Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [140]
1 One knot is 1 nautical mile an hour. A nautical mile is 6076.12 feet or 1852 meters. Therefore 1 knot is 1.152 miles an hour, or 1.85 kilometers an hour.
2 Smith, Southern Winds, pp. 220-21.
3 Hydrogen atoms weigh 1.08 atomic mass units (AMU); helium atoms weigh 4.0026, yielding a 0.0294 shortfall.
4 Huler, Defining the Wind, p. 60.
5Expressed in mathematical language, 1.74 X 1017 watts.
6 J. W. Chamberlain and D. M. Hunten, Hadley Circulation, Theory of Planetary Atmospheres (San Diego: Acadian Press, 1987), pp. 79—80.
7 In a paper titled "On the Equations of Relative Motion of a System of Bodies."
8 David J. Van Domelen, of the Ohio State University Department of Physics, gave me my first understanding of the Coriolis force. For the more technically minded, he also gives the following equation relating the Coriolis force to an object's mass (m), its velocity in a rotating frame (v), and the angular velocity of the rotating frame of reference (03): FCorioiis = —2 m (CD X vr). See his Web site at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~dvandom/Edu/newcor.html..
9 Newton, Encyclopedia of Air, p. 131.
10 Chris Fogarty, "Extratropical Transition of Hurricane Michael," fournal of the American Meteorological Society, September 2004, p. 1323.
11 Chris Fogarty, Canadian Hurricane Centre, Dartmouth, interview.
12 DeBlieu, Wind, p. 5.
13 Romance of the Sea, J. H. Parry, Washington, National Geographic Society, I98i,p. 254.
14 David Jennings, spokesman for the Canadian Coast Guard, quoted in "Maersk Damage," Halifax Chronicle Herald, January 28, 2003.
15 DeBlieu, Wind,pp. 64-65.
16 Peter Bowyer, interview, November 2004.
17 Encyclopaedia Britannica 6:543.
18 Encyclopaedia Britannica 16:454.
19 Smith, Southern Winds, pp. 52—54.
20 R. E. M. Rickaby and P. Halloran, "Cool La Nina During the Warm of the Pliocene," Science, March 25, 2005, p. 1948.
21 A good exposition of these events is from Josh Larson, USATODAY.com/ weather/.
22 Jury, McQueen, and Levy, fournal of Theoretical Applied Climatology, no. 50, pp. 103-15, and Allan, Lindesay, and Parker, fournal of the American Meteorological Society, no. 69(2), pp. 24—27.
23 Sheets and Williams, Hurricane Watch, p. 270.
24 Interview, October 2004.
25 Kelly Shiers, "Timetable for Next Hurricane," Halifax Chronicle Herald, September 25, 2004.
26 Newton, Encyclopedia of Air, p. 135.
27 Sheets and Williams, Hurricane Watch, p. 6.
28 Vortex material from T R. Joe Sundaram, who owns and operates an engineering research firm in Columbia, Maryland, at http://www.worldandi.com.
29 The energy within a single tornado has been calculated at between io4 and io7 kwh, not much less than the 20-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which was 1013.
30 P. J. Hufstutte, "Tornado Rips Apart Tavern," Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2004.
31 Ibid.
32 This discussion of tornadoes owes considerable debts to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, "Climate and Weather," vol. 16, p. 436 ff.; to a National Geographic magazine article on tornadoes, April 2004; and to Robert Henson and Erik Rasmussen, who authored a piece in Natural Science, May 1995 on tornadoes. Henson is the author of Television Weathercasting: A History; Rasmussen is a scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, and the coordinator of a field program called the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX).
33 Trachard, Voyage to Siam, p. 34.
34 Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Climate and Weather" (see note 32).
35 In an essay in What If a compilation of historical might-have-beens edited by Robert Cowley.
36 Smith, Southern Winds, p. 55.
37 Ibid.,p. 135.
38 DeBlieu, Wind, p. 117.
39 Proulx, The Shipping News, p. 317.
40 Wreckhouse stories and the Lauchie McDougall story by Mont Lingard in Next Stop: Wreckhouse, quoted by Bruce Whiffen, November 30, 1998.