Ángel F. Adames-Corraliza

So the Taino, for example, they had the Semí, which is kind of like their, you know, entity of destruction is Huracán.

That's where the hurricane name comes from.

And so there was knowledge of these things, right?

And then same with the Peruvian natives.

They knew about El Niño.

So local communities did know about the major phenomenon, maybe not necessarily what drove them, but they knew about their existence.

But of course, the mid-latitude countries that were actually pushing the research, they didn't really know much, right?

And so there was knowledge in India, China and other communities as well, but there wasn't that much conversation.

So it's actually, I don't think it's incorrect to say that people in North America and Europe knew nothing about the tropics until World War II.

So World War II came, and what happened was that the U.S.

and the allied countries got into war with Japan.

And Japan had taken over a lot of islands in the Pacific.

So a lot of the war actually happened in the tropical Pacific.

And early combat was actually kind of catastrophic.

Because typhoons, actually, a typhoon came and sank a Navy ship, for example.

Before all this happened, people had just assumed that the tropics were kind of like this paradise.

It was just sunny and beautiful all the time.

And then maybe every now and then you'd get a hurricane.

But then people started realizing, oh, oh, dang, weather in the tropics does actually change at a substantial scale.

And this is all summarized in the first tropical meteorology book ever written by somebody in the northern latitudes by Herbert Real in the 1950s.