Weather in the movies: Little Mermaid Hurricane Jonathen Green For this article, I chose to focus on the hurricane scene from my favorite movie, Disney's 1989 classic, The Little Mermaid. In the show, the main character Ariel is a teenage mermaid princess who is curious about the land-dwelling world. One night intrigued by the explosions of fireworks above, she swims to the surface and observes a ship at sea celebrating the birthday party of the land people's Prince Eric. Shortly after the festivities, the vessel is caught in a hurricane and then smashed into the rocks. The prince is knocked unconscious and is thrown overboard. Ariel then rescues the drowning prince and brings him to shore. The storm is significant to advancing the story because it is the initial event that forces the two main characters to meet and fall in love. While watching the scene, I thought that the following weather phenomena were interesting:
Early in the scene as the hurricane approaches and the rain begins to come down I noticed that the skies were painted an eerie shade of green. I thought this seemed a little weird so I decided to research it The Little Mermaid. Image: Walt Disney Pictures, Inc. It turns out that sometimes in rare instances skies can indeed turn green right before a major storm. According to an article from weather.com, heavy precipitation in a storm such as rain and hail can refract some of the red and orange colors of a setting or rising sun, and that can cause the skies to appear in a foreboding shade of green. (Erdman. 2016) Later, the storm intensifies, and the ship becomes uncontrollable. Lightning strikes illuminate the skies above and show a towering spiral of clouds above that show that they have entered into the eye of the hurricane. The seas are at their most intense and the ship is carried atop a wave that is two or three times the height of the boat. This confused me because I have always heard that the eye of a hurricane is typically the calmest. The Little Mermaid. Image: Walt Disney Pictures, Inc. I learned that although on land the eye is the calmest part of a hurricane, at sea it's not the same. “On land, the center of the eye is, by far, the calmest part of the storm, with skies mostly clear of clouds, wind, and rain. Over the ocean, however, it's possibly the most dangerous: inside, waves from all directions slam into each other, creating monster waves as tall as 130 feet (40 meters).”(Wolchover. 2011) In the same scene, Ariel’s seagull companion “Scuttle” is violently torn from his hold on the ship, sucked into the sky, and then flung away. I thought that this seemed a bit of a stretch. The Little Mermaid. Image: Walt Disney Pictures, Inc. Then I learned that this is also consistent with the eyewall of a hurricane. Because of convection, the rotating winds of the Hurricane cause intense updrafts in the eye that move from the ocean's surface upwards to the top of the storm. (Wolchover. 2011) Finally towards the end of the scene, after the vessel has been smashed into the rocks, the winds blow so strongly that they cause the mast of the ship to snap and fall. I wasn’t sure if the winds should be that strong so I decided to look it up The Little Mermaid. Image: Walt Disney Pictures, Inc. The closest analogs to ship masts that I could find were tree trunks and wooden power lines. I learned that tree trunks tend to snap when wind speeds reach about 94 mph. (Shultz. 2016) In a study by Midwest Energy, they found that 122 mph winds are required to break wooden power poles that are made from Class 2 Douglas Fir trunks. This data suggests that the maximum wind speeds of the Little Mermaid event were at least between 94 and 122 miles per hour and possibly higher. Therefore the wind speeds shown in the film match at minimum a category 1 hurricane according to the Saffir-Simpson scale. Anything less would not be sufficient to cause the mast to snap. (Engel, et al. 2007) When I began this assignment, I was doubtful, and I expected that I would find fault with the way that weather was portrayed in this movie. Instead, I was surprised. I learned that the events and conditions shown in this scene are remarkably consistent with what one should expect of a hurricane at sea. It is clear to me that the team at Disney put in a great deal of time, effort, and research to successfully make this animated storm real and believable. And so still, The Little Mermaid remains, my favorite movie. Sources: Engel, Michael. Phillips, Edmund. Brown, Richard II. Bingel, Nelson.
“Extreme Winds Test Wood Pole Strength.” Transmission and Distribution World, tdworld.com, 01 May 2007, https://www.tdworld.com/transmission-reliability/extreme-winds-test-wood-pole-strength. Erdman, Jon. “Why Skies Turn Green in Thunderstorms.” The Weather Channel, Weather.com, 27 APR, 2016,https://weather.com/science/weather-explainers/news/green-sky-thunderstorm-hail. Shultz, David. “Trees, regardless of size, all break at the same wind speed. Here’s why.” Science, sciencemag.org, Date of 04 Feb. 2016, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/trees-regardless-size-all-break-same-wind-speed-here-s-why. Wolchover, Natalie. “Why Is the Eye of a Hurricane Calm?.” Live Science, livescience.com, 27 Aug. 2011, https://www.livescience.com/15805-calm-hurricane-eye.html.
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