Rain Page 8
FOUR
THE WEATHER WATCHERS
In November 1703, a strange malevolence began to gust through the dark streets of London. Daniel Defoe was walking in his neighborhood on the evening of Wednesday the 24th when “the Wind encreased, and with Squauls of Rain and terrible Gusts blew very furiously.” Those winds whipped tiles from the rooftops, snapped limbs and entire trees, and toppled chimneys, one of which very nearly crushed Defoe. Had he been killed, he never would have given the world Robinson Crusoe, and one of the most famous literary umbrellas of all time. Nor would he have written The Storm, considered by many the first work of modern journalism.
For two more days, the winds swept from the southwest in violent gusts. No one could have imagined they were the outer bands of a storm three hundred miles wide, the largest and most destructive ever to hit the British Isles. When Defoe looked at his barometer on Friday evening the 26th, the mercury was as low as he’d ever seen it. He suspected that “the Tube had been handled and disturb’d by the Children.” (Not a bad guess, since he and his wife, Mary, had seven at that time, ranging in age from two to fourteen.)
Defoe was then a poet and pamphleteer who sold his writing by the sheet. He was also just out of prison. For his most recent pamphlet, a satire on the religious intolerance of high-church Anglicans, he was charged with seditious libel. He was fined two hundred marks, locked in an elevated public pillory—the old wooden chokey with holes for head and hands—and jailed for four months. Now bankrupt, he was desperate for paid work to support his family. On the morning of the 27th when the worst of the fury was past and people began to “peep out of Doors,” Defoe looked out over the destruction and saw a brand-new genre.
Hardly anyone had slept the night before; “the Distraction and Fury of the Night was visible in the Faces of the People.” Many expected their houses to fall in on them, but they could hardly leave, as bricks, tiles, and stones flew through the streets. Unlike any writers of his day, and borrowing from the emerging scientific method, Defoe took detailed notes of his own observations, began to interview eyewitnesses, and set out to gather the grim facts. He visited the Thames to report on the seven hundred or so ships that had been tossed in heaps by the wind. Some of his most vivid reporting came from the Goodwin Sands in the English Channel, where mariners who thought they’d found safety were later washed away.
Defoe’s eyewitness account was revolutionary, but he went much further in collecting detailed, personal storm stories from all over England. Journalism was brand new. Nine months before, London’s one-page Daily Courant launched as the first English-language daily newspaper. Defoe placed ads in the Courant and the London Gazette and wrote to sources all over England asking for storm stories and particulars. The heart of The Storm contains about sixty accounts that Defoe selected, edited, and deemed credible, as “most of our Relators have not only given us their Names, and sign’d the Accounts they have sent, but have also given us Leave to hand their Names down to Posterity with the Record.”
Defoe estimated that the storm drowned 8,000 people at sea, including a fifth of the soldiers in the queen’s navy. It killed 123 Londoners, flattened 300,000 trees, destroyed 900 homes and 400 windmills, and blew away countless church steeples, turrets, and lead roofs, including the one atop Westminster Abbey. Fifteen thousand sheep drowned in the Severn River on the storm surge at high tide.
More than recounting, Defoe tried to explain the storm to his readers. Emerging atmospheric science shows up alongside moral reflection and scripture, barometric readings hand-in-hand with metaphysical rumination. “I cannot doubt but the Atheist’s hard’ned Soul Trembl’d a little as well as his House, and he felt some Nature asking him some little Questions,” Defoe wrote. “Am I not mistaken? Certainly there is some such thing as a God—What can all this be? What is the Matter in the World?”
Searching for answers and counseling his readers, Defoe had done more than crank out the first modern work of journalism. He had issued the first modern weather report.
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The earliest-known recorded rain science comes from the ancient Greeks; some of them had begun rolling their eyes at the prevailing belief that rain was sent by the almighty Zeus. In the Aristophanes play The Clouds, Socrates tells the farmer Strepsiades that Zeus doesn’t exist. Strepsiades protests: “No Zeus up aloft in the sky! Then, you first must explain, who it is sends the rain; or I really must think you are wrong.”
