Unusual events, as we know, are often the subject of a tribunal of inquiry, to see what lessons can be learned and how their worst effects may be avoided in the future. Thus it has been from time to time in history that a storm has been investigated. One such inquiry with far-reaching consequences was that which followed a disaster in the Crimea 144 years ago today, on November 14th, 1854.
The storm in question occurred at the height of the Crimean War. On the morning of the November 14th, a very deep depression brought to the Black Sea the strongest winds known in that area.
Its timing, for military purposes, was a mixed blessing. The Russian ships, anchored in the comparative shelter of the harbour at Sebastopol, suffered little damage - but the fleet of the British and French Allies was decimated.
Twenty-one British vessels sank, the French lost 16, and the Allied forces both on land and at sea were severely battered by this partisan depression. Czar Nicholas I, hearing of the events, was moved to write to his commanding general, Prince Menshikov: "Thank you for the storm; it has helped us greatly. Another one would yet be even more desirable."
As it happened, the storm did not influence the final outcome of the Crimean War, but hostilities were much prolonged because of it. The Allied forces now lacked the strength to deal a coup de grace to their debilitated enemy, and it was September 1855 before Sebastopol fell, signalling the final defeat of the Russian armies.
But for meteorologists, the subsequent inquiry by the French authorities had more important consequences. The investigation was entrusted by the Emperor Napoleon III to Urbain Jean-Joseph Leverrier, the great French astronomer who, 10 years earlier, had achieved a worldwide reputation by predicting the existence and precise position of a new planet, later to be called Neptune. His brief was to determine if there was any way in which the path of the great storm could have been foreseen, and the navy warned in time.
Leverrier contacted over 250 scientific institutions in the course of his examination, and six months later he presented the Emperor with a detailed plan to warn mariners of approaching storms. It was based on a "meteorological network" whose observations, he said, could now be exploited in a practical way following the recent invention of the electric telegraph.
By June 1855 13 of these weather reporting stations had been established throughout France, and shortly afterwards, from the Paris Observatory of which Leverrier was now Director, the world's first scientifically produced storm warnings were issued.