100 Fun Facts About Meteorology

Which philosopher wrote the oldest comprehensive treatise on meteorology, around 340 BC?

Aristotle's Meteorologica, written about 340 BC, runs to four books, three on weather and the heavens and one on what we would now call chemistry; the word 'meteorology' descends from its title.

Who proposed the cloud-naming system of cumulus, stratus and cirrus in 1802?

Luke Howard, a Quaker manufacturing chemist, presented the Latin cloud names to London's Askesian Society in December 1802; Goethe later wrote verses in his honour, and the Linnaean logic helped the system stick.

The Beaufort wind scale was devised in 1805 by a hydrographer serving which country's fleet?

Britain's Royal Navy was Francis Beaufort's service: commanding HMS Woolwich in 1805 he set down 13 wind classes, from 'just sufficient to give steerage' to 'that which no canvas sails could withstand'.

A Saffir-Simpson Category 5 hurricane has sustained winds of at least what speed?

157 mph or more marks Category 5 since the 2012 revision of the scale, which Herbert Saffir drafted around 1969 and Robert Simpson extended at the National Hurricane Center; Category 4 runs from 130 to 156 mph.

The Enhanced Fujita scale rates tornadoes on how many intensity categories?

Six (0 to 5) is the count: EF0 to EF5, rated from damage surveyed after the tornado, so wind speeds are estimates; the US adopted it in 2007 and Canada in 2013.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the Coriolis effect deflects moving air in which direction?

To the right is the Northern Hemisphere deflection, from the mathematics in Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis's 1835 paper on rotating frames; it is why air spiralling into a low spins anticlockwise north of the equator.

Who is usually credited with inventing the barometer in 1643?

Evangelista Torricelli, Galileo's last assistant, filled a glass tube with mercury and inverted it in a dish in 1643, describing the result in a 1644 letter; Gasparo Berti's earlier water column was not built to track pressure.

The earliest known description of an anemometer, in 1450, came from which Italian Renaissance architect?

Leon Battista Alberti described a swinging-plate anemometer around 1450, a board that tilted with the wind; the familiar four-cup design came much later, from Thomas Romney Robinson in 1846.

The dew point is the temperature to which air must be cooled for its relative humidity to reach what?

100% relative humidity means saturation: at the dew point the air holds all the vapour it can, so dew point equals air temperature; otherwise the dew point is always lower.

Which Japanese meteorologist detected the jet stream in the 1920s near Mount Fuji?

Wasaburo Oishi tracked pilot balloons from the Tateno observatory near Mount Fuji from 1923 and published the strong westerlies in Esperanto, so his discovery went largely unread abroad.

El Niño takes its name from Peruvian fishermen's reference to whom?

The Christ Child is 'El Niño' in Spanish: Peruvian fishermen named the warm current for its arrival around Christmas, 'El Niño de Navidad'; the cool phase was later called La Niña.

Jacob Bjerknes linked the El Niño feedback in 1969 to an overturning atmospheric cell he named after whom?

Gilbert Walker, director of Indian observatories, found the Southern Oscillation in the 1920s while seeking monsoon predictors; Bjerknes's 1969 paper tied it to Pacific sea temperatures and called the east-west cell the Walker circulation.

The largest hailstone officially measured, 7.9 inches across, fell in 2010 in which US state?

South Dakota's town of Vivian was hit on 23 July 2010 by a stone 18.6 inches around and nearly two pounds in weight; the US severe-hail threshold had been raised to one inch that same year.

The air around a lightning flash rapidly heats to roughly what temperature?

About 30,000 °C, roughly five times the Sun's surface temperature, is reached within microseconds along the channel; an average negative cloud-to-ground stroke carries around 30,000 amperes.

Thunder is produced by what?

The heated air expands faster than sound can otherwise travel, and the sonic shock is heard as a clap or a rolling peal.

In a primary rainbow, the most intense light leaves the raindrops at roughly what angle?

42 degrees from the antisolar point is where one internal reflection concentrates the light, red at 42 and violet near 40; the fainter secondary bow sits about ten degrees outside with colours reversed.

The term 'Tornado Alley' was first used in 1952 as the title of what?

A research project on severe weather across Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas carried the title 'Tornado Alley' in 1952; the region has no official boundaries, and the National Severe Storms Laboratory calls it a media term.

