Storm

by George R. Stewart

  Upon the present map four such storms stood out boldly—concentricities of black-pencil curves about centers marked LOW, the curves sharpening to angles as they crossed certain red, blue, or purple lines. Sylvia was a vigorous storm now centering over Boston; it—or she—had just brought heavy snowfall to the northeastern states and was now moving out to sea, leaving a cold-snap behind. Felicia was a weak disturbance over Manitoba; she had little past and probably not much future. Cornelia was a large mature storm centering four hundred miles at sea southeast of Dutch Harbor. Antonia, young and still growing, was moving out into mid-ocean some two thousand miles behind Cornelia. In spite of their distances apart, the storms overlapped, and a curved belt of disturbed weather thus extended from Nova Scotia clear across to Japan.

  In the western United States, however, and over the adjacent part of the Pacific Ocean the black curves nowhere crossed colored lines or sharpened to angles; they lay far apart and were drawn about points marked HIGH. To the Junior Meteorologist these were all obvious signs of clear calm weather. In the jargon of his trade, this region was covered by “the semi-permanent Pacific High.” He looked at it malignantly. Then he smiled, for he noticed that the High had today accidentally assumed the shape of a gigantic dog’s head. Rising from the Pacific waters it looked out stupidly across the continent. The blunt nose just touched Denver; the top of the head was in British Columbia. A small circle over southern Idaho supplied an eye; three concentric ovals pointing southwest from the California coast furnished a passable ear.

  Dog’s head or not—the Pacific High was no laughing matter for California. While it remained, every storm advancing in boldly from the Pacific would sheer off northeastward. A drenching rain would pour down upon the south Alaskan coast and Vancouver Island; a steady drizzle in Seattle and Portland. But San Francisco and the Great Valley would have only cloud, while still farther south Los Angeles would continue to bake in the sunshine. In its actuality, invisible to man’s eye, the Pacific High lay upon the map as clearly as a mountain range—and not less important than the Sierra Nevada itself in its effects upon the people of California.

  Far away from the American coast, in the upper left-hand corner of the map, long lines which were close together and almost parallel ran from the interior of Asia southward to China and then curved eastward into the Pacific. To the Junior Meteorologist this too was a commonplace—the visible sign of that great river of wind, the winter monsoon, at work pouring out the cold air from Siberia. He noted in passing that the temperature at Peiping was eight below zero Fahrenheit. With more professional interest he let his eyes follow along those curving lines which ran into the Pacific.

  Here and there in this region as elsewhere in the ocean he saw a little cluster of notations representing the weather reports furnished by radio from some vessel. Over one of these he paused. The ship, three hundred miles southeast of Yokohama, had reported a barometric pressure of 1011, but by its position on the map it should have reported about 1012. A difference of one millibar, he realized, was inconsiderable and might easily result from an inaccurate barometer or from a careless reading of the instrument. For these reasons he had at first permitted himself to neglect this particular report. But now he reconsidered.

  The ship’s position was about half way between the island weather-stations of Hatidyosima to the north and Titijima to the south, about two hundred miles distant from each. But the temperature of the air at the ship was only two degrees warmer than at Hatidyosima, whereas it was twelve degrees colder than at Titijima. This was clear indication that the ship had already been engulfed in the cooler air which was sweeping out with the monsoon, and that somewhere between the ship and the southern island the cooler air which had come from the north would be pushing against the warmer southern air. He himself had already recognized this fact by drawing a blue line, indicative of a “cold front,” from the center of Antonia westward and southward clear to the Chinese coast. Along such a boundary between cool and warm air a new storm was almost certain to form somewhere.

  No other ships reported from that vicinity. Glancing at the wind-arrows of the two island stations, he saw that they tended to contradict rather than confirm the reading of the ship’s barometer. Hatidyosima had a northeast wind instead of northwest; Titijima a west wind instead of south or southwest. Practically, he realized, the whole matter was of no importance, but he felt the twinge of scientific curiosity and the challenge of a difficult problem.

