THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES
In the Nineteenth Century, Scientists Set Out to Solve the “Problem of American Storms”
The exact mechanism by which storms formed was once a subject of fierce debate among American scientists.
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| ―Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie. detail (1866), Wikimedia |
"To fully appreciate the modern-day marvel that is the National Weather Service, it’s useful to start with numbers. There’s 6.3 billion. (The number of observations the agency collects and analyzes every day.) There’s 1.5 million. (The number of forecasts it issues each year… There’s also zero. That’s the approximate number of minutes a typical American like you or me spends wondering about the weather information we access..
This blasé attitude would have astounded the colonists who... found North American weather to be, in a word, hellish. They sent letters home describing the climate in apocalyptic terms.
When it rained, wrote one colonist in New Sweden, on the Delaware River, “the whole sky seems to be on fire, and nothing can be seen but smoke and flames.” “Intemperate” was how a missionary from Rhode Island described it. “Excessive heat and cold, sudden violent changes of weather, terrible and mischievous thunder and lightning, and unwholesome air” created an environment that was “destructive to human bodies.”
The harshness of the weather… wasn’t just an unpleasant surprise. It was also confusing. Among the various, sketchy assumptions that the Europeans had brought with them to their new home was the idea that a location’s climate was directly correlated to its latitude.
By the colonists’ logic, the seasons in Newfoundland should resemble those in Paris, and crops grown in Spain should thrive in Virginia. Instead, the olive trees imported from the Mediterranean died in the frozen ground during the mid-Atlantic winters, and the beer went sour in the summer heat. American settlers could have consulted with the resident experts—the Native Americans who had lived in the eastern part of the continent for thousands of years and knew more about the local climate than anyone else. But they generally didn’t. (“Descriptions of local indigenous knowledge in early colonial narratives,” the historian Sam White noted in his book A Cold Welcome, “are mostly conspicuous by their absence.”)
