Kite micrometeorology is ominous. Overpowering turbulence, by diverse mechanisms, is common. Fickle whirlwinds play in sunlight & cloud on the finest days. The sky is full of kite assassins; down-bursts, white squalls, super & hyper-helicity, high instability, rotors, frontal boundaries, odd jets. Forget tornados, any ordinary "gustnado" will snuff kites. Virga is a kite hazard; hot air evaporates rain aloft, creating cold pockets that crash to surface as murderous microbursts.
Vortical Filaments fly kites into the ground as surely as a suicidal control input. The same filament that kills one kite can lift another off the ground a set it prettily in the sky. I saw a large Sutton flow form picked off as if by a sniper at a One Sky festival, every other kite around it was spared.
A wind-field vortex is a spinning flywheel made of air, held together by low-pressure, embedded in high-pressure.
Dancing with turbulence is not a hopeless problem. Just knowing vortical handedness allows moving a kite to a favoured position (Crouch on lifted side of kite-window according to the handedness of prevailing wind-helicity.).Primordial quantum jitter bloomed our universe, kite breeze is fossil Big Bang. Its Milton's Elder Chaos that caresses a baby's cheek. Wind, breath, & spirit are one at the root of language. Unicorn-wild, child-friendly; there is weird agency to kites. Ancient kite traditions insist that deities & ritual determine flight. Design is honed by taboo & divination works; the sky gods have something to say. So does science...
A kite is Maxwell's Demon, sorting order from entropy.A wry NASA subculture developed a demonology of lift , a functioning folk aerodynamics, as Sagan himself fretted about a "demon-haunted world...science... a tiny candle in darkness". So the aerodynamicists joked about "lift demons", Space-Age folklore about flow, particularly turbulence. Rocket-science demonology could design real aircraft heuristically just as Stone-Age Polynesian sky cults in fact developed a folk-aerospace demonologically.
Recall the "Hairy Ones" of Isaiah, wind demons, the Pelosi, evil-spirits, jins (genies); to the Tibetans- pretas, beings felt by hyper-acute nomads & natives over milennia. Hiesenburg on his death-bed, the story goes, put turbulence over quantum mechanics in difficulty. Later, Feynman could cite turbulence as the lone unsolved classical physics problem. Science remains rife with weirdness unpredicted by theory. Chaos Theory helps, some. Reynolds, Taylor, & Kolmorgorov made a start, but demons are slippery.
Gustyness & veering recorded at ground stations are a flat-land subdimensional view of wind-helicity. High winds are generally gusty, more helical, flows at higher reynolds-numbers. Even weak winds can be highly helical as a helicized airmass slows into decayed fragments. By accounting for hemisphere, barometric trend & the gustiness/veering windspeed signal one can usually predict handedness, power, & size.
Fluid dynamicists rhyme about "whirls within whirls", aka supercoiling, like ancient phone handset cords twist, or like DNA, a double helix in turn twisted & twisted again into ever larger coils.
The universe is all protean flow, cascades of multimedium quazi & classic Kolmorgorov Turbulence Spectrums. Spiraling galaxies wind stars to stir planets that spin weather in the grand Rossby Waves that spawn tornados or caress one's cheek, snakey tendrils twisted right from the Big Bang, which continues still, a rolling monkey-barrel. Helicity hands up too'. Indeed, a vortice shedding butterfly eventually shapes its galaxy & beyond, as does any particle, straight Chaos Theory. Hairy spin structure haunts electromagnetism, gravity, molecular & macro-embryology. Spacetime spirals everywhere all the time. Relatavistic spin, from a child's top to spun-up blackholes, account for much missing dark-matter.
The kite's environment is dynamic supercoiled soup. Wind sport guru Jake says folks would freak to really see wind fields. This page's supercomputed background represents the invisible montrousness of the Hairy Ones.Bethewaite's grand epiphany was wind-field helicity as a critical parameter of understanding ultimate flying & sailing performance. Vorticity is always present, there is no fully laminar (flat/straight) flow.
The red worms at right are simulated vortex cores in moderately turbulent flow, essentially what a kite flys in, but the ordinary kiter only sees a dancing kite that eventually hooks into ground or tree "for no reason".
At left is a different helicity isosurface chosen to depict a different character of a vortex field. Iso-lines trace-out structures whether pressure, velocity, or temerature of the vortex field is plotted. Isobaric isosurfaces reveal wind helicity as a snake-den of Taylor Rolls. In real life we only get to see the dewpoint iso-surface, as cloud, but it hides & omits structure as much as reveals. Misty flickering teases in obscuring & revealing. Over Ilwaco i have seen up to seven layers into the middle stratosphere, the Dance of Seven Veils over celestial flesh.