  Methodically he checked back over the maps of the last ten days, and determined that there had never before been an occasion to doubt the accuracy of the reports from this particular ship. He paused a moment with eraser held above the blue line. The ship’s barometer-reading, he considered, along with the general probability of the whole situation indicated an incipient storm. The failure of the island reports to confirm would mean only that the disturbance was as yet too small to have affected them. This in itself lent a piquancy, for seldom was it possible to spot a storm so close to its beginning.

  He erased a little section of the blue line, and drew in a red line at such an angle as to indicate a shallow wave. Then around the crest of the wave as center he drew a black line in the shape of a tiny football; this he labeled 1011, and inside it he printed, in minute letters, LOW. So much accomplished, he again surveyed his work, and smiled.

  As a baby possesses the parts of the adult, so the baby storm displayed as in caricature the features of a mature storm. The red line symbolized the “warm front” along which the southern air was advancing and sliding over the northern; the blue line symbolized the “cold front” where the northern air was advancing and pushing beneath the southern. The black line shaped like a football was an isobar, indicating a barometric pressure of 1011 around the center of low pressure, symbolizing also the complete circuit of winds around that point. As a baby is without teeth, so also the storm was lacking in some attributes of maturity. But just as surely as a baby is a human being, so also was his new discovery a storm in charming miniature—provided always that he had rightly analyzed the situation.

  For a moment he looked contentedly at his creation, and then glanced over the Pacific, considering the future. The general set-up seemed to indicate that in the next twenty-four hours the new storm would move rapidly eastward. As it moved, it could grow both in area and in intensity; its winds becoming stronger, its rains heavier.

  Suddenly his fingers itched for a slide-rule. He remembered his training under professors who considered weather a branch of physics; his own thesis—almost entirely complicated equations—had won him High Honors. Such equations now flashed into his mind with photographic exactitude; they dealt with velocities and accelerations, with the Coriolis force, and frictionless horizontal rectilinear flow. They contained such delightful terms as ½Ait2, ΔT0,0, and 2mvω sin ϕ. To a well-trained mathematical meteorologist they were more beautiful than Grecian urns.

  He shrugged his shoulders. The local Weather Bureau had to deal in immediate practicality; there was little need and no time for mathematical abstractions. And besides—he was forced to admit—with data supplied by a single ship and by weather stations two hundred miles from the center of activity, the application of highly refined methods was hardly warranted.

  With resignation he again turned his attention to the map, and considered the lonely cluster of notations in the ocean. That particular ship, he presumed, had just passed through the area of disturbance. In a few hours it had probably crossed the boundary between warm and cold air more than once, and had experienced changeable but not very pronounced weather. The ship was moving west; the storm, like all such storms, was moving easterly. Ship and storm would not meet again, and yet for a moment the two lingered together in his thoughts. Doubtless the ship would be of interest to sailors, but to him it seemed wholly dull and mechanical. It might be one of twenty built to the same specifications, indistinguishable from the others unless you were close enough t
o read the name. But the storm! He felt the sudden rise of feeling along his spine. A storm lived and grew; no two were ever the same.

  This one—this incipient little whorl, come into being southeast of Japan—would live its own life, for good or for bad, just as much as some human child born the same hour. With the luck of favorable conditions it would grow and prosper to a fine old age for a storm; just as possibly it might languish, or be suddenly annihilated.

  There remained one other detail, and this called for no marks on the map. He must name the baby. He considered a moment for more names in -ia, and thought of Maria. It was more homely than Antonia or Cornelia; it did not even sound like them. But it was a name. And, as if he had been a minister who had just christened a baby, he found himself smiling and benign, inchoately wishing it joy and prosperity. Good luck, Maria!

  SECOND DAY

  1

  As a crab moves on the ocean-bottom, but is of the water, so man rests his feet upon the earth—but lives in the air. Man thinks of the crab as a water-animal; illogically and curiously, he calls himself a creature of the land.

