just didn’t look like it meant business, until it did. “By getting the intensity forecast wrong,” James says, “that contributed to our getting the track forecast wrong. If we had correctly anticipated that Joaquin was going to beat the shear and remain a stronger storm, that would have argued for a forecast more to the south.”
James explains why even with advanced computers and significant amounts of data, we still can’t accurately predict the future 100 percent of the time. In fact, an important part of the NHC meteorologists’ job is to keep tabs of, and learn from, error. The NHC is one of the few government offices that obsessively tracks its own mistakes; meteorologists use these errors to improve their models and methods.
On the NHC website, there’s an entire section dedicated to its own errors going back to 1970. Multiple line graphs detail two kinds of errors: track errors and intensity errors. What path the storm takes depends on the larger forces around it. Like a leaf floating down a powerful river, it can get caught in swirling eddies, loop back, cut loose, and stall in slower currents near the riverbank. Meteorologists often think of weather systems in terms of fluid dynamics. But unlike a leaf, the hurricane is a nine-mile-high engine—making its movements and behavior even more difficult to predict.
Heat is the fuel that drives the hurricane’s engine. The more heat the system absorbs into the upper atmosphere from the warm waters below, the faster it spins, converting the heat’s energy into powerful winds. That’s why hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere occur late in the season, after the summer sun has warmed the southwestern Atlantic up to 84 degrees.
As oceans continue to warm due to climate change, hurricanes will get more intense because they’ve got more fuel to convert to energy. We’ve already witnessed proof of this; several tropical cyclones have broken records in the past decade alone. Hurricane Sandy, which pounded the New Jersey and New York coasts in October 2012, was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, spanning eleven hundred miles. A year later, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines became the strongest tropical cyclone to hit land ever recorded, with one-minute sustained winds recorded at an astounding 195 miles per hour, killing at least sixty-three hundred people. Hurricane Patricia intensified at an unprecedented rate off the western coast of Mexico two years later, churning out record-breaking maximum sustained winds of 215 miles per hour.
Hurricane Irma, followed by Hurricane Maria, revealed exactly how destructive these systems can be. The huge Category 5 hurricane blasted through Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. Its tornado-like winds knocked out the entire power grid and nearly all cell-phone infrastructure and cut a swath of devastation, peeling off roofs, stripping away all vegetation, and causing widespread flooding. Ports were closed, and much of Puerto Rico’s shipping infrastructure was compromised by winds and flooding.
In the aftermath, Puerto Ricans found themselves without fresh food, water, and electricity. Hospitals, schools, homes, and factories went dark. Some towns were completely wiped out. Tankers were unable to dock or unload; without fuel, emergency efforts ground to a halt. By mid-October, more than 1.2 million people on the island lacked access to potable water.
HURRICANE JOAQUIN FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 13: 0300 UTC THU OCT 01 2015: HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 23.8N 73.1W AT 01/0300Z. PRESENT MOVEMENT TOWARD THE SOUTHWEST AT 5 KT. MAX SUSTAINED WINDS 100 KT WITH GUSTS TO 120 KT.
Joaquin would continue this superheated superstorm trend with its own series of unprecedented stats. As it was forming, it traveled westward, but a ridge of high pressure blocked its forward progression, redirecting it south over the hot Bahamian waters—about 86 degrees—two degrees hotter than ever recorded at that time of year. This was the heat Joaquin needed to thrive. For sixty hours, the storm fed off these warm waters and rapidly intensified. At 2 a.m. on September 30, about 170 miles east-northeast of the small Bahamian island of San Salvador, Joaquin became a hurricane.
Mariners live and die by weather. Naturally, they are obsessed with forecasts, signs, and augurs. Long after a seaman has turned his back on the ocean, he follows the weather. He might live in landlocked New Mexico, four hundred miles from the nearest boat, but he’ll still be able to tell you all about the system forming off the coast of the Bahamas.
At home in Portland, Maine, on September 29, 2015, El Faro’s off-duty Second Mate Charlie Baird couldn’t pull himself away from the Weather Channel. He’d just stepped off El Faro a week before, relieved by Second Mate Danielle Randolph. The pair had been tag-teaming the job for a couple of years, seventy days on, seventy days off. Now he was on his sofa, still in his robe at ten o’clock in the morning. He didn’t like what he was seeing, this storm developing in the Atlantic. He was off the clock, but he couldn’t help himself.
He picked up his phone and texted El Faro’s captain, Michael Davidson: “Storm forming north of the bahamas!!”
Growing up in Portland, Charlie loved the water, loved sailing, loved the sea. In high school, he was a state-champion swimmer, breaking record after record, and got recruited to swim at Niagara College. At sixty-six, he’s still remarkably fit, and still competing in triathlons. A handful of medals hang from the chandelier in his dining room.
Charlie joined the merchant marine in the early ’80s. He’s been shipping so long that, like many mariners, he’s missed a lot of life while at sea. Like someone who’s spent a few years in a coma, he’s kind of disconnected. A lot of casual conversation doesn’t make sense to him—movies, music, and events have simply passed him by. He would make a terrible Trivial Pursuit partner.
Charlie lets this all wash over him as he swigs another glass of red wine on ice.
He knew not to mess with hurricanes. First, there are the winds. At low speeds, the wind’s force on a large ship is minimal. That is, up to about 35 miles per hour. Wind speed and force have an exponential relationship, meaning that as the wind notches up, its force doubles, then triples, and then quadruples, and so on. It’s based on a simple formula: wind pressure per square foot = 0.00256 x (wind speed)2. Put another way, between 1 mile per hour and 35 miles per hour, the wind’s force against the boat runs roughly six to nine times its velocity. That’s the kind of incremental change that the human brain can handle. But over the next 35 miles per hour, its force rapidly grows to eighteen times its velocity. At 112 miles per hour, the wind’s force is thirty times its velocity—you can’t stand upright in that kind of wind no matter how far you lean; first you’ll slide across the ground, then you’ll get thrown backward into an uncontrollable somersault.
This power makes a big difference when you’ve got a crosswind across a large surface area, say, like the side of a container ship piled with boxes. At midspeeds, the wind’s force would be equivalent to twenty-one tons pushing up against that ship. You’ll heel a bit, and might want to shift your ballast to try to correct. Ratchet up the wind’s velocity to 110 miles per hour, and you’ve got about 375 tons trying to push the ship over. That’s the cumulative force of three of the world’s largest locomotives. If you’ve got vulnerabilities, like a low deck with lots of openings, that kind of force can be catastrophic.
And then there are the waves. At first, the cyclone’s high winds cause whitecaps to form on the water’s surface. As the hours pass, the waves grow. Start with a completely calm sea at noon on Monday; a 28-mile-per-hour wind starts to blow and by 11 p.m. on Tuesday, you’ll have thirteen-foot waves. A rough guide for wind to wave height is two to one—60-mile-per-hour winds (52 knots) stir up thirty-plus-foot waves, depending on fetch, or the length of open water over which the wind blows.
Of course, most mariners hope they’re never caught in seas like that, especially in a small boat.
How big can ocean waves get? For millennia, sailors spun stories about extreme waves a hundred feet high that came out of nowhere and smashed apart boats with just one hit. These
