Waters of the World

by Sarah Dry

  37 Robert H. Scott, Instructions for the Use of Meteorological Instruments (London: J. D. Potter, 1875), 9–10.

  38 Robert Brain and M. Norton Wise, “Muscles and Engines: Indicator Diagrams and Helmholtz’s Graphical Methods,” in Universalgenie Helmholtz: Rückblick nach 100 Jahren, ed. Lorenz Krüger (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994), 124–145; and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (1992): 81–128.

  39 Lorraine Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy,” Representations 136, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 45–71; and Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (London: Picador, 2001).

  40 Ralph Abercromby, Seas and Skies in Many Latitudes, Or Wanderings in Search of Weather (London: Edward Stanford, 1888).

  41 William Clement Ley, Cloudland: A Study on the Structure and Character of Clouds (London: Edward Stanford, 1894), vii.

  42 “Manchester Photograpic Society,” British Journal of Photography (22 December 1876): 609.

  43 Brück and Brück, Peripatetic Astronomer, 217.

  44 Charles Piazzi Smyth, Cloud Forms That Have Been at Clova, Ripon, 1892–1895, 3 vols., Archives of the Royal Society.

  45 H. H. Hildebrandsson and Teisserenc de Bort, International Cloud Atlas (Paris: 1896), 15.

  46 Piazzi Smyth, introductory note, Cloud Forms, 5, 7.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 Biographical sources on Walker include S. K. Banerji, “Sir Gilbert Walker CSI, ScD, FRS,” Indian Journal of Meteorology and Geophysics 10, no. 1 (1959): 113–117; Geoffrey Taylor, “Gilbert Thomas Walker, 1868–1958,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 (November 1962): 166–174; J. M. Walker, “Pen Portrait of Gilbert Walker, CSI, MA ScD, FRS,” Weather 52, no. 7 (1997): 217–220; and, on Walker’s work with the Indian Meteorological Department, D. R. Sikka, “The Role of the India Meteorological Department, 1875–1947,” in Uma Das Gupta, ed., Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, c. 1784–1947, 381–421, vol. 15, part 4, of D. P. Chattopadhyaya, ed., History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization (Delhi: Pearson-Longman). For a sustained treatment of Walker’s work on the Southern Oscillation, see Richard Grove and George Adamson, El Niño in World History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), especially chapter 5, “The Discovery of ENSO,” 107–137; and Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), especially part 3, “Decyphering El Niño,” 211–239.

  2 The Queen’s Empire: A Pictorial and Descriptive Record, Illustrated from Photographs, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1897–1899), 120.

  3 Frederik Nebeker, Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1995), 197n21.

  4 Nebeker, Calculating the Weather, 21.

  5 Deborah Coen, “Climate and Circulation in Imperial Austria,” Journal of Modern History 82, no. 4 (2010): 846.

  6 Julius von Hann, Handbook of Climatology, trans. Robert De Courcey Ward (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 2.

  7 Climate scientists today still use these techniques, and the assumptions they share with Hann (that it is useful to consider some periods of climate as fundamentally stable) continue to shape the way we understand climate. See Mike Hulme, Suraje Dessai, Irene Lorenzoni, and Donald Nelson, “Unstable Climates: Exploring the Statistical and Social Constructions of ‘Normal’ Climate,” Geoforum 40 (2009): 197–206.

  8 Hann, Handbook, 2.

  9 See Coen, “Climate,” 846; and Deborah Coen, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 139–143.

  10 “Notes from India,” Lancet 157, no. 4045 (15 June 1901): 1713.

  11 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 26.

  12 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 32.

  13 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 146.

  14 Report of the Indian Famine Commission 1880, part 1 (Parliamentary Paper, c. 2591), vol. 52 (1881): 25.

  15 Times of India, 11 June 1902.

  16 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 152–155.

  17 Biographical material on Walker is from Geoffrey Taylor, “Gilbert Thomas Walker, 1868–1958,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 (1962): 166–174; and Walker, “Pen Portrait.”

  18 Cited in Taylor, “Walker,” 168.

  19 Letter from Cleveland Abbe to Gilbert Walker, February 24, 1902, in Gilbert Walker Papers, Science Museum Library Archive, MS2012/39.

  20 Frank Cundall, Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1886), 116.

  21 Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 260–261.