Weather is a flow-field zoo with quite specific effects on kite flight. Given phases of a right handed vortex kicks the kite one way, left-handed vortex kicks the other way. In a given wind field these rotations reverse sequencially, up & down a scale spectrum, so the kites main wind might be clockwise vortices, with smaller weaker counter-clockwise eddies infilled.
Convective flows look like
below, highly turbulent, strongest rising vertically, weaker laterally, weakest
coiling down.
A kite's-eye view of the approaching windfield looks like the image below, like peeled log veneer.
Steer a right path & the kite flys wonderfully, better than the field average. Hit by an "assasin helix" the kite is rolled (death-dived) into the surface, its built-in stability & the pilot's desperate input overwhelmeded. A basic precaution is to postiion the kite defensively in its window as a dangerous helix approaches , generally higher & toward the window edge where the kite is lifted, not sunk.
Boundary Layer avoidance- Climb above or stay below turbulent shear zones between ~laminar atmospheric layers.
Watch out for boundaries- shear zones. Of particular concern is the upper zone of the surface boundary layer where airborne wind-energy & ocean shipping kites will operate (~.3-1km). Simple kites fly best by getting above or staying below the "mixing zone" as the boundary layer waxes & wanes thru the day.
Boundary layers are like lint rolled between two surfaces. Smaller retrograde helicity rolls form between dominant rolls, & boundarys generally..
Convective jets take a mushroom form, the cap is a ring vortex. A cross section reveals the "scroll" or "bookends" that form, also seen when a fluidic jet is operating in a flattened space, such as the earth's atmosphere (couette-flow). Micro-busts (down-bursts, white-squalls,) often take scroll form as do sea-horses & embryos. Perfected piloting depends on recognizing & responding to structure correctly.
*Abrams, Cambridge Forum
A kite is a widow's mite gracefully recieved or a golden idol presented to a wrathful god. Dare fly a big kite & the wind tests you; be skilled & the wind smiles. Fly right & its Magee's "tumbling mirth"... the 69 position, ying, & yang. A kite naturally sweeps a laid down figure-eight, an elemental lissajou pattern, the symbol of infinity, what's up w/ that?
Twisted corkscrews, precisely"Celtic" spirals in world art sprang from SouthEast Asia by a continuous tradition spread from the post Ice-Age sea level rise. Of all "flow-form" graphic traditions none is more adept than Pacific North West native art.
The cartoon Tasmanian Devil moves as a whirlwind.
Huracan, Mayan God of turbulence.
squiggles (plural- giggle)
Trapping Demons
Mastering wind-field helicity is a key to kite reliability. But how to present the new vision to nonbelievers? When i presented Bethwaite's helical wind-field epiphany Peter Lynn burst into comic-profane kiwi gibberish. Peter had strugged for years with a theory of designed "super stability" to explain kite dancing. Dave Culp demanded to know how we miss all this universal twistyness. This essay took took years to answer him.
I began by noting that waving flag flaps in its own shedding vortices; one easily misses that the overall flapping traces 3D horizontal corkscrews. How to better see the helicity everywhere predicted? Near KiteShip a distant seagull flew into the setting sun over the East Bay, a tiny flapping sunspot that slowly described regular little circles on the dull orange disk, again & again & again, until the Sun Bird vanished, helicity revealed mytho-poeticly. But it was still a faint clue.
Gradually my gaze sharpened & the predicted snakey flow-forms began to show everywhere, playing thru leaves, in flying fluff, sunlit dust motes, & hair. From tiny scattered clues, such as a Kickapoo scout gleans, informed imagination can fill the air with graphics, meat-based six dimensional Navier-Stokes calculation in realtime.
Natural flow patterns are portals to a meditative dreamyness, self-similar processing of the itself convective-structured brain.
A secret-of-life hypothemerges, that molecular bio-synthesis was flow-formed, "breathed" into being, in contrast to stale ideas based on solid biosythetic templates or static primordial-soup suspensions.
Turbulent structures assume quazi-existence as personae with elemental agency that proves angelic or demonic by context. Recall the "Hairy Ones" of Isaiah, the pelosi, evil-spirits, wind demons, jins (genies), pretas, as percieved by hyper-acute nomads over milennia. These elementals are mechanistic animats compared to us, but as human as clever puppets.
Poe's Eureka: A Prose Poem presages chaos theory & the new cosmologies; Poe's general spookiness springs from reality's heart.
