Inevitably, meteorological records will be kept, and this will lead in turn to meteorological reports and even forecasts in the newspapers and on the radio and telegraph. In eighteenth-century Europe, informal networks of towns shared weather observations (De Villiers 133), and by the 1840s, weather events were telegraphed across regions of the United States and Britain. (Monmonier, 40).
In Flint, 1633, Chapter 14, Jesse tells Jim, "We need someone to organize a weather service. . . ." In October 1633, the Voice of America, broadcasting from Grantville, features a "local weather forecast." Hughes, "Turn Your Radio on, Episode Two" (Grantville Gazette 20).
I imagine that the weather was mentioned on the weekly Farm-to-Market report mentioned in Huff and Goodlett, "Waves of Change" (Grantville Gazette 9).
Merton Smith of TransEuropean Airlines calls up the weather service in Huff and Goodlett, "High Road to Venice," and he has weather information from as far away as Rome. (Grantville Gazette 19). By fall, 1635, there are weather stations in Russia, at least one of which is equipped with an up-time thermometer and barometer, although their data is transmitted by messenger rather than by radio. Huff and Goodlett, "Butterflies in the Kremlin, Part Seven, The Bureaucrats are Revolting" (Grantville Gazette 9).
Thus, we anticipate that the characters will combine their qualitative knowledge of the winds that prevailed before the Ring of Fire, with the limited quantitative information that the Grantville literature furnishes on late-twentieth century wind climatology, and use it to predict the prevailing winds that will be experienced in the decades following the Ring of Fire.
Winds Aloft
As you go higher, air temperature and pressure drop, at least until you reach 11 km. Upper air weather maps often are identified in terms of the standard pressure at the height the measurements were made, rather than the height (above sea level) directly. Note that one millibar (mb) equals 100 pascals. The weather maps most often available are for the "pressure altitudes" shown below:
Winds increase in speed with altitude, because they aren't slowed down as much by friction with the earth's surface. I assume an exponential increase in wind speed with height, with the reference height being 10 meters (standard meteorological practice) and the exponent being 0.2. The exponent in fact depends on the terrain below, and the stability of the air, and you can find a list of suitable values for different circumstances at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_gradient
Winds also change direction with altitude, either veering (turning clockwise with height) or backing (turning counter-clockwise). Generally speaking, they veer in the northern hemisphere and back in the southern, because the upper air levels experience less "frictional" drag than the lower ones and thus the wind is faster, and this means that the Coriolis force, which is perpendicular to the wind and proportional to the wind speed, is greater. Here's an applet to play with:
http://itg1.meteor.wisc.edu/wxwise/kinematics/testwind2.html
However, veering and backing can also occur as a result of horizontal temperature gradients ("thermal wind") so it's a complex matter. The matter is alluded to by McGHEST/"Wind."
Over the ocean, the average veering is 10.5° at 1,000 meters height (relative to the surface wind), and rising another 1,000 meters adds another 2.5°. (Gray 49). The effects of latitude (0-60°), wind speed and season are minor, with, at 1,000 meters height, perhaps a 4° range (Gray 49, 51, 54). Over land, the veer at 1,000 meters is much larger, perhaps 25-35°. (Gray 75-6).
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There's a weather proverb, "If clouds move against the wind, rain will follow." It's evidence of wind shear, wind direction aloft being different than wind direction at the surface. (So, too, is the movement of different cloud layers in different directions at the same time.) I am not sure how old the saying is, but I found it in Loudon's 1824 Encyclopaedia of Gardening. The down-timers are much more familiar with the outdoors than we are, and may have noticed this phenomenon. Certainly, ships' officers may be asked to note any evidence of wind shear in the future.
