evaporating waters; a fat bubble like a swelling blister began to rise,
the first movement of air in many days. It was not a big bubble, only a
hundred miles across, but as it rose, the rotation of the earth's
surface began to twist the rising air, spinning it like a top, so that
the satellite cameras, hundreds of miles above, recorded a creamy little
spiral wisp like the decorative icing flower on a wedding cake.
The cameras relayed the picture through many channels, until at last it
reached the desk of the senior forecaster of the hurricane watch at the
meteorological headquarters at Miami in southern Florida.
Looks like a ripe one/ he grunted to his assistant, recognizing that all
the favourable conditions for the formation of a revolving tropical
storm were present. We'll ask Airforce for a fly-through.
At forty-five thousand feet the pilot of the US Airforce B5.2 saw the
rising dome of the storm from two hundred miles away. It had grown
enormously in only six hours.
As the warm saturated air was forced upwards, so the icy cold of the
upper troposphere condensed the water vapour into thick puffed-up silver
clouds. They boiled upwards, roiling and swirling upon themselves.
Already the dome of cloud and ferociously turbulent air was higher than
the aircraft.
Under it, a partial vacuum was formed, and the surrounding surface air
tried to move in to fill it. But it was compelled into an
anti-clockwise track around the centre by the mysterious forces of the
earth's rotation. Compelled to travel the long route, the velocity of
the air mass accelerated ferociously, and the entire system became more
unstable, more dangerous by the hour, turning aster, perpetuating itself
by creating greater wind velocities and steeper pressure gradients.
The cloud at the top of the enormous rising dome reached an altitude
where the temperature was thirty degrees below freezing and the droplets
of rain turned to crystals of ice and were smeared away by upper-level
jet-streams. Long beautiful patterns of cirrus against the high blue
sky were blown hundreds of miles ahead of the storm to serve as its
heralds.
The US Airforce B52 hit the first clear-air turbulence one hundred and
fifty miles from the storm's centre. It was as though an invisible
predator had seized the fuselage and shaken it until the wings were
almost torn from their roots, and in one surge, the aircraft was flung
five thousand feet straight upwards.
Very severe turbulence/ the pilot reported, We have vertical wind speeds
of three hundred miles an hour plus. The senior forecaster in Miami
picked up the telephone and called the computer programmer on the floor
above him. Ask Charlie for a hurricane code-name. And a minute later
the programmer called him back.
Charlie says to call the bitch Lorna. Six hundred miles south-west of
Miami the storm began to move forward, slowly at first but every hour
gathering power, spiralling upon itself at unbelievable velocities, its
high dome swelling upwards now through fifty thousand feet and still
climbing. The centre of the storm opened like a flower, the calm eye
extended upwards in a vertical tunnel with smooth walls of solid cloud
rising to the very summit of the dome, now sixty thousand feet above the
