2010 image from the GOES 11 satellite showing an atmospheric river flowing from the eastern Pacific to California
5 January 2023
In current meteorological jargon, an atmospheric river is a narrow stream of very humid air that often carries a series of storms with it. Perhaps the most famous of these is the so-called Pineapple Express that flows from Hawaiian waters to the west coast of North America. But the term is not a new one, having existed for some 150 years.
And metaphorical use of river to refer to a mass of a flowing substance is even older, dating to at least the fourteenth century when it appears in a Wycliffite translation of Job 29.6:
I wesh my feet with butter, and the ston helde to me ryueres of oile.
The Vulgate uses rivos. So, the underlying metaphor is an old, obvious, and common one.
But the specific phrase atmospheric river dates to at least 1865, when John Mullan used it in his survey of the American West to describe a belt of warm air that flowed from Missouri to Montana:
The meteorological statistics collected during a great number of years have enabled us to trace an isochimenal line across the continent, from St. Joseph’s, Missouri, to the Pacific; and the direction taken by this line is wonderful and worthy the most important attention in all future legislation that looks towards the travel and settlement of this country. This line, which leaves St. Joseph’s in latitude 40°, follows the general line of the Platte to Fort Laramie, where, from newly introduced causes, it tends north-westwardly, between the Wind River chain and the Black Hills, crossing the summit of the Rocky Mountains in latitude 47°; showing that in the interval from St. Joseph’s it had gained six degrees of latitude. Tracing it still further westward it goes as high as 48°, and develops itself in a fan-like shape in the plains of the Columbia. From Fort Laramie to the Clark’s Fork, I call this an atmospheric river of heat, varying in width from one to one hundred miles. On its either side, north and south, are walls of cold air, and which are so clearly perceptible that you always detect them when you are upon its shores.
The use in the present-day meteorological sense dates to at least 1871. From an article on meteorology by T.B. Maury in Scribner’s Monthly from February of that year:
But the Gulf Stream is a great liquid avenue, over whose blue waters roll mighty masses of atmosphere and ride in terrifio [sic] triumph the fiercest cyclones.
Its track is overhung by aqueous vapor, and is thus a region of rarefied air and of a low barometer.
Here is a natural ATMOSPHERIC RIVER-BED. Its banks are colder and heavier air and its bottom is the bosom of the sea itself. The storm, as it passes along this great highway carved out for it by an ordinance of the Almighty, may rub and fret against its bounds, as the locomotive, thundering along the curve of the road, may chafe against and batter the steel edges of the unyielding rail. It may even, like the engine, leave and leap its track and fly off in tangential fury. But it has a track, an ordained track, in which man may ordinarily expect to find it.
And from later in the article:
Moreover, as the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic is the natural channel for the storms which beat upon the British coast, so the Kuro-Siwo, or Black Stream of Japan, a mightier gulf stream than ours, whose recurving waters wash and warm the Pacific coasts of America, affords a pathway for cyclones generated in the Pacific Ocean and the China seas. This latter region of the earth is near the very womb and nursery of the tempest and the typhoon. The storm engendered in its bosom finds, in the atmospheric river-bed overhanging the smoking waters of the Kuro-Siwo, a free and ready transit.
Chalk another one up to the recency illusion.
Sources:
Maury, T.B. “Weather-Telegrams and Storm-Forecasts by the American Signal Service.” Scribner’s Monthly, 1.4, February 1871, 418, 421. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Mullan, John. Miners and Travelers’ Guide to Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. New York: William M. Franklin, 1865, 39–40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, s.v. river, n.1.
Image credit: US Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, 2010. Public domain image.