Status Updates From A Furious Sky: The Five-Hun...

Dan Rather, famous Texan TV anchor, played a pivotal role in putting radar imagery of hurricanes on-screen, helping the general public visualize hurricanes for the first time… and paving the way for extreme weather to become the ultimate reality TV. On the theme of tech & weather: could advance sun neural network models allow meteorologists to detect new patterns in notoriously complex weather systems?

Repeated whallops in Gulf, Florida expose the National Weather Service’s gaping lack of capability to monitor storms while over the ocean. Rapid economic development of commercial hubs in Galveston, Miami crushed 1900 - 1930 by successive Category 4 - Category 5 storms. Losses of life in the 1000s 😳

Humanitarian scientists featured too: Padre Benito Viñes of Cuba studied weather science to prevent human suffering and became the most accurate hurricane forecaster of the late 1800s. Clara Barton’s American Red Cross deployed to barrier islands in the Carolinas and Florida Keys to bring food & medical care to blacks, destitute veterans, and other marginalized storm victims otherwise abandoned

Redfield then applies Morse’s invention of the telegraph to real-time storm warnings, though Henry, Secretary of the nascent Smithsonian Institute, is the one who operationalizes US national weather « forecasting » or at least reporting

History of meteorology surprisingly slow 1650 - 1800. Finally, combined ideas of: storm travel over distance (Franklin), whirlwind motion (Redfield), convection from evaporation (Espy), barometric pressure readings (Sharpe), and application of the Coriolis effect (Ferrel) produced modern hurricane theory by 1900

The word for hurricane - a uniquely strong US Gulf / East Atlantic storm - comes from the Taino name for the god of evil and storms: « Huracán » Early recorded episodes related by both natives and Europeans continually leave people at a loss for words at the level of destruction