  22 Norman Lockyer, “Sunspots and Famines,” Nineteenth Century 2, no. 9 (1877): 583–602.

  23 Imperial Gazetteer of India, chapter 3, “Meteorology” (London: Clarendon Press, 1909), 104.

  24 Norman Lockyer, “The Meteorology of the Future,” Nature 8 (12 December 1872): 99.

  25 Cited in J. Norman Lockyer and W. W. Hunter, “Sunspots and Famine,” Nineteenth Century (1877): 591.

  26 Clerke, Popular History, 176. See also Helge Kragh, “The Rise and Fall of Cosmical Physics: Notes for a History, c. 1850–1920,” https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3890, accessed 17 December 2018.

  27 Balfour Stewart and Norman Lockyer, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” Macmillan’s Magazine 18, no. 106 (August 1868): 319–327, at 327.

  28 Lockyer and Hunter, “Sunspots and Famine,” 585.

  29 Lockyer and Hunter, “Sunspots and Famine,” 602.

  30 “Friday August 19, Subsection of Astronomy and Cosmical Physics, Chairman Sir John Eliot,” Report of the Seventy-Fourth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Held at Cambridge in August 1904 (London: John Murray, 1905), 456.

  31 Report on the Administration of the Indian Meteorological Department from 1907–1908, 7.

  32 Eliot, Report, 457.

  33 Arnold Schuster, “Address to the Belfast Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science,” Report of the Seventy-Second Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: John Murray, 1902), 519.

  34 Cleveland Abbe, Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 39 (1890): 77.

  35 Nebeker, Calculating the Weather, 28.

  36 Napier Shaw, Manual of Meteorology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926–1931), 333.

  37 Shaw, Manual of Meteorology, 333.

  38 H. H. Hildebrandsson, “Quelques recherches sur les centres d’action de l’atmosphère,” Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar 29 (1897); Teisserenc de Bort, “Etude sur les causes qui determinant la circulation de l’atmosphère”; and H. F. Blanford, “On the Barometric See-Saw between Russia and India in the Sun-Spot Cycle,” Nature 25 (1880): 447–482.

  39 H. H. Hildebrandsson and Teisserenc de Bort, Atlas International des nuages: pub conformenent aux decisions du Comite meteorologique international (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1896).

  40 Gilbert Walker, “World Weather,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 54 (April 1928): 226.

  41 Gilbert Walker, “Correlation in Seasonal Variation of Weather, VIII: A Preliminary Study of World Weather,” Memoirs of the Indian Meteorological Department 24 (1923): 75–131, 109.

  42 Walker, “Correlation,” 109.

  43 Gilbert Walker, “On Periods and Symmetry Points in Pressure as Aids to Forecasting,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 72, no. 314 (1946): 265–283.

  44 Eliot, Report, 453.

  45 Gilbert Walker, “Seasonal
Foreshadowing,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 56 (237): 359–364.

  46 Charles Daubeny, Climate: An Inquiry into the causes of its differences and into its influence on vegetable life, comprising the substance of four lectures delivered before the Natural History society, at the museum, Torquay, in February 1863 (London and Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1863).

  47 As Normand, the man who headed the Met Office from 1927 to 1944, wrote, “On the whole, Walker’s world-wide survey ended by offering more promise for the prediction of events in other regions than in India.” Charles Normand, “Monsoon Seasonal Forecasting,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 79 (October 1953): 469.

  48 Gilbert Walker, “Presidential Address to the Fifth Indian Science Congress, Lahore, January 1918,” Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, New Series Vol. XIV, 1918 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society): lxxvii.

  49 Nebeker, Calculating the Weather, 48.

  50 From R. B. Montgomery, “Report on the Work of GT Walker,” Monthly Weather Review 39 (1940): supplement 1–22.

  51 Sikka, “The Role,” 397.

  52 Sikka, “The Role,” 401.

  53 Sikka, “The Role,” 415.

  54 Sikka, “The Role,” 401.

  55 J. Bjerknes, “Atmospheric Teleconnections from the Equatorial Pacific,” Monthly Weather Review 97 (1969): 163–172.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 William Koelsch, “From Geo- to Physical Science: Meteorology and the American University, 1919–1945,” in Historical Essays on Meteorology, 1919–1995: The Diamond Anniversary History Volume of the American Meteorological Society, ed. James Fleming (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1996), 541–556.

