CHAPTER IX. — THE EQUATORIAL CLOUD-RING.
Description of the Equatorial Doldrums, § 346. — Oppressive Weather, 348. — The Offices performed by Clouds in the terrestrial Economy, 349. — The Barometer and Thermometer under the Cloud-ring, 350. — Its Offices, 353. — How its Vapors are brought by the Trade-winds, 361. — Breadth of the Cloud-ring, 363. — How it would appear if seen from one of the Planets, 364. — Observations at Sea interesting, 368.
345. SEAFARING people have, as if by common consent, divided the ocean off into regions, and characterized them according to the winds; e.g., there are the “trade-wind regions,” the “variables,” the “horse latitudes,” the “doldrums,” &c. The “horse latitudes” are the belts of calms and light airs (§ 101) which border the Polar edge of the northeast trades. They were so called from the circumstance that vessels formerly bound from New England to the West Indies, with a deck load of horses, were often so delayed in this calm belt of Cancer, that, for the want of water for their animals, they were compelled to throw a portion of them overboard.
346. The “equatorial doldrums” is another of these calm places (§ 104). Besides being a region of calms and baffling winds, it is a region noted for its rains and clouds, which make it one of the most oppressive and disagreeable places at sea. The emigrant ships from Europe for Australia have to cross it. They are often baffled in it for two or three weeks; then the children and the passengers who are of delicate health suffer most. It is a frightful grave-yard on the way-side to that golden land.
347. A vessel bound into the southern hemisphere from Europe or America, after clearing the region of variable winds and crossing the “horse latitudes,” enters the northeast trades. Here the mariner finds the sky sometimes mottled with clouds, but for the most part clear. Here, too, he finds his barometer rising and falling under the ebb and flow of a regular atmospherical tide, which gives a high and low barometer every day with such regularity
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that the time of day within a few minutes may be told by it. The rise and fall of this tide, measured by the barometer, amounts to about one tenth (0.1) of an inch, and it occurs daily and every where between the tropics; the maximum about 10h. 30m. A.M., the minimum between 4h. and 5h. P.M., with a second maximum and minimum about 10 P.M. and 5 A.M.* The diurnal variation of the needle changes also with the turning of these invisible tides. Continuing his course toward the equinoctial line, he observes his thermometer to rise higher and higher as he approaches it; at last, entering the region of equatorial calms and rains, he feels the weather to become singularly close and oppressive; he discovers here that the elasticity of feeling which he breathed from the tradewind air has forsaken him; he has entered the doldrums, and is under the “cloud-ring.” Escaping from this gloomy region, and entering the southeast trades beyond, his spirits revive, and he turns to his log-book to see what changes are recorded there. He is surprised to find that, notwithstanding the oppressive weather of the rainy latitudes, both his thermometer and barometer stood, while in them, lower than in the clear weather on either side of them; that just before entering and just before leaving the rainy parallels, the mercury of the thermometer and barometer invariably stands higher than it does when within them, even though they include the equator. In crossing the equatorial doldrums he has passed a ring of clouds that encircles the earth.
348. I find in the journal of the late Commodore Arthur Sinclair, kept on board the United States frigate Congress during a cruise to South America in 1817-18, a picture of the weather under this cloud-ring that is singularly graphic and striking. He encountered it in the month of January, 1818, between the parallel of 40 north and the equator, and between the meridians of 190 and 230 west. He says of it: “This is certainly one of the most unpleasant regions in our globe. A dense, close atmosphere, except for a few hours after a thunder-storm, during which time torrents of rain fall, when the air becomes a little refreshed; but a hot, glowing sun soon heats it again, and but for your awnings, and the little air put in circulation by the continual
- See paper on Meteorological Observations in India, by Colonel Sykes, Philosophical Transactions for 1850, part 2d, page 297.
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flapping of the ship’s sails, it would be almost insufferable. No person who has not crossed this region can form an adequate idea of its unpleasant effects. You feel a degree of lassitude unconquerable, which not even the sea-bathing, which every where else proves so salutary and renovating, can dispel. Except when in actual danger of shipwreck, I never spent twelve more disagreeable days in the professional part of my life than in these calm latitudes. “I crossed the line on the 17th of January, at eight A. M., in longitude 21º 20’, and soon found I had surmounted all the difficulties consequent to that event; that the breeze continued to freshen and draw round to the south-southeast, bringing with it a clear sky and most heavenly temperature, renovating and refreshing beyond description. Nothing was now to be seen but cheerful countenances, exchanged as by enchantment from that sleepy sluggishness which had borne us all down for the last two weeks.”