A meteorologist in which Australian state first gave personal names to weather systems, between 1887 and 1907?

Queensland's government meteorologist Clement Wragge named storms after Greek letters, mythological figures and politicians he disliked; the habit died with his retirement and was revived by US forecasters in the Pacific in 1945.

Atlantic hurricane name lists rotate every how many years?

Six lists are used in turn, so 2024's names return in 2030; each skips Q, U, X, Y and Z, alternates male and female names, and the WMO hurricane committee retires the names of deadly or costly storms.

The World Meteorological Organization grew out of a nongovernmental body founded in which year?

1873 was when the International Meteorological Organization, a nongovernmental body of national weather-service heads, was founded at a Vienna congress; it became the intergovernmental WMO when the convention took effect on 23 March 1950.

The troposphere holds roughly what share of the atmosphere's total mass?

80% is the share usually quoted, though some texts say three-quarters; the troposphere also holds 99% of the water vapour, so nearly all weather happens there, and the name is from the Greek for 'turning'.

In the Köppen climate classification, which letter denotes arid climates?

B is the arid group, split into BW desert and BS steppe; A is tropical, C temperate, D continental and E polar in Wladimir Köppen's scheme, first published in 1884 and refined in 1900.

Where was Earth's record air temperature of 56.7 °C (134 °F) measured in 1913?

Furnace Creek, Death Valley, recorded 56.7 °C on 10 July 1913, a reading the WMO keeps as the world record although some climatologists dispute it; Al Aziziyah's 1922 Libyan claim of 58 °C was struck off in 2012.

The lowest ground-level temperature ever, -89.2 °C, was measured in 1983 at which station?

Vostok, the Russian station on the East Antarctic plateau, logged −89.2 °C on 21 July 1983; satellites have since sensed lower surface temperatures on the plateau, but those are not counted as air-temperature records.

Mawsynram, reportedly the wettest place on Earth, is in which Indian state?

Meghalaya's Khasi Hills hold both Mawsynram and Cherrapunji, about 15 km apart; Mawsynram averages nearly 12,000 mm of rain a year, most of it in the June-to-September monsoon.

Which is the world's driest non-polar desert, with stations that have never recorded rain?

The Atacama, in northern Chile, lies in a two-sided rain shadow between the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range; some of its weather stations have never recorded rain, and the cold Humboldt Current offshore starves it of moisture.

A 231 mph wind, a world record for 62 years, was measured in 1934 on which mountain?

Mount Washington, New Hampshire, logged 231 mph on 12 April 1934, a world record until a 1996 tropical-cyclone gust of 253 mph on Barrow Island, off the Pilbara coast.

Which BBC forecaster seemed to dismiss a viewer's hurricane worry hours before the Great Storm of October 1987?

Michael Fish told lunchtime viewers on 15 October 1987 that a woman had rung to ask whether a hurricane was coming and 'don't worry, there isn't'; that night's storm killed 18 people in England and flattened some 15 million trees.

The deadliest natural disaster in US history was a 1900 hurricane that struck which Texas city?

Galveston, then Texas's busiest port, was hit on 8 September 1900 by a storm surge that swept over the island; estimates run from 6,000 to 12,000 dead, with 8,000 the figure most often cited.

Katrina in 2005 killed 1,392 people, the most in the United States since which earlier storm?

The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane drowned some 2,500 people in Florida when the dike around Lake Okeechobee failed; every US hurricane between it and Katrina killed fewer than 1,392.

In Daniel Fahrenheit's original 1724 scale, 0 °F was set as the freezing point of what?

A brine of water, ice and ammonium chloride gave Fahrenheit his zero, the lowest temperature he could reliably reproduce; his upper fixed point was body heat, first 90 and later 96 degrees.

In Anders Celsius's original 1742 proposal, what temperature was the boiling point of water?

0 degrees was boiling and 100 was freezing in Celsius's 1742 scale; it was inverted soon after his death in 1744, and the unit was called 'centigrade' until the 1948 conference that renamed it.

'Derecho', a long-lived line of damaging thunderstorm winds, comes from the Spanish for what?

Straight, as in 'straight ahead', is the sense physicist Gustavus Hinrichs wanted when he coined the term in 1888 to contrast with the twisting 'tornado', after studying a windstorm that crossed Iowa in 1877.

