The Law of Storms Listen in RealAudio Email Your Comments

Dave Thurlow, Host

 
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow for The Weather Notebook. Back in the first half of the 19th century, Americans flocked to public lectures for enlightenment and entertainment on the burning issues of the day -- one of which was weather.

The quest to discover "the law of storms" -- the idea that a single phenomenon accounted for the violence in the atmosphere -- was a prime mover of 19th century meteorology, and scientists thundered away on the lecture circuit defending their theories and debunking their rivals. This controversy came to a head in the ongoing debate between the mathematician James Pollard Espy and the naturalist William Redfield.

Redfield, a New England native, became obsessed with tropical storms in 1821 when he observed what a hurricane did to the Connecticut forests. After a decade spent poring over historical accounts and pondering the workings of the atmosphere, Redfield concluded that hurricanes took the form of great vortices rotating about a central eye, and that the violence of the winds caused air pressure to drop and torrential rain to fall. Not bad for 1821.

The more learned James Espy -- who was know as the Storm King because he studied weather -- disagreed. He claimed that rising air and the resulting condensation alone accounted for rain, hail, snow, winds and air pressure changes.

So, who won the debate? Well, nobody really. So even though neither of these great thinkers figured everything out about the laws governing storms the highly publicized debate they created in the 1830s and 1840s unquestionably gave meteorology a nudge in the right direction.

Thanks to today's contributing writer David Laskin, Subaru and the National Science Foundation.