Anti-Hurricane Campaign

The veering of the hurricane track toward the populous northeast coast of the U.S. has made the nation more hurricane-conscious than ever before. Next season the Government will launch a campaign to find out what makes hurricanes form, grow, sweep on their courses and do their destruction. When a hurricane's secrets are fully known, perhaps it can be prevented, diverted or destroyed.

Guided by Weather Bureau scientists, every Government agency that can take a hand is planning to help the National Hurricane Research Project. From Trinidad to Florida, 27 stations will launch weather balloons and record the radio reports on the weather they pass through. The Air Force will send flying laboratories into each hurricane. B50 bombers will take care of altitudes from 1,000 to 25,000 ft., and a B-47 jet-bomber crew will make runs between 30,000 and 45,000 ft. All the planes will bristle with instruments to measure everything from the temperature to electrical conditions in the air or clouds.

Rockets Above. When a hurricane comes within reach of Wallops Island, Va., the Navy will stand by to give it the works with two-stage rockets, which will soar 100 miles above it and take pictures of its spinning doughnut. The rockets' recording gear will be parachuted into the sea. When the blow is over, the instruments will call for help with small radio voices, and Navy rescue crews will hurry to pick them up.

As soon as the hurricane's calm blue eye takes shape, the Weather Bureau plans to drop a balloon inside it. Equipped with automatic instruments to keep it at a constant level, it will float serenely in the heart of the storm, reporting its position by radio and tracking the hurricane.

As the storm sweeps northward, shore stations and offshore Texas towers will measure its waves. Their radars will plot the streams of rain. If the hurricane hits land, Army engineers will collect flood data; the Hydrographic Office and the Coast and Geodetic Survey will observe wave effects. The enormous mass of information will be put on punch cards, fed into a machine and turned into a clear report of how the hurricane is behaving and is likely to behave.

Fine Structure. The purpose of all this effort, says Meteorologist Robert H. Simpson, the Weather Bureau's head of the project, is to get a line on the "fine structure" of hurricanes, to learn where they get their energy and how they use it in building up destructive force.

When hurricanes are very young, they are still feeble, and there is at least a possibility that modern cloud-seeding methods (with dry ice or silver iodide particles) can keep them from forming an ordered, destructive doughnut. Full grown, a hurricane develops more energy in each second than several atomic bombs, and nothing can be done about it directly. But there is a possibility that a hurricane's symmetry can be damaged. If the rate of energy release in one quadrant of a hurricane can be increased or decreased, the storm may change its direction, perhaps missing by miles a vulnerable coast.

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