Esther, 1961. Plus, the fascinatingly low-tech way we tracked storms before we had eyes in orbit.
In September 1961, Earth's best meteorologists got scooped on a major story. Tiros III, an American satellite, had returned an image of what appeared to be a major hurricane. Storms had been photographed from space before, but this was the first time a serious storm had been discovered from orbit.
This was a huge moment for both the space program and weather tracking in general. The Tiros satellite's hardware was primitive but effective: While it took hours to transmit the imagery, which was stored on magnetic tape, via FM signal to Earth, the resulting photographs were of fairly high quality. Good enough, according to Deputy Assistant Secretary for Scientific Programs Fred Singer, to do real science:
Esther will be assured a place in meteorological history... In all cases, the Tiros pictures provided important supplements to reconnaissance aircraft observations and to data obtained by ground-based observations, by fixing the position of the hurricane center and showing the extent of the spiral cloud bands.
...It has now become possible to deduce the strength of the hurricane winds from the degree of organization seen in satellite pictures.
