Historical Hurricanes

Unstable Fluids

It's taken nearly a century of intense scientific studies to begin to understand hurricanes. Most of the scientific work on hurricanes is done at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), which is also responsible for much of the information used by your TV weatherperson. NOAA crunches the data in its supercomputers, some of the fiercest data eaters in the world, and spits out forecasts, analyses and much more. Even this computing power does not completely solve the problem of hurricane dynamics, because there is an essential randomness in the process. This randomness is at the bottom of all sorts of processes involving fluids, where liquids and gasses count as fluids. The same sort of randomness occurs in solids, too, but it is not as obvious. This randomness is easily seen in a cloud chamber, where we call it Brownian Motion.

I do not know how hurricanes work in detail, but I do know in general how they come to be. Atlantic hurricanes (which are structurally the same as Pacific typhoons) start as winds near West Africa. These winds are the result of solar heating of the land and oceans, and are also part of a global circulation pattern. By themselves, the winds would not evolve into hurricanes; they need water from the oceans. That water is supplied by evaporation due to solar heating. Heated water vapor rises from the surface to form clouds, which are just condensed water. That condensation releases heat into the surrounding uncondensed atmosphere, which means the molecules of the surround are made more energetic, speeded up. Since the molecules go every which way, this heating in itself would not make a hurricane.

The critical factors which turn winds blowing this way and that into hurricanes are (1) the fact that hot air rises and (2) the Earth spins. The Earth's spin is "felt" as the Coriolis force, which makes rising gases seem to rotate. (Whether they rotate or not depends on your frame of reference: Einstein.) That hot air rises depends on local conditions. If convective and radiative processes are dominant, the heated parcels will be dissipated. Hot air parcels, or bubbles, will rise only if they are trapped, as in a hot-air balloon, and their density is lower than the surrounding medium, and the medium is not sufficiently viscous to prevent flow. In our Sacramento Valley and other places in California, we have intense summer heating when the hot air parcels do not rise. Cool, dense ocean air overlies California's valleys, which traps the air under it, and acts as a lens focusing incoming sunlight. Thus, we do not have hurricanes forming in California, although certain areas near the Sierras, where the air rises rapidly, are notorious for tornados. What we do get is extremely hot heat spells, which end in fierce winds when the trapped air finally breaks through the ocean layer. Even though heat and the Earth's spin are critical in making hurricanes, they are not enough to guarantee one.

Whether hurricanes form over the eastern Atlantic is entirely a matter of chance. The most that can be said is that so many hurricanes will form during an average hurricane season. How many form each season depends on the insolation and average temperature, the salinity of the ocean and unpredictable factors. Many of the factors involved in hurricane formation are "historical;" i.e., formation depends upon preceding conditions. If spring weather is thus and so, then summer weather may be like this, which would increase or decrease the probability of hurricanes. Climate also influences hurricane formation: it is predicted that global warming will cause more intense hurricanes, although not necessarily more of them. All of the foregoing factors are probabilities, not certainties, not mechanical laws.

If the molecules of air move in the right direction, if they stick together in a certain way, if the sun is hot enough, and if there is enough water vapor, and if together all this air and water feels the force of gravity, then out of the randomness - the vast, warmed surface waters and air of the Atlantic - comes a hurricane. If you cannot believe this is so, then pour some water into a glass pot, put it on the stove and heat it to boiling. Watch the bubbles forming in the pot, and arrange lights to see the water boiling off the surface. Now, try to predict when and where a bubble forms, and where the steam goes.

Many hurricanes dissipate long before they reach the Americas. They form and break up. Only a few manage to survive the growth process to become large enough to make the trek to the Caribbean. Those that do become humanly classified hurricanes are more predictable than the others. They have a tendency to follow certain tracks, and develop an intensity that depends closely on certain conditions. Thus, the Weather Service has gotten pretty good at modeling these large hurricanes, and predicting what they'll do. While the predications aren't perfect, they are highly probable. This means atmospheric scientists have probably correctly determined the main factors governing large hurricane development. It does not mean they can predict when or if one will form, or how long it will last.

So I would have you consider hurricanes. They arise out of seeming nothing, randomness. Most of them fall back into the oceans whence they came. A few become monsters that hurl themselves against the land, but predictably fail to overcome it for long. Hurricanes are, first and last, creatures of the sea. They lack the solidity and stability required for success on Continental Earth. That success is reserved, so far, to living creatures which contain the raging motions within their skins, which are organized bags of water.

Examples

There are many such phenomena all about us. Things that form, seemingly out of nothing, and return to the nothingness. The push and pull of matter is temporary, driven by invisible energy, which is by nature random. Like large hurricanes, some of these phenomena seem to be regular. We attribute them to "forces," and like to say one thing "causes" another. The one thing all such forces and causes have in common is that they are large enough to have been noticed by intelligent observers; viz., on Earth, us.

