Announcing the 2011 FERMILAB/WGN Tornado & Severe Storms Seminar on Saturday, April 30, 2011

By Meteorologist Tom Skilling

Greetings to each of you! We have an extraordinary program planned for our 31st Annual Fermilab/WGN-TV seminar which takes place this year on Saturday, April 30th. I'm very excited about this year's program and the speakers who will join me at noon Saturday, Arpil 30th and again for a repeat of the entire program at 6 p.m. The event will take place at the Ramsey Auditorium on the grounds of the Batavia-based Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory.  Please feel free to attend either the noon session or the 6 pm session. We'd love to have you join us!  Hope to see you there and again here are the key details.

Where: Fermilab - Kirk Rd & Pine St, Batavia, Illinois, 1.630.840.3000
When:  Saturday, April 30th @12pm and again at 6pm

For a complete listing of guest speakers and topics of discussion continue reading below!

Putting these programs together the past 31 years has been a real labor of love for each of us involved in the seminar's preparation and production. The program is absolutely free! There are no tickets required--just show up! Seating is first come, first-served, so we recommend you get to the Fermilab grounds early--about an hour or hour and a half before the start of each program. As in recent years, we'll be giving away a number of NOAA Weather Radios.  Be sure you sign up at the Lake County Skywarn Booth as you approach the Ramsey Auditorium.

There's so much to talk about and share with you this year--and our speakers list is spectacular! We have an incredibly active 2011 tornado season underway and showing no sign of easing anytime soon which we intend to update and discuss. But, we've also been through quite a winter which has included one of this area's worst blizzards on record. The extraordinary Blizzard of 2011 was one for the books--the third worst snowstorm since records began in the 1884-85 snow season. Despite one of the best advance forecasts of such a storm ever, thousands ended up stranded on Lakeshore Drive--among other thoroughfares across the area. Why was that? And how was it that the storm was so accurately predicted so far in advance? We'll have insights from the National Weather Service's Dr. Louis Uccellini, Director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Camp Spring, Maryland as well as Dr. Jim Angel, our Illinois state climatologist at the Midwestern Regional Climate Center in Champaign, who will join us to discuss the work he and his colleagues have done on the impact; economically and in human terms, of February's crippling storm.

Jim Reed is one of the most respected storm chasers and extreme weather photographers on the road today. An author and all around wonderful human being, it was Jim who guided our WGN team as it encountered a multiple vortex tornado which chased us at speeds over 60 mph last May in northeast Oklahoma.  You'll meet Jim and find his presentation riveting.

We have a whole series of other presentations planned at our April 30th programs--and here's a rundown of them--both the speakers and the subjects of their talks. Both the noon and the 6pm programs run 3-4 hours with a break mid-way through.

I'm often asked if our program is suited to younger children.  Probably not. There will be all manner of "storm- in -progress" slides and videos which may frighten some young people. We've found in most past programs at Fermilab that 4th graders and older are best equipped to handle the content of our presentations.

Here are our speakers and the topics that will be discussed. Check them out!

Tom Skilling, Chief meteorologist, WGN-TV  Join us for a front row seat as we take you on a video excursion through a wild year of weather. The presentation will include our all-too-close encounter with a multiple-vortex tornado which chased us down an Oklahoma highway at 55mph. We'll also take a look at February's horrific blizzard--arguably the area's single most crippling snowstorm in decades. The blizzard, despite a week's worth of advance warning, still stranded thousands in howling 70 mph winds under drifts up to 5 to 6 ft. on Lakeshore Drive for up to 14 hours. We'll also review early returns from the already formidable 2011 tornado and severe weather season underway which is seriously outpacing the 2010 twister season to date.

Tom plans to take you on a video excursion through it all--and will even include eye-opening and horrifying video clips of the devastating Japanese tsunami in progress, as it takes apart one seaside community in the space of just 9 minutes.  The presentation will include a look at the revolution underway the past half century in meteorology which has allowed better forecasts and tracking of tornadoes and all manner of weather.

Dr. Louis W. Uccellini, Director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)  Dr. Uccellini will present a talk: "Forecasting The Blizzards of 2010-2011".  Warnings for Chicago's third largest snowstorm on record in February 2011 and New York City's record blizzard in December 2010 were issued with plenty of lead time; yet not all heeded the warnings.  This talk will explore how forecasters approached these storms and offer insights into how the warnings were received as the dangerous storms approached major metropolitan areas.

Extreme weather, including blizzards, tornadoes and severe thunderstorm outbreaks, are being predicted with greater accuracy and longer lead times than ever before. This past winter's blizzard in Chicago, the third largest snowstorm on record, was flagged as a potential threat for the Great Lakes region 5 to 7 days before the storm struck. Yet uncertainty in the track forecast remained even as the storm was predicted to become a large and dangerous blizzard that would impact a large area of the northern Midwest. The ability of this country's forecast system to provide forecasts of extreme events (like the blizzards and the recent major tornado outbreaks) has been decades in the making and is based on revolutionary advances in observing, numerical prediction models, computers, and the abilities of the forecasters to work with and fully utilize these sophisticated models and observations to issue warnings with increased confidence and specificity.

Global and local observations are becoming increasingly reliant on satellites and radar networks.  And today's forecast models run on supercomputers which are able to readily access over 3.5 billion observations per day and perform 70 trillion mathematical calculations per second---a speed which will double or triple over the next 4 to 5 years.  There may be no one who who has played such an active role in this revolution in weather forecasting than Dr. Louis W. Uccellini who, as Director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (or NCEP as it is known in the meteorological profession), oversees the operations of 9 centers including the Storm Prediction Center, Hydrometeorological Prediction Center, National Hurricane Center and the Environmental Modeling Center (which plays a key role in the development of the computer models) and of the NCEP Central Operations (which maintains and runs these models on the operational supercomputers on a daily basis).  Dr. Uccellini will discuss the Chicago and New York City blizzards with a comparison showing that while the forecast and warnings highlighted the potential threat associated with the onset of these storms highlighted days before their arrival, improvements are still needed to provide predictive information and decision support required for more decisive action.  Finally, Dr. Uccellini will take your questions at the end of the presentation..

Dr. Jim Angel, State Climatologist, Midwestern Regional Climate Center February 2011 Blizzard's astounding impact: Tab on storm $400-million in snow removal costs and in lost business, nearly 7,000 miles of highways buried beneath a foot or more of snow, over 10-million impacted

The February blizzard's economic impact has come in at just under half a billion dollars in northeast Illinois alone, according to the Midwestern Regional Climate Center's Dr. Jim Angel. Angel is Illinois' state climatologist in Illinois. Just under 10 million Illinoisans alone experienced 12-inch plus accumulations and an extraordinary 6,993 miles of Illinois highways were buried beneath 12 inches.

Jim Reed, Award winning photographer "Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey" - Join award-winning extreme weather photographer Jim Reed as he discusses his favorite images from his critically-acclaimed book and how he captured the photos

It was veteran storm chaser Jim Reed with whom Tom Skilling and WGN producer Pam Grimes and photographers Steve Scheuer and Jordan Guzzardo traveled into the Plains last spring for a trip which led to an encounter with a multiple vortex tornado which chased them down a northeast Oklahoma highwa. The storm flipped semis and cars on their sides. WGN viewers were along every step of the way for the ride. One of the world's most accomplished and award-winning extreme-weather photographers, Jim Reed has dedicated 20 consecutive years to documenting America's changing climate for editorial and fine art clients that include National Geographic, The New York Times, and Corcoran Gallery of Art.  In 2010, Jim served as WGN's field guide on the Emmy-Award winning "Chased by Tornadoes," leading Tom to his first on-location tornado. Author of the critically-accalimed book, "Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey," Jim has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Weather Channel, and many other TV shows. Check out Jim's Nikon Podcast on iTunes! You can follow Jim on Twitter: @jimreedphoto


Jim Allsopp, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, NWS Chicago  Tornadoes in the Chicago area: How often have they occurred and how do events like the current La Nina, which the cooling of the equatorial Pacific, have an impact on local tornado occurrence?

Several years ago Jim Allsopp did a study on the frequency of significant (F2 and greater) tornadoes across the eight county Chicago metro area. In 2010 Valparaiso meteorology student Tony Lyza expanded the study to the entire 23 county area served by the Chicago NWS office and also looked at correlations between tornado frequency and the El Nino/Southern Oscillation cycle.

Brian Smith, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, National Weather Service, Omaha, Nebraska "Killer Wind:  Do not ignore Severe Thunderstorm
Warnings"

Brian Smith, veteran National Weather Service meteorologist and severe weather specialist at the Service's Omaha forecast office, and former student and longtime research assistant to famed University of Chicago tornado researcher Dr. Ted Fujita, will look at derechoes and downbursts, explain what they are, how they happen and the dangers they represent.  Brian has irrefutable evidence they are just as dangerous as tornadoes and makes the case that Severe Thunderstorm Warnings should be taken just as seriously as tornado warnings and not ignored.

Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, MD, University of Illinois-Chicago The lightning injury rate in the U.S. is down but lightning injuries and deaths remain high in tropical and sub-tropical countries. What is being done to change this?

Due to the hard work of many people, the lightning injury rate in the US has declined substantially.  However, there continues to be significant numbers of injuries and deaths in tropical and subtropical countries around the world.  We cannot export the US solutions to areas where thatched roof homes and labor intensive agriculture is still the norm but must come up with other solutions including innovative educational ways to reach the people.  Dr Cooper will discuss some of the developments and outreach that is happening in these areas.

Ed Fenelon, Meteorologist in Charge of the NWS Forecast Office-Chicago Rip Currents: Killers on the Great Lakes--but what are they and what do you do when they strike?

