Sardines & Hurricanes

The German Hydrographic Institute reported last week that tuna and sardines, considered warm-water fish, are now being caught in the North Sea. Dr. Guenther Boehnecke, the institute's chief, suspects that the fish have extended their range northward because the North Sea, like many other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, is slowly growing warmer.

On the other side of the Atlantic the climate is growing warmer too, but the mild winters of the past decade are not the only result. Last week Jerome Namias of the U.S. Weather Bureau told a New York meeting of the American Meteorological Society that the warming of the climate may be what steers more hurricanes toward the U.S. East Coast.

Something has happened, said Dr. Namias, to the "planetary air current" the great, sinuous river of high-altitude wind that sweeps around the earth in temperate latitudes. It flows in waves like a shaken rope, and the position and size of the waves is a controlling factor in Northern Hemisphere weather.

In recent years, Dr. Namias explained, the planetary current over North America has changed its behavior. Its waves have shifted in a way that brings more air from the Atlantic Ocean and less from Canada. Since ocean air is warmer in winter than Canadian air, the change makes the winters milder along the Atlantic coast.

But with the warm oceanic air that drifts toward the land in summer as well as in winter come the undesirable hurricanes. Before 1938, said Namias, few hurricanes hit the coast north of Cape Hatteras. Most of them followed a curving track into the Atlantic. Now, with the change in the pattern of the planetary wind, they tend to cross the coastline instead of veering away from it.

Something similar is happening in the northeastern Pacific. Japan is getting more hurricanes (typhoons) than it formerly did. "I can tell you," says Dr. Namias, "that the typhoons in the Pacific, the hurricanes in the Atlantic, the abnormal weather in Europe and the tuna in the North Sea are related in some way. Eventually, we hope to understand how they are related."

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