The Children's Blizzard (15 page)

Residents of the capital were proud to have a weather station atop their new Chamber of Commerce building (and prouder still that the station was
not
in Minneapolis). If they squinted, passersby on Robert Street could just make out the horizontal windmill of the anemometer, whirling in even the faintest breeze. And three times a day anyone who glanced skyward would be treated to the appearance of doughty Signal Corps observer Sergeant Patrick Lyons popping out onto the roof like a cuckoo clock. Quite the natty fellow he was, with clipped dark hair parted in the middle, a stand-up collar and an abundant waxed mustache. Every day of the year in every kind of weather, Lyons or his assistant ventured forth unfailingly to check the rooftop instruments at 6 A.M., 2 P.M., and 9 P.M. local time. Saint Paulites could set their pocket watches by it.

Sergeant Lyons boarded at the Saint James Hotel near the river on Third and Cedar, five long blocks from the Chamber of Commerce building. Five interminable blocks in the dark and bitter cold of winter mornings. But Sergeant Lyons was not in the habit of complaining. A confirmed bachelor in his mid-forties, Lyons had been taking weather observations in Saint Paul for going on fifteen years—just about from the inception of the Signal Corps’ weather operations—and in 1888 he had nearly two decades of observations ahead of him. If anyone was used to the weather in Saint Paul, it was Sergeant Lyons.

On the morning of January 11, he reported to work as usual to take the 6 A.M. observations. A light dry snow had started during the night and was still swirling down. The temperature stood at 26 degrees below zero. Lyons noted that it was the fourth morning in a row of double-digit readings below zero.

Lyons was well settled into his daily routine—that day, among his other duties, he climbed out on the roof to oil the anemometer and wipe off the station’s battery—when Woodruff and his assistant, Sergeant Alexander McAdie, arrived at the Indications office across the hall at 9 A.M. The men got to work at once. They had an hour and a half before the morning indications were due to be telegraphed to Western Union, and then there were the five daily maps to prepare, copy on the cyclostyle (an early duplicating process using stencil and ink), and distribute to the main local railroads, newspapers, and hotels. Together Woodruff and McAdie went through the data telegraphed from the stations on the regular Signal Corps circuit as well as the additional readings from stations to the north and west that Woodruff had requested. He noted that the atmospheric pressure had dropped sharply at Fort Assinniboine in northern Montana—from 27.31 inches of mercury at 10 P.M. the previous night to 27.06 at that day’s 7 A.M. observation. Wind out of the east and barely any temperature change—from ­4 to ­3.

Helena and Fort Custer were both reporting a slight rise in temperature and light winds. Cold and clear in the Dakotas—20 below in Bismarck and Huron—though still not as cold as it was in Saint Paul.

Woodruff and McAdie began entering the 7 A.M. data on blank maps of the United States—for every station in their network, some forty-six stations in all, they filled in the temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and state of the weather (fair, clear, cloudy, raining, or snowing). On the first map, Woodruff used red pencil to draw in the isobars, the contour lines connecting stations reporting the same air pressure. As if by magic, evanescent mountain ranges of high and low pressure erupted across the country in ripples and tongues and irregular concentric circles of isobars. Woodruff could see clearly that the huge elongated high centered just north of the Dakotas that had material-ized on the previous night’s map was shifting southeast. A low seemed to be nudging down from the north behind the high, hence the falling barometer at Fort Assinniboine, but Woodruff did not have readings from far enough north in Alberta or Saskatchewan to get a clear picture of what was happening upstream. The high over the Dakotas was nothing out of the ordinary for this time of year, so it was unlikely that anything really violent was pressing behind it. The sharply dropping pressure over Fort Assinniboine might be a freak or an error or a fabrication by a lazy observer. Woodruff had spent enough time in wind-whipped frontier forts to know that the sergeants and privates who staffed these weather stations were none too reliable. And Fort Assinniboine was one of the most remote military outposts in the country—a vast rectangular treeless compound of two-story brick buildings, second in size only to San Francisco’s Presidio, thrown up hastily in the harsh grasslands of northern Montana in the wake of Custer’s disaster at Little Bighorn.