349. One need not go to sea to perceive the grand work which the clouds perform in collecting moisture from the crystal vaults of the sky, in sprinkling it upon the fields, and making the hills glad with showers of rain. Winter and summer, “the clouds drop fatness upon the earth.” This part of their office is obvious to all, and I do not propose to consider it now. But the sailor at sea observes phenomena and witnesses operations in the terrestrial economy which tell him that, in the beautiful and exquisite adjustments of the grand machinery of the atmosphere, the clouds have other important offices to perform besides those merely of dispensing showers, of producing the rains, and of weaving mantles of snow for the protection of our fields in winter. As important as are these offices, the philosophical mariner, as he changes his sky, is reminded that the clouds have commandments to fulfill, which, though less obvious, are not therefore the less benign in their influences, or the less worthy of his notice. He beholds them at work in moderating the extremes of heat and cold, and in mitigating climates. At one time they spread themselves out; they cover the earth as with a mantle; they prevent radiation from its crust, and keep it warm. At another time, they interpose between it and the sun; they screen it from his scorching rays, and protect the tender plants from his heat, the land from the drought; or, like a garment, they overshadow the sea, defending its
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waters from the intense forces of evaporation. Having performed these offices for one place, they are evaporated and given up to the sunbeam and the winds again, to be borne on their wings away to other places which stand in need of like offices. Familiar with clouds and sunshine, the storm and the calm, and all the phenomena which find expression in the physical geography of the sea, the right-minded mariner, as he contemplates “the cloud without rain,” ceases to regard it as an empty thing; he perceives that it performs many important offices; he regards it as a great moderator of heat and cold — as a “compensation” in the atmospherical mechanism which makes the performance of the grand machine perfect.
350. Marvelous are the offices and wonderful is the constitution of the atmosphere. Indeed, I know of no subject more fit for profitable thought on the part of the truth-loving, knowledge seeking student, be he seaman or landsman, than that afforded by the atmosphere and its offices. Of all parts of the physical machinery, of all the contrivances in the mechanism of the universe, the atmosphere, with its offices and its adaptations, appears to me to be the most wonderful, sublime, and beautiful. In its construction, the perfection of knowledge is involved. The perfect man of Uz, in a moment of inspiration, thus demands of his comforters: “But where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? The depth saith, it is not in me; and the sea saith, it is not with me. It can not be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls, for the price of wisdom is above rubies.
Whence, then, cometh wisdom, and where is the place of understanding? Destruction and Death say, we have heard the fame thereof with our ears.
“God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof; for he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven; to make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure. When he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder; then did he see it, and declare it; he prepared it, yea, and searched it out.”*
When the pump-maker came to ask Galileo to explain how it was that his pump would not lift water higher than thirty-two
- JOB, Chapter xxviii.
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feet, the philosopher thought, but was afraid to say, it was owing to the “weight of the winds;” and though the fact that the air has weight is here so distinctly announced, philosophers never knew it until within comparatively a recent period, and then it was proclaimed by them as a great discovery. Nevertheless, the fact was set forth as distinctly in the book of nature as it is in the book of revelation; for the infant, in availing itself of atmospherical pressure to suck the milk from its mother’s breast, unconsciously proclaimed it.
351. Both the thermometer and the barometer (§ 347) stand lower under this cloud-ring than they do on either side of it. After having crossed it, and referred to the log-book to refresh his mind as to the observations there entered with regard to it, the attentive navigator may perceive how this belt of clouds, by screening the parallels over which he may have found it to hang from the sun’s rays, not only promotes the precipitation which takes place within these parallels at certain periods, but how, also, the rains are made to change the places upon which they are to fall; and how, by traveling with the calm belt of the equator up and down the earth, this cloud-ring shifts the surface from which the heating rays of the sun are to be excluded; and how, by this operation, tone is given to the atmospherical circulation of the world, and vigor to its vegetation.
Having traveled with the calm belt to the north or south, the cloud-ring leaves the sky about the equator clear; the rays of the torrid sun pour down upon the crust of the earth there, and raise its temperature to a scorching heat. The atmosphere dances (§ 205-6), and the air is seen trembling in ascending and descending columns, with busy eagerness to conduct the heat off and deliver it to the regions aloft, where it is required to give momentum to the air in its general channels of circulation. The dry season continues; the sun is vertical; and finally the earth becomes parched and dry; the heat accumulates faster than the air can carry it away; the plants begin to wither, and the animals to perish. Then comes the mitigating cloud-ring. The burning rays of the sun are intercepted by it. The place for the absorption and reflection, and the delivery to the atmosphere of the solar heat, is changed; it is transferred from the upper surface of the earth to the upper surface of the clouds.
352. Radiation from the land and the sea below the cloud-belt
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is thus interrupted, and the excess of heat in the earth is delivered to the air, and by absorption carried up to the clouds, and there transferred to their vapors to prevent excess of precipitation.