  As water environs the crab, so air surrounds, permeates, and vivifies the body of man. If traces of noxious gas mingle with it, he coughs and his complexion turns deathly gray. If it becomes overcharged with water-droplets, he gropes helplessly in fog. If it moves too fast, he becomes a pitiable wind-swept creature, cowering in cellars and ditches. Even for rain he is dependent on air. If actually removed from air, he dies immediately.

  Physicists describe the air as tasteless, odorless, and invisible. It could not well be otherwise. But these are not so much its qualities as adjustments of man. For if the air impressed the senses, being at the same time all-pervasive, it would necessarily obscure all other tastes, odors, and sights.

  Air is so bound up with man’s life that only with difficulty can he realize its existence as something in itself. To a savage it is as much an abstraction as consciousness; a child can conceive wind, which is air in motion, but not air itself. In our own language, wind, mist, and rain are ancient words, but air is a late and learned borrowing of a Greek word, which itself originally meant wind.

  In his pre-natal months, indeed, man is aquatic. But thrust forth into the atmosphere—small and red—he sucks in a first breath spasmodically, and owes his allegiance to air. Seventy years later, a nurse stands by an old man’s bed, waiting for what is known as “the last breath.”

  Even among the so-called land-animals, man is less than most bound to the earth. His tree-dwelling ancestors may have descended to the ground furtively, as to a foreign and hostile region; in civilization people spend most of their time upon raised platforms called floors.

  As individual men move in a too well-known landscape without noticing its features, so man—fallaciously—takes for granted the all-pervasive air. His historians deal in lands and seas. But most movements of peoples have been not so much quests for better countries as for better atmospheric conditions. “A place in the sun” explains much of history more exactly than we usually realize, except that just as often we should say, “A place in the rain.” A thunderstorm in hay-time may overthrow a ministry, and a slight average rise or fall of temperature may topple a throne; a shift in the storm-track can ruin an empire. In the twentieth century a temporary variation of rainfall put Okies upon the highway by the hundred-thousand, just as in the third century a similar shift might in a single year hurl the Huns against the Chinese frontier and set the blue-painted Caledonians swarming at Hadrian’s Wall. In the mass as in the individual, man is less a land-animal than a creature of the air.

  2

  At five minutes to four on January mornings there was never any sign of dawn. Few buildings showed lights, and the Chief, still sleepy, felt himself steering from street-lamp to street-lamp like the captain of a coastwise steamer laying his course from one lighthouse to the next. An occasional truck passed by, showing that even at that hour the city did not entirely give over activity.

  One advantage of getting to work so early was that at least you had no parking troubles. As he walked across to Tom’s All-Night Coffee Shop, he took a professional survey of weather conditions. No moon, stars bright everywhere, cloudless; fresh breeze from the northwest; temperature safely above frost; a typical winter morning for San Francisco.

  “Fair and warmer,” said Tom.

  “If it doesn’t rain,” replied the Chief, completing the formula begun so many years back that they had forgotten the original joke.

  “Orange juice, coffee, snail.”

  “Right, Chief,” said Tom, putting a morning paper on the counter.

  The Chief glanced at the headlines without enthusiasm—rumbles of war, labor crises, political strife. He felt a stirring of pride at his own international profession in which you were pitted against natural forces, not your fellow-men. By association of thought he glanced out of the window. A row of electric lights now shone brightly from the flat roof of the Federal Building just across the street; one of the boys must just have gone up to read the instruments. Tom’s clock pointed at four—but that meant noon, Greenwich time. At this minute, everywhere, observers in weather stations were peering at thermometers and barometers and scanning the sky to see how much of it was cloud-covered.

  He had a sudden thought of the whole world and all those observers. In London and Paris they would read the instruments and have plenty of time left before lunch. In Rio it was nine in the morning; in New York, seven. Here on the Pacific Coast men turned out sleepily at a very inconvenient hour. But Alaska was even worse off. By the time you got around to New Zealand, the observer most likely stayed up till he read his instruments and went to bed afterward. The Japs had an easy time of it—about nine in the evening. In Bombay it might be sundown; in Athens and Cape Town, early afternoon. Ships at sea changed hours as they moved. And what about the Arctic stations? There it was night all winter anyway, and perhaps a man arranged his private life by whatever time was most convenient.

