Were/are there signs of an approaching storm that Americans utilized before the days of satellites and other modern tools? Or were they basically surprised every time?
Red sky in morning, sailors take warning.
Falling barometric pressure was measured using barometers.
How early?
It’s pretty hard to tell how the natives of the Caribbean islands dealt with hurricanes since do few of them survived Europeans.
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There would have been little warning in advance of the the fringes of the storm itself before the Twentieth Century. Many ships of the Spanish Empire, for example, sank when they were unexpectedly overtaken by hurricanes.
I live on the Gulf coast.
The weather feels different when a storm is approaching-maybe 24 hours out. I don’t need a barometer to know something is coming. And yes, I am well aware of biases inherent in this. I have been around a lot of hurricanes and the weather is different.
Of course it doesn’t help much in predicting where or how strong the storm is. But I know something is coming. There may be false alarms as the storm makes landfall somewhere else, but the storm is going to hit somewhere.
I felt and saw Harvey 24 hours before the first landfall. Fortunately for my area, it was just a few days of intermittent showers. But it wasn’t a surprise.
I bet the Seminole Indians in Florida knew when they were coming having lived in the area for generations. They probably headed inland or knew of protective caves nearly when the cloud and wind signs showed up.
I’m not sure when telegraph lines were installed in the relevant areas, but that could be used.
Brian
It’s a-comin’.
It’s a-gonna blow.
From Wikipedia’s article “1893 Sea Islands hurricane”
So, the winds start picking up about 24 hours ahead of the storm and we know to start moving to high ground … by the early 20th Century, we have the beginnings of radio networks and ship-to-shore communications which was a big advance in forecasting ability …
We had a thread on something similar a while ago. The point there was that you can do a lot about general awareness of weather without satellite imagery. The most important measure of weather is probably barometric pressure. Once you have the ability to communicate reasonably quickly - such as with a telegraph system, and you have what is needed to get a passable amount of information about the nature of the regional weather. If you can have some ships equipped with radio sending in weather readings as they travel about you can include some part of the ocean, and that gets you a lot more. The ability to create a synoptic chart with an understanding of how weather works will get you some awareness of the existence and location of weather systems. For a hurricane you won’t necessarily know how bad it is, and certainly won’t be able to make accurate predictions about its path, but you should have some idea. Even without communications a rapidly falling barometric pressure is going to be a very good clue that there something bad on the way. But with communications you can gain an idea of where and when.
Overall the advent of supercomputer prediction systems have had a much greater influence on weather forecasting than satellites.
Father Benito Vines started the first hurricane warning service in the 1870s by observing the clouds. He could give a couple days warning and track the hurricane by the types of clouds and the direction they came from. This required the hurricane to be coming close to his location, of course. It wasn’t until ships started using radio in 1905 that reliable tracking was done before the hurricane was close.
There are some rules of thumb for predicting hurricanes by local observation, but I don’t know how much people knew 150+ years ago and how much was compiled more recently. Some people living along the coast surely knew *some *of them.
About four days before a hurricane, a 1 meter swell will roll in about every 10 seconds from the direction of the hurricane. This will increase in height and frequency until the hurricane passes. 48 hours before the hurricane hits winds will go calm because it disrupts the normal winds in the area. The pressure starts falling and cirrus clouds approach from the hurricane’s direction at 36 hours. The barometer falls faster, winds pick up and low clouds come in at 24 hours, etc. From there, things more or less get worse and worse. It should be pretty obvious something nasty is coming 24 hours out.
I imagine this kind of thing would play a big part. The natives peoples essentially lived outside all the time and for that and other reasons would be very adept at noticing small changes in the local environment.
Did the Europeans have any knowledge about hurricanes before the New World was discovered?
Hurricanes hit the Azores all the time, occasionally hit the Canaries, and on very rare occasions, may even impact Europe directly, so yes? No Medieval records, but the Early Modern record is a good pointer. Also, not hurricanes sensu strictu, but anyone trading with the East would likely have been aware of Indian Ocean cyclones, which strike anywhere from the Arabian Peninsula through to India.
one theory about the Lost Colony on the coast of NC in 1590 is that they were wiped out by a hurricane but that’s not a widely accepted theory.
folks interested (and who wouldn’t be?) should read Al Roker’s bookStorm of the Century.
it’s specifically about the hurricane that hit Galveston but it’s also about the history of the weather service and forecasting more generally.
fascinating but an easy/fast read.
Thousands of people in Galveston learned about the hurricane when they woke up in the middle of the night in the wreckage of their homes drowning in the storm surge.
Me and another old coot were talking about the weather the other day, missing the old days when all the warning you had was whatever was coming up over the horizon. Wasn’t all that long ago, either.
The 1938 New England hurricane was not very well forecast and lots of damage on Long Island, NY due to inadequate warning.
I don’t know how old the coast lines of Texas and Louisiana and of course North Carolina to long Island have been around, but you can tell by the crooks and grannies that they have seen a lot of hurricanes in their developmental ages.
The real question is how did anyone survive in those regions to warn the next generation to leave that area when the stormy weather is coming. However I did see a hurricane come as far as Waco, Texas when I was a small boy, of which the old timers probably still talk about.