Her Name Will Be Faith by Christopher Nicole Read Free Book Online Page A

States we use inches, but in
the rest of the world pressure is recorded in millibars. Then, when all those observations are received, the
forecaster – or nowadays, the
computer – joins all the lines of equal pressure together, making
up what we call a synoptic chart."
    "And that tells you what the weather is going to
do?"
    "Sure. Obviously, if Station
A, five hundred miles away, reports heavy cloud and rain at, say, 8.00 am in the morning, and
Station B, three hundred miles away, reports blue skies at that hour, and then
at ten o'clock
Station A reports clearing skies and Station B increasing cloud, you can assume a rain storm is
approaching from A to B. If at ten o'clock Station A still reports cloud and
rain, when it is also being reported from Station B, then it is obviously a pretty big storm system.
That's pure observation.
But the isobars tell us what wind speeds to expect. When the different lines are well
spaced, a shallow gradient, we know the wind flow will be light. When the lines appear close
packed, a steep gradient, strong winds are indicated. This is very important to
ships at sea, which may
be travelling down a pressure gradient themselves. It is an axiom, for instance, that if a ship's
barometer drops as much as three millibars in any hour, the crew should prepare for a gale. In the
sub-tropics, where there
is very little pressure movement at all, a drop of three millibars in one hour can very well indicate a
hurricane in the vicinity. But nowadays, of course, we have many more sophisticated ways of
telling the weather..."
    Jo was fascinated. Not only by the
subject itself, which she had never really considered in any depth before, but by the total
knowledge and expertise which flowed from
the man. He was an expert. As well as being one of the most attractive men she had ever met. But that was dangerous thinking
in her present state of mind.
    "So," he was saying,
"back in the days when radio was first developed, and as accurate weather forecasts
became important to shipping, and sport, and of course aviation, and folks realized that
long-range forecasting could even save lives, a whole series of these weather reporting
stations I was
talking about were set up. There were even ships at sea, whose business was to maintain a
certain position and do nothing but report on the weather. So a regular series of observations
could be obtained from very far away, and an idea of what was happening there fitted into an overall picture of what the
weather was doing everywhere else, in what direction and how fast the systems were moving, what wind
strengths could be
anticipated, etcetera. But of course those are all virtually obsolete now. Since the Hitler War, radar
has been developed to such an extent that we can look hundreds of miles out to sea, and in the
last thirty years or
so we've had the spread of satellite observation. From a satellite you can look
across several hundred miles of weather at a glance. Take that picture, for instance..." he
indicated the huge framed photograph hanging
on the wall above his head.
    Jo did indeed look at it. She had
noticed it when she first sat down, and had intended to bring it into the conversation as soon
as she could. It was
an enlarged photograph of the Gulf of Mexico, taken from a great distance up,
in the center of which was a pile of white, rather like a large scoop of whipped cream dropped on
to the cardboard, although the cream was clearly rotating in an anti-clockwise direction,
while in the center there was drilled a neat little blue hole. "That's a
hurricane," she said. "The hole
is the eye."
    "The first hurricane of
1977," he agreed. "Named Anita. Now there you have the entire
dimensions of the system on one photo. The outer clouds, those things that look like rocks,
are over Brownsville, Texas. The hurri cane force winds, the edge of that thick white cloud, are
hitting the Mexican coast,
around Yucatan. And of course the size of the system, and the speed at which it