Rip Currents caused the drowning death of 30 people last year on the Great Lakes, and on average claim 100 lives per year in the United States.  Sadly, most if not all of these lives could have been saved had people known the right thing to do.  Just what are these powerful water flows that occur at our beaches, and what do we need to be teaching our kids before they go in the water?  Ed Fenelon will talk about what ripncurrents are, and about a new partnership between beach managers, first responders, community leaders, the media, and the National Weather Service to reduce rip current drownings at our beaches.  Through advances in rip current research we are now able to predict days when rip currents may form.  By being informed before deciding to go to the beach, and following the advice of lifeguards and beach signs when there, we can ensure many happy returns to the water.  Rip Currents -
break the grip of the rip!  More information at ripcurrents.noaa.gov

MEDIA RELEASE James C. (Jim) Weyman, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service weather forecast office and director of the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu, retired March 31, after 15 years of service in the islands and more than 40 years of combined federal service. From 1970 through 1990, Weyman served as meteorologist in the [...] Related Posts Hurricane preparedness workshops in Hilo, Kona National Weather Service issues wind and wave advisories Weather...

- visit Hawaii 24/7 to read the full story -

Do you ever get the felling that the problem with our “distinguished leaders” in Washington isn’t that they don’t *get* what the problems facing average Americans are; but they simply don’t *CARE* what the problems are?

The official death toll in Japan from last week’s 8.9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami topped 10,035. And what “critical legislation” are the Republicans in the House of Representatives trying to force through? A spending plan being pushed by Republicans would slash funding by one-third for the agency that warned Hawaii and the West Coast about the devastating tsunami’s carnage in Japan.

The plan, approved last month by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, would cut an estimated $126 million from the National Weather Service budget, the agency that houses the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.

The center issued widespread warnings less than two minutes after the earthquake and issued instructions, guidance and updates throughout the day.

A union representing workers at the tsunami center said the proposed cuts, part of $454 million in cuts for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, could result in furloughs and rolling closures of weather service offices and will undoubtedly cripple the center’s ability to issue warnings similar to those issued Friday.

“I understand the tsunami is the disaster of the day — and it’s terrible — but the bigger issue for the U.S. is that we’re coming up on tornado season, we’re coming up on hurricane season,” said Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization. “The number one mission of the National Weather Service is to save lives. If you start deconstructing the early warning system, something is going to fall through the cracks and people are going to die.”

A spokeswoman for the House Appropriations Committee, which is leading the budget-cutting effort, said deep cuts were needed to restore the country’s fiscal health. The party’s plan would cut spending for NOAA operations by nearly 10% below the budget enacted last year.

“The nation is in a historic fiscal crisis, and it is imperative that the Congress roll back spending in virtually every area of government — including NOAA — so that we can help our economy back on track,” said spokeswoman Jennifer Hing.

But Congress continues to ignore GAO REPORT IDENTIFYING $200 BILLION IN WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE.

But it’s fairly simple to understand at least one of the motivations behind this latest “screw the people” move by the right-wing. Hawaii usually votes Democratic. So if its population gets wiped off the map, that’s two less Democratic Senators the Republicans will have voting against them, and they can always import their pineapples from central and/or South America. It wouldn’t be difficult to see this as the same kind of political power-grab used in Wisconsin.

If there were a similar threat to one of the always-vote-Republican states, you can be certain that the Republicans would appropriate a sum bigger than the Pentagon’s contractor catering budget to save it.

I would like to go to each member of Congress, right and left, and find out what caused the death and/or suffering of someone in their immediate family, and then announce that I’m going to slash all funding that helps that organization because “America needs to cut spending.” Make it personal. Make it affect THEM. Let’s see how eager our “best and brightest” are to slice budgets then.

It’s just this simple: The tsunami warning center provided critical information to public safety officials for an effective and almost immediate response to the tsunami that directly saved lives in Hawaii and California. The House-passed bill that attempts to slash the warning center’s budget is shortsighted and puts our nation’s security, health and infrastructure at risk.

The GOP claims that their cuts to the tsunami budget would save $126 Million next year. How about this: How about Congress picks one of the multi-billion-dollar corporations that still haven’t paid back their Bailout money and prevents the CEO and other executives from getting any bonus next year. Based on commonly available figures, that could save upwards of $400 Million.

Better still, how about they immediately act on the GAO’s report and cut just 10 percent of the overspending identified there. That would immediately save $200 Million.

No wonder the American education system is in the toilet. Our “best and brightest” can’t do simple math.

While President Barack Obama's standing in Washington has dropped a notch or two in the year since he and his family last spent their holiday vacation in this beach community, the thrill is definitely not gone for many Kailuans about him coming back. Associated Press.

While President Barack Obama and his family have been coming to Hawaii for vacation almost every year, it will be the first island visit for "First Dog" Bo. If he passes a veterinary exam when he lands, he'll be allowed to follow the Obama ohana to Kailua immediately. Hawaii News Now.

First lady Michelle Obama, daughters Malia and Sasha, and dog Bo arrived at the beach community of Kailua over the weekend, but President Obama is still in Washington waiting for the lame duck Congress to wrap up its pre-Christmas work. USA Today.

U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye is chiding his Senate colleagues for shelving an omnibus spending measure in favor of a short-term resolution keeping expenditures at current levels. Associated Press.

For 10 years, Hawaiian citizens have requested island wide and U.S. Government official hearings of the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act that would reclassify Native Hawaiians as Native Americans and establish a separate, sovereign, race-based nation on all islands of the archipelago. Hawaii Reporter.

Oahu will remain under a flash-flood watch through this afternoon following a rain-soaked Sunday that saw a storm-related fire knock out power to parts of Ala Moana Center on the last shopping weekend before Christmas, the closure of the Honolulu Zoo and City Hall, an overwhelmed sewer system that burst manhole covers and wrong-way drivers trying to avoid flooded streets. Star-Advertiser.

A Flash Flood Watch has been extended for all Hawaiian islands through Monday afternoon as deep tropical moisture is drawn up by a strong low pressure system west of the state. Hawaii News Now.

The National Weather Service in Honolulu has issued a winter weather advisory for Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea until Tuesday morning. West Hawaii Today.

An out-of-season tropical cyclone has formed west of Hawaii. The Central Pacific Hurricane Center says Tropical Storm Omeka was located 505 miles south of Midway Atoll, or about 1,210 miles west of Lihue, Kauai. Hawaii News Now.

The bulk of the heaviest rain was Saturday night.KHON2.

As heavy rains fell on parts of the state on Sunday, Department of Health officials issued warnings about coastal waters. KITV4.

Heavy rains caused sewer lines to back up into people's homes in Kailua and a sewage spill in Hawaii Kai. KITV4.

A Brown Water Advisory was issued Sunday for Kaua‘i due to heavy showers. Garden Island.

Cargo company Young Brothers has announced they will be increasing their shipping rates statewide. Molokai Dispatch.

Washington Place, the historic home to Hawaii’s last queen and previous governors, has fallen into disrepair.KITV4.

Hawaii's new governor completes his Cabinet by selecting a trial lawyer with 33 years experience in litigation. Civil Beat.

David M. Louie, a trial lawyer and managing partner with the Honolulu law firm of Roeca Louie & Hiraoka, was nominated yesterday by Gov. Neil Abercrombie to be Hawaii's next attorney general. Star-Advertiser.

Gov. Neil Abercrombie on Sunday announced he has chosen David Louie to be his attorney general. KITV4.

Former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann has been named president of the Hawaii Hotel & Lodging Association. Associated Press.

Kamehameha Schools plans to convert a four-story office and retail building at 680 Ala Moana Blvd. into loft-style apartments for rent to households at or below the median income level. Star-Advertiser.

With the median sale price of a Big Island home down 5.8 percent from the same time a year ago, it's still a buyer's market -- and the buyers are starting to return. Tribune-Herald.

Across the country, a few of the millions of people who have had their homes foreclosed are counterattacking in the courts. Maui News.

Last week, we looked at some measures the new administration might want to consider to improve the business climate in Hawaii and reduce the burden on taxpayers and consumers who continue to struggle to make ends meet. But finances and taxes are not the only things that need fixing. West Hawaii Today.

For most of its 40-year history, Kumu Kahua Theatre has told Hawaii’s story through theater, offering talented local playwrights and actors a crucial venue for their craft, and giving the Hawaii community new perspectives on its island home. Many of its productions have become statewide touchstones, such as the hits Folks You Meet at Longs by Lee Cataluna and Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois Ann Yamanaka. Hawaii Independent.