Woodruff decided to be cautious. Central Montana stations were reporting slightly warmer conditions, and it was a good bet that this mild weather would spread south and east as the high-pressure center continued to move eastward across the country. He wrote out the afternoon forecast by hand in black ink on a slip of tissue paper:

January 11, 1888—10:30 AM

Indications for 24 hours commencing 3 PM today.

For Saint Paul, Minneapolis and vicinity: Slightly warmer fair weather, light to fresh variable winds.

For Minnesota and Dakota: Slightly warmer fair weather, light to fresh variable winds.

Woodruff would keep an eye on those Montana pressures when he issued his next set of indications at midnight. Though the press and the public still believed that forecasting the weather was more hocus-pocus—or hoax—than science, Woodruff was convinced that the essential elements were clear and straightforward. If you could define the areas of high and low pressure, identify their centers, and track their movement, you could pretty much predict the rise and fall of temperature and the likelihood of stormy weather over the next day and often over the next two days. As Woodruff wrote in his paper “Cold Waves and Their Progress,” “In various in-vestigations and studies, it has been shown that a fall of temperature succeeds or follows an area of low barometer, and a rise precedes such an area; and that, in general, the reverse is true of an area of high barometer, viz.: that a fall precedes and a rise follows it.” In other words, temperatures rise in advance of an approaching low-pressure system and fall once the low has passed, while high pressure causes temperatures to fall as it builds in and rise as it breaks down. Woodruff was aware that highs and lows “move almost invariably across the United States from west to east,” and further, that the movement of a low seemed to determine the movement of the high-pressure area following behind it, almost as if low pressure dragged high pressure along in its wake. “[O]ne storm begets its successor,” wrote Elias Loomis, a pioneer of American weather science whose
Treatise on Meteorology
Woodruff had read during his training course at Fort Myer. “The undulations thus excited in the atmosphere bear considerable analogy to the waves of the ocean agitated by a tempest, and which are propagated by mechanical laws long after the first exciting cause has ceased to act." Woodruff concluded from researching his paper that the cold waves originating in “the vast regions of ice and snow near the arctic circle” almost always entered the United States through Montana, and from there took one of three tracks: due east “along the chain of great lakes and across New England”; southeast into Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and so on across the entire country; or due south through Dakota Territory and all the way down to Texas, where the cold air sometimes veered northeast and spread up the Atlantic coast. The critical question for the forecaster was: What made a given cold wave take a particular track?

Woodruff frankly admitted ignorance. “Even after a decided cold wave is observed in the extreme northwest,” he wrote in his paper, "we are not able to determine which one of the three paths it will take.” Greely conceded much the same thing, though rather more pompously, in his book
American Weather:
“As yet it has not been determined with olute accuracy what conditions must obtain to induce the passage of cold waves” in one direction over another. "The question doubtless depends upon the relative relation of the centre of the anticyclone to that of some cyclone far distant." Since they had no knowledge of fronts and their role in structuring storms and only the vaguest idea of how upper-air conditions influence what happens on the ground, forecasters of the day fell back on probabilities based on statistical analysis of existing data—and guesswork. Statistics told Woodruff that over half the cold waves entering the U.S. from Helena moved southeast, while only about a quarter plunged directly south down to Texas; and further that 71 percent of these Helena cold waves hit Bismarck in eight hours and 88 percent reached Omaha within a day. Interestingly, Woodruff also ascertained that nearly half of the cold waves in his sample were first detected at the 3 P.M. observations (2 P.M. Central time)—typically the warmest time of the day in winter—an insight that Greely mentioned (crediting Woodruff) in
American Weather.

It wasn’t much to go on in the face of the tremendous surge of energy spinning down at him from the north. A couple of formulas, a few charts of statistics, some rather murky mumbo-jumbo about the three possible paths. Even with a rooftop bristling with instruments and the all-important telegraph wires connecting him to the national grid, what Woodruff saw when he looked out from his office at the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce building was more a mirror of his own mind than a window on reality.

