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Nineteenth century scientists set out to solve the "problem of American storms"
- jmclnx 3y agoInteresting read
- initramfs 3y agovery interesting! Another thing Morse code led to that I didn't think of.
- danielvaughn 3y agoEvery 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?
- hotnfresh 3y agoAvoid? 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.
- fsckboy 3y ago>I would be curious how they coped with them 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
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoUm, 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.
- dmoy 3y agoHorses 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.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoThe 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." Yeah!
- dmoy 3y agoOh yea moving objects are way worse than inanimate objects from horse perspective. Just meant that inanimate objects, even ones they've seen before, are also sometimes suspect. That old tractor? The one that's been rusting in the same spot for years? Well TODAY it's spooky, because... no reason.
- jprd 3y agoso much experience demonstrated here - omg the memories from this statement!
- ethbr1 3y agoMy vet father's opinion on horse intelligence, specifically vis-a-vis being spooked: "What's the best thing about a horse?" "They taste like chicken." But I guess you get suddenly kicked, bit, leaned on, etc., you develop strong feelings on the matter. ... oddly enough, he's rather fond of cows.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
- pfannkuchen 3y agoI thought you were supposed to kill the horse, cut it open and crawl inside? (I’ve read that Lucas was extremely influenced by western films, I guess I know where that one came from now).
- TedDallas 3y agoThat 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.
- giardini 3y agoI'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.
- taeric 3y agoI'd hazard that, with cars, you are traveling far farther from your local area than most people could ever do in the past.
- hotnfresh 3y agoDust 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.
- siftrics 3y agoAnecdata: 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."
- hotnfresh 3y agoYeah, 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.
- msrenee 3y agoI'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.
- jabroni_salad 3y agohttps://esirc.emporia.edu/bitstream/handle/123456789/904/Marchand%20Vol%2026%20Num%202.pdf?sequence=1 https://esirc.emporia.edu/bitstream/handle/123456789/904/Mar... (scroll down to 'storm on the plains') 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.
- ethbr1 3y agoNeat! 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.
- jabroni_salad 3y agoAnd 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.
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ekw2j/how_did_precolonization_midwest_native_americans/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ekw2j/how_d...
- swatcoder 3y ago> What did they think they were? 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).
- junofan 3y agoYeah 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.
- swatcoder 3y agoYeah, 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.)
- embedded_hiker 3y agoEven Lewis and Clark seemed to not know the word "tornado". On the way west, they found a patch of woods that had been torn up: https://lewis-clark.org/the-trail/nebraska-iowa/willards-bad-day/ https://lewis-clark.org/the-trail/nebraska-iowa/willards-bad...
- phkahler 3y agoAround 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.
- Eumenes 3y agoThis is very interesting - https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-summer/ https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1816-year-without-a-...
- dang 3y agoSome past threads on this: Year Without a Summer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809070 - Oct 2023 (2 comments) The Sun-Spot Panic of 1816 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30651021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30651021 - March 2022 (3 comments) Tambora Erupts in 1815 and Changes World History (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853116 - Oct 2020 (8 comments) Year Without a Summer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400480 - Feb 2020 (131 comments) How a volcanic eruption made 1816 the year without a summer (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949772 - Sept 2018 (1 comment) 1816, the Year without a Summer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15768951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15768951 - Nov 2017 (14 comments) The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619876 - May 2015 (2 comments) Tambora – The Volcano That Changed the Course of History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7564442 - April 2014 (3 comments)
- chiph 3y agoI'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. https://www.weather.gov/iln/cwop https://www.weather.gov/iln/cwop
- onionisafruit 3y agoI have one even though I don't have an ideal site for it because all I actually care about is the weather in my garden anyway.
- j-bos 3y agoThanks for sharing! Where would you buy it from?
- jabroni_salad 3y agoI 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.
- taeric 3y agoIts 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.
- avgcorrection 3y agoWikipedia 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.
- contravariant 3y agoThat's suspiciously close to 1m. Which sounds like a lot to me, but who knows.
- chrismcb 3y agoThat is 1m a year. Which is like 3mm a day (if it rained every day) but really Seattle gets that over about 9 months. Which is like 4 or 5mm a day.
- ian-g 3y agoHi 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
- kibwen 3y agoRain 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.
- ethbr1 3y agoFor 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.
- dmix 3y agoIf 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: https://www.mikeleake.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DpQ9YJl.png https://www.mikeleake.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DpQ9YJl...
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> 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 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age ) By contrast with the article, the colony of Virgina dates from the early 17th century.
- totetsu 3y ago>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. It reads like a Discworld novel.
- cainxinth 3y agoFor 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.