A dynamic wind field is quite hairy, filimentatious flow explodes into turbulent Medusas as velocity increases.
Quijote rightly saw the giant in the windmill that thrashed him. Restless air is precisely that thing going bump in night.
The new vision of wind-field superhelicity
Quazi-Existent Proto-Beings in Flow-Fields
Artaud's shamanic revelation, trekking the weathered stone of Tarahumaran Sierra Madre, was worlds of proto-human form. The same forms haunt the restless air, moving freely. These are our elemental ancestors. Flayed flesh reveals gnarly helical fields. Invisibility hides air's fleshy structure. The whorls at your finger tips reveal deep vorticity spiraling from the cosmos thru the heart of your being. The Navajo took this precise view long ago*, it would have saved me months of futzing on the kite-determinism problem.
*Abrams, Cambridge Forum
Nightly paradise, the Starry Sea, is deeply revealed by a trick- "lucky seeing", opportunistic lensing by atmospheric turbulence thar reveals in flickering celestial objects otherwise to dim to see. Thus did the Dogon discover Jupiter's moons, without stinkin' telescopes. Gaze long upon the Pleides to see the effect, even in haze & light pollution. This is the turbulence that bedevils formal astronomy, the very twinkling of stars, haunted by Artaudian proto-being. A Mexican eye naturally discerns angel-form hosts in wavering starlight, the beating wings; in particular the Mexican Virgin shimmers montaged with serpents & demons. Natural patterns are reality's portals, not us, but like us.
Blindness has a way with the invisible. Helen Keller, on an aeroplane, felt "liquid mountains" in sky. Wiley Post, an actual cyclops in the original spacesuit, first traced the Great River overhead, the Jet-Stream, but air is shot with lesser jets, tornadic strings, worms that make up wind-fields. The rest of us gaze blankly on a cloud-faced dew-point iso-surface that hides & confuses as much as reveals; foggy, dark, & transparent invisibility. Palest rainbow outshows the universal wormy ferment. Quijote to rightly saw the giant of any windmill.
A secret of life, molecular bio-synthesis is flow-formed, "breathed" into being. Nature doesn't abhor vacuum, for rotating mass in spacetime yearns for vacuum at its heart.
Kite flight is harmonic interaction of stability mechanisms with dynamic helical windfields; amplifying or dampening chaotic oscillation, absorbing quazi random perturbation
Turbulence "blooms" to a fluid-dynamicist as well as Sir Kenneth Clarke, who rightly saw an iris flower in a Turner sea-storm.A rose by another name is a pin-vortex. One's own head is a flowering in a pin-head vortex garden called the body. Navajo elders concur, the whorls on your fingertips reveal a fluidic nature. We are flow.
The secret sign of invisible wind helicity is gusty veering- period & intensity trace, by fourier or wavelet transform, allows komolgorov vortex spectrum characterization. My DIY 3D windvane revealed even more vertical motion than expected. The advancing quadrant of an orthogonal vortex is the danger zone , hurricane sailing instructions as extreme example. North Earth, facing wind, a Low is usually on your right, a High leftward. Here on the Lower Coumbia the prevailing wind is westerly & vortical Lows push in like a buzz saw. This winter (2007-8) saw 140 mph peak winds with hurricane force lasting four days.
Breezes whisper, caress, & tug at the body. Possessed kite fliers "dance with the wind", intercoursing with something -in-the-air. As Brummitt put it"...the joy of kiting lies in that fine sense of extension... almost literally a hand reaching into the sky." Kite binds creature & cosmos, a flying Walden Pond rippled by etherial being, a tin-can telephone to Manu, the Great Spirit, celestial vibration descends kite-string to finger-tip, the sensitive is telepresented skyward as if beamed-up or catapulted.
Rumor of a wondrous universe, the awestuck epiphany of an early trans-Atlantic mail pilot, afterlife-like, flying through a vast moonlit cathedral of luminesent waterspouts, so wrote De Exupery, to whom aircraft control panel was a Holy Altar before Nature. All adventure is childish. Kiteflying is all signs & wonders. A Kite Age dawns, a call to play. Oh, to be airworthy .
String Theory, Knot Theory, DNA is twisted string.
Our helical procreation- "screwing"; Only helices screw . DNA screws prodigiously, spinning as it replicates.
Vortical filaments are acoustic & optic waveguides
Magee's "tumbling mirth"..the 69 position ying-yang, the kite sweeps a laid down figure-eight, the symbol of infinity. What exactly is a babbling brook trying to say?
Huracan, Mayan God of turbulence. Boreas the Greek,
squiggles (plural- giggle), corkscrews bring on wine.
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