Woodruff and young Alexander McAdie broke for lunch as usual at 1 P.M. on January 11 and were back in the office at 2:30 P.M., Central time—half an hour after Lyons took the afternoon observations (the temperature in Saint Paul had risen 10 degrees since the morning readings to a comparatively balmy 15 below zero). One hundred and thirty-two other Signal Corps sergeants and privates were taking (or faking) observations at precisely the same time—3 P.M. in Washington, D.C.—but it would be two hours before the data arrived in Saint Paul from the Chicago Western Union office (to hasten distribution, a circuit was established through Chicago so that data from stations throughout the West could be transmitted simultaneously and then relayed to Saint Paul). And then it took McAdie another hour to translate the telegrams (weather messages were telegraphed in code to make them shorter—and thus cheaper to send—and to avoid numerical errors). Back at the Signal Office in Washington, they had the transcription and mapping process down to a science: as the telegrams came in on the wires from all over the country, a team of clerks read aloud the translations of the cipher while another clerical team recorded the new data, each clerk working on only one stream of data (temperature, air pressure, and so on). Meanwhile, the indications officers hovered behind the clerks and watched the pressure systems emerging on the maps, so that by the time all data were entered and all the isobars drawn, they were ready to issue their forecasts. Very likely McAdie and Woodruff worked in a similar fashion in Saint Paul, though necessarily more slowly since there were only two of them (or three when Private W. H. Ford was on duty).

It was approaching 5 P.M. in Saint Paul before Woodruff got a clear picture of what had happened in the course of the day. The readings from Fort Assinniboine were startling. The pressure had fallen dramatically since the 7 A.M. observations—from 27.06 to 26.76, a drop Woodruff had rarely seen in all his years in the West—while the temperature had risen 11 degrees, from 3 below to 8 above. Bismarck was also reporting a rapidly falling barometer and rising temperatures. Farther south in Huron, a stiff southeast wind had kicked up and the temperature had jumped 18 degrees, from 20 below at 7 A.M. to 2 below at 3 P.M.

As Woodruff inked the isobars in red on the map, a distinct oval bowl of low pressure took shape around Medicine Hat in southern Alberta, just north of Fort Assinniboine: the first faint shadow of the coming storm.

Woodruff and McAdie left the office at 5:45, shortly after tabu-lating the afternoon observations. The temperature was still rising in Saint Paul, odd for this time of day in winter, though with readings remaining in the double digits below zero, they hardly noticed. The men took four and half hours off for supper and a rest, and then returned to the Chamber of Commerce building at 10:15 P.M. to await the arrival of the nighttime observations from Chicago. Again there was the time lag due to the backlog at Western Union and then the tedious process of translation and transcription. Woodruff worked quickly on the charts—he and McAdie were eager to get home—and the highs and lows bloomed under his hand like faint red targets.

He saw at once that the Alberta low from the afternoon chart had moved quickly to the southeast and was now centered over Fort Keogh, the eastern Montana army post where he had been stationed with his regiment when he was called up for signal duty. But still no outbreak of truly frigid air over the U.S. Fort Assinniboine reported 4 above at the 10 P.M. (Eastern time) observation with slightly rising barometer and northerly gales. Helena was 33 above, Bismarck 7 above, and the Huron station, staffed since 1881 by the conscientious Sergeant Samuel W. Glenn, was reporting a slightly falling barometer, stiff southeast winds, and a temperature rise of 5 degrees in the past seven hours, from 2 below to 3 above.

The reading that stood out most starkly was the temperature at North Platte, in southwestern Nebraska : 22 degrees above zero at 10 P.M., a rise of 20 degrees since the 3 P.M. observations.

It took Woodruff only a few minutes to complete the midnight indications. It was perfectly clear to him from the 10 P.M. observations that a deep low was in the process of dropping southeast over the country—the classic path. He knew that temperatures would rise in advance of the low and fall once it had passed. He knew that Helena held the key. Once temperature began to drop in Helena, they would be likely to drop in Bismarck eight hours later (71 percent of the time according his calculations) and in Saint Paul within twenty-four hours (73 percent of the time). But as of 10 P.M., Helena was still showing a
rise
of temperature—so there was as yet no cause for alarm. This rise in Helena was a bit puzzling, because according to Woodruff’s own formulation “a
fall
of temperature succeeds or follows an area of low barometer,” and the center of low pressure had already passed well to the south and east of Helena.