There is limited information in Grantville Literature about winds aloft. The EB2002CD essays on monsoons set forth the vertical thickness of the monsoon zone. EB2002CD also mentions the "antitrade wind," a "steady wind that blows poleward and eastward between latitudes 30° N and 30° S, at altitudes of 2 to 12 kilometres (about 1 to 7 miles). Such winds overlie the westward-blowing trade winds." So, if a transatlantic airship could cruise at an altitude of 2 kilometers or higher, it could take advantage of the antitrades to retrace its steps, if that would be more convenient than jogging northward to the westerlies.
If you are wondering about the jet stream, this lies at 10-50 km, well out of airship reach. (EB2002CD/"Jet Stream").
In the old time line, upper air meteorological data was collected by miniaturized "meteorographs," carried by kites and balloons, beginning at least by the 1890s (Monmonier 69). This surely will happen much sooner in the new universe-if we can't build a meteorological balloon, we certainly aren't ready to launch airships!
"Author's Only" Information on Surface and Upper Air Winds
A prospective author may (indeed, better) know more than his or her characters about the conditions awaiting them. That may mean consulting modern, scholarly sources of wind climatology.
For overland flights over the United States, go here for "wind roses" (graphical representations of the probability of various wind speeds and directions):
http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/climate/windrose.html
and for wind speed only:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/societal-impacts/wind
There is wind data for other parts of the world here:
http://www.windfinder.com/windstats/
Ocean data comes from voluntary shipboard observers, buoys, and, most recently, satellites. You may obtain monthly norms of wind speed and direction for the entire world (sea only) at http://cioss.coas.oregonstate.edu/scow/opendap.html
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Here is a sample of the combined overland and ocean wind speed data that's available from the wind atlases prepared for the wind energy industry:
http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/windpower/ResourceMap/sse_figure28a_rev.gif
In general, the surface wind speed over land is half the surface wind speed over water, and one-third the speed aloft above the "friction layer." (Watts 117).
This site has separate January and July maps of (separately) wind speed and wind direction for January and July.
http://www.climate-charts.com/World-Climate-Maps.html
This site has flash animations showing changes in sea level pressure and wind vector, and 500 mb height and wind vector, for the entire world on a monthly basis:
http://geography.uoregon.edu/envchange/clim_animations/index.html
Here you can find the monthly mean 850 hPa winds for the entire world:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/realtime/clim/annual/monthly/monthly.12.w850.html
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/climatology/Wind-850.shtml
and for the 200 hPa pressure altitude:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/realtime/clim/annual/monthly/monthly.12.w200.html
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/climatology/Wind-200.shtml
The following website allows you to create maps of vector wind, scalar wind speed, zonal wind or meridional wind, for any of a great variety of pressure altitudes from the surface up, based on the average over a specified year range (chosen from 1948-2011) for any specified month or range of months or the entire year, for the entire world or specified regions. The data is from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis, and is gridded at 2.5 degree intervals.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/composites/printpage.pl
After you generate the map, you can also get a copy of the u-wind and v-wind text data file used to generate the vector wind-u-wind is the east-west component and v-wind the north-south component.
If you are dealing with a trip at the time of mon
soon changeover, you may need weekly rather than monthly data. You can create a weekly report by use of a daily composite:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/composites/day/
You may also access daily data here,
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.ncep.html
(click on create plot/subset for the wind data of interest).
If that's not enough information for you, you'll need to launch your own weather satellite. . . .
Conclusion
It's a pity that our characters can't carry the winds in a knotted cord, and release the wind they need by untying it. But they can do the next best thing, which is to learn to predict which winds will prevail at a particular place during a particular time of the year.
Bibliography
Meteorology
"Pressure Altitude"
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/slc/projects/wxcalc/formulas/pressureAltitude.pdf
(formula used to convert pressure altitude (mb) to geometric altitude (ft, m) on spreadsheet)
Cavcar, "The International Standard Atmosphere (ISA)",
http://home.anadolu.edu.tr/~mcavcar/common/ISAweb.pdf
Deblieu, Wind: How the Flow of Air has Shaped Life, Myth and the Land (1998)
De Villiers, Windswept (2006).
Huler, Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and how a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry (2004).
Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather (2000).