HONOLULU—On Monday, Gov. Neil Abercrombie released $67 million from Hawaii’s Hurricane Relief Fund to restore 17 instructional days for the 2010-2011 school year; and $23.7 million from the Rainy Day Fund for community programs as appropriated by the State Legislature under Act 191. “Private nonprofit organizations are employers,” Abercrombie said in a statement. “Like all businesses, they are relying on government to follow through on its commitments. We need to get our economy moving and this is a first step.” Of the $23.7 million appropriated for community programs: Catholic Charities Hawaii will receive $350,000, Kapahulu Center will receive $300,000, Moiliili Community Center will receive $150,000, and Waikiki Community Center will receive $150,000. Because some of the allocated funds may have to go through the state procurement process, the Abercrombie said his administration will have to work across departments and in collaboration with community organizations to ensure that the funds are deployed as quickly as possible. The State Department of Budget and Finance coordinated the release of these funds. Abercrombie nominated Kalbert Young as the department’s director and Dean Hirata as deputy director. Hirata, 53, is the former Chief Financial Officer of Central Pacific Bank. Hirata, a Certified Public Accountant, has 30 years of experience in banking both in the public and private sectors. Hirata graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Programs supported by Act 191 include: * $1.5 million to Healthy Start program * $3 million for Kupuna Care program * $2 million for QUEST health care payments to restore adult dental care * $1.5 million for development disabilities Medicaid waiver program * $1.5 million for mental health services * $1.4 million for substance abuse treatment * $1 million for homeless service housing pilot program * $332,000 for Waianae District Comprehensive Health and Hospital * $800,000 for child care subsidies * $762,500 for domestic violence shelters * $600,000 for HMSA for Keiki Care * $550,000 for Hawaii immigrant health initiative program * $500,000 for meals for the elderly for Kupuna Care * $500,000 for Kokua Kalihi Valley Comprehensive Family Services * $300,000 for Families for R.E.A.L. program

The first days of April 1974 were perfect for thunderstorms. On April 1, a strong low-pressure system settled across the Upper Midwest. On one side of this low pressure dry, very cold air began to descend from the Canadian interior. At the same time, warm moist air surged up from the Gulf of Mexico. As a front built up across the country, the differences between one side and the other were extreme.  For the next two nights, thunderstorms appeared around sunset and people across the Midwest were kept awake by rocketing winds and lightning storms so constant that the pyrotechnic display turned into one continuous pulse of flashing light accompanied by pounding drums.

On April 3, the atmosphere exploded. In a line stretching from Michigan to Alabama, potent "supercell" thunderstorms formed as a strong upper level jet stream finally sent  the cold air crashing through the warm. In storm after storm, whirling mesocyclones developed high in the atmosphere and in storm after storm cold air along the front dragged downward on these vortexes, hurling them to the earth. Just after noon, a tornado was spotted on the ground in central Illinois. More tornadoes were born, sped through towns and farmlands of Illinois and Indiana, and faded to twisting ropes. Quickly the activity spread east and south, and as it did, the tornadoes grew more intense.

Tornadic storms are rated on a scale developed by Dr. Ted Fujita of the University of Chicago. The scale is intended to judge the intensity of the storm based on size and wind speed, but the measurement is almost never made directly. It's made by looking at the damage. There was plenty of damage on April 3, 1974.

Most tornadoes fall in classes F0 and F1.  These storms are still dangerous, with the power to topple light buildings, bring down tree limbs, and push cars into ditches.  About a fifth of all tornadoes are F2 storms, able to uproot large trees, smash windows, and send objects whirling through the air.  Moving upward along Dr. Fujita's scale, the frequency of storms drops quickly once you're past F2. Only about one tornado in twenty reaches F3 – which is a good thing, as these storms are able to level homes, lift cars from the ground, and twist even steel-framed skyscrapers.  One out of a hundred reaches F4, where even the best-built buildings are liable to be leveled, cars aren't just lifted but thrown through the air, and where bricks, boards, and trees become screaming missiles.  About one tornado in a thousand reaches F5. F5 storms can have wind speeds above 300 miles per hour. They can be a mile, even two miles, in width. In an F5 storm, even houses become missiles. F5 storms are erasers.

In a two hour period on the afternoon of April 3, 1974, at least six F5 storms were spawned across the Midwest.  Just before 5PM, one of these storms plowed through the city of Xenia, Ohio.  It struck a high school where students practicing for a play scattered in time to avoid a school bus that was dropped into the middle of the stage. The students survived. Residents of subdivisions along the city's west side were not as lucky. 34 people died as literally half the town was leveled in the space of minutes. When the Xenia storm had faded, there were five more F5 tornadoes on the way. By the afternoon of April 4, 163 confirmed tornadoes had spread out over 13 states and traced out a combined path of destruction over 2,500 miles long. More than 300 people were dead.

The "Super Outbreak" of 1974 is the worst day of tornadoes and thunderstorms on record in the United States, and the United States is the world capitol of tornadoes.  This is about as bad as it gets when it comes to weather over land.

Having watched in horror as Hurricane Katrina blasted through the City of New Orleans, you may think you've seen the worst that storms originating over water can do. In terms of pure dollars of damage, Katrina did $81 billion in direct damage and the total bill topped $100 billion. Much of this damage remains unrepaired. (In other words, it cost about as much as one year of the war in Iraq, and while it may be patriotic and freedom-loving to spend that money causing death and destruction elsewhere, it's traitorous socialism to spend an equal amount creating jobs, helping neighbors, and building homes in America...)  

The power of hurricanes (in the North Atlantic and NE Pacific) is measured on a scale named for engineer Herbert Safir and meteorologist Bob Simpson. Like the Fujita scale for tornadoes (and the Richter Scale for earthquakes) Safir-Simpson was originally based around the amount of damage that could be expected from a storm, though these days it's completely defined by wind speed.

On any scale, Katrina was a particularly erratic storm. One day before it struck Florida, Katrina was still an unnamed tropical depression with winds below 40 mph. It reached tropical storm status on that last day, and crossed the line into hurricane force winds only two hours before striking southern Florida on August 25, 2005. Though the National Hurricane Center had correctly predicted the storm's growth and shelters were opened, many people were taken off guard by the rapid change, which  helps explain why 14 people died in Florida as Katrina passed across the peninsula and entered the Gulf.  The Gulf waters were extremely warm that year, and the energy of those waters quickly returned the storm to hurricane status. At one point in its development, Katrina carried winds of 175 mph – a record that was broken later that same year by Hurricane Rita. At that speed, Katrina was a Category 5 storm.  Fortunately, by the time it reached landfall in Louisiana on the storm had weakened somewhat to a very strong category 3. It reached the coast with winds of 125 mph, pushing a storm surge of 12-16 feet. That surge would go on to break the levees of New Orleans in over 50 places.  In total, over 1800 people would die. Most of them drowned either as a direct result of the storm surge, in areas affected by the broken levees, or from flooding associated with the storm's heavy rains.  The nation looked on in horror.

What may be surprising is that Katrina is not the deadliest hurricane to rise out of the Atlantic. In fact, it's not even in the top ten.  Even if we restrict ourselves to hurricanes that did their damage in the United States, there are storms that caused more damage and took more lives.

In 1928, a storm formed in the Mid-Atlantic, several hundred miles east of the small archipelago of Guadeloupe, and began to move almost directly westward. By the time it reached the islands of the Eastern Caribbean, the storm was carrying winds in excess of 120 mph and pushing a wall of water a dozen feet high that surged over homes and drove ships inland. That would have been bad enough, but as it pressed on it ran into warm currents that gave it more strength and winds that slowed its forward motion. The hurricane slowed almost to a stop. And grew. It reached Puerto Rico on September 13 and by tradition became "Hurricane San Felipe" – named for the saint whose feast day matched the landfall. Saint or no, the winds of the storm were in excess of 160 mph – Category 5.  Creeping along, San Felipe battered the island with hurricane force winds for 18 straight hours, and slashed the island with a twelve foot storm surge and 25 inches of wind driven rain. Because the storm had approached so slowly, there had been time to give many warnings and to evacuate areas near the coast. Fatalities were "only" 312. Then the storm turned toward Florida. Again, the warning time meant that the coasts could be evacuated and causalities there were light. But there was another coast that was not as prepared – the shoreline of Lake Okeechobee. Inland residents had thought themselves safe from the storm, but the hurricane arrived almost perfectly aimed at the Lake and its many vacation homes and fishing lodges.  The storm surge carried across the low ground between ocean and lake, then across dikes, dams, and canals. Twenty feet of water carried homes into the lake and into surrounding forests and fields where they were smashed like kindling. The death toll ran upwards of 3,000 and for weeks afterwards floodwaters carried bodies into the Everglades.

And that still wasn't the worst.  There was no organized system for tracking hurricanes in 1900, but at the end of August ships traveling new the Windward Islands reported difficult weather.  By September 4, officials in Galveston, TX received notice from the weather bureau that a tropical storm was affecting Cuba. There was no way to know which way it would go from there, though the best guess was that it would turn up along the coast of Florida. It didn't. At dawn on September 8, 1900 skies in Galveston were clear, but those looking out at the water – which on that Saturday morning included many visitors to the area -- noticed particularly large swells rolling into the beach. A few hours later, clouds began to scud across the sky. Isaac Cline, the head meteorologist for the US Weather Bureau office in Galveston, had written an article some years earlier saying that the idea of a hurricane striking the city was "ridiculous." The article had been a big factor in halting plans to build a sea wall to protect the city. But on that morning, Cline had his doubts. Increasingly concerned by what he was seeing in the skies over the Gulf and by the heavy, rising chop of the waves, Cline bypassed official channels. At noon, he issued a hurricane warning without waiting for permission from Washington.  At 5pm hurricane force winds reached the city. Cline's office recorded speeds of 100mph, at which point the instruments were destroyed. It's likely that the storm which reached Galveston that Saturday afternoon was a Category 3 storm, with wind speeds matching those of Hurricane Katrina. As darkness fell, the eye of the storm passed over the city and wind direction changed. With that change in winds came a 15' storm surge. The highest point in Galveston was 9'. In the next hour, somewhere around 8,000 people (and possibly as many as 12,000) drowned as the island temporarily vanished beneath the wild sea.

These are all interesting, if terrifying events, but what good does it do us to review and morn these catastrophes? Maybe it would help to review another storm.

In 1915, another hurricane struck Galveston dead on. As with the 1900 storm, this one was a category 3. In fact, the winds of this storm were higher -- 135 mph -- and it also carried with it a storm surge of 12-15 ft.