  2 Cited in Robert Marc Friedman, “Constituting the Polar Front, 1919–1920,” Isis 73, no. 3 (September 1982): 355.

  3 See Roger Turner, “Teaching the Weather Cadet Generation: Aviation, Pedagogy, and Aspirations to a Universal Meteorology in America, 1920–1950,” in Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate, ed. James R. Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic, and Deborah R. Coen (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2006), 141–173.

  4 Joanne Malkus, “Large-Scale Interactions,” in The Sea: Ideas and Observations on Progress in the Study of the Seas, vol. 1, Physical Oceanography, ed. M. N. Hill (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1962), 99.

  5 W.-K. Tao, J. Halverson, M. LeMone, R. Adler, M. Garstang, R. House Jr., R. Pielke Sr., and W. Woodley, “The Research of Dr Joanne Simpson: Fifty Years Investigating Hurricanes, Tropical Clouds, and Cloud Systems,” AMS Meteorological Monographs 29, no. 15 (January 2003): 1.

  6 Duncan Blanchard, “The Life and Science of Alfred H. Woodcock,” BAMS 65, no. 5 (1984): 460.

  7 Bergeron later recognized the limits of his own experience, noting that “I then hardly had seen any weather or climate south of 50 degrees N (except the winter of 1928/29 on Malta).” On Bergeron, see Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Roscoe Braham, “Formation of Rain: A Historical Perspective,” in Historical Essays on Meteorology, 1919–1995, 181–223; and Arnt Eliassen, “The Life and Science of Tor Bergeron,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 59, no. 4 (April 1978): 387–392.

  8 Herbert Riehl, “Preface,” Tropical Meteorology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954).

  9 Alfred Woodcock and J. Wyman, “Convective Motion in Air over the Sea,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 48 (1947): 749–776.

  10 Michael Garstang and David Fitzjarrald, Observations of Surface to Atmosphere Interactions in the Tropics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 58.

  11 “Interview with Joanne Simpson,” in The Bulletin Interviews, ed. Hessam Taba (Geneva: WMO, 1988), 271.

  12 See Blanchard, “Woodcock,” 460; and “American Meteorological Society, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Tape Recorded Interview Project, Interview of Joanne Simpson, 6 September 1989, Interviewer Margaret LeMone” (hereafter Simpson Oral History), 21, in Papers of Joanne Simpson, 1890–2010, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute (hereafter Simpson Papers).

  13 Simpson Papers, MC 779, Simpson 1.13, Family History Overview, Childhood, 2.

  14 Simpson Oral History, 21.

  15 Simpson Papers, MC 779, Simpson 1.8, Notes between Simpson and lover C, 1950s.

  16 J. S. Malkus, “Some Results of a Trade-Cumulus Cloud Investigation,” Journal of Meteorology 11 (1954): 220–237.

  17 Simpson Papers, MC 779, 1.4, Simpson letter re: self-hypnosis for migraines, January 1996.

  18 Simpson Papers, MC 779, 1.4, Journal re: Simpson and lover “C” 1952–54, 1 of 2. Entry dated 16 October 1952.

  19 Simpson Papers, MC 779, Simpson 2.10, Beginnings of a research career, 1953–1964.

  20 J. S. Malkus, “Some Results,” 220–237.

  21 Simpson Papers, MC 779, 2.10, Summary of the Meteorological Activities of Joanne S. Malkus year 1954–55, Clippings, Beginnings of a research career.

  22 See Blanchard, “Woodcock,” 460.

  23 Henry Stommel, “Entrainment of Air into a Cumulus Cloud,” Journal of Meteorology 4 (June 1947): 91–94.

  24 Deborah Coen, “Big Is a Thing of the Past: Climate Change and Methodology in the History of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas (April 2016): 305–321.

  25 Victor Starr, “The Physical Basis for the General Circulation,” in Compendium of Meteorology, ed. Thomas Malone (American Meteorological Society, 1951), 541.

  26 Robert Serafin, “The Evolution of Atmospheric Measurement Systems,” in Historical Essays on Meteorology, 1919–1995. During the war, some eighty of these were deployed daily across the United States, and the numbers continued to grow after the hostilities ended.

