THE SAMOAN HURRICANE.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 4978, 10 April 1889, Page 3

THE SAMOAN HURRICANE.

Apropos to tbo late diaastera at Samoa, ia the queation : What ia the cauae of the hurricanes ? M. Faye, a French meteorlogoist, is the author of the latest theory. It ia thus set forth in an article in a recent number of the Edinburgh, Review :—“ The atmospheric circulation of our globe consists essentially in a surface flow from the poles to the equator, with a high level return from the equator to the poles. The velocity of these upper currents is very great, and, like the translatory movements of tempests- it becomes accelerated towards the poles. . . . The cease-

less and harmless flow of the storm wind continually rushing high over our heads encohnters no obstacles; yet it is not everywhere the same. In the ocean above the clouds there are rivers without banks or estuaries, but varying in volume and velocity with the plentifulness of their source of supply. These depend upon the heating of the surface beneath, and they are irregularly distributed, because the power of accumulating the sun’s rays is very different in the seas and continents, forests and deserts, with which the inferior atmospheric layers are in contact. Disparities in speed and strength between currents unequally fed are inevitabe. It follows that there must be eddies in those aerial rivers. Just as a relarded thread of water in a rivulet gives rise to little dimpling whirlpools, so the friction between a sluggish and a swifter current of air flowing side by side necessarily produces gyratory movements which subsist until the particular inequality, they serve to compensate is exhausted. The margins, then, of the swiftly-eliding cirrus bearing streams of the upper air are constantly fringed with vortices borne along with them in their course, whirling moreover from right to left, and from left to right in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres respectively. Gravity conspires with centrifugal force for the propagation of these eddies downward. Hurricanes and cyclones are aerial eddies which have touched bottom.”