In May of 2004, another great outbreak of tornadoes occurred. 389 twisters hit over an 11-day period as a series of fronts clashed over the Plains and Midwest. Over the Memorial Day weekend, violent tornadoes cut across Missouri, Illinois, Nebraska, and Iowa, including one tornado that was 2.5 miles wide, the largest known.

Why bring these up?

Because of what happened between 1900 and 1915, and what happened between 1974 and 2004. After the almost incomprehensible disaster of 1900, the City of Galveston finally built that sea wall. They also dredged sand from the harbor and raised the elevation of the island by several feet. In addition, the weather service was much more vigilant after 1900. More stations were set up to track storms, and warnings were given earlier and across a wider area. All of these help to shape the reason why the first Galveston hurricane is remembered as a monster and this second storm is all but forgotten. When the second storm struck, the death toll in Galveston wasn't 12,000 or 8000. It was 11.

In the 2004 tornado outbreak, a total of 7 people died. There were twice as many tornadoes as the 1974 event (though fewer F5s) and the property damage was several times greater. Why were the human causalities so much less than in 1974? There were much less knowledge about how tornadoes form and no Doppler radar to spot their incipient appearance. The tornadoes that hit town after town in 1974 might as well have appeared by magic. In most towns (including Xenia) there was no early warning, no system of sirens, no plan for how to respond. On the other hand, when an F5 tornado obliterated the town of Greensburg, KS in 2007 the tornado was literally wider than the town. It didn't take out half the buildings, it took them all. 12 people died, but the number could have been in the hundreds if it hadn't been for a warning system that gave most people in the town a critical 20 minutes to find shelter.

Not every disaster is avoidable. We may never be able to stop a tornado in its tracks or alter the course of a hurricane. But the expenditures we make to research causes, provide warnings, and plan responses are far from wasted. Yes, there are some classes of disaster that may be so enormous, or so unlikely, that addressing them is pointless. No one should put any funds behind a "Stop the Sun from Expanding" committee. But there are a great swath of events in the middle ground where planning and consideration may greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the consequences. Next week I hope to look at some of the possible challenges we may face (from nature this time, not at our own hands) to see which of them might be worth an investment of time and materials.

Oh, and one last quick note. The population of Galveston when the great hurricane swept through in 1900 was around 42,000 -- less than 1/10th that of the City of New Orleans itself (not to mention surrounding communities) in 2005. Over 1800 people died in Katrina (including some who perished in the post-storm chaos), but tragic as that number is it's much smaller than what might have happened if a well-informed National Hurricane Center had not contacted an alert mayor who responded quickly to get most of the city's populace on the road. If New Orleans had suffered losses proportional to those in Galveston, the count could have been in six figures (and if you think that can't happen, look at up the results when Hurricane Mitch dropped 75" of rain on Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in 1998, or the toll from the 1970 Bhola cyclone).

In September of 1992, Hurricane Iniki struck the Hawaiian island of Kauai. According to the Central Pacific Hurricane Center, Iniki was the costliest and most powerful hurricane to hit the state of Hawaii in recorded history. Like hurricanes Alicia, Andrew, Elena, Gloria and Isabel, Iniki ended up inspiring a few baby names. Unlike those other [...]

Paris In Miami? Maybe In 2012 from AVwebFlash Current Issue
With a growing aerospace industry and a location that provides access to the Latin American market, an economic development group in Florida hopes to bring a major commercial air show similar to the one in Paris to Miami every other year. Airbus has moved its Latin America and Caribbean sales team from France to Miami, and trains about 2,000 crew members at a center there each year. The Miami show could attract small and medium-size companies that can't get to Paris, and would also be attractive to the U.S. military, said Frank Nero, CEO of The Beacon Council, an economic development group working for Dade County. The show could launch as soon as 2012, though "there are still many hurdles," Nero told the Miami Herald.

Your 2010 AirFest photos - Rockford Register Star
Two Thunderbirds perform aerial stunts at Rockford AirFest, which took place over the weekend at the Chicago Rockford International Airport in Rockford. ...

Great Texas Balloon Race 2010 - Longview - 07/30/10 from FenceCheck Forums

Biggin Hill Air Fair future uncertain from key.Aero
Air Displays International has issued a statement on the termination of its licence.

2010 Gold Unlimited Race Prospects and more.... from www.aafo.com

DAY 8: COMPETITION HEATS UP. from US Army Golden Knights 
“You must prepare yourself for success, picture yourself succeeding and never think of any other outcome.” - Anthony Morrison Breakfast:  Part 8– See Day 1. Beef Stroganoff with dates, potatoes and gravy. With a solid first day behind us, we head into today knowing our performance will set the conditions for success. “Dobry Vecher.” SSG [...]

Uncontrolled Airspace #201 "Waiting for C-5"
It's closing day of AirVenture Oshkosh 2010 and the gang have gathered high atop the EAARadio building on the Fly-in's flightline. We review the week, and keep an eye on all the departures on Runway 18. All this and more on Uncontrolled Airspace #201 "Waiting for C-5"

A Bright Finish For "Sploshkosh" 2010 from AVwebFlash Current Issue
The challenging wet weather in Oshkosh leading up to opening weekend was surely a factor in keeping this year's attendance figures about 7 percent lower than last year, but EAA President Tom Poberezny says the drop was expected after last year's "blockbuster" event. But he added that the second half of the week was "outstanding." The weather turned clear and comfortable, and the Saturday night airshow was a hit -- it will be back next year, Poberezny said. Also, commercial exhibits were up to 777 this year, compared to 750 in 2009. If you missed any part of this year's show, check AVweb's media round-up for all the news, video and podcasts from EAA AirVenture. And if you're thinking about getting there for next year, EAA has some spectacular plans already in the works. ...

Oshkosh View from Aviation Blogs 
For those that have never been to Oshkosh for the EAA's AirVenture, it's hard to describe how many airplanes are there. This video will give you a good idea....

Southwest Airlines spends the day at EAA AirVenture 2010 from Aero Pacific Flightlines 
Southwest Airlines 737-7H4 (36662/3296) N948WN rotates from Rwy 18 at Oshkosh (OSH/KOSH) after spreading the "LUV" to all the aviation enthusiasts at the annual EAA event. **Note the special "Free Bags Fly Here" markings just fwd of the wing.

Air Force officials take remotely piloted aircraft safety message to EAA Airventure 
from Air Force Link Top Stories 
Members of the Air Force Safety Center attended the Experimental Aircraft Association's Airventure 2010 in an effort to increase awareness among the general aviation community about the service's RPA efforts.
According to Safety Center officials, the event, which ran July 26 through Aug. 1, is the one of world's largest general aviation fly-ins and air shows with more than 500,000 pilots and aviation enthusiasts attending each year. ...

San Diego Air and Space Museum has downloaded over 90,000 aviation photos from their collection from The Kathryn Report 
Photo galleries loaded with images for the aviation enthusiast:
http://www.sandiegoairandspace.org/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/archives/

RC Aircraft Air Show coming to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force from National Museum of the USAF Top Stories 
Giant-scale models of jets, warbirds and helicopters will land on the runway behind the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force from Sept. 3-5.
The 15th Annual Giant Scale Radio-Controlled Model Aircraft Air Show is scheduled during Labor Day weekend and features aircraft from all eras of aviation history. Nearly 200 pilots will entertain audiences as they perform skillful and daring aerobatic maneuvers with RC (radio-controlled) aircraft. ...

August 3 from Cut and Paste Aviation

This is only a test: Civil Air Patrol uses hurricane to hone readiness - Bangor Daily News
BANGOR, Maine — The scene: A huge hurricane that has been churning for days in the Atlantic Ocean is bearing down on the Northeast. Its heavy rains and high winds already are wreaking havoc, raising rivers and streams in central Maine, threatening to wash out roads and bridges. Perhaps as a result of the storm, the signal from an airplane’s black box is beeping near Pittsfield, but no one has reported seeing a crash. ...

NORAD Plans Exercise With Russian Air Force from Milcom Monitoring Post 
PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. - The Russian air force and the North American Aerospace Defense Command will conduct their first cooperative air defense exercise, NORAD officials announced.
Russia's Federal Air Navigational Service and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration also will be involved in the exercise, officials said, along with the military air operations centers at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, and Khabarovsk, Russia.  ...

Forest fires destroy 200 Russian navy aircraft – RT
As many as 200 aircraft stationed at a Russian Navy base near Moscow have been damaged by fire amidst the continuing heat wave, a news site reports. ...

NASA Delays Deciding Where Retired Space Shuttles Will Be Displayed from SPACE.com
NASA has delayed making a decision on where its space shuttle fleet will be displayed once the shuttles complete their final missions.

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Prices rise as New Zealand passes emissions trading scheme

The government has pressed ahead with plans to slash the nation's carbon output, despite widespread opposition and New Zealand's larger neighbour Australia shelving its own scheme.

Motorists were hit by a 3c (1.4p) rise in the price of a litre of petrol overnight, while householders face a 5 per cent increase in gas and electricity prices.

Oil Falls a Fourth Day After Unexpected Increase in U.S. Gasoline Supplies

Crude oil fell for a fourth day in New York, the longest losing streak in seven weeks, amid concern the economic recovery in the U.S. and China will slow and curb demand in the world’s two largest energy consumers.

Oil slumped to its lowest in two weeks as Hurricane Alex weakened to a Category 1 storm on its path over northeastern Mexico and forecasters said it could be further downgraded to a tropical storm by tomorrow. China’s manufacturing expanded at a reduced pace for a second month in June, adding to signs the fastest-growing major economy is cooling.

