Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [50]
Less-violent wind vortexes than tornadoes are often just called landspouts. They're common at the higher elevations of Colorado and Kansas and in the Caucasus of eastern Russia, where the height of the land makes it difficult for strong tornadoes to form. Witnesses who have seen these elusive and fleeting apparitions describe them as curiously beautiful, almost luminous and translucent, perhaps because the low level of available moisture is not enough to fill them completely. They're called landspouts because they rather resemble their aqueous cousins called, for rather obvious reasons, waterspouts.
Water vortexes—waterspouts—are true tornadoes though their debris fields, and therefore their visibility, are rather different. Waterspouts have made their way into a good deal of fantastical literature—whole ships are said to be sucked up, and one early novel even had a stable community of spout-dwellers living comfortably at the spout's apex. Alas, even the more prosaic legends are mostly untrue. Waterspouts may pose some danger to small fishing boats, but none whatever to larger ships; nor do they suck up massive quantities of water, although they may lift water a few yards. They're really only visible because they contain clouds formed by condensation.
The most famous real, as opposed to fictional, waterspout appeared off Massachusetts in 1896. It was witnessed by thousands of holiday makers on a variety of beaches, for it appeared three times, lasting some thirty-five minutes. Estimates cobbled together from numerous excited eyewitnesses put it at over 3,000 feet high and maybe 250 feet at base.
It was widely believed that interrupting this column of air could be dangerous. "The violence of the wind retains the column in the air, and when that long spout of water comes to be cut by the masts or yards of the ship entering into it, when one cannot avoid the same, or the motion of the wind comes to be interrupted by rarifying the neighboring air with cannon or musket shot, the water being then no longer supported falls in prodigious quantities [upon the vessel]."33 But no, contrary to legend, firing a cannonball into a waterspout will have no effect whatever, except to wet the cannon-ball on its way through. 34
If you could interrupt a vortex, you would, indeed, destabilize it and cause it to fail; this is the theory behind controlling hurricanes. But the energy to do so is almost as great as that carried by the vortex itself, and the notion rather lacks for practicality.
VI
The third complicating factor in weather analysis is the microclimate winds, local systems that are geography and topography dependent, that ride on the back of global wind systems but that have a profound effect on local climate and weather. Engineers have to pay attention to local winds. The "local wind climate" can affect how buildings and bridges need to be designed.
But local winds have affected more than that. Winds affect not just myth and mood; they have also, in a very direct way, affected history, changing it for better or worse. If global winds have affected human history, in the sense of delineating those regions where cultures might best flourish, local winds and storms have affected it also, but much more abruptly—the "what if" school of history is full of weather-related stories. For example, a Saharan sandstorm foiled the