A haboob, an intense dust storm driven by thunderstorm downdrafts, takes its name from which language?

Arabic habūb, meaning 'blasting' or 'drifting', named the dust storms of Sudan; the wall of dust forms when cold air rushes down out of a storm and hits the ground, and the term later spread to Arizona.

A dry, warm downslope wind on the lee side of a mountain range is known by which German name?

Foehn (Föhn) is the Alpine name: moist air cools slowly as it rises over the range and sinking dry air warms faster, so the lee side gets warm, dry gusts; the Rockies' version is the Chinook.

What is virga?

Precipitation that evaporates before reaching the ground is virga, seen as streaks hanging beneath a cloud; it is common over deserts, where the evaporating rain cools the air and can trigger dry microbursts.

Mammatus clouds, the pouches that hang beneath a storm cloud, are named from the Latin for what?

Udder or breast is the meaning of Latin mamma, the root of mammatus; the pouches most often hang under the spreading top of a cumulonimbus but can form on other cloud types too.

Noctilucent clouds, the highest in Earth's atmosphere, form at roughly what altitude?

76 to 85 km up, in the mesosphere, is where noctilucent clouds form from ice crystals about 100 nanometres wide; they were first recorded in 1885, two years after the Krakatoa eruption.

'Petrichor', the scent of rain on dry ground, was coined in 1964 by researchers from where?

Australia's CSIRO was where Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas worked when they coined the word in a 1964 Nature paper, from the Greek for stone and for ichor, the fluid in the veins of the gods.

The mirage called a Fata Morgana is named, via Italian, after which figure of Arthurian legend?

Morgan le Fay, the enchantress of Arthurian legend, is 'Fata Morgana' in Italian; the superior mirages common over the Strait of Messina were taken for fairy castles conjured by her magic.

Which former captain of HMS Beagle invented the word 'forecast' for his daily weather predictions?

Robert FitzRoy, who had captained HMS Beagle on Darwin's voyage, began issuing daily 'forecasts' to The Times in 1861 and coined the word; he had set up the Meteorological Department in 1854 to warn sailors of storms.

The Met Office was established on 1 August 1854 as a small department within which UK body?

The Board of Trade housed the new Meteorological Department, created to collect ships' weather logs and improve safety at sea; from 1861 it telegraphed storm warnings to ports, where cones and drums were hoisted for ships.

According to the Groundhog Day tradition, what happens if the groundhog sees its shadow on 2 February?

Six more weeks of winter follow a shadow, says the Pennsylvania Dutch lore brought from German Candlemas customs involving a badger; no shadow means an early spring.

Before the butterfly, Edward Lorenz illustrated the 'butterfly effect' with which creature?

A seagull was Lorenz's first image: a 1963 paper said one flap of a gull's wings could alter the weather's course; the butterfly arrived in the title of his 1972 talk, suggested by colleague Philip Merilees.

What was the name of the first operational weather satellite, launched in 1960?

TIROS-1, the Television Infrared Observation Satellite, went up from Cape Canaveral on 1 April 1960 and returned nearly 23,000 pictures of cloud cover in 78 days of operation, NASA's first test of satellites for studying Earth.

The term 'atmospheric river' was coined in the early 1990s by researchers at which university?

MIT's Reginald Newell and Yong Zhu introduced 'atmospheric river' in papers from 1992 to capture how narrow the moisture plumes are; the Pineapple Express from near Hawaii to the US West Coast is the best-known example.

On what surface did Wilson Bentley catch the snowflakes he was first to photograph in detail?

Black velvet on a tray caught the crystals, which the Vermont farmer moved to a slide with a feather and shot through a microscope bellows camera; his first successful photograph came on 15 January 1885.

The eye of a tropical cyclone is typically how wide?

30 to 65 km is the typical eye diameter, though Hurricane Wilma's shrank to under 4 km in 2005; the eye is ringed by the eyewall, where the tallest thunderstorms and strongest winds are found.

The Northwestern Pacific typhoon basin accounts for roughly what share of the world's tropical cyclones?

Almost one third of the world's tropical cyclones form in the northwestern Pacific, the most active basin; its Regional Specialized Meteorological Center is in Japan, with other warning centres in Hawaii, the Philippines and Hong Kong.

