Dead Reckoning Read Online Free PDF Page B

electronics a little f arther off the floor and then turned and walked out.
     
    12:00 AM, MONDAY, MAY 28 TH – EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER (EOC), KWAJALEIN, MIDNIGHT BRIEFING
     
    “Tropical Storm Ele has picked up speed and is now approximately 250 miles east-southeast of Kwaj,” I began my part of the briefing.
    “At this rate, I believe typhoon conditions are imminent at Kwajalein Atoll, starting in approximately eighteen hours. While Ele is strengthening faster than expected, I am watching an upper level trough coming down from the northwest which will increase shear and should help to limit the growth of the storm, if it gets here in time. Onset of 35 knot winds now looks to be within 12 hours.”
    All departments provided their status in turn, and preparations were moving along as expected. My mind, however, was focused on the doubt that I always lived with as a meteorologist. We got kicked around a lot, but most people understand how hard it is to predict the weather. The worst case scenario was that I was wrong, and Ele would continue her rapid intensification and explode into a killer that not only destroyed our paradise, but killed many people I knew. After all, the average elevation of our island was only eight feet, and there were no good places to hide.
    I looked around the table and thought about the people sitting there. Some were my friends, but they all depended on my forecast that day, whether they knew it or not. One woman tapped a pencil on her notepad as if annoyed by the whole thing. Another guy appeared to be preoccupied with something in his coffee cup. Most listened intently but without a sense of urgency. I wondered whether people appreciated the danger.
    I had considered every piece of available data and provided the best forecast I could. And I tried to instill in people a sense of the worst case scenario. But there is always a fine line between covering your ass and crying wolf too often. I had been wrong before, and I could be wrong now.
    Sometimes I hated my profession because uncertainty was my constant companion. I doubted engineers worried much about whether the equations they used to build bridges were correct. X amount of concrete and Y amount of rebar will support Z amount of traffic, and everyone lives happily ever after. I never enjoyed such certitude in my job. The problem with my job was chaos theory. The saying goes that a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and sets off a chain of unpredictable, chaotic events that leads to a typhoon in China two weeks later. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but it illustrates a point: the weather is subject to so many interactions that range from chemical reactions on the atomic level (that cannot be adequately measured over the globe, much less modeled) to the physical forces of fluid dynamics acting over hundreds or thousands of miles, that a meteorological forecast is most accurately defined as little more than an educated guess. While forecasting continually improves through better methods of estimating that which we cannot explicitly model (we call this parameterization), given the unimaginable complexity of the system, we can still state virtually nothing with certainty. You might say meteorologists suffer from occupational confidence envy!
    I noticed some movement on the far side of the room. It looked like a cockroach crawling backward up the wall. Curious, I squinted my eyes to better focus on the object. Ants were carrying a dead cockroach up a wall toward a hole at the top. I wondered if they sensed the impending weather better than I did.
    The cockroach was many times bigger than all the ants combined, so the fact that they could transport it up a wall was remarkable enough, but their organization was what truly impressed me.
    Most of the ants were common laborers, but a couple of leaders scurried about communicating with the heavy lifters. When they got to the top, they spent a few minutes trying to get the bug turned into the