Father Hurricane

Fr. Benito Viñes, SJ (1837–1893) and the science of hurricane forecasting

by Dr. Bob Sheets and Jack Williams

Fr. Viñes's book Notes Relative to Hurricanes of the Antilles in September and October of 1875 and 76 included this map of an area near Cardenas, Cuba, flooded by a hurricane (note: north is down). Before hurricanes would hit, Viñes spent hours logging observations of wind and water and clouds in Cuba. After storms passed, he assessed the damage. Such scholarship and research allowed him to demonstrate that hurricanes (such as Wilma, lashing at Cuba in 2005 on the previous page) could be predicted.

The official weather map for September 28, 1874, is the first to show a hurricane. It was offshore between Jacksonville, Florida, and Savannah, Georgia, and apparently hit the Carolina coast two days later with no reports of deaths or substantial damage from the sparsely populated region.

This forecast represented progress, but there's progress and then there's progress; the real forecasting advances in that era were made by Fr. Benito Viñes, SJ, who became director of the 400-student Royal College of Belen in Havana, Cuba, in 1870.

The Jesuits' long tradition of scientific education and research had made seismology something of a specialty, but Cuba's problem was hurricanes, not earthquakes. It and all the other islands of the Carib bean and the eastern Atlantic had been periodically, tragically devastated by the great storms arriving almost unannounced on their shorelines. Within just a few years, Viñes more or less singlehandedly evened the playing field, and by the end of the century he and his fellow Jesuit Fr. Federico Faura, based in Manila, were the most proficient and best-known hurricane and cyclone forecasters in the world. Considering that they didn't have radio reports from ships at sea, much less from airplanes or satellites, their contributions to the science of storms and to forecasting were extraordinary.

Standing watch

Viñes was up-to-date on the latest theories, but he knew that the key to real progress in forecasting was empirical research. He started with the twelve years of detailed weather observations the college had collected before he arrived. To this database he added his observations, compiled every hour from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week. He had no assistants, but he did have a full complement of the equipment available at that time, including sextants, barometers, and anemometers. When a storm was near, Viñes picked up the pace and collected data 24 hours a day.

American Jesuit Fr. Walter Drum wrote of his brother Jesuit decades later: "He studied the structure of the cyclone, the phenomena that preceded it, and the havoc left in its wake—in fact, he noted with ardor and painstaking care all meteorological signs and data which preceded, accompanied, and followed up the storm, and that, too, with out neglecting the ordinary and toilsome routine work of the observatory."

The Jesuits' Royal College of Belen in Havana was where Spaniard Fr. Benito Viñes, SJ, a seismologist by training, taught. But "Cuba's problem was hurricanes, not earthquakes," write the authors, explaining Viñes's shift to the study of meteorology.

The payoff

The grueling work paid dividends when Viñes predicted on September 11, 1875, that an intense hurricane would hit Cuba's southern coast two days later. When it did so, his reputation for accurate forecasts achieved immediate and wide circulation. This had never happened before -— anywhere! Later that year he made another successful forecast. The following season a special edition of La Voz de Cuba announced on October 19, "We have just received from Rev. Father Viñes, the learned director of the Meteorological Observatory of the Royal College of Belen, the following important communication that we hasten to make known to the public before the time of our evening edition... We are very near to the vortex of a hurricane."

Viñes expected the wind to blow from the northeast, followed by "a calm that should not be trusted, and thereafter the wind would shift with a sudden and terrific force to the southwest"—exactly what will happen as the eye of a hurricane passes directly over a location, moving east to west. Again, Viñes's forecast was correct, and toasts were hoisted by the Royal Academy of Science in Havana.

In 1877 Viñes expanded his operation with more reporting stations around Cuba and on other Caribbean islands. The Havana Chamber of Commerce and several companies provided financial aid, the telegraph companies didn't charge for their services, and railroads and steamship lines offered the famous prognosticator free transportation along their routes. The railroad even ran a special express if Viñes needed immediate transportation; he rarely if ever missed either firsthand observation of a storm or the earliest possible visit after the fact.

Fr. Federico Faura, SJ (1840–1897), Fr. Viñes's colleague in the Pacific, founded the Observatorio Meteorologico de Manila to study the typhoons that plagued the Far East.

On guard

In September 1877 Viñes forecast that a hurricane still far over the Atlantic would strike Barbados soon. After it then did so, Viñes pre dicted, on September 22, that the hurricane would miss Puerto Rico but would strike Santiago, Cuba, on the 24th. "Be on your guard," he advised. These successful forecasts were almost certainly more luck than skill, but they weren't all luck. After these correct forecasts, one newspaper in Puerto Rico wrote: "Thus Viñes, whose choice has for us the authority of an oracle, calmed our souls by his timely warning. He well deserves the European reputation that he enjoys."

