The Tonic of Wildness

Thoreau wrote that humans need the tonic of wildness.

Few natural events are wilder than a series of tropical storms bearing down on the Hawaiian Islands.

Floating in the midst of the first tropical storm to hit Hawaii in 22 years is a low-riding, autonomous ocean robot broadcasting data.

Holoholo is an robot that autonomously sends pictures and weather data while at sea.

Holoholo is called a wave glider. It is a robot powered by waves and solar panels. It has sensors that measure water temperature, wind speed, water pressure, and wind direction. Using an onboard internet connection, Holoholo sends data to the world.

"The Wave Glider SV3 is the world’s first hybrid wave and solar propelled unmanned ocean robot."
― Liquid Robotics

“My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

If not a tonic, the autonomous data from Holoholo affords the vicarious sensations of wildness.

REFERENCES

• Liquid Robotics, Wikipedia.
• Wave Glider Holoholo, Twitter Account @Holoholo_WG, Liquid Robotics.
• This Surfing Robot Is Live-Tweeting Hawaii's Hurricane, by Jason Koebler, Motherboard, 8 August 2014.

Tropical Cyclones

Hurricane Isabel (2003)

A tropical cyclone is a storm system centered about an area of low atmospheric pressure.

Low pressure sets an air mass into motion. This motion would be experience by as wind - wind with measurable intensity and direction.

The term cyclone refers to cyclical wind flow. The direction of wind flow in cyclonic systems is:

• Counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, and
• Clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere,

due to a rotational deflection known as the Coriolis force.

The Coriolis force deflects moving objects when they are viewed in a rotating reference frame such as the earth's rotation. Wind undergoes an apparent deflection from its path because of the rotation of the earth.

Hurricane Sandy 10/26/2012

“There is no way that we can predict the weather six months ahead beyond giving the seasonal average”
― Stephen Hawking, from Black Holes and Baby Universes

Tropical cyclones originate over tropical oceans in the equatorial regions of the earth. A cyclone derives its energy from condensed water vapor. Condensation occurs as warm, saturated air rises from the ocean surface (evaporation) and cools.

“One of the fellows called me 'Cyclone' but finally shortened it to 'Cy' and its been that ever since.”
― "Cy" Young, Major League Baseball pitcher (1867 – 1955).

A tropical cyclone is also referred to as a hurricane, a typhoon, a tropical storm, a cyclonic storm, a tropical depression, or simply a cyclone, depending on the global region and wind-speed intensity.

Name	Wind Speed	Global Region
Tropical Depression	38 mph or less	―
Tropical Storm	40 to 72 mph	―
Hurricane	74 mph or greater	Western North Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific
Typhoon	74 mph or greater	Western North Pacific

REFERENCES

• Coriolis Effect. Wikipedia.
• Tropical Cyclone by Kerry Emanuel. The Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. 2003. 31:75–104.
• Tropical Cyclone. Wikipedia.