  27 Carl-Gustaf Rossby, “The Scientific Basis of Modern Meteorology,” in Climate and Man, Yearbook of Agriculture (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1941), 599–655.

  28 New York Times, 11 January 1946, 12.

  29 Philip Thompson, “The Maturing of the Science,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 68, no. 6 (June 1987): 631–637.

  30 “If the super-calculator could be built and operated successfully, weather experts said, it not only might lift the veil from previously undisclosed mysteries connected with the science of weather forecasting.” New York Times, 11 January 1946, 12.

  31 “Weather to Order,” New York Times, 1 February 1947.

  32 John von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?,” in Fabulous Future: America in 1980 (New York: Dutton, 1956), 152.

  33 Von Neumann, “Can We,” 108, 152.

  34 “Weather to Order.”

  35 “Making Weather to Order,” New York Times, 20 July 1947.

  36 “Weather to Order.”

  37 See chapter 12, “The Unification of Meteorology,” in Nebeker, Calculating the Weather.

  38 “Making Weather to Order.”

  39 Jule Charney, “Impact of Computers on Meteorology,” Computer Physics Communications 3 (1972 Suppl.): 124.

  40 See David Atlas and Margaret LeMone, “Joanne Simpson 1923–2010,” Memorial Tributes: National Academy of Engineering 15 (2011): 368–375; W.-K. Tao et al., “Research,” 4.

  41 Nebeker, Calculating the Weather, 124; Jacob Bjerknes, “Practical Application of H. Jeffrey’s Theory of the General Circulation,” Résumé des Mémoires Réunion d’Oslo (1948): 13–14; and Victor Starr, “An Essay on the General Circulation of the Earth’s Atmosphere,” Journal of Meteorology 5 (1948): 39–43.

  42 Herbert Riehl and Joanne Malkus, “On the Heat Balance in the Equatorial Trough Zone,” Geophysica 6, no. 3–4 (1958): 534.

  43 They cautioned their readers to remember that “man
y of the quantities are to be based on calculation as residuals rather than independent measurement and are therefore subject to a considerable margin of error.” Riehl and Malkus, “On the Heat Balance,” 505.

  44 Simpson Papers, MC779, Simpson 3.10, Joanne Simpson Notebooks on Research II: Second Set April 1957–July 1959, Evolution of hot towers hypothesis, 1.

  45 Malkus, “Large-Scale Intentions,” 95.

  46 “The gaps in at least our gross factual information are currently being removed rather rapidly.” Starr, “Physical Basis,” 541.

  47 Malkus, “Some Results”; Joanne Starr Malkus and Claude Ronne, “On the Structure of Some Cumulonimbus Clouds Which Penetrated the High Tropical Atmosphere,” Tellus 6 (1954): 351–366; Joanne Starr Malkus, “On the Structure of the Trade-Wind Moist Layer,” Papers in Physical Oceanography And Meteorology 12, no. 2 (1958): 47.

  48 See, for example, Herbert Riehl, “On the Role of the Tropics in the General Circulation,” Tellus 2 (1951): 1–17; Herbert Riehl, Tropical Meteorology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), chapters 3 and 12; Herbert Riehl, “General Atmospheric Circulation of the Tropics,” Science 135 (1962): 13–22; and Riehl and Malkus, “On the Heat Balance.”

  49 Starr, “Physical Basis,” 549.

  50 For an early review of this work, see Herbert Riehl and Dave Fultz, “Jet Stream and Long Waves in a Steady Rotating-Dishpan Experiment: Structure of the Circulation,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (April 1957): 215–231; and Oral History Interview with Dave Fultz, http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7ks6pzf.

  51 H. E. Willoughby, D. P. Jorgensen, R. A. Black, and S. L. Rosenthal, “Project Stormfury: A Scientific Chronicle, 1962–1983,” Bulletin American Meteorological Society 66, no. 5 (May 1985): 505.

  52 Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades,” Tellus 9, no. 1 (February 1957): 18–27.

  53 Revelle and Suess, “Carbon Dioxide,” 20.

  54 Richard Anthes, “Hot Towers and Hurricanes: Early Observations, Theories and Models,” in Wei-Kuo Tao, ed., Cloud Systems, Hurricanes and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM): A Tribute to Joanne Simpson (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 2003), 139.