  He came back from his survey of the world as Tom set breakfast before him.

  “What’ya goin’ t’give us t’day, Chief?”

  “Hn-n? Nothing much today, Tom, I don’t believe.”

  “Time y’were scarin’ somethin’ up for us. Sure could use a rain.”

  Tom moved off to a new customer. The drought was really getting bad, the Chief reflected, when the proprietor of an all-night-restaurant began talking about it.

  Down the counter Tom was obviously telling the newcomer who the other fellow was. The Chief had long known that he was Tom’s most treasured exhibit. He could hear the not-too-well-muffled voice.

  “Yessir, that’s Old Weather Man himself.”

  “Yu-don’t-say!” The Chief caught the tone of mingled surprise and awe. A lot of people, he knew from experience, never quite sensed any difference between predicting weather and making weather.

  Tom’s coffee still warm within him, the Chief walked along the lighted corridor on the top floor of the Federal Building. On the right were the Administration offices; on the left, the Climatological Division. Both were still dark. Only ahead could he see light shining through a glass door; it bore the words: FORECASTING DIVISION. At that point the Chief felt his regular tingle of professional pride. Administration—that meant stenographers and mailing-lists and pay-checks, just what you found in a thousand other offices in the city. Climatology—that was only endless statistics about dead weather. But Forecasting—that was the battle-line.

  “Hello, Whitey. . . . How are you, boys? . . . Any reports in yet?”

  “Nothing yet, sir,” said Whitey.

  In the chart room stood a long table divided into four sections, a draftsman’s stool at each. On the nearest stool sat the new Junior Meteorologist; he had almost finished the plotting of air soundings taken at various Pacific Coast stations that night. The Chief looked at the graphs. Phoenix, San Diego, Burb
ank. The lines ran upward and inclined off to the left; here and there they showed angles; a definite reversal of direction marked the point at which each balloon had entered the stratosphere. Oakland, Medford, Spokane. In a minute his practiced brain had summarized what was happening in the upper air over the district.

  The next chart displayed the winds of the western United States at two-thousand-foot intervals from the surface up to fourteen thousand feet. Upon the first map the arrows pointed in many directions, for at the surface local relations of hill and valley were often the determining factors. The two- and four-thousand-foot maps were largely blank, for the mountain stations were actually above that level. At six and eight thousand the map filled in, and a fairly simple wind-pattern began to appear. At ten thousand and higher all the winds were strong and from the west.

  Just as the Chief was finishing his survey, the sudden click of a teletype-machine sounded from the next room. Involuntarily, he smiled. It was like a bugle-call. During the next hour his life would move at its fastest.

  “Who’s chart-man this morning?” he said.

  “I am, sir,” said Whitey.

  “Good.”

  The Chief turned from the long table to the smaller one which stood in a windowed alcove. His own chair was in the alcove facing inward. Opposite it, across a large table, was a chair for the chart-man. On the table lay a large outline map of North America and the adjacent waters, a tiny circle representing each weather station. As yet only the local report had been entered; the wind-arrow and little cluster of figures at San Francisco stood lonely and conspicuous against the vast area of continent and ocean.

  By now more than one teletype was sounding. Whitey came in with the first batch of reports, settled into his seat, and with a fine-pointed fountain pen began entering the data. An arrow graphically indicated wind-direction, and the number of barbs the wind-force. The amount and design of the shading within the tiny circle showed cloud conditions. Figures and other symbols served to record pressure, temperature, humidity, and other conditions as needed. North Platte, Concordia, Omaha, Sioux City. The map no longer looked so empty in the region of the Missouri Valley. Knoxville, Charlotte, Atlanta, Charleston. Whitey was working with the speed and accuracy of a machine. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Washington.