Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [71]
The satellite was put to early use. The National Hurricane Center had declared Hurricane Floyd to be a tropical depression on September, 7, 1999, but QuikScat had found a surface vortex with the required wind speed a full two days earlier, and was able to track the vortex all the way back to the African coast—the future Floyd emerged from the Sahara to the sea on September 2. "Because such vortices, in their early stages, are too small to be resolved by numerical prediction models," Liu says, "and have no clear cloud signal, the scatterometer, with its high spatial resolution, is the best means, if not the only means, of early detection of hurricanes and the study of their genesis."29
There's a wonderful feeling of empowerment, and a somewhat more hubristic feeling of omnipotence, in looking at a satellite-eye scatterometer picture of the Atlantic Basin. In one taken after Floyd gathered strength and bulled his way into the Caribbean, and subsequently posted on the JPL Web site, you can clearly see the whole area dominated by a massive high-pressure system whose anticyclonic flow was creating strong northerlies along the coast of Spain and Morocco, implying strong upwelling in the ocean. Hurricane Floyd is clearly visible doing his business west of the Bahamas. And you can already see Tropical Depression Gert, later Hurricane Gert, forming a counterclockwise spiral in the central Atlantic. In the northwest Atlantic, off New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces, nothing much was happening on that day. There would still have been tourists on the beaches around Cape Cod, though of course the satellite images didn't show them. Here and there, no doubt, lobsters were being boiled and broiled and roasted and consumed with the usual accompaniments, mostly beer mixed with beach sand. At that moment, our connections to the Caribbean, and to Mitch and Floyd and Ivan and his cohorts, seemed mercifully slender.
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The difference between modern national hurricane centers is revealing. The American center in Miami is relatively new; located in an aesthetically challenged and charmless concrete and steel structure hunkered into the earth, its roof bristling with data collection devices, disks and domes and antennae of various description. So secure is the building that the only way to tell if a major storm is raging overhead when inside is to watch the computer screens that will tell you so—or to emerge like a startled rabbit into the open air above, to be buffeted about in person. It is a place built to withstand the most severe winds imaginable—and the denizens of the center can imagine and have experienced winds of awesome ferocity.
The Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth, which is governed by Environment Canada's weather service, is a very different beast. It was until recently at the top of a small eighteen-story high-rise, for one thing. And "at the top" means just that—it is higher than the elevators go, and you have to trudge the last story up what looks for all the world like an emergency-escape stairway. While the U.S. center is like a bunker, the Dartmouth operational center is located in a large, airy room surrounded by curtain walls of glass, with magnificent views down along Halifax's extraordinary harbor past McNab's Island, which sits like a cork in its mouth, and thence out to sea. High-rises are not good places to be during hurricanes, and indeed when borderline Category 2 Hurricane Juan struck the city in 2003 the staff had to evacuate, not so much because they were alarmed for their safety but because the building's sprinkler system had failed, and thereafter bureaucratic regulations took over. Don Connolly, a Halifax broadcaster who was in constant phone