Hurricane Alex Strikes Mexico, Heads Inland

Hurricane Alex was downgraded to a tropical storm after it came ashore over northeastern Mexico from the Gulf of Mexico where it had shut down a quarter of oil production.

The earliest Atlantic hurricane since 1995 was packing maximum sustained winds of 70 miles (110 kilometers) per hour about 55 miles west of Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in advisory posted on its website just before 7 a.m. Central Time. The storm, earlier a Category 2 system blowing at 100 mph, was heading west at 12 mph and will continue to move inland today, the center said.

China expands natural gas network

China plans to expand natural gas storage facilities to all provinces except Tibet in the next few years to meet the surging demand, said Chi Guojing, Secretary General of China Gas Association.

CNPC, China's largest gas producer, and city gas distributors have prepared to establish storage facilities, according to Chi.

JX Nippon plans new LNG terminal

Japanese refiner JX Nippon Oil & Energy is planning to build a liquefied natural gas receiving terminal in Kushiro, northern Japan, to tap projected growth in demand, especially from the industrial sector.

Pak hints India 'pulled out' of IPI due to US pressure

Three months after signing a $ 7.6 billion pact for a gas pipeline with Iran bilaterally, Pakistan has hinted that India had "pulled out" of the trilateral project under US pressure and said it could still join.

Belarus raises oil products transit tariff for Russia

MINSK (Itar-Tass) - The pumping of Russian oil products through oil mainlines located in the territory of Belarus from now on will cost higher by about 12.7 percent. The republic on Thursday introduces a higher tariff for the services of oil products’ transportation. The country’s Economics Ministry adopted a resolution on raising the tariffs on April 29.

Investors Are Wary of Petrobras Sale

Petrobras, the Brazilian energy giant, has taken a beating of late. But don’t blame BP for it all.

While Petrobras is heavily into the deep-water business, its technical prowess at ferreting out hydrocarbons trapped in the ocean is world class. What is questionable is the firm’s ability to withstand the Brazilian government’s designs to make it an instrument of social policy, as highlighted by its huge coming stock sale and spending program.

India auction of oil, gas blocks fetches $1.1 billion

NEW DELHI (AFP) – Companies have committed 1.1 billion dollars to explore for oil and gas in India's latest energy auction round, a statement said Wednesday, but the sum was shy of government hopes.

However, the government said it expects a much more enthusiastic response in its next auction thanks to a decision last week to allow petrol prices to be set by the market rather than the state.

Cambodia to pump oil in 2012

PHNOM PENH - CAMBODIA said on Thursday it will begin pumping oil for the first time in December 2012 as it looks to tap the potential of its offshore reserves.

Interior Delays Offshore Expansion Hearings

WASHINGTON — The Interior Department, preoccupied with its response to the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, said Wednesday that it was pushing back the date of public hearings on the administration’s plan, announced before the disaster began, to expand offshore drilling.

BP Oil Spill To Become Largest Ever In Gulf

BP's massive oil spill will become the largest ever in the Gulf of Mexico by Thursday based on the highest of the federal government's estimates, an ominous record that underscores the oil giant's dire need to halt the gusher.

The oil that's spewed for two and a half months from a blown-out well a mile under the sea is expected to surpass the 140 million gallon mark, eclipsing the record-setting Ixtoc I spill off Mexico's coast from 1979 to 1980. Even by the lower end of the government's estimates, at least 71.2 million gallons are in the Gulf.

Despite Gulf Leak, World Still Wants Deepwater Oil

With crude still hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico, deep-water drilling might seem taboo just now. In fact, extreme oil will likely be the new normal. Despite the gulf tragedy, the quest for oil and gas in the most difficult places on the planet is just getting underway. Prospecting proceeds apace in the ultra-deepwater reserves off the coasts of Ghana and Nigeria, the sulfur-laden depths of the Black Sea, and the tar sands of Venezuela’s Orinoco Basin. Brazil’s Petrobras, which already controls a quarter of global deepwater operations, is just starting to plumb its 9 to 15 billion barrels of proven reserves buried some four miles below the Atlantic.

Oily rain and cracks in the earth: Busting Gulf oil spill myths

As the prospect of an active hurricane season adds a new dimension to the on-going BP Gulf oil spill disaster, on-line media is awash with rumors of impending worst-case scenarios for the region. Viral Internet myths range from a collapsing seabed to oily rain to contaminated seafood.

Here are a few oil spill myths and misconceptions, addressed by scientists, experts, and official sources:

Sites to stop Gulf oil leak near completion

One of two relief wells being drilled to stop the Gulf oil spill is within about three football fields of intersecting the original, leaking pipe, and 15 feet off to the side, a BP spokesman said Wednesday. But it's still not expected to be finished before August: The process becomes more delicate the closer the drill gets.

Allen retires from Coast Guard, remains on oil spill

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen retired on Wednesday from his military position but will remain incident commander overseeing the government's response to the BP Plc oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Manager of BP oil fund says not all claimants will be paid

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The prominent US lawyer managing BP's 20-billion-dollar oil disaster fund said Wednesday not all claimants will be paid, especially some of those seeking compensation for falling houses prices.

Louisiana Governor Seals Oil-Spill Records

Elected officials in Louisiana and members of the public seeking details on how Gov. Bobby Jindal and his administration fared in their own response to the disaster are out of luck: late last week, the governor vetoed an amendment to a state bill that would have made public all records from his office related to the oil spill.

BP enlists Washington elite to help image

WASHINGTON — James Lee Witt, the former FEMA director who built his reputation responding to disasters, is poised to become the latest big name on a team of Washington insiders that BP has amassed to help it respond to the Gulf Coast oil spill, rescue its reputation and protect itself from lawsuits.

The list, which includes several prominent Democrats now working on behalf of a company responsible for the worst environmental disaster in the nation's history, is causing some unease — even in a city where power and influence are wielded and traded with ease.

Methane's hidden impact in Gulf oil spill

Large quantities of methane released by BP's oil blowout aren't fouling beaches like the Gulf oil spill is, but could endanger a key link in the undersea food chain.

BP Kills Turtles in Oil Containment Burns, Lawsuit Says

Endangered sea turtles are being killed in BP Plc’s “controlled burns” in the Gulf of Mexico by getting trapped inside the booms the company uses to collect spilled oil, wildlife activists said in a lawsuit.

London-based BP, which is struggling to control the largest spill in U.S. history, should be forced to stop the burns or ensure no turtles are caught inside the floating “corrals” before the oil is ignited, the environmentalists said in the suit. BP’s killing of the turtles constitutes an illegal “taking” of an endangered species under environmental laws, they claim.

Some 70,000 turtle eggs to be whisked far from oil

PENSACOLA BEACH, Florida (AP) — An effort to save thousands of sea turtle hatchlings from dying in the oily Gulf of Mexico will begin in the coming weeks in a desperate attempt to keep an entire generation of threatened species from vanishing.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will coordinate the plan, which calls for collecting about 70,000 turtle eggs in up to 800 nests buried in the sand across Florida Panhandle and Alabama beaches.

The E.P.A. on Dispersants: Cure Is Not Worse Than the Disease

Initial tests of Corexit, the oil dispersant that BP is using in the Gulf of Mexico, and of competing products finds that the dispersants range from “practically nontoxic’’ to “slightly toxic,’’ the Environmental Protection Agency says.

Afghanistan war toll hits high mark

WASHINGTON — Coalition forces killed in Afghanistan topped 100 in June, the war's highest monthly toll and approaching some of the deadliest months in the Iraq war.

The deaths of 102 servicemembers included a record 59 Americans. Nine of the 46 nations in the U.S.-led coalition suffered fatalities, the most countries to lose troops since the conflict began nearly nine years ago.

The real Gulf BP oil crisis could be peak oil production

The real Gulf of Mexico and BP oil crsis could be peak oil production which maybe starting to rear it’s head at BP’s Thunder Horse oil platform that was supposed to extract a billion barrels of oil at a rate of 250,000 barrels a day.

Oil production at the Gulf’s Thunder Horse began in May 2008 and by the end of 2008 had reached 170,000 barrels per day. Then something unexpected happened, instead of oil production increasing to the rated 250,000 barrels daily, oil production began to drop at 2 to 3 percent each month so by the end of 2009 production was down to 60 or 70,000 barrels per day.

As BP is under no obligation to tell us what is going on at the Thunder Horse oil well, little news other than mandatory federal production reports have been released.

Loan Giants Threaten Energy-Efficiency Programs

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may not accept home loans if consumers take advantage of energy-efficiency programs.

Petrolheads steer for green track

I don't want to get carried away here, but what you have with the F1 brains trust is a kind of mini-Manhattan Project for auto engines. Set a demanding goal, provide a major pot of money and point enough brainy people in the right direction, and you stand a good chance of making it work - that's the theory, anyway.

It might seem a less purist approach to cutting carbon emissions than signing a global treaty on the subject, but that doesn't mean it won't bring in real savings - and even if you're not in the anthropogenic climate change camp, you might still appreciate the idea for the delay it will would bring to the onset of peak oil.

Blimps could replace aircraft in freight transport, say scientists

Fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers and other foreign luxuries could be part of a global revolution by carrying cargo around the world in airships instead of planes, one of the UK's leading scientists has predicted.

The government's former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, told a conference that massive helium balloons – or blimps – would replace aircraft as a key part of the global trade network as a way of cutting global warming emissions.

Reducing the US carbon footprint, toe by toe

The best hope for a climate-change bill this year is one that would mandate use of alternative energy sources for electric utilities. Many states are already doing this, and Congress should follow – especially when it can't lead on global warming.

Delaware environment: Rising sea levels threaten coast

At the height of a nor'easter last November, waves broke through the dunes at Indian River Inlet and flooded Del. 1.

