Preface: October 2014

As I write this, we are getting fresh reminders of what the atmosphere can do. Bermuda, Hawaii, and Japan are all confronting tropical systems. In the years since I wrote the original version of “Next Month's Storm,” we have seen Katrina and Sandy, the devastation of Haiti, and a variety of disasters around the globe. We also have seen the endlessly growing debates over climate change, including arguments about the significance of each individual event as a sign (or non-sign) of what is coming towards us in the decades to follow.

One thing that has not changed is the imperfection of human beings; our sciences and technologies have not become perfect either. The advancing sophistication of satellites and radars and other gadgets drowns both short-term forecasters and long-term researchers in far more information than possibly can be digested. At the same time, there still is (over most of the world's surface) a shortage of instruments to gather direct data about what is happening in the air.

Simultaneously, we have both too much and too little to work with. And we have no convenient way out of this paradox; technology is not going to cure what it has inflicted on us.

The political environment surrounding our dilemmas has worsened. People demand answers that are clear, simple, absolute, and guaranteed. Scientists (if they practice honesty and integrity) supply careful and cautious estimates instead. Demagogues and advertisers exploit the gap with push-button slogans and phony promises. Sometimes the reckless verbiage contributes to avoidable deaths, and then the blame game (lawsuits included) has another round.

Overall, I have nothing more to contribute than I did before. I can ask people to think and plan realistically, but nobody can force this to happen; furthermore, I confess that I can't even present my own behavior as a shining example of “perfect” analysis and preparation. I can only hope that my words will get people to think. Maybe this is a start.

March 1999

“My forecast was perfect; the atmosphere was wrong.”
— Anonymous weather forecaster.

October 1978.

I was a weather observer stationed on an aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation. We were in the western Pacific, about six hundred miles north of the equator, heading west towards the Philippines; in a few days we would be going through the San Bernardino Straits in the central Philippines and would enter the South China Sea.

Several hundred miles east of our task force was Typhoon Rita. She was following our course towards the Philippines and was forecast to cross the country a few days after us.

Whenever a storm as intense as this one was close to our operating area, we in the weather office became even busier than usual. We were using up our weather plotting charts at a ferocious rate, and I had been sent back to our storage room to pick up a new roll of them. When I got near the room, I saw some boatswain’s mates working by the door, transferring some of their gear from one deck to another. I was acquainted with one of them; since he knew that I was one of the “weather-guessers,” he asked me about the storm. All of his co-workers stopped their work and gathered around to get the forecast.

Before I could start my impromptu briefing—a task which all of us in the weather office had become accustomed to doing frequently since Rita reached typhoon strength—one of the other boatswain’s mates spoke up. I didn’t know him, and I never found out his name. He was, like myself, in his early twenties. He was a Filipino, one of thousands in the United States Navy, and he told me that his entire extended family (about twenty-five people) lived in the central Philippines. He wanted to know how much of a threat the storm would be to his folks.  He told me that his family was extremely poor—his Navy salary was their primary source of income—and they could not travel all the way to the safer high ground on the larger islands of Luzon or Mindanao. As for the Philippine government . . . well, this was the era of the Marcos dictatorship; it was well known that more money was being splurged on Imelda’s shopping sprees in a month than was spent on disaster preparedness in a year. There simply were not enough boats and planes to go around.

I unlocked the door to the storage room, took a roll of charts of Asia off a shelf, unrolled one, and asked him to show me on the chart his family’s location. He pointed to a small island on the southern side of the San Bernardino Straits, not far from where our task force would soon be traveling.

I swallowed hard.

The most recent warning from the Forecast Center on Guam had come over the teletype less than an hour before. I had plotted it onto the weather office’s storm tracking map myself.  Typhoon Rita had a smooth and steady inward flow of moisture and warm air; as far as anyone could tell, all the conditions seemed perfect for continued intensification and a steady westward course. She was expected to go from her current Category Four strength to a Category Five—the strongest category there is—well before she reached land.  By the time she hit the islands, her maximum sustained winds were forecast to be around one hundred eighty miles per hour, with gusts well above two hundred.

Winds of this strength, over the open ocean, would produce waves thirty-five to forty-five feet high inside of and around the storm’s eye. Driven by these winds, and combined with rainfall amounts that could reach several feet in less than a day, the storm seas would leave few, if any, man-made structures standing after they came ashore.

The young boatswain’s mate’s family lived near the beach. The highest point on their little island was perhaps a hundred feet above sea level, and they might not even be able to bring all the family members up to that meager refuge.

And, in less than a week, the eye of the typhoon was expected to go a mere thirty miles from their homes. Winds greater than one hundred miles per hour would be pounding them for hours. There was little doubt about what all that air and water would do.

In the weather office, most of our time was spent reducing the atmosphere to numerical quantities and coded messages. We often tended to get separated from the human reality of what we were working on, even when we went outdoors to do an observation and could feel the actual wind and rain in our faces.

But this was different. Now I had to take all the arcane symbols on the plotted charts, all the gray smudges on the satellite photos, all the data provided by a variety of instruments, and turn them into a probable death sentence for a person’s family.