Watson, Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (1984).
Gray, "Diagnostic Study of the Planetary Boundary Layer over the Oceans," Atmospheric Science Paper No. 179, Dept. Atmospheric Science, Colorado State U. (Feb. 1972)
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2 amp;doc=GetTRDoc.pdf amp;AD=AD0741717
Lewis, "Winds over the World Sea: Maury and Koppen, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc'y, 77:935 (May 1996). http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0477%281996%29077%3C0935%3AWOTWSM%3E2.0.CO%3B2
NASA,
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/AmazonLAI/amazon_lai3.php
Voeikov, Discussion and Analysis of Professor Coffin's Tables and Charts of the Winds of the Globe (1876)
http://www.archive.org/stream/discussionandan00voegoog#page/n90/mode/2up
Watts, The Weather Handbook (1994).
Cushman-Roisin, Chapter 8, "The Ekman Layer," in Introduction to Geophysical Fluid Dynamics: Physical and Numerical Aspects (2011)
http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~cushman/books/GFD/chap8.pdf
(for possible use in trying to quantify frictional veering)
Wikipedia "Density of air"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_density
Ship's Logbooks
Garcia-Herrera, CLIWOC: A Climatological Database for the World's Oceans 1750-1854, Climate Change, 73: 1-12 (2005).
Garcia-Herrera, Description and General Background to Ships' Logbooks as a Source of Climactic Data, Climatic Change, 73: 13-36 (2005).
Prieto, Deriving Wind Force Terms from Nautical Reports through Content Analysis: The Spanish and French Cases, Climatic Change 73: 37-55 (2005).
Wheeler amp; Wilkinson, The Determination of Logbook Wind Force and Weather Terms: The English Case, Climatic Change, 73: 57-77 (2005).
Koek, Determination of Wind Force and Present Weather Terms: The Dutch Case, Climatic Change, 73: 79-95 (2005).
Wheeler, An Examination of the Accuracy and Consistency of Ships' Logbook Weather Observations and Records, Climatic Change 73: 97-116 (2005).
Wheeler, British Naval Logbooks from the Late Seventeenth Century: New Climatic Information from Old Sources, History of Meteorology 2:133-145 (2005).
Wheeler, Using Ships' Logbooks to Understand the Little Ice Age (1685 to 1750): developing a new source of climatic data
Wheeler, The weather during the voyage of the Royal Spanish mail Ship Grimaldi, February-March 1795
Garcia, Sailing Ship Records as Proxies of Climate Variability over the World's Oceans
Garcia-Herrera, The Use of Spanish and British Documentary Sources in the Investigation of Atlantic Hurricane Incidence in Historical Times
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The Progression of Trauma Care and Surgery after the Ring of Fire, Part 2
Gus Kritikos
As in Part 1, I'll include a number of references in this article. Most will be to either canon or Wiki articles giving more detail on some topics than I can include here. I also wish to thank Panteleimon Roberts, Danita and Nimitz Lover for their off Bar input.
For some things, there are no good substitutions.
As I noted at the end of Part 1, only a limited amount of suture material came through the Ring of Fire (RoF). Some is at the physicians' offices, some at the veterinarians' offices, and possibly some at the nursing home. Dr. Ellis or Dr. McDonnell might have a couple of spools of black surgical silk stashed with old office equipment. Because of the war and the change in medical conditions, this small supply will rapidly be used up. I don't know what stocks of plain (unflavored, unwaxed) dental floss will be available at the RoF, but the floss is fine enough and limp enough to thread through eyed needles, as well as strong enough and has a good enough "hand" (the ability to be securely knotted) to act as an impromptu suture material once sterilized.
