdom that reminds you to move camp under certain season, climate, or weather patterns will get your culture through lifetimes of tornadoes without ever spending much thought on "what" tornadoes are (whatever that even means).
Yeah I dunno, the Caddo and Wichita were pretty serious about folk science. They had real villages and farms and stuff. They weren’t just kinda camping out and going with the flow wherever ancestral memory took them.
Yeah, I'm not saying nobody outside of modernity thinks about "what" but that many cultures didn't/don't. And it's not even a matter of primitivism and in no way suggests some kind of meager culture. It just turns out that sophisticated cultures have gotten by without an exhaustive theory of "what", and that modernity's particular obsession is an idiosyncrasy rather than either an accomplishment or a universal.
(Edit: although, re-reading my comment from earlier, I can see what you responded to in it. I could have written it more clearly.)
For those just wanting to know what the “problem” was:
Their assumptions about climate being tied to latitude proved incorrect, as the extreme seasons and severe storms differed from the more moderate European climates. They were also unaware of how eastward-flowing air masses and the tail end of the Little Ice Age were affecting North American weather.
> And the tail end of a regional cooling period known as the Little Ice Age was, at the time of the Europeans’ arrival, still exacerbating North American winters.
What happened here? One theory of the Little Ice Age is that it was caused by the depopulation of the native Americans after exposure to the Europeans. That theory would have had a hard time getting off the ground if the Little Ice Age was wrapping up just as Europeans arrived in America.
But of course it turns out that that's not at all the case:
> The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. It was not a true ice age of global extent. The term was introduced into scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939. The period has been conventionally defined as extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries
When I read about them there was a kind of question in my mind that never quite demanded an answer. This article nailed it.