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IV

Because of hurricanes' enormous potential for destruction, predicting them has always been a special case of weather forecasting, and in many ways has driven the constant search for new and more sophisticated weather technology. Available data were always depress-ingly sparse. Even after it was known that hurricanes were wandering cyclones, tracking their paths and intensities was at best a hit-and-miss business. At first, of course, this was because the proper technology simply didn't exist. There were no high-flying aircraft or satellites, for one thing. Indeed, when the U.S. Weather Bureau was first set up there were no aircraft at all, and data radioed from ships was only incorporated into forecasts in 1909. But for a while the lack of proper data at the turn of the twentieth century, and the consequent failure to accurately track storms, was also a factor of the politics and personalities of the American weather service itself.

The best hurricane predictions at the time were those of the Cubans, led by the flamboyant genius Jesuit Father Benito Vines, who mixed intuition and meticulous observation to derive his often eerily accurate storm predictions. But although American relations with Cuba were then cordial, a turf war was under way in Washington— the head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, Willis Moore, had actually banned the use of the word tornado in forecasts, fearing it would create panic and through panic would come criticism, something he was ill-disposed to accept, engaged as he was in an attempt to centralize forecasting through his own office. That the Cubans often did things better than his people did was infuriating, and Moore instructed his people to ignore them or even to sabotage them. Vines died before the major storm that destroyed Galveston and killed thousands of its citizens, but his work was carried on by his successors, and the Cuban rivalry with Washington persisted, with fatal consequences—the U.S. bureau discounted Cuba's alarming prognostications about the Galveston storm, and as a consequence failed to warn the Texans in time.24

Aircraft changed the way hurricanes were perceived. Radiosondes, the workhorse of the weather-prediction industry, were more or less useless in hurricanes. Hydrogen or helium balloons could only be released fore and aft of a hurricane—they'd simply be blown away otherwise—and so there was a yawning gap in the knowledge of what was actually happening inside major storms. Forecasters were restricted to land-based observations and the occasional report from a hapless vessel caught in the storm itself, though the crews were usually too busy saving themselves to spend much time updating the weather service. Radar, developed during the Second World War, helped to some degree. The National Hurricane Research Project was founded in the United States in 1952, and first used radar imagery to track a storm off Cape Hatteras in 1955. But radar was then land-based and fixed, useful for last-minute track changes but not for forecasting. Still, during Hurricane Isabel in 2003, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) combined airborne sensors, offshore monitoring stations, and land-based radar to assess the storm. A series of towers with Doppler and SMART radars (Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research and Teaching) were deployed and were able to report minute-by-minute data back to the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma—the eye wall actually passed between two of the towers.25

But it was really aircraft-deployed "dropsondes," first used in the early 1950s but not widely deployed until the 1990s, that revolutionized storm data collection. Dropsondes are aircraft-borne radiosondes; aircraft flying high overhead can drop them through a storm on small parachutes, and before they are destroyed, they can collect the same data the land-launched balloons do—pressure differentials, wind speeds, temperatures, and humidity.

The first storm photographed