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By Root 310 0

The hiring profile for a weather analyst would be a mathematician, unflappable under pressure, fast to make judgments, well schooled in the models, and a good communicator. Analysts' judgments can have enormous consequences. When they draw the path-predictions on their computer screens, placing dots where they believe the storm will be in twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight, and seventy-two hours, it is this path that is issued by the center in its public advisories, and emergency preparedness services in a dozen places either stand down or go into heightened alert as a consequence; the same report might make the difference between thousands of people packing up to evacuate or staying home, a decision that can have dire consequences, sometimes life-or-death consequences. In the text explanations that accompany the bulletins, the forecasters can hedge somewhat and second-guess themselves. Many do, and will advise when the predictions are more than ordinarily uncertain, but they know as well as anyone that many of their readers only look at the path on the map and behave accordingly. "If I change one little thing in one of the models," Chris Fogarty told me, "it can change the landfall data by ioo kilometers [60 miles] or more. That can make the difference between destruction and escape." The forecasters have to learn to live with their guesses, to accept their mistakes, to coach their readers constantly not to take specific projections forty-eight hours or more into the future as gospel worth gambling on, and then . . . to do it all over again next time. Burnout, not surprisingly, is common.34

VI

Sometimes weather "customers," particularly those who are especially vulnerable to storm winds, need more hand-holding than national hurricane centers are able to provide. When you're out at sea in a small boat, you listen to the marine forecasts as often as you can. It can be wonderfully pleasurable sailing the open ocean in a small boat, but terrors lurk too, and yachts will scatter like chaff when they know a hurricane is coming. To supplement the official forecasts, a curious network of amateurs has emerged, people who provide direct and personal, and therefore doubly reassuring, links between weather forecasters and sailors. David Jones, a name nicely out of maritime legend, is one of them. He is a British accountant turned Caribbean weatherman who created the Caribbean Weather Network for yachters in 1993. Based on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, he transmits on single sideband twice a day, at seven thirty A.M. and five thirty P.M. He gives the official forecasts for the Caribbean but adds his own gloss, his own interpretation of a U.S. Navy forecasting model available on the Internet. In short order, yachting folk came to believe he was generally a day or two ahead of the National Hurricane Center.35

There are several other individuals doing the same kind of duty:

Schooner Arcadia Schooner Arcadia, this is Southbound II Coastal. Do you copy?

The voice is that of Herb Hilgenberg. He is hunched over a transmitter in the basement room that is the studio for Southbound II Coastal, his private commercial radio station. To his right, a computer screen is filling with an image of the globe as an updated satellite weather photo is downloaded, pixel by pixel. Over to his left, another computer is twittering away, compiling the raw data, isobar by isobar, that Herb has been transmuting into yachtsmen's gold—accurate weather data.

He toggles a switch. The airwaves hiss and crackle.

Schooner Arcadia, do you copy, please?

His face, amiable in repose, is furrowed in concentration.

"They're out there in the blackness of the ocean, all alone," he'd said that morning, speaking of his listeners. "The ocean can be very large, when you're all alone and an easterly gale is blowing. It's reassuring for them to hear a familiar voice." We'd been sitting in his sunlit kitchen, staring outdoors past the two satellite dishes tucked away in an L in the house, sucking data from the satellites orbiting overhead. "I'm talking to