Further inland, at Oak Orchard and Riverdale, flooding was significant.

And to the north, along Delaware Bay, the rushing water ripped across the sand, inundating the nearby marshes in many areas.

But here is the worst of it: "That is going to become the new normal," said Collin O'Mara, state secretary of natural resources and environmental control.

Indonesia's last glacier will melt within years

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Lonnie Thompson spent years preparing for his expedition to the remote, mist-shrouded mountains of eastern Indonesia, hoping to chronicle the affect of global warming on the last remaining glacier in the Pacific. He's worried he got there too late.

Even as he pitched his tent on top of Puncak Jaya, the ice was melting beneath him.

JUAN CARLOS LLORCA, Associated Press Writer

GUATEMALA CITY - Torrential rains brought by the first tropical storm of the 2010 season pounded Central America and southern Mexico, triggering deadly landslides. The death toll stood at 15 Sunday but authorities said the number could rise.

Tropical Storm Agatha made landfall near the border of Guatemala and Mexico on Saturday with wind speeds of up to 45 mph (75 kph), then weakened into a tropical depression before dissipating over the mountains of western Guatemala.

Although no longer even a tropical depression, Agatha still posed trouble for the region: Remnants of the storm were expected to deliver 10 to 20 inches (25 to 50 centimeters) of rain over southeastern Mexico, Guatemala and parts of El Salvador, creating the possibility of "life-threatening flash floods and mudslides," the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said in an advisory Sunday.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said Saturday night that the rivers in the country's south were flooding or close to it.

Colom said 4.3 inches (10.8 centimeters) of rain had fallen in Guatemala City's valley in 12 hours, the most since 1949.

As of Saturday night, 4,300 people were in shelters and authorities said the number could rise as figures come in from around the country.

Earlier Saturday, Agatha's rains caused a landslide on a hillside settlement in Guatemala City that killed four people and left 11 missing, Guatemalan disaster relief spokesman David de Leon said. Most of the city was without electricity at nightfall, complicating search efforts.

Four children were killed by another mudslide in the town of Santa Catarina Pinula, about six miles (10 kilometers) outside the capital. And in the department of Quetzaltenango, 125 miles (200 kilometers) west of Guatemala City, a boulder loosened by rains crushed a house, killing two children and two adults, de Leon said.

Calls to local radio stations told of many more landslides and possible deaths, but those reports could not be immediately confirmed.

A three-story building in northern Guatemala City fell into a sinkhole but there were no reports of victims.

Cesar George of Guatemala's meteorological institute said the community of Champerico had received 11.8 inches (30 centimeters) of rain in 30 hours.

"It rained in one day what it usually gets in a month," George said.

Colom said authorities have not been able to reach Champerico by "air, land or sea."

In El Salvador, President Mauricio Funes declared a "red alert," the highest level of emergency, after rains delivered by Agatha triggered at least 140 landslides throughout the country and killed two adults and a 10-year-old child. The exact cause of their deaths was unclear.

Civil defense officials said the Acelhuate River that passes through the capital, San Salvador, had risen to dangerous levels and was threatening to overflow into city streets.

Agatha formed as a tropical storm early Saturday in the East Pacific.

Before the rains, Guatemala already was contending with heavy eruptions from its Pacaya volcano that blanketed the capital in ash and destroyed 800 homes.

The volcano, which is just south of the capital, started spewing lava and rocks Thursday afternoon, forcing the closure of Guatemala City's international airport. A TV reporter was killed by a shower of burning rocks.

A below-normal hurricane forecast for the June 1-Nov. 30 season doesn't mean Hawaii won't have some damaging weather, warns the Central Pacific Hurricane Center director.

A below-normal hurricane forecast for the June 1-Nov. 30 season doesn't mean Hawaii won't have some damaging weather, warns the Central Pacific Hurricane Center director.

MEDIA RELEASE NOAA’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center has announced projected climate conditions point to a below normal hurricane season in the Central Pacific basin this year. The outlook was issued at a news conference called to urge Hawaii residents to be fully prepared for the onset of the hurricane season, which begins June 1. “It is important [...]

- visit Hawaii 24/7 to read the full story -

ON THE 3RD OF JULY 1814, a gang of scrappy Devonshire fishermen and crabbers working the Duncannon Pool of the Dart River in southwestern England fell upon a huge and disoriented sea creature that had made its way too far up the tidal reach and too close to the village of Stoke Gabriel. After four hours of bludgeoning it with boathooks in the muddy shallows (aided by a pair of furious terriers), they heard the twelve-foot fish emit a plaintive, expiring wail, “like the bellowing of a bull.” And that was that.

Or that would have been that, except word of the catch reached the ears of Colonel George Montagu, who lived in patrician seclusion on his estate some ten miles down the road. Montagu, veteran of the American Revolution (and at the time the world’s leading expert on the taxonomy of British sponges), was a corresponding member of several societies for natural history, and he set out to recover what was left of the carcass, which had been briefly exhibited at the county fair before being boiled down for oil—the bones unceremoniously dumped back in the river. A little diligent muckraking revealed the skeleton of what Montagu eventually decided was a little whale not previously seen on the English coast, so he wrote up a detailed anatomy and preserved its toothy skull.

Though Montagu stepped on a rusty nail a few months later and promptly died of tetanus, his final dissection outlived him: published posthumously, his account represents the first recognized scientific description of the bottlenose dolphin, a creature Americans generally think of as “Flipper,” but which those in the know call Tursiops truncatus. The skull of the Dart River Beast remains to this day in a drawer in London’s Natural History Museum—the eternal type specimen for the species as a whole. If, therefore, you wish to grasp the essential nature of the bottlenose, you should, technically speaking, start here, pulling item number GERM.353a, and looking down that bony beak into a pair of empty orbits. Alas, poor Yorick!

Actually, though, knowing the bottlenose is a good deal harder than that. Neither Colonel Montagu nor those rough-handed boatmen could have had any idea that the creature they dispatched to scientific apotheosis in 1814 would go on to lead such a queer and dramatic life in the collective imagination of modernity. Tursiops truncatus—a slate-gray, slick-skinned net thief, which coastal fishermen of the late nineteenth-century Atlantic sometimes called the “herring hog” in disgust—would, by the 1970s, leap in the vanguard of the Age of Aquarius, enjoying an improbable secular canonization as the superintelligent, ultrapeaceful, erotically uninhibited totem of the counterculture. And to this day, for many, the bottlenose—mainstay of aquatic ecotourism, beloved water-park performer, smiling incarnation of soulful holism—represents a cetacean version of our better selves. If, as Thoreau wrote a few years after the slaying of the Dart River dolphin, “animals . . . are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry a portion of our thoughts,” then there are few creatures that have done more hauling for Homo sapiens in the twentieth century than Tursiops truncatus.

How? Why? Answering these questions demands a turn through the strange history of postwar American science and culture, and the unbraiding of a set of unlikely historical threads: Cold War brain science, military bioacoustics, Hollywood mythopoesis, and early LSD experimentation. Recovering our strange and changing preoccupations with the bottlenose dolphin across the twentieth century is, in the end, an adult swim. 

BUT LET’S START WITH the children. San Diego is as good a place as any to watch Tursiops grin and splash their way through our feel-good fantasy life. With this in mind, I pull into the oceanic parking lot of SeaWorld on a bright Saturday morning in August and make my way through the sprawling gates. By trade, I’m a left-leaning intellectual historian, so I know I am supposed to dislike this sort of establishment—rife with callow consumerism, sentimental vulgarity, and bad food. But the truth is, SeaWorld is pretty nice: sculpted paths edged by well-tended plantings of sea lavender and greasewood; shady groves hedged in blooming rosemary. And though the park is filled with weekending families, it doesn’t feel crowded; people (of all shapes, colors, sizes) are courteous, maneuvering their strollers into designated areas and waiting here and there in unrancorous concession lines.

I steer toward the “Rocky Point Preserve” to have a “Dolphin Encounter.” Admittedly, the Rocky Point Preserve is none of these things. For starters, there aren’t any real rocks, but rather an ersatz topography of sculpted cement surrounding a swimming-pool-blue in-ground enclosure. And the notion of a “preserve” must be extended considerably beyond customary usage to be applicable here, where a dozen nonendangered Tursiops line up to be fondled in exchange for vanishingly small smelt. One does fret for a moment about a culture that accepts such a perfect inversion of meanings in the name of infotainment: dolphin preserve? They probably sell jars of it in the gift shop.

But surely only a wild-eyed animal libertarian could grouse about the cerulean interspecies paideia unfolding before me. The tank looks clean enough, and the tykes are comely and unblemished. Moreover, as a cheerful woman on a headset microphone explains to the crowd, the dolphins have the option to wait out the “encounter period” in a small inaccessible side pool—a sort of cetacean greenroom. This fact draws a misty aura of mutuality over the moment (though, like much mutuality, there are the inevitable hidden constraints: this is how these creatures get their rations, so understandably few opt for inordinate displays of privacy when smelt, however diminutive, are on offer). I take my paper tray of little fish and join the line.

Opportunities to interact with Tursiops truncatus drive a healthy minor industry in the U.S. and abroad. Touch-and-feed attractions like this one are ubiquitous at water-themed amusement parks around the world, and programs in Mexico, the British Virgin Islands, and elsewhere cater to tourists seeking fully immersed contact with these animals. The most elaborate of such enterprises feature “dolphin assisted therapy,” which offers patient-customers the opportunity for extended aquatic intimacies that promoters insist can work wonders with autistic children, the withdrawn, those suffering from chronic pain—a whole roster of ailments like those that once drove pilgrims to the baths at Lourdes.