Only the clouds can send rain, Socrates tells him:
Was there ever a shower seen to fall in an hour
when the sky was all cloudless and blue?
Yet on a fine day, when the clouds are away,
[Zeus] might send one according to you.
About a century later, Aristotle refined Greek ideas about rain in his scientific treatise Meteorologica. Historians of science note the discourse gets it wrong on almost everything we know about weather phenomena—except rainfall. Aristotle saw rain as part of a sun-driven cycle among air, land, and sea, a rhythm he called “river of Ocean.” Soaking into the earth, rain produced a “wet exhalation,” forming springs as well as rivers that ultimately carried it back to the sea.
By the fourth century B.C., people had figured out some of the appreciable benefits of measuring rainfall; the more you know about what rain’s done in the past, the better you can predict what it will do in the future. The first written reference is from India, in Kautilya’s Arthashastra: “In front of the storehouse, a bowl with its mouth as wide as an Aratni [that’s 18 inches] shall be set up as a Varshanana [rain gauge].” In Palestine, a book recording four hundred years of Jewish life through the second century A.D. reports a year of detailed rainfall and soil-moisture data. But those are isolated instances. The systematic measure of rainfall—still a key to rain science even in the era of weather satellites—would take another thousand years.
The cylinders that catch rain in modern backyards emerged in Korea during the reign of King Sejong the Great, who ruled from 1418 to 1450. A Korean cultural hero to this day, Sejong put a premium on science—especially agricultural technologies to help coax more food from the drought-prone land. Sejong wanted every village in the country to report rainfall back to the crown, a chore that involved inspecting roots and soils for moisture after a storm. His son, the crown prince, is said to have come up with the tubular gauge. King Sejong sent one to every village. Korean historians have a running disagreement about whether Sejong actually used the data, or collected it as a shrewd political move to show he cared about the problems of agriculture.
European weather watchers were using cylindrical catches by the time of the Great 1703 Storm; Defoe reports rainfall amounts captured in observers’ “tunnels.” But it is no surprise that the first rain instruments developed in the East. Legal executions for witchcraft were still well under way in Europe, and scientists were routinely hauled before the Inquisition.
In Italy, Evangelista Torricelli, the young mathematician-physicist who figured out in 1643 that mercury would rise and drop in a glass tube along with air pressure, kept his experiments secret to all but a few trusted compatriots. He’d watched the Inquisition of Galileo by the Church, and had gossipy neighbors who suspected he was up to witchcraft. Torricelli died of a brief and vicious fever when he was thirty-nine years old, before he could perfect his apparatus. In 1663, Robert Boyle named it the barometer—soon the centerpiece in a home weather-prediction craze that spread across Europe and then to America.
Torricelli also gave science its first description of wind, and a lyrical explanation of our place in the atmosphere: Noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d’un pelago d’aria—“We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air.” But when it came to describing and talking about the rain, neither science nor letters could ever sum it up quite so tidily. Rain’s chaotic nature made it among the hardest parts of the weather to measure—and even to name.
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In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth book in D
ouglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, a lorry driver named Rob McKenna is a rain god but doesn’t know it. “All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays,” Adams writes. “All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him and to water him.”
McKenna despises rain, but he gets to know it so well that he creates a scale of 231 different types of rainfall. Type 11 is “breezy droplets,” Type 33 a “light pricking drizzle which made the roads slippery,” Type 39 “heavy spotting.” Sea storms fall between 192 and 213. Type 127 is “syncopated cab-drumming.” His least-favorite is Type 17, a “dirty blatter, blattering against his windshield so hard that it didn’t make much odds whether he had his wipers on or off.”