I never seriously considered lying to him, and I could not pass the buck to anyone else. I was the person right there with the information, and I was the one who had to look one of my shipmates straight in the eye and give him the bad news. The U. S. Navy had lots of training programs, but neither I nor this poor Filipino kid had ever received any instruction about how to handle a situation like this one. I swallowed hard again, mustered all the reserves of courage that I was able to dredge up, and laid it all out, in the most compassionate but also the clearest language that I could find.

He didn’t say anything; what could he have said? What could either of us do besides hope that the forecast was wrong? I will not attempt to describe the expression that was on his face when I finished speaking, but I still remember that expression clearly, more than two decades later. Giving him that forecast was, without a doubt, the most difficult thing I ever had to do as a weatherman. I was very lucky, I suppose, that I only had to do such a job once.

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In the early 1800s, scholars and scientists were enthusiastically exploring the vistas opened up to them by the work of Isaac Newton and his followers. A French astronomer and mathematician named Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, spoke for his era in his Analytic Theory of Probabilities:

Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.

Of course, no one seriously believed that any flesh-and-blood humans would ever actually acquire such a perfect “snapshot” of the Universe, let alone be able to apply their knowledge so precisely that they would be able to record all of history and foretell all of the future. But the basic concept of these theoretical possibilities had a strong appeal to the egos of many scientists. We might never wholly gain such Godlike perfection, but we could forever (in theory) keep getting closer and closer to it.

This idea has long had a special importance for those who study the Earth’s atmosphere, for it is fairly close in some respects to what they actually attempt to do. Thousands of people, scattered around the world, measure temperature, pressure and relative humidity and so forth, share all the measurements with each other, and then “submit these data to analysis,” trying to fill in the gaps between the actual measurements with a combination of sophisticated technology, experience, intuition, guesswork, and their knowledge of natural laws. From all this come forecasts—never perfect, but always (we hope) improving.

Even after the discoveries of twentieth-century physics began dashing hopes for perfection in many areas, quite a few meteorologists hung on to the idea that weather forecasting could improve basically without limit. Although Einstein may have made so many things dependent on where one is standing, and Heisenberg may have made things unavoidably fuzzy down among the electrons, and Hubble may have placed limits on how far even the biggest telescopes can reach, and Gödel may have found frustrating problems in the bowels of mathematics itself—still the atmospheric scientists maintained hope. After all, the demands made by the meteorologist were not as great as those made by the theoretical physicist, were they? The weather forecaster did not want to analyze the structure of the electron, but only that of the air and the oceans; he didn’t really need to look at particles smaller than hydrogen atoms; he didn’t need to know all the rules operating everywhere throughout the entire universe, but only a relatively small number of laws governing a “laboratory” containing one liquid (water), a few gases, and a single, well-defined energy source (the sun) providing heat and light to an equally well-defined and extremely familiar environment. If the scientists could just get enough measurements in enough places around the world, and sort out some admittedly tricky but not overwhelming (or so they thought) questions concerning the flow of turbulent fluids, then they should have things licked. Eventually, they would be able to tell you exactly whose houses would be clobbered by next month’s storm.

Although the specific statements made by meteorologists in the first half of the twentieth century were tentative, they never fully abandoned a long-term faith in the constantly increasing accuracy of forecasts. Thus, in 1931, Donald Piston, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maine, wrote in his book Meteorology:

The problem of predicting weather for months or years in advance is one which appeals to the popular imagination, and it is a problem which has engaged the serious attention of a number of investigators. In spite of the work which has been done, however, we are still far away from an even approximately satisfactory solution of the problem.

Piston’s use of the phrase “far away from,” however cautious it may sound, still implies that a “satisfactory solution” still exists out there in the future.

Similarly, in 1938, Thomas Blair, an associate professor of meteorology at the University of Nebraska and a senior meteorologist with the US Weather Bureau, wrote about precipitation forecasting in his book Weather Elements: “It is not possible as yet . . . to foresee the exact area of rain, nor, especially, to foresee the amount of precipitation” (emphasis added). Like Piston, Blair implies that future scientists will be able to achieve the long-term accuracy that present forecasters cannot; it is just a matter of time.

In his book Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick gives us a historical perspective and paints a vivid picture of what meteorological hubris looked like at its height:

The fifties and sixties were years of unreal optimism about weather forecasting.  Newspapers and magazines were filled with hope for weather science, not just for prediction but for modification and control. Two technologies were maturing together, the digital computer and the space satellite. . . . There was an idea that human society would free itself from weather’s turmoil and become its master instead of its victim . . . [Computers were built] with the precise intention, among other things, of controlling the weather. . . . With the computer up and running . . . scientists would calculate the equations of fluid motions for the next few days. Then a central committee of meteorologists would send up airplanes to lay down smoke screens or seed clouds to push the weather into the desired mode.

But Gleick tells us about this optimistic euphoria only so he can describe how short-lived it was. Gleick’s book is about chaos theory and its implications, which finally would force weather forecasting into that same tantalizing trap that had already captured so much of twentieth-century physics.