353. In the mean time, the trade-winds north and south are pouring into this cloud-covered receiver, as the calm and rain-belt of the equator may be called, fresh supplies in the shape of ceaseless volumes of heated air, which loaded to saturation with vapor, has to rise above and get clear of the clouds before it can commence the process of cooling by radiation. In the mean time, also, the vapors which the trade-winds bring from the north and the south, expanding and growing cooler as they ascend, are being condensed on the lower side of the cloud stratum, and their latent heat is set free, to check precipitation and prevent a flood.
354. While this process and these operations are going on upon the nether side of the cloud-ring, one not less important is going on upon the upper side. There, from sunrise to sunset, the rays of the sun are pouring down without intermission. Every day, and all day long, they operate with ceaseless activity upon the upper surface of the cloud stratum. When they become too powerful, and convey more heat to the cloud vapors than the cloud vapors can reflect and give off to the air above them, then, with a beautiful elasticity of character, the clouds absorb the surplus heat. They melt away, become invisible, and retain, in a latent and harmless state, until it is wanted at some other place and on some other occasion, the heat thus imparted.
355. We thus have an insight into the operations which are going on in the equatorial belt of precipitation, and this insight is sufficient to enable us to perceive that exquisite indeed are the arrangements which Nature has provided for supplying this calm belt with heat, and for pushing the snow-line there high up above the clouds, in order that the atmosphere may have room to expand, to rise up, overflow, and course back into its channels of healthful circulation. As the vapor is condensed and formed into drops of rain, a twofold object is accomplished: coming from the cooler regions of the clouds, the rain-drops are cooler than the air and earth below; they descend, and by absorption take up the heat which has been accumulating in the earth’s crust during the dry season, and which can not now escape by radiation. Thus this cloud-ring modifies the climate of all places beneath it; overshadowing, at different seasons, all parallels from 5º south to 15º north.
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356. In the process of condensation, these rain-drops, on the other hand, have set free a vast quantity of latent heat, which has been gathered up with the vapor from the sea by the trade-wvinds and brought hither. The caloric thus liberated is taken by the air and carried up aloft still farther, to keep, at the proper distance from the earth, the line of perpetual congelation. Were it possible to trace a thermal curve in the upper regions of the air to represent this line, we should no doubt find it mounting sometimes at the equator, sometimes on this side, and sometimes on that of it, but always so mounting as to overleap this cloud-ring. This thermal line would not ascend always over the same parallels: it would ascend over those between which this ring happens to be; and the distance of this ring from the equator is regulated according to the seasons.
357. If we imagine the atmospheirical equator to be always where the calm belt is which separates the northeast from the southeast trade-winds, then the loop in the thermal curve, which should represent the line of perpetual congelation in the air, would be always found to stride this equator; and it may be supposed that a thermometer, kept sliding on the surface of the earth so as always to be in the middle of this rain-belt, would show very nearly the same temperature all the year round; and so, too, would a barometer the same pressure.
358. Its Office. — Returning and taking up the train of contemplation as to the office which this belt of clouds, as it encircles the earth, performs in the system of oceanic adaptations, we may see how the cloud-ring and calm zone which it overshadows perform the office both of ventricle and auricle in the immense atmospherical heart, where the heat and the forces which give vitalityand power to the system are brought into play — where dynamical strength is gathered, and an impulse given to the air sufficient to send it thence through its long and tortuous channels of circulation.
359. Thus this ring, or band, or belt of clouds is stretched around our planet to regulate the quantity of precipitation in the rain- belt beneath it; to preserve the due quantum of heat on the face of the earth; to adjust the winds; and send out for distribution to the four corners, vapors in proper quantities to make up to each river-basin, climate, and season, its quota of sunshine, cloud, and moisture. Like the balance-wheel of a well-constructed chronometer,
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this cloud-ring affords the grand atmospherical machine the most exquisitely arranged self-compensation. If the sun fail in his supply of heat to this region, more of its vapors are condensed, and heat is discharged from its latent store-houses in quantities just sufficient to keep the machine in the most perfect compensation. If, on the other hand, too much heat be found to accompany the rays of the sun as they impinge upon the upper circumference of this belt, then again on that side are the means of self-compensation ready at hand; so much of the cloud-surface as may be requisite is then resolved into invisible vapor — for of invisible vapor are made the vessels wherein the surplus heat from the sun is stored away and held in the latent state until it is called for, when instantly it is set free, and becomes an obvious and active agent in the grand design.
360. That the thermometer stands invariably lower (§ 351) beneath this cloud-belt than it does on either side of it, has not, so far as my researches are concerned, been made to appear by actual observation, for the observations in my possession have not yet been fully discussed concerning the temperature of the air. But that the temperature of the air at the surface under this cloudring is lower, is a theoretical deduction as susceptible of demonstration as is the rotation of the earth on its axis. Indeed, Nature herself has hung a thermometer under this cloud-belt that is more perfect than any that man can construct, and its indications are not to be mistaken.
