GagHalfrunt
Lifer
- Apr 19, 2001
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I wonder if people knew what hurricanes looked like prior to satellite photos.
They did. Ben Franklin was an avid astronomer and keen to watch an eclipse. The weather spoiled his view in Philadelphia and he tried to gather information from other people including his brother in Boston. Turns out the weather spoiled the view along the entire northeast. Ben charted out the timing and the description of the storm from those reports and worked out the shape and the wind direction and the rotation based on what the storm was doing at various times in various places. The wind direction was from the east in one city and from the west in another and from the south in a third. From that he deduced the movement, shape and the counter-clockwise spin of the storm.
It might not have been an actual hurricane, it might have been either a small hurricane or a bitch of a nor'easter, but the effect was the same. He figured it out by seeing only a small piece of it.