It was, in fact, a meteorologist, using a meteorological program on a computer in 1961, who made some of the earliest discoveries in chaos theory. Edward Lorenz, working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ran a simple simulation of some temperature and wind scenarios. While attempting to run the program a second time with identical data, he unintentionally made a tiny change to one number, in the fourth place to the right of the decimal point. When he ran the program again, the long-range results were vastly different.  Gleick describes Lorenz’s troubled reaction:

Something was philosophically out of joint.  The practical import could be staggering. Although his equations were gross parodies of the earth’s weather, he had a faith that they captured the essence of the real atmosphere. That first day, he decided that long-range weather forecasting must be doomed.

Indeed it was. Those questions about the flow of turbulent fluids turned out to be not only overwhelming; they were cataclysmic. A modest-sounding but ultimately devastating phrase was added to science: “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” This phenomenon also is known as the “butterfly effect,” suggesting, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, “that the mere flapping of a butterfly’s wing can change the weather.” Gleick summarizes the full awful impact of chaos on weather forecasting:

Suppose the earth could be covered with sensors spaced one foot apart, rising at    one-foot intervals all the way to the top of the atmosphere. Suppose every sensor gives perfectly accurate readings of temperature, pressure, humidity, and any other quantity a meteorologist would want. Precisely at noon an infinitely powerful computer takes all the data and calculates what will happen at each point at 12:01, then 12:02, then 12:03 . . . The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away.  Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.

Among Lorenz’s fellow scientists, there was widespread resistance to his ideas early on; but as more and more people have studied them closely, bringing more and more powerful computer hardware and software to bear upon chaos theory, the overall picture has become increasingly (and, one might say, depressingly) clear.  By 1993, Lorenz himself was able to write in his book The Essence of Chaos:

[Many] models . . . have been used for predictability experiments, in which two or more   solutions originating from slightly different initial states have been examined for the presence of sensitive dependence. . . . The models have indicated that small initial differences will amplify until they are no longer small. There is even good quantitative agreement as to the rate of amplification. . . . We are more or less forced to conclude that   the atmosphere itself is chaotic.

And since 1993, the situation has not changed appreciably. Faster computers are continually brought into play, and the programs running on them become more and more sophisticated, but the results they produce simply solidify the entrenchment of chaos. The most recent issues of the Journal of the American Meteorological Society have the language of chaos as prominent in their pages as professors of meteorology have it in their classes.

Paradoxically—and ironically—the mathematics of chaos has sometimes been very useful in meteorology, allowing researchers to describe and analyze complex situations that were difficult, or even impossible, to handle with older tools.  But each time chaos theory is applied, it is one more grim reminder of the trade-off that weather forecasting has been forced to make: some gains in certain areas have been obtained by abandoning the hope of long-term convergence towards perfection. The additions to the toolboxes of the theoreticians may be little consolation to the weather workers out in the field.

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October 1978.

As it happened, the family of that young boatswain’s mate was lucky. Soon after I talked to him, there was a small twitch in the atmospheric circulation near the storm, a twitch so small that no observers or forecasters could have caught it at the time even if there had been weather people in that area, which there weren’t. As small as the twitch was, it was enough to nudge Typhoon Rita into a slow, gradual curve to the west-northwest, putting that sailor’s family out of the zone of catastrophic destruction—but putting other families into it.

Although Rita’s path did not match our early forecast, her intensity did. When Rita made landfall on the island of Luzon, about four hundred miles north of that boatswain’s mate’s home island, she was a high Category Five, with some wind gusts close to two hundred fifty miles an hour. In spite of the corrupt inefficiency of the Marcos regime, the small islands off the eastern coast of Luzon were evacuated in time, and most coastal residents were moved well up into the steep interior mountains before the worst of the storm hit. The center of the storm cut a jagged line across the peaks, mainly through sparsely populated regions. The rugged terrain did heavy damage to the storm’s circulation, and Rita entered the South China Sea with only half the maximum wind speed she had had before landfall.

It was not just that boatswain’s mate’s family that was lucky; a significant portion of the population of the Philippines was just as fortunate. The final death toll was “only” between two hundred and three hundred people. This may sound like a lot, but consider the following: had that tiny twitch of circulating air been a little different and sent Rita seventy miles or so to the south of its actual landfall point, the city of Manila could have taken a direct hit. The death toll might have exceeded that in Honduras in 1998 after Hurricane Mitch came through. It was just a little movement, too small to detect or measure at the time, which made the difference. One microscopic bit of chaos. One single, unseen beat of the butterfly’s wings.

Other people in the weather business have had to do what I did on that October day in the western Pacific: deliver the unavoidable bad news. Sometimes the forecast is correct, and sometimes it is not. As the old saying goes, “It’s the suspense that kills you.” If we could tell what next month’s storm was going to do with strong confidence and tight precision—if we could say “The houses in this block will be destroyed, but not those one block over”—then whole professions related to planning would be vastly different.

But we can’t. And so other weather workers will continue to give other forecasts to other people, hoping for the best, and trying to learn what they can from mistakes. And so it will continue forever, unless someone someday finds a way to break the iron grip of chaos.