Up-time, we have a wide variety of suture materials,[i] but down-time the Grantville medical community's options will be limited, at least until material sciences catch up. It's interesting to remember that thread sizes were standardized before specific sutures were in regular use, with size 0 being the smallest thread that could be spun with early-nineteenth century technology. As suture materials advanced, smaller and smaller threads and filaments were made, requiring more and more zeros to indicate the sizes. While up-time sutures are available down to 11-0 size (used for corneal surgery and requiring the use of an operating microscope), the most common sizes used range from 3-0 to 6-0, which is as fine as most human hairs. Size 0 and even #1 sutures are most often used to hold chest tubes in place, or provide closure (when passed through buttons) in very obese abdomens. The use of smaller sutures, along with earlier removal, leads to less scarring, especially on the face.
The first absorbable sutures available down time will be processed from sheep gut. This material was used in Our Time Line (OTL) through the 1990s and is similar to the strings used for violins, violas and tennis racquets. In OTL, two forms were used, plain and chromic. The difference between the two was a treatment with chromic salts that makes the chromic-treated (essentially tanned) material last about twice as long as the plain, at an increased risk of serious inflammation. Gut is best sterilized with iodine solutions, a technique developed in 1906 in OTL. The synthetic absorbable suture materials (polyglycolic acid derivatives)[ii]will probably appear around the same time as nylon and polyethylene sutures do, as the same kind of advancements of the organic chemical industry is needed, and sutures done with the synthetics heal much better than those done with gut. This is especially true in plastic surgery and where absorbable sutures are needed near vascular repairs.
Early down-time non-absorbable sutures will include braided silk, spun cotton, and silver wire. Linen thread may also be used, although it is stiffer than cotton, and causes substantial inflammation[iii]. Both cotton and linen are more flexible and actually stronger when wet, which helps make them useful for suturing. Point of use sterilization will consist of wrapping the suture material around a soft core like a rubber tube and boiling it for twenty minutes. A sample should be weight tested for tensile strength before use.[iv] Braided polyester will probably be the first up-time suture material redeveloped, as it will be usable with the same kind of eyed needles as the silk and cotton.
A fair chance exists that some of the thinnest suture material for a few years will actually be iodine treated horsehair. This is the closest thing available to fine monofilament sutures and is soft enough to thread through the eye of the smallest needles.
>
Up until the early 1950s in OTL, all surgical needles had eyes to hold the thread, just like the common sewing needles from which they were derived. Despite modifications of the eyes to allow the suture material to lay flat along the tail of the needle, the bulk of the doubled thread causes more trauma to the patient's tissues than the simple passage of the curved needle.
In the early 1950s, a technique to swage the hollow butt end of the needle around the bitter end of the suture material was developed. This resulted in an "atraumatic" needle/suture set, which is much gentler to the tissues than the older method.
One reason for developing the swaged-on units was that monofilament suture materials were too stiff to lay properly in the grooves of an eyed needle. Fine (5-0 or smaller) monofilament suture material, needle drivers, and small swaged-on needles are all necessary preconditions for the development of vascular and cardiac surgery, as was noted in Part 1 of this series. Monofilament suture materials' stiffness does mean that it is more difficult to tie those materials securely. Despite their extra stiffness, monofilament sutures have advantages over the braided forms, both in reduction of tissue damage, reduction of tissue irritation, and reduction in the chances of post-operative infections. Over time, the braided or spun materials allow bacteria to follow the suture track deep into the tissues. Monofilament sutures decrease the risk of this effect. Both nylon and polypropylene may be available before 1640, and but probably not by the time stainless steel needles should be available-around 1636-37. These polymers are easily drawn out to fine monofilaments, especially with the expected down-time technological advances between 1631 and 1640. Thus, braided polyester and silk will probably be the first suture materials to benefit from swaged on needles as a result.
Up-time, swaged-on suture materials come in a variety of precut lengths, generally from 18 inches (45 cm) to 36 inches (90 cm). They are normally double wrapped and sterilized by radiation from Cobalt 60 or other high gamma radiation source. Steam sterilization will work for all of the natural materials except gut, and most of the synthetic materials. A caveat is that heating the monofilament materials while they are coiled may cause a "set," which makes the suture material much more difficult to deal with.
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