With its hurly-burlies and nor’easters, rain’s eccentric vocabulary connects to the soggy literary landscapes of Ireland and England: Jonathan Swift is credited with the earliest published version of “raining cats and dogs” in 1738, though an English dramatist named Richard Brome had his dialogue raining “Dogs and Polecats” a century before. Some lexicographers suggest that, during bleak times, heavy rains might well have sent the corpses of drowned dogs and cats down streets and gutters—inspiration for Swift’s gruesome mock pastoral “A Description of a City Shower.”
Cat-and-dog cloudbursts seem practically ordinary compared with “raining young cobblers” in Germany. It rains shoemakers’ apprentices in Denmark, chair legs in Greece, ropes in France, pipe stems in the Netherlands, and wheelbarrows in the Czech Republic. The Welsh, who have more than two dozen words for rain, like to say that it’s raining old women and walking sticks. Afrikaans-speakers have a version that rains old women with knobkerries (that would be clubs). The Polish, French, and Australians all have a twist on raining frogs; the Aussies sometimes call a hard rain a frog-strangler. Portuguese- and Spanish-speakers both might say it’s raining jugs. Inexplicably the Portuguese also say it’s raining toads’ beards, and the Spanish: está lloviendo hasta maridos—it’s even raining husbands! Probably not what the Weather Girls had in mind with their 1982 hit disco single, “It’s Raining Men.”
Around the British Isles, hard rain is commonly described as persisting, pissing, bucketing, lashing, sheeting, stotting, or coming down in stair rods. In Scotland, people might say a heavy rain is chuckin’ it doon, teemin’, skelpit, stoatin’ aff, or bouncin’ aff the streets; a soft one that hangs in the air is a smirr or haar. Light rains have a graceful language with their mizzles and drizzles. In Ireland, a persistent drizzle is known as a “soft day.”
Linguists mapping dialect in the soaking American South collected more than 170 descriptions for rain, including a temperance rain, a tub soaker, a log mover, a lighterd knot floater, a milldam buster, and a potato bed soaker. My southern father seems to have a hundred ways to describe a rain that hasn’t even arrived yet, when the sky is “trying to rain,” “wants to rain,” or is “fixin’ to rain.”
This rich depth of description makes it odd that during the Scientific Revolution, as the bearded men of meteorology decided how to measure, classify, and talk about the atmosphere, they came up with only scant definitions for rain—light, moderate, or heavy, sometimes throwing in a shower or drizzle. The clouds earned themselves a much more elegant lexicon, and so did the wind.
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We owe the expressive global language of clouds to an amateur meteorologist in London named Luke Howard, who in 1802 proposed a Latin-based classification that he likened to reading expressions on a person’s face: Clouds “are commonly as good visible indications of these causes (of rain and other weather) as is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body.”
As a teenager, Howard built a small meteorological station in his parents’ garden with a rain gauge, thermometer, and inexpensive barometer. His mother called the gravel path to the gadgets “Luke’s Walk.” Twice a day, he trekked faithfully down to record rainfall, evaporation, air pressure, wind direction, and high and low temperatures in his slim pocket journals. His father wanted his son’s head out of the clouds, and sent him away for apprenticeship with a chemist. Howard became a pharmacist by profession, but studied meteorology all of his life, writing prolifically on clouds and the climate of London.
Howard’s proposed classification was similar to the Linnaean system being used in botany and zoology, taken from the Latin for easy adoption “by the learned of different nations.” His three primary descriptions: cirrus, from the Latin word for “fiber” or “hair”; cumulus, from the Latin for “heap” or “pile”; and stratus, “layer” or “sheet.” Howard also suggested intermediate cloud types, various blends of the three primary clouds. For the rain cloud, which he saw as a stormy combination of cirrus, cumulus, and stratus, he chose the Latin word for cloud: nimbus.
Nearly a century later, in 1896, the world’s top meteorologists gathered in Paris to mark a ballyhooed “year of the cloud” and release their agreed-upon system of ten types, based around Howard’s names. The International Cloud Atlas is still the official identification guide, although over time, meteorologists have made it a bit clunky; in 1932, they reclassified Howard’s rain cloud as a nimbostratus.
