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Super Storms
AUGUST 2006
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By Thomas Hayden
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Image by NASA
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Scientists are urgently trying to forecast the next killer hurricanes.
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When the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic is bearing down on you, a salvaged armchair under a wood-and-tin awning might seem a poor choice of shelter. But that's where Don E. ("I'd rather keep my last name out of it") was parked when Wilma hit South Florida at 6:30 a.m. last October 24. For Don and a buddy, it was the start of the workday at Jimbo's Place, a ramshackle beer and bait shop down by the water on Miami's Virginia Key. "Once we got out here, it was kind of too late to do anything but ride it out," Don says with a small laugh.
Jimbo's looks like nothing so much as an abandoned shack. But whether through good luck or unexpectedly sound construction, it survived Wilma's fury. Mercifully, the winds had ebbed from 185 miles an hour (300 kilometers an hour) at sea to 120 miles an hour (200 kilometers an hour) by the time the storm hit, but Wilma still left almost all of South Florida without power. For the next two weeks a generator and donated bags of ice kept Jimbo's open—the only establishment on the key where visitors could be assured of a cold beer and a friendly welcome.
Wilma was a record breaker in a season of unsettling records. Katrina, at the end of August, killed more than a thousand people and left much of New Orleans and the neighboring coast in ruins. The damage exceeded a hundred billion dollars—the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history—and the toll in fractured lives is incalculable. Rita, in September, rivaled Wilma in intensity and ravaged the Gulf Coast through western Louisiana and East Texas.
These three monster storms were part of an unmatched run of Atlantic hurricanes—15 in all. With a total of 27 named tropical storms, 2005 was the first year meteorologists exhausted their preseason list of 21 Atlantic cyclone names and had to dip into the Greek alphabet for the latecomers.
Days after Wilma, one visitor to Jimbo's was already worrying about what future hurricane seasons might bring. Sharan Majumdar, 34, is a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, just across the highway from Jimbo's. He is one of a cadre of scientists trying to understand nature's most powerful storms and more reliably predict their surges, ebbs, and lurching paths from birth to landfall.
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