361. Where do the vapors which form this cloud-ring, and which are here condensed and poured down into the sea as rain, come from? They come from the trade-wind regions (§ 115); under the cloud-ring they rise up; as they rise up, they expand; and as they expand, they grow cool, form clouds, and then are condensed into rains; moreover, it requires no mercurial instrument of human device to satisfy us that the air which brings the vapor for these clouds can not take it up and let it down at the same temperature. Precipitation and evaporation are the converse of each other; and the same air can not precipitate and evaporate, take up and let down water, at one and the same temperature. As the temperature of the air is raised, its capacity for receiving and retaining water in the state of vapor is increased; as the temperature of the air is lessened, its capacity for retaining that moisture
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is diminished. These are physical laws, and therefore, when we see water dripping from the atmosphere, we need no instrument to tell us that the elasticity of the vapor so condensed, and falling in drops, is less than was its elasticity when it was taken up from the surface of the ocean as water, and went up into the clouds as vapor.
362. Hence we infer that, when the vapors of sea water are condensed, the heat which was necessary to sustain them in the vapor state, and which was borrowed from the ocean, is parted with, and that therefore they were subjected, in the act of condensation, to a lower temperature than they were in the act of evaporation. Ceaseless precipitation goes on under this cloudring. Evaporation under it is suspended almost entirely. We know that the trade-winds encircle the earth; that they blow perpetually; that they come from the north and the south, and meet each other near the equator; therefore we infer that this line of meeting extends around the world. By the rainy seasons of the torrid zone we can trace the declination of this cloud-ring stretched like a girdle round about the earth: it travels up and down the ocean as from north to south and back.
363. It is broader than the belt of calms out of which it rises. As the air, with its vapors, rises up in this calm belt and ascends, these vapors are condensed into clouds (§ 361), and this condensation is followed by a turgid intumescence, which causes the clouds to overflow the calm belt, as it were, both to the north and the south. The air flowing off in the same direction assumes the character of winds that form the upper currents that are counter (Plate I.) to the trade-winds. These currents carry the clouds still farther to the north and south, and thus make the cloud-ring broader. At least, we infer such to be the case, for the rains are found to extend out into the trade-winds, and often to a considerable distance both to the north and the south of the calm belt.
364. Were this cloud-ring luminous, and could it be seen by an observer from one of the planets, it would present to him an appearance not unlike the rings of Saturn do to us. Such an observer would remark that this cloud-ring of the earth has a motion contrary to that of the axis of our planet itself — that while the earth was revolving rapidly from west to east, he would observe the cloud-ring to go slowly, but only relatively, from east to west. As the winds which bring the cloud-vapor to this region of calms
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rise up with it, the earth is slipping from under them; and thus the cloud-ring, though really moving from west to east with the earth, goes relatively slower than the earth, and would therefore appear to require a longer time to complete a revolution.
365. But, unlike the rings of Saturn through the telescope, the outer surface, or the upper side to us, of this cloud-ring would appear exceedingly jagged, rough, and uneven.
366. The rays of the sun, playing upon this peak and then upon that of the upper cloud-surface, melt away one set of elevations and create another set of depressions. The whole stratum is, it may be imagined, in the most turgid state; it is in continued throes when viewed from above; the heat which is liberated from below in the process of condensation, the currents of warm air ascending from the earth, and of cool descending from the sky, all, we may well conceive, tend to keep the upper cloud-surface in a perpetual state of agitation, upheaval, and depression.
367. Imagine in such a cloud-stratum an electrical discharge to taklie place; the report, being caught up by the cloud-ridges above, is passed from peak to peak, and repeated from valley to valley, until the last echo dies away in the mutterings of the distant thunder. How often do we hear the voice of the loud thunder rumbling and rolling away above the cloud-surface, like the echo of artillery discharged among the hills! Hence we perceive or infer that the clouds intercept the prog, ress of sound, as well as of light and heat, through the atmosphere, and that this upper surface is often like Alpine regions, which echo back and roll along with rumbling noise the mutterings of the distant thunder.
368. It is by trains of reasoning like this that we are continually reminded of the interest which attaches to the observations which the mariner is called on to make. There is no expression uttered by Nature which is unworthy of our most attentive consideration — for no physical fact is too bald for observation — and mariners, by registering in their logs the kind of lightning, whether sheet, forked, or streaked, and the kind of thunder, whether rolling, muttering, or sharp, may be furnishing facts which will throw much light on the features and character of the clouds in different latitudes and seasons. Physical facts are the language of Nature, and every expression uttered by her is worthy of our most attentive consideration.