The flat top of a mature cumulonimbus cloud is usually compared to what object?

An anvil is the comparison: the top flattens where rising air hits the stable tropopause and spreads out as cumulonimbus incus, and the shelf can run ahead of the storm for kilometres.

Which instrument measures the humidity of the air?

Hygrometer is the general name; the hair hygrometer, which Horace-Bénédict de Saussure built in 1783, exploits the way a human hair lengthens as humidity rises.

Which son of Korea's King Sejong invented the first standardised rain gauge in 1441?

Munjong, then crown prince, devised the cheugugi in 1441, a bronze cylinder on a stone stand; copies were sent across the Joseon kingdom so rainfall could guide land-tax assessments.

Who in 1686 published a systematic study of trade winds and monsoons, tying them to solar heating?

Edmond Halley's 1686 paper in Philosophical Transactions mapped the trade winds and monsoons and blamed solar heating; George Hadley added the role of Earth's rotation in 1735, giving the Hadley cell its name.

Which Norwegian argued in 1904 that weather could be forecast by calculation from natural laws?

Vilhelm Bjerknes set out in 1904 the seven equations whose solution would give future weather from present observations; in 1917 he founded the Bergen school, where his son Jacob mapped the polar front.

Who published 'Weather Prediction by Numerical Process' in 1922?

Lewis Fry Richardson worked his one trial forecast by hand while serving as an ambulance driver in France; it predicted an absurd 145 hPa pressure rise over a single forecast step, yet his method underpins modern numerical prediction.

The Beaufort scale's post-war typhoon extension tops out at which force number?

17 is the top force of the 1946 extension, forces 13 to 17 covering winds above the old force 12; the extended scale was adopted for typhoon reporting in places such as Taiwan and mainland China.

What was Herbert Saffir's profession when he devised the hurricane scale that bears his name?

Structural engineer Herbert Saffir, based in Miami, was asked by the United Nations in 1969 to study low-cost housing in hurricane-prone areas and devised the wind-damage scale; Robert Simpson of the National Hurricane Center extended it.

In 2009 the US National Hurricane Center dropped which two factors from Saffir-Simpson categories?

Pressure and storm surge ranges were dropped because they correlate poorly with wind category, as Ike's huge surge at Category 2 showed in 2008; the renamed Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale became operational on 15 May 2010.

Which French naturalist devised a rival cloud classification in 1802 that failed to catch on?

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, better known for his theory of evolution, published a cloud scheme in 1802 with French names such as 'nuages pommelés' (dappled clouds); his descriptive terms lost out to the Latin system adopted internationally in 1891.

Which prefix marks mid-level clouds such as altocumulus and altostratus?

These clouds can form as low as 2,000 metres above the surface at any latitude.

Typhoons said to have wrecked Kublai Khan's invasion fleets in 1274 and 1281 gave Japan which famous word?

Kamikaze means divine wind: the storms' timing seemed heaven-sent, and the name was revived in the Second World War for pilots meant to sweep an enemy fleet from the seas again.

Group Captain James Stagg's forecast persuaded which commander to delay the D-Day landings from 5 to 6 June 1944?

Dwight Eisenhower gambled on Stagg's promise of a short lull. The next dates with suitable tides fell two weeks later, when a major storm battered Normandy and would have made beach landings impossible.

Cartoons draw raindrops as teardrops, but air resistance gives a large falling raindrop a shape likened to what?

A hamburger bun is the usual comparison: the air pushing up flattens the drop's underside, and the very largest drops balloon into a parachute shape before they break apart.

Which New York skyscraper, hit about 23 times a year, disproves the saying that lightning never strikes twice?

The Empire State Building is tall, pointed and isolated, exactly what lightning favours, so one strike marks a spot as a likely target for the next rather than a safe place to stand.

Forecasters turned to which alphabet for extra storm names when the Atlantic hurricane list ran out in 2005 and 2020?

The Greek alphabet ran as far as Zeta in 2005 and Iota in 2020, after which the World Meteorological Organization replaced it with a supplemental list of ordinary names.

Dust blown across the Atlantic from which desert is a major supplier of phosphorus to the Amazon basin's soils?

The Sahara sends more windblown dust aloft than anywhere else on Earth, roughly 400 to 700 million tons a year, and it feeds a rainforest whose own soils are mostly short of that nutrient.