SeaWorld itself offers occasions for such miracles. One of the park’s employees tells me the story of an old man in a local nursing home who had been mute and vegetative before a community service agency brought him into the park’s Dolphin Interaction program, whereupon, after several sessions, he reportedly regained his vitality, his will to live, and finally even his speech. Anecdotes like this concerning the salvific powers of Tursiops abound in the subculture of committed dolphin lovers, many of whom believe that the animals use their sonar (bottlenose dolphins possess powerful abilities to echolocate underwater, scanning their environment by means of sound) to reach inside the human body for diagnostic or palliative purposes—and perhaps also, at times, to reach inside the human mind. As one dolphin handler put it to me, looking up from a pen of captive Tursiops, “Plenty of folks out there think these creatures are closer to God.”

Though it is by no means obvious, upon reflection, why one would accord Tursiops this privilege. Despite the widespread sense of the benevolence of these beasts, there are reported instances of wild and captive Tursiops injuring and even killing swimmers. Males are, episodically, libidinous in the extreme, and in some of these cases it has been alleged that the aggressive animals had mating in mind. As for their vaunted intelligence, it’s an iffy thing: for instance, they have not proven especially savvy about escaping from fishing nets at sea; and though they can jump almost twenty feet in the air, they very rarely sort out how easy it would be to roll over the top of an encircling trap. When I explained to the chief veterinarian at SeaWorld that I had come to spend some time with the Tursiops, he tried to be encouraging, but it was clear they were not his favorite animals; the “bad boys of the cetacean fraternity” he called them, and mentioned that the aquarium staff at Epcot had tried to put Tursiops in their large sea tank but found that the males were so aggressive in their efforts to “breed” the sharks (family-park euphemism there) that it was a matter of life and death—for the sharks, which ultimately had to be quarantined. Inclined now and again to rake, butt, and sodomize each other, these powerful sea mammals with fixed grins have presented challenges to their keepers from the earliest days of captivity: one male in a Florida facility in the late 1940s used to spend a good deal of time hanging poolside, its lengthy member inserted into the filtration hose, through which ran a firm current of fresh seawater.

“What do they feel like?” asks the blond woman in a purple and black wet suit who wears the Madonna mike. “A hot dog!” chirps a small girl in a pink dress. And it’s true, I think, brushing the top of a gaping snout as I dangle my limp fry over the deep, pink throat guarded by a snapping jaw of needle-teeth—they do feel very much like a hot dog.

FOR A BRACINGLY CONTRASTIVE glimpse of the bottlenose, one need only take a short drive south from the pink and green-blue towers of SeaWorld, climbing over the ridge of Point Loma on Nimitz Boulevard. A quick right turn, and Rosecrans Street peters out into a warren of armed gatehouses and federal installations. Welcome to the Bayside Campus of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR), home to about seventy-five Tursiops truncatus, the majority of which are so-called “fleet animals” trained to perform military functions. Some of them deploy with the Navy’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Units (primarily in swimmer interdiction programs—i.e., the dolphins serve as underwater watchdogs), and others work with Navy Special Clearance Team One (primarily in mine detection operations—i.e., the dolphins assist in identifying and locating underwater explosives, using their natural capacities for echolocation).

Cleared through the checkpoint and clipped with a small red security tag, I make my way down to the water’s edge in the company of a minder from the Navy’s Public Affairs Office. Now and again the billowing thunder from a fighter jet—already long gone over the Pacific—momentarily forestalls communication and redlines the input indicator on my Dictaphone.

With the permission of my host, I step out onto the floating piers, where a dozen or so civilian employees pad around in flip-flops, wearing sun visors and carrying large, cylindrical, fish-filled Igloo coolers emblazoned in garish magic marker with names: Niño, Mu, Old Ben, Shasta, Belle. Here and there out of the honeycomb of docks a large bottlenose suddenly squirts from the water in a suspended vault, before splashing back into its pen, having seized a mackerel from a dockside handler. A few divers emerge from a shed, carrying their tanks and flippers; and three small center-console runabouts, battleship gray, nose in and out around the lattice of nested holding pens, license-plate-sized American flags flapping from long radio antennae.

My guide rehearses the official history and nonclassified operational specifics of the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program: Dating back to the early 1960s and emerging out of research into hydrodynamics (it was briefly thought that the study of dolphin swimming might lead to improvements in torpedo design), the Navy’s work with captive Tursiops eventually gave rise to a then-secret plan to deploy trained dolphins in Vietnam, as part of an effort to capture and/or kill Viet Cong sappers raiding the ammunition depots of Cam Ranh Bay. Though the deployment did not last for very long, Navy records accounted the program a success, and military divers continued to expand the scope of their tactical work with free-swimming trained bottlenose.

Some of the animals before me now are ready to go, should the call come. Bayside personnel pride themselves on their ability to get their Tursiops (which leap up out of the water into carrying slings on command) aboard the cargo planes—accompanied by their retinue of veterinary technicians and trainers, mobile tanks and filtration systems—in a matter of hours. Deployment specifics are classified, but mine-sweeping dolphins (often outfitted, cyborglike, with undersea cameras and other equipment) were used at the start of the most recent Iraq war, and there is every reason to think that some of the animals having their lunch right here have done a tour in the Persian Gulf. Indeed, with life spans of over forty years, it is quite possible that some of them have smelled the Mekong Delta—rumor has it that Toad, one of the beloved animals from the Cam Ranh Bay mission, is still alive, but no one will tell me where she is.

My guide, who has fielded queries from many Vietnam-obsessed conspiracy theorists over the years (Did the dolphins ever actually kill anybody? No no, they were only trained to “mark” intruders . . . ), would rather talk about the future. The latest plan is to use Navy Tursiops to ratchet up port security in the war on terror: trained bottlenose already assist in perimeter monitoring in the open water around moored military vessels at a base in King’s Bay, Georgia, and a similar arrangement is slated for deployment later this year at a Navy shipyard in Washington State, not far from Seattle. Not surprisingly, a number of animal protection groups oppose these projects, and dolphin-loving radicals from such organizations have attacked Navy marine mammal facilities on several occasions over the years, in efforts to liberate animals or damage equipment.

I descend the gangplank to the pools, and stand just a few feet from one of the animals, which rolls to its side to eye me, showing the lightest pink edging of a white belly. The gaze is steady, attentive; the body motionless. This is Belle, a military dolphin.

Wouldn’t the little girl in the pink dress on the other side of Point Loma be surprised to meet Belle? After all, she just might be a trained killer.

CONCEPTUALLY SPEAKING, San Diego’s geographically adjacent dolphin-worlds would seem to be a million miles apart. What is truly strange, then, is to discover that they are, genealogically speaking, kissing cousins.

The roots of this family tree lie buried in a set of forty-one boxes in the basement of the Stanford University Archives. These weathered files, acquired at a considerable price (rumored to touch the hem of seven figures), represent the personal and laboratory papers of the most important dolphin scientist of the twentieth century, the controversial neurophysiologist John Cunningham Lilly—the man who was, in effect, the spiritual grandfather of both the new age dolphin and its military alter ego. Lilly died in 2001, and though he is now widely reviled by those who study Tursiops truncatus professionally (working scientists have for some time tended to dismiss him as a lunatic or a charlatan), there is, in fact, no one who played a larger role in shaping modern ideas about dolphins. To the extent that Tursiops has been a hard-working Thoreauvian “beast of burden” for much of the last half century, it was John C. Lilly who put the smiling creature in harness.

So who was Lilly? His early biography offers little hint of what would be his enduring obsession with the bottlenose. Taking a degree in physics from Caltech in 1938, Lilly headed off to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, joining the war effort as a researcher in avionics. An early photo shows him as a rakish young scientist, smoking a corncob pipe while tinkering with a device designed to monitor the blood pressure of American flyboys—a number of whom, in those days, were actually using surfacing cetaceans for strafing practice.

After the war, motivated in large part by contact with the pioneering brain surgeon Wilder Penfield, Lilly turned his hand to neuroscience, applying the era’s expanding array of solid-state electronic devices to the monitoring and mapping of the central nervous system. Eventually appointed to a research position at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), Lilly spent the better part of a decade conducting invasive cortical vivisection on a variety of animals, particularly macaques. In the spy-versus-spy world of the high Cold War, this kind of work had undeniably creepy dimensions. Manchurian Candidate anxieties about “forced indoctrination” and pharmacological manipulation of political loyalties peaked in the 1950s, and security establishment spooks (as well as a few actual thugs) hung around the edges of the laboratories where scientists were hammering electrodes into primate brains. Lilly later claimed not to care for that sort of thing, but in his prime as a government employee he had high-level security clearance—J. Edgar Hoover knew him by name—and was actively involved in research into brainwashing (or “reprogramming” as it was then called among the cognoscenti), sleep deprivation, and “operant control” of animals with wires implanted in the “pain centers” of their gray matter. Lilly’s papers from this period include a black-and-white photograph of two brain-wired monkeys at coitus, ostensibly being driven by remote electrical stimulation. It may have been some sort of inside joke around the lab, but maybe not.

It was about this time that Lilly learned from a European colleague, an oceanographer with military contracts to study the physiology of deep-diving, that the small toothed whales had surprisingly large brains—proportionately speaking nearly as large as those of human beings; and in absolute terms, bigger. Intrigued, Lilly got wind of an outfit in Florida—Marine Studios, which was at this time a cross between a public aquarium and an underwater sound stage for shooting swamp-thing-oriented B-movies—that had figured out how to keep bottlenose in captivity. By 1955 Lilly had found his way down to St. Augustine, in the company of a number of other researchers, to hammer some electrodes into Tursiops brains and see what happened. 

