Thomas Morris Longstreth

Reading the Weather Thomas Morris Longstreth

Book Excerpt: ... Look up some day when wisps of clouds are floating very high. You will notice that their port is in the east, mattering not what wind may be blowing where you are. They are above the petty disturbances of the shallow surface winds. They follow a Gulf Stream of immeasurable grandeur. Onward, always onward, they sail, emblems of a great serenity. Beneath this vast drift of air, which increases in velocity as it nears the pole, is an undertow from two to three miles thick. It is the movements of this undertow that affect our lives. These movements are influenced by all the changes of temperature and by the configurations of land. They take the form of whirls. These whirls may be small eddies, local in effect, or vast cyclones with diameters of fifteen hundred miles. Small or large they roll along under the Westerlies, translated by friction, and invariably moving for most of their course in an easterly direction, like their tractor above....