On the 1896 list, the king of clouds—towering cumulonimbus—was listed number nine. This is why, when we feel the highest of high, we say that we are on Cloud Nine. As the British cloud enthusiast Gavin Pretor-Pinney* tells the story, scientists unfortunately rearranged the order in the second edition of the atlas, shifting mighty cumulonimbus to number ten. But the phrase “Cloud Nine” stuck.
Today, International Cloud Atlas descriptions are used worldwide by scientists and fourth grade teachers alike to describe the fair-weather cumulus; the thin, wispy cirrus that often indicate a change in the weather; the low, flat stratus moving in with a drizzle. It’s the nature of science, and also human nature, to organize Earth in universally recognizable ways. Well before globalization, we ordered our nations on maps, our music in scales, our geographic coordinates in long and horizontal lines. Just three years after Howard proposed his cloud nomenclature, a British Royal Navy officer named Francis Beaufort devised a scale for wind speed to give sailors a common way to describe wind and its impact on the sails of ships. The Beaufort Scale, tweaked for modern vessels, is still familiar worldwide. It is brilliantly simple for communicating the complexity of wind, says my science writer friend Scott Huler, who became so obsessed with its poetic elegance that he wrote a book about the scale. Beaufort 0 is “calm,” described this way: “smoke rises vertically.” Beaufort 1 is “light breeze,” one to three miles per hour: “Direction of wind shown by smoke but not by wind vanes.” In Beaufort 12, “hurricane,” “devastation occurs.”
All of which leads to an elephant in the room—a great gray missing from humanity’s ordering of winds, clouds, musical scales, and vodka proofs. Among so many rigorous classifications, we don’t have the same sort of global language for rain. There is no poetic lexicon shared by ship captains and children’s sky-watcher charts, no standard measure for precipitation that falls into the dizzyingly different types of rain gauges used by scientists: the totalizer, the tipping-bucket gauges, the weighing gauges, with various configurations among those and even different ways of measuring what they catch. Inevitably, both rain’s description and its measurement are vernacular, often even personal.
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Almost every atmospheric scientist, meteorologist, and weather reporter I interviewed about rain was either obsessed with rainfall as a child—watching it spill from the skies, tracking rain’s runoff, and observing how it puddled and soaked the ground—or had a vivid weather experience in childhood. The latter was often more thrilling than terrifying, as Lance Morrow once well described big weather, “a child’s delight in dramatic disruption.”
So it was with the man called “the father of British rainfall,” George James Symons. G. J. Symons was born in London in 1838 and “while quite young commenced regular observ
ations of the weather.” Historians of science trace his rain obsession to the severe droughts of England in the 1850s; it must have been sorrowful for the young rain watcher to see the skies turn dry.
By the time he was twenty-one, Symons had begun to build an enthusiastic club of rain-gauge readers, and to publish their collective data. The first issue of what would become a lifelong labor of love appeared in 1860 and included rain reports from five hundred stations. The work drew the attention of Robert Fitzroy, who had been tapped by the British government five years before to establish the country’s first weather bureau.
Fitzroy was a distinguished naval captain who commanded HMS Beagle on its famous five-year voyage with Charles Darwin. One hundred and fifty years after Defoe’s harrowing narrative, storms still caught captains by deadly surprise. In 1859 the Royal Charter Storm wrecked the ship for which it was named and as many as two hundred others, drowning more than eight hundred sailors. The loss inspired Fitzroy to develop a system of calculations and a new term, “forecast,” to help alert the public and ship captains to coming weather. Even if imperfect, he believed that sharing rainfall, barometric readings, and other data could help reduce the great numbers of shipwrecks. The idea was enormously controversial in Victorian times. As they tried to save lives by predicting storms, Fitzroy and other public meteorologists were ridiculed as the “government Zadkiel,” a reference to Britain’s most notorious astrologer.