Which gas makes up about 78 percent of the dry air in Earth's atmosphere, far more than any other?

Nitrogen makes up 78.08 percent of dry air, oxygen 20.95 percent and argon 0.93 percent, leaving carbon dioxide, for all its influence on climate, at only about 0.04 percent.

Which American founding father deduced that storms do not always travel in the direction of the prevailing wind?

Benjamin Franklin is said to have realised it after a 1743 storm hid a lunar eclipse in Philadelphia yet, his brother wrote, reached Boston to the northeast only later.

At which temperature do thermometers marked in Fahrenheit and in Celsius show exactly the same number?

Minus 40 is where the two scales cross: a Fahrenheit degree is only five-ninths of a Celsius degree, so above that point the Fahrenheit number is always the higher of the two.

Which city's Great Smog of December 1952 killed thousands and led to a Clean Air Act four years later?

London lay under the smog for five days after an anticyclone trapped coal smoke in cold, windless air, and later research put the toll at 10,000 to 12,000.

Which continent is on average the windiest and driest on Earth and also has the highest average elevation?

Antarctica is mainly a polar desert, with far less than 200 mm of precipitation a year inland, and katabatic winds pouring off its high plateau often blow at storm force at the coast.

Tropical cyclones rarely form within about 500 km of which line, where the Coriolis effect is too weak?

The equator is where the Coriolis force vanishes, so air simply flows from high to low pressure without the large-scale rotation a cyclone needs to organise.

Mongolia's Gobi Desert is dry partly because the Himalayas block moist air, an effect known as what?

A rain shadow forms because air forced up the windward slopes sheds its moisture there as rain or snow, then sinks down the far side compressed, warmer and dry.

Sailors gave which name to the windless ocean belt where the northeast and southeast trade winds converge?

The doldrums were feared in the Age of Sail, when being becalmed in the hot, muggy belt could mean death; meteorologists know it as the Intertropical Convergence Zone.

Airliners often cruise in the lower reaches of which layer of the atmosphere, the home of the ozone layer?

The stratosphere grows warmer with height because its ozone absorbs ultraviolet light, and that layering leaves it stable, with no regular convection, so jets ride above the turbulent air below.

Earth's seasons are caused chiefly by which feature of the planet, rather than by changing distance from the Sun?

Axial tilt lifts the Sun higher in the summer sky and strengthens its rays. Earth is in fact closest to the Sun in January, when the Northern Hemisphere is in midwinter.

Snow can shrink on a cold, dry day without melting; what is the direct change from ice to water vapour called?

Sublimation skips the liquid stage altogether, the same change dry ice undergoes at room temperature; frost forms by the reverse route, vapour turning directly to ice.

Which glow, seen on ship masts and aircraft during thunderstorms, did sailors sometimes take as a good omen?

St. Elmo's fire is named after Erasmus of Formia, patron saint of sailors. It is a corona discharge, luminous plasma streaming from pointed objects in a strong electric field, and can warn of an imminent lightning strike.

Oymyakon, known as the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth, lies in which country?

Russia holds the title through this village in the Sakha Republic, where the average temperature across the whole of January 1931 was −54.1 °C (−65.4 °F).

The 1970 Bhola cyclone, the deadliest tropical cyclone on record, made landfall in what is now which country?

Bangladesh did not yet exist: the coast was East Pakistan, and anger at the government's slow relief effort fed an opposition landslide a month later and then the war of independence.

The official Atlantic hurricane season opens on 1 June and closes on the last day of which month?

November closes a season that really peaks from late August through September, around a midpoint of 10 September; early forecasters drew it narrower, from 15 June to 15 November.

The 'dog days' of summer are named after which star, whose return to the dawn sky they follow?

Sirius, the Dog Star, was blamed by ancient poets for the heat and fever that followed its return, and astrologers tied it to drought, lethargy and sudden thunderstorms.

The World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations' agency for weather and climate, is based in which city?

Geneva is the base from which the agency keeps weather data flowing freely between national services, under a congress of member states that meets every four years.

Which smooth, stationary clouds that form downwind of mountains have often been mistaken for flying saucers?