The idea floated decades before by William Redfield that upper-air winds carry storms along with them through the atmosphere, somewhat in the way that a stream carries a vortex downstream, now enjoyed general consent by meteorologists, including Viñes. But he was making his correct forecasts long before meteorologists had any means at all of mea suring those wind speeds and their directions in the upper atmosphere. How was he able to do so? By dint of hard work and a genius for obser vation, it seems. Viñes simply had the touch for tropical weather. He could feel the atmospheric forces at work—and he could see them as well.

For centuries, observation was all that most forecasters had to go on. The most basic observation was that huge swells in an otherwise calm sea portend a strong storm somewhere far out at sea. By Viñes's era, it was known that a storm's winds create waves of all sizes, and the longer the wind blows, the harder it blows, and the greater the distance over the water the wind blows (the "fetch"), the larger the waves. These waves move out in all directions from the center and begin sorting themselves into groups moving at the same speed and in the same direction. This action is incredibly complex, and only the fastest supercomputers can handle the simulations now used by oceanographers to study how these waves gradually smooth out and grow longer to form swells. These powerful swells can pound the beaches targeted by an approaching hurricane for many days. The surf resounds with a continuous roar that shouts a warning of lurking calamity.

But even a supreme forecaster such as Viñes, however, could not discern from the swells alone how far away a storm was or in which direction it might be heading. Besides, Viñes's specialty was not waves but clouds. His forecasts relied to a large extent on detailed observations of winds at the surface and of clouds at different levels of the atmosphere, from which he was able to infer wind currents in the upper air. He was the first to do this, and it was a remarkable accomplish ment. He correctly hypothesized that clouds—carried by the winds, naturally—converge toward the center of a hurricane at low altitude. At middle altitudes, the winds and clouds tend to circle around the storm. At high altitudes, the winds carry clouds away from the storm. Of course, reading the clouds is not as easy as it sounds. High clouds that seem to be radiating outward from a point in the distance might really be, because of perspective, just parallel rows of clouds that appear to be converging in the distance, like a railroad track. It takes the touch of an Old Master to paint clouds, and in the nineteenth century it took the touch of a Viñes to read them.

The Jesuits' Manila observatory was founded in 1865 for the purpose of weather prediction. It later expanded its scientific pursuits to include seismology and astronomy.

Good estimates

As his predictions proved, Viñes worked out methods for making a good estimate of a storm's path, and he developed simple devices that observers could use to gain a clearer picture of a storm's location based on surface winds and the clouds they saw at various heights.

Like maritime observers from time immemorial, Viñes understood that "brick red" sunrise and sunset often indicated foul weather in the future. Like those old-time observers, he also knew that the puffy cumulus clouds that normally dot the skies around tropical islands appear as a storm approaches, and, as we've just seen, that upper-air winds carry clouds away from the storm. What he did not and could not have known is that all three of these phenomena are the result of the same dynamic in the storm system. We now understand that air flowing out of the top of a hurricane—carrying clouds with it—descends to Earth in a ring. This descending air is warmed, which evaporates the puffy cumulus clouds. Satellite photographs of hurricanes and typhoons clearly show this "moat" of clear air around hurricanes and typhoons. This warming air also creates "inversion," a layer of air that's warmer than the air below it—just the opposite of the state of affairs that's driving the storm itself, where warm air is rising from the surface. The inversion, which might be just a few hundred feet above the surface, traps the air at the surface and keeps it from rising along with dust and other particles, which otherwise would be carried aloft. These trapped particles create the vivid sunrises and sunsets that sailors have admired and worried about for ages.

Predicting storms' paths

Viñes complemented all these close observations of winds, ocean swells, and clouds with historical data and developed a climatology that showed the paths that storms of different areas of the eastern Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico were likely to follow at various times during the hurricane season. There are such patterns, and he was remarkably able to discern them through the fog of time. Across the Pacific, Faura used forecasting and research techniques similar to Viñes's to record the same success with typhoons roaming the western Pacific. The two Jesuits were the best at what they did.

With today's knowledge of hurricanes and forecasting, we know it is highly likely that Viñes missed many storms, either those that never struck or those that missed the forecast target. However, his work was remarkable for its time, and it seems that his successes were remembered and recorded while his failures were less well-known. Neither the details of Viñes's techniques nor his forecasting scoreboard were as important to the coming century as the notion that hurricanes can be forecast. Viñes firmly planted the idea that an understanding of hurricanes could be used to save lives.  

Dr. Bob Sheets is the former director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami and a veteran of many hurricanes.	Jack Williams, one of the founders of USA TODAY Weather Page, is Coordinator of Public Outreach for the American Meteorological Society.