Future Ready

1Rethink Everything

On October 22, 2012, meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center (NHC), a cement fortress in Miami, Florida, registered Tropical Depression 18 in the southwestern Caribbean Sea. The event was then just a line of thunderstorms moving across the turquoise water, but it represented a serious potential risk. Hurricanes and other weather-related events kill an annual average of hundreds of people and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damages in the United States alone.

The NHC, which is tasked with predicting the future risk of these low-pressure systems across the United States, jumped into action. It dispatched one of the Air Force's Lockheed Martin Super Hercules aircraft for observation. Despite all the data that streams in from geostationary satellites, as well as other land- and water-based weather stations, flying an 80-ton airplane into a furious windstorm is currently still the best way to gather some information.

In Miami, experts in meteorology, satellite data, and remote sensing poured over the reports and fed it into multiple hurricane forecast models that predicted the event's future direction and destructive potential. Many tropical depressions fizzle out, but the environment surrounding Number 18—including warm waters and local atmospheric conditions—caused it to intensify rapidly with a defined circulating pattern and winds above 38 miles per hour (61 kmh), thus earning it a name: Tropical Storm Sandy. Over the next few hours, Sandy's ...