The Fifth Risk(32)
Since the end of the Second World War, weather data collection has become one of the greatest illustrations of the possibilities of global collaboration and public-spiritedness. Every day thousands of amateur weather observers report data to their governments, as do a lot of experts aboard commercial planes in the sky and on ships at sea. Every day, twice a day, almost nine hundred weather balloons are released from nine hundred different spots on the globe, ninety-two of them by the U.S. government. A half-dozen countries, including the United States, deploy thousands of buoys to collect weather from the ocean surface. Then there’s the data collected by billion-dollar satellites and fancy radar stations—in the United States alone, the National Weather Service maintains 159 high-resolution Doppler radar sites.
The United States shares its weather data with other countries—just as other countries share their weather data with the United States. But back in 1996, when DJ was hacking the Department of Commerce computer servers, weather data was not generally available to even the most enterprising hacker. “It wasn’t open to the public,” said DJ, “but it turned out there was a hole.” What came through that hole was such a vast trove of information that it overwhelmed the capacity of the computers in the University of Maryland’s math department, so DJ hunted for other computers at the university he might use. “You can get historical data and play with it,” he said “It was the original idea of the internet. I was that guy. I didn’t have a supercomputer. So I just had to steal that, too.”
He’d start work at eight every night, when no one else was using the computers, and go until seven the next morning. He cobbled together enough storage to hold his borrowed treasure. “That was my academic claim to fame,” he said. “That I downloaded the Weather Service’s data.”
As he looked at the data, a couple of things became apparent. First, that the weather forecasts were improving more dramatically than he’d imagined. No one else was paying much attention to this, but for the first time in history the weatherman was becoming useful. Before the Second World War meteorology had been a bit like medicine in the nineteenth century: the demand for expertise was so relentless that the supply had no choice but to make fraudulent appearances. Right through the 1970s, the weather forecaster would look at the available weather information and, relying heavily on his judgment and personal experience, offer a prediction. His vision typically extended no more than thirty-six hours into the future, and even then it was blurry: snow will fall somewhere over these three states. For a very long time the weather had been only theoretically predictable—that is, people had some pretty good ideas about how it might be predicted, without being able actually to predict it.
Around the time DJ began downloading it, the weather data had led to practical progress that shocked even the theoreticians. On March 12, 1993, what became known as the Storm of the Century hit the eastern United States. Its force was incredible: waves in the Gulf of Mexico sank a two-hundred-foot ship. Roofs across southern states collapsed under the weight of the snow. Tornadoes killed dozens of people. Travel ceased along the entire Eastern Seaboard.
But the biggest difference between this storm and those that had come before it was that it had been predicted by a model. Following a segment on CBS Evening News about the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, Louis Uccellini, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, had warned of the coming massive threat.
The TV hosts had treated the nation’s weatherman with amusement—they ended the story by saying, “The weatherman is usually wrong.” But this time he wasn’t. The National Weather Service had relied on its forecasting model, with no human laying hands on the results, and it had predicted the location and severity of the storm five days before it hit. “It was unheard-of,” said Uccellini. “When I started in the 1970s, the idea of predicting extreme events was almost forbidden. How can you see a storm before the storm can be seen? This time, states declared an emergency before the first flake of snow. It was just amazing for us to watch. We sat there wrapping our heads around what we’d done.” Six years after the storm, Uccellini described the advances in weather prediction from about the end of World War II as “one of the major intellectual achievements of the twentieth century.”
The achievements received surprisingly little attention, perhaps because they were, at least at first, difficult to see. It was not as if one day the weather could not be predicted and the next it could be predicted with perfect accuracy. What was happening was a shift in the odds that the weather forecast was right. It was the difference between an ordinary blackjack player and a blackjack player who was counting the cards. Over time the skill means beating, rather than losing to, the house. But at any given moment it is impossible to detect.
DJ could see that this progress was a big deal. A world-historic event. Here you could see chaos theory dramatized, but in reverse. You could rewind history and consider how things might have come out differently if our ability to predict the weather had been even a tiny bit better, or worse. “The failed hostage rescue in Iran was caused by a sandstorm we didn’t see coming,” said DJ. “The Kosovo offensive was so effective because we knew we wouldn’t have cloud cover.” You could pick almost any extreme weather event and imagine a different outcome for it, if only people had known it was coming. The hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, back in 1900, before anyone thought to name such storms, had struck without warning and killed so many people that no one ever figured out exactly how many had died. Maybe six thousand or maybe twelve thousand. What their grandchildren would know about the weather might have saved them all.