Lenticular clouds hold still while the wind blows through them. Powered pilots steer clear of the turbulence nearby, but glider pilots seek out the rising air at the leading edge.

Ice crystals can create bright patches of light 22 degrees either side of the solar disc, popularly known as what?

Sun dogs appear when flat, plate-shaped crystals drifting in high cloud act as tiny prisms, bending the light by a minimum of 22 degrees; scientists call them parhelia.

The daytime sky is blue because air scatters short wavelengths most strongly, an effect named after which physicist?

Lord Rayleigh's scattering also paints the sunset: by the time low sunlight has crossed so much air, the blue and violet have been scattered out of the direct beam, leaving red and orange.

Fresh snow bounces back around 90 percent of the sunlight that hits it; what is this measure of reflectivity called?

Albedo comes from the Latin for whiteness, and it feeds on itself: a fresh snowfall reflects sunlight away and cools the area, which helps the snow to last.

Which country's Lake Maracaibo has the highest density of lightning on Earth, a display nicknamed the Everlasting Storm?

Venezuela's Catatumbo lightning gathers over the marshes where the Catatumbo River enters the lake, flashing for hours on end on well over a hundred nights a year.

Which writer gathered eyewitness accounts of England's Great Storm of 1703 into a book called The Storm?

Daniel Defoe placed newspaper advertisements within a week of the storm asking readers for their own stories, then edited about sixty into a book since hailed as pioneering modern journalism.

What name is given to the energy released when water vapour condenses, which keeps the air in a thunderstorm rising?

Latent heat takes its name from the Latin for lying hidden: evaporation absorbs it without warming anything, and condensation gives it back, heating the air inside the growing cloud.

Which type of thunderstorm is defined by a mesocyclone, a deep, persistent rotating updraft that can spawn tornadoes?

Supercell storms are most common on the Great Plains of the United States, yet for all their menace only about 30 percent or fewer of them ever produce a tornado.

Ted Fujita defined which term for a violent downdraft under 4 km wide, blamed for several airliner crashes?

Microburst was his word for the smallest downbursts, which are most dangerous to aircraft taking off or landing; recognising and escaping one is now standard simulator training for flight crews.

What name is given to the glassy tubes formed when lightning strikes sand and fuses it, nicknamed fossilised lightning?

Fulgurite takes its name from fulgur, the Latin for lightning: a strike can bridge more than 100 million volts, melting and vaporising the sand along its path into a hollow, branching tube.

Which cold northwesterly wind blows across southern France to the Mediterranean, bringing Provence clear, fresh weather?

The mistral means masterly in the Occitan of Languedoc, and it earns the name, topping 90 km/h in the Rhône Valley while shaping the bright, dry climate of the whole region.

Bernard Vonnegut, brother of novelist Kurt, discovered that which compound could seed clouds to make rain and snow?

Silver iodide works as a nucleating agent, giving ice something to form on, and the discovery left a literary trace: Kurt alluded to his brother's research in the novel Cat's Cradle.

English folklore says rain on 15 July, the feast of which saint, will be followed by forty more days of rain?

St Swithin, a ninth-century bishop of Winchester, asked to be buried outdoors; one theory traces the legend to a downpour on the day in 971 when his remains were moved inside.

The tropical circulation in which warm air rises, flows poleward and sinks near 30 degrees latitude bears whose name?

George Hadley, an English lawyer and amateur meteorologist, proposed it in 1735 to explain the trade winds, a pressing puzzle when sailing ships relied on them to reach North America.

Weather observers record cloud cover in which unit, on a scale from 0 for clear sky to 8 for overcast?

Oktas count eighths of the sky, and the reporting code keeps one more setting in reserve: a 9 means the sky cannot be seen at all, usually because of dense fog or heavy snow.

The 1816 'Year Without a Summer' was caused mainly by the eruption of which Indonesian volcano the previous April?

Mount Tambora's 1815 blast brought on a volcanic winter that cooled the land by about a degree Celsius; harvests failed, and oats that cost 12 cents a bushel in 1815 fetched 92 cents a year later.

Crested, wave-like clouds formed by wind shear are named after Lord Kelvin and which German physicist?

Helmholtz discovered the instability in 1868 and Kelvin put it into mathematics in 1871 while modelling how wind raises ocean waves; the same curling pattern appears around Jupiter's Red Spot.