So, when did humans first figure out hurricanes were shaped like that? They're too big for it to be obvious from the ground and I imagine the realization must have been quite a cool "ooohh..." moment.
The eye would be a known thing, right? "Sometimes the hurricane stops but you need to not stray too far from safety, because it can come back quick, and then it will last about as long again"
After that, a few people talk about whether they got the stop in the middle, and that the stop is near the worst of the wind, you can determine it's probably near the center
I think this one has a clear answer, fortunately! In 1831, William C. Redfield published the results of his study of the damage of an 1821 hurricane in Connecticut. He mapped out the directions that the trees fell, and the "lines" of damage that the storm had left, and proposed that the storm must be a cyclical vortex to account for it all. It was definitively a debated idea at the time, so there was no clear consensus on what hurricanes "were" before then; as more evidence piled up the circular model won out.
Not disputing ofc that some knowledge and ideas predated this moment - they clearly did, in particular sailors had been managing hurricane risk for centuries and had a bunch of applied knowledge. But a systematized understanding of the "shape of a hurricane" can I think be dated to that paper.
(At least in the Eurosphere, the evolution of the idea in other cultural groupings is beyond my knowledge)
the fact that we can simply see them from space now is wild
actually how good a view did terrestrial telescopes have of Jupiter’s red spot before satellites? did we see interplanetary cyclones before our own?
Extremely amusingly, the first uncontroversial observation of Jupiter's Great Red Spot is... also in 1831! By German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe. Real banger year for hurricanes.
I had to amend "uncontroversial" there though because there are observations of something-like-a-spot on Jupiter from the 1600's and so. But they disappear from the record for like a hundred years in the 18th century, and the locations of the spot on those earlier observations don't align, either with each other or modern observations. There was a recent paper I believe arguing that the Great Red Spot emerged only around the 19th century, and so those previous observations were of a different storm (or were things like artifacts from the shadows of Jupiter's moons and such). I haven't read the paper though, not sure where the consensus is now.