Please excuse the circularity, but one of the things that makes us "intelligent," not just observers, is the fact that we ascribe regularities to that which we observe: forces, causes, etc. Worse, it is ourselves that assign such ascriptions to the category "intelligent," even though we do not know that for a fact. A defense of our intelligence might be that we characteristically ascribe, which is to say that intelligence is a behavioral pattern. Since it is our intelligent selves which would make that defense, then intelligence is reflexive, possibly recursive. At bottom, it arises out of thin, hot air.

Analogies are analogies, not at all the same as proof. But, what if nothing can really be proved? How, then, are we to proceed in analyzing our experience, our world? It seems to me, like the stuff we suppose composes us, that all disappears when looked at finely enough. In the Quantum Mechanical view of the world, at the very bottom is nothing at all. (Like Seinfeld, it's all about nothing; yet we laugh.)

We invented mathematics, which allows us to propose and manipulate systems of symbols. Our experts use the scribbling of symbols to prognosticate about hurricanes and all sorts of other things. Taken together, the scribbling and our scribbling behavior constitute a "system" which treats certain marks as symbols. Those "symbols" are analogies, exemplars, which inspire certain individuals - from shamans to astrophysicists - to signal (utter, write, etc) prognostications. The rest of us have been trained to respond to those signals in certain ways. Bees do the same thing in discovering honey.

While I barely understand it, somehow the Quantum Mechanical view seems correct, or, at least, as near to correct as I am likely to get in my remaining lifetime. Excepting gravity itself, Quantum Mechanics has been incredibly successful in "explaining" the world around us. TV, transistors, computers and even The Bomb are the result of human doodling called Quantum Mechanical Calculations. At its bottom, everything in those calculations is a matter of probability.

Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics, which are the basic sciences required to understand hurricanes, are very much like Quantum Mechanics. They start with randomized molecules, and end up with the regularities of aggregates. Those regularities are described in complex, sometimes insoluble, partial differential equations. Digital approximations to solutions of those equations inspire hurricane prediction. They also model the aerodynamic behavior of airplanes, rockets, cars, submarines and even houses lifted by Kansas tornadoes.

All of this understanding is something we do. As far as I can determine, Chimps don't. That leads me to the suggestion of this piece: "history" is our invention, which depends on having a concept of time. Without time, things happen, but not in any special order. Physics doesn't care about time. Things could as well happen one way or the other, forward or in reverse. We just experience them as happening one way, as directed by the arrow of time. Thanks to Einstein, we know that time is intimately connected to gravity, but, at least to me, both are a mystery; I (and most people) take them as givens. If we had a counter-example, of someone or something not bound by gravitation or time we might make better work of understanding them.

It is enough for now to say that history is like a hurricane. What we call historical are only those collections of events large enough to reach our collective attention. I doubt anyone will pay attention to my life much beyond my death. I don't know a thing about thousands of people I have encountered in my travels. I don't even know 'what became of' hundreds of people I once knew better. Most of us are little hurricanes that never make the trek, so we live and die barely noticed. It is only those lives coupled together in the large events of human affairs, in human time, that we call "history." History arises from nothing, as do all Quantum Mechanical events, and eventually returns there. 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.'

Just as hurricanes appear to become more determinate in their behavior when they evolve into larger selves, so the large affairs of history seem to be all the more regulated. Do this, get that. It's the same with the quanta: evanescent quarks, gluons and the rest make up now-you-see-it-now-you-don't nuclear particles, which combine with themselves and electrons to become atoms. The atoms combine into molecules, which are still bedeviled by quantum hangovers - the mysterious van der Waals forces. Somehow, at each stage of combination things become more and more regular. Like the hurricanes, they adopt predictable tracks which depend on observable conditions. Thus chemistry.

It's alright by me to use the word "cause" within some sort of mechanical theory. Surely, "a causes b" has a meaning within an interpretive system; e.g., gravity makes the rock drop when I let it go. But, it may have no meaning beyond that, if we have no proof the interpretation is also the "actual" state of affairs. Cause, like logical deduction, is an inference from a selected pool of observations, which is true (or even "factual") because we have selected the pool, ascribed events to symbols and manipulated the symbols according to our behavior patterns (cleverly disguised as "rules").

Thus, I prefer to look upon history as I do hurricanes. Many histories are born, but few survive. Those that live long enough can be tracked and examined. They have their own internal logic, or at least one we "see" in them. In a history, events are connected as causes and effects. Eventually, like hurricanes, histories crash against the solidities of matter and time, break up and disappear into the whence they came. The story lasts no longer than the telling.