This may sound flippant, but that was in fact the basic modus operandi in the early days of neurophysiology: stick electrode into brain; apply charge; observe animal; move electrode; repeat. The correlation of spasms, jerks, and eye-rolling with the position of the electrode eventually amounted to a cortical map. It was an ugly business, but the youthful Lilly was not a sentimental character. He wanted to get inside heads, and, if possible, get his hands on the steering wheel of consciousness—as can be surmised from the title of a shocking unpublished paper he prepared in these years, “Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents as Reconnaissance and Intelligence Devices,” where he noted proudly that “a technique for covert and relatively safe implantation of electrodes into the human brain has been devised”—a little hardware that would ultimately provide “push-button control of the totality of motivation and of consciousness.”

The dolphins, which (unlike people) do not continue breathing when anaesthetized, had the good fortune, for the most part, to die with merciful dispatch. One of them, however, before succumbing, made a set of wheezing phonations that Lilly interpreted as an effort to mimic the voices of the laboratory personnel. It was his eureka moment, and he would later equate it with the Copernican Revolution. For Lilly, and those who became his champions, that fateful day at Marine Studios would forever stand as the epiphany of a fundamental discovery: human beings were not at the center of the animal universe. After knocking firmly on countless mammalian brains, the energetic brain doctor finally got a reply—John C. Lilly had heard a voice.

To appreciate the rings of significance that widened from this laboratory scene, it is critical to understand that in the 1950s no one thought of whales and dolphins as “musical” or “intelligent” or—of all things—“spiritually enlightened.” At that time, the large whales were generally regarded as huge kegs of fat (useful for making soap), meat (good to feed to chickens), and fertilizer (best thing to do with what was left after you took the fat and meat), and the smaller dolphins and porpoises were mostly just a nuisance to fishermen—though bottlenose were sometimes actually hunted, since the fine oil in their jaw ducts was considered a superior lubricant for precision timepieces.

This context helps explain the furor that attended Lilly’s presentation, in May of 1958 (at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco), of a paper that made a set of dramatic claims for the intelligence and linguistic abilities of Tursiops truncatus. Despite his small and entirely anecdotal evidence, newspapers on both coasts picked up the fascinating story (Talking fish! What will they think of next?), and by the autumn of that year Lilly was writing grants for a major initiative to study cetacean communication and cognition. In a matter of months he had quit his job at NIMH, separated from his wife of two decades, and moved to the Caribbean. Initially using some of his own funds, but soon outfitted with a string of prestigious federal research awards (National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Department of Defense, even NASA), Lilly founded his own nonprofit scientific establishment—the Communications Research Institute, or CRI—and built a dedicated dolphin laboratory, complete with holding tanks and state-of-the-art bioacoustical equipment, on Nazareth Bay at the eastern end of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He also married a woman from the Islands, a divorced fashion model named Elisabeth Bjerg.

ARCHIVE WORK IS, when you get right down to it, a pain in the ass. The chairs are hard, the room generally silent, the papers often boring. What’s worse, Palo Alto produces one perfect day after another. Time for a break. Time to do a little bodysurfing in the glorious, roiling waters of the Pacific.

An hour or so later I am tucked into my wetsuit (critical equipment for research trips) and making my way down to a small arc of sand nested at the bottom of a precipitous and eroding dune. The water is less cold than I feared, and I paddle out, feeling my neoprene skin fill with brine. A handful of hardboard surfers cork in a line about a hundred yards offshore, waiting for the combers that mount smoothly on the outside reef. By contrast, the shore break is sloppy, more up and down than straight ahead; but it still feels good to move freely in the active surf. When a fair-sized wave rises behind me, I give a kick, throwing my legs up into the curl. One stroke and I am in the churn, body stiff, chin tucked, hands out, splitting the liquid like a prow and feeling the hard sand as I am driven ashore.

Why was Lilly so amazingly successful at promoting his unlikely program of research on the bottlenose? After all, he managed to cash in upward of half a million dollars a year in grants at his peak—big money in those days. And for what? Dolphin communication? Rolling over in the spent foam of a receding wave and looking out across the heaving blue, it occurs to me that part of the answer lies right here: in the ocean and its changing meanings.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of being propelled through a slipstream in a sea surge, the rush of water seeming to lengthen the body into a fusiform streak. So natural does this watery pleasure feel, so native to the body and the mind, that one easily forgets the novelty and historical specificity of this way of experiencing the briny deeps. Granted, there have long been surfers and surf-swimmers among the traditional peoples of the Pacific islands, but it took a very long time for Anglo-Europeans to approach the sea with anything but anxiety and disgust. The beach as a locus of health and pleasure is a firmly nineteenth-century invention (before that it was a convenient place to throw garbage). And our crystalline vision of refreshing, turquoise waters teeming with beautiful fish would have had little currency before the mid-twentieth century—right about when Lilly turned to the bottlenose. Only then did the widening availability of inexpensive swim goggles and modestly safe diving equipment open leisured access to underwater vistas. Previously, the sea floor fell away in the imagination as murky and abysmal—unaccommodating, hostile, black.

The 1950s and 1960s, then, saw the emergence of a new and widespread cultural preoccupation with the undersea world, a burst of interest on which Lilly drew and capitalized, and to which he ultimately contributed. It was in a file that he had labeled, somewhat ominously, “Solitude,” that I found Lilly’s dog-eared paperback copy of The Silent World, the popular oceanic vade-mecum authored by the psychopomp of SCUBA, Jacques Cousteau, and popularized in the U.S. in the late ‘50s in connection with a successful motion picture of the same name. Significantly, Lilly had marked with care a number of passages, all of which dealt with the kinetic and tactile experience of being submerged, weightless, isolated, and sensitized by a descent into the aquatic realm.

Lilly was no diver, however. His deep fascination with these feelings hails from a very different arena:  his long-standing research into that menacing corner of the human sciences known as sensory deprivation. While still working for the government at NIMH, Lilly and several collaborators developed a new technique for testing the psychological stability of human beings under sustained isolation and reduced sensory input: the flotation tank. Warm water, circulating silently through a perfectly dark chamber, buoyed a naked experimental subject over whose whole head had been fitted a latex mask attached to life-support and monitoring devices. Money for this sort of research hailed, of course, from the military, which was mostly curious how pilots and submariners (and potentially astronauts) would fare during long spells of lonely tedium. When it turned out that many subjects rapidly came unhinged in this disorienting environment, unforeseen possibilities emerged: the technology could be used in personality assessment, and perhaps also in personality adjustment. Lilly himself—fearless about self-experimentation, and already beginning to conceive of himself as a cosmonaut of consciousness—spent many hours encased in his own tanks, exploring what happened when a mind in the water was left to its own devices. The results were trippy (this was, after all, the Lilly that would later inspire the sci-fi thriller Altered States), but he was convinced that the mentally sophisticated and strong—those with what he would eventually call “wet courage”— could thrive under these conditions. One had to transcend the terror, because a kind of enlightenment lay on the other side.

Suspended in warm water, in perfect darkness, Lilly became, you might say, a brain in a vat. And he liked it. Liked it enough that he took a flotation tank with him to his new St. Thomas dolphin laboratory, where it soon became an important tool in his increasingly eccentric pursuit of cetacean intelligence. His own lengthening spells in weightless submersion led him to ponder with mounting awe the sort of mammalian brain that would evolve to dwell in the deep sea. It would be, he decided, a mind like his own, only more so: fearless, deep, and self-sufficient—an expansive intelligence in contemplation of itself. Moving to the Caribbean, Lilly mostly left the electrodes behind, and embarked on a new way of getting inside the heads of his experimental animals: rather than cracking them open like nuts and rewiring them like doorbells, he would cogitate his way in, commensurating his intelligence to theirs, becoming, through strenuous exercises of sympathetic convergence, his own instrument—more and more he wanted to “think like a dolphin.” Thus a nasty piece of Cold War psy-ops technology was launched on a new career path: as the head-trip hot-tub of psychedelia. Before long, Lilly, floating in the dark, was piping the feed from the hydrophones in the dolphin tanks to his own stereo headphones and trying to imagine what it would be like to “see” with sound. And that was pretty far out.

ON THE GRANT APPLICATIONS, however, the central research project of Lilly’s Caribbean dolphin institute was more straightforward: “communication.” At the most basic level this meant studying the phonations of Tursiops truncatus in an effort to understand if they could communicate with each other, and, by extension, if we could communicate with them. Like any savvy fund-raiser, Lilly sold his idea of intelligent and communicative dolphins to different people in different ways, and he started with those he knew best: his earliest and most important backers were in the military.

One of Lilly’s old classmates from Caltech, William B. McLean, had gone on to glory as a wizard of warcraft, developing the Sidewinder (the first functional air-to-air missile), and rising to serve as the technical director of the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) in China Lake, California. McLean was struck by Lilly’s visionary ideas, and had him out to NOTS for a briefing—where he clearly stimulated some out-of-the-box thinking. Sifting Lilly’s correspondence from these heady and secretive years, I discovered a magnificently cryptic letter from an excited Navy researcher at NOTS following up on the visit: 

I have wondered whether it might not be feasible to attempt to develop some mechanical equipment that a dolphin might use . . . [and] wondered whether it might be at all feasible (and I realize that this idea may sound a little fantastic) to arm dolphins with some sort of weapon that would enable them more easily to attack shark . . .

And why not something more elaborate, like,

. . . the possibility of developing some dolphin toys, large complex mechanical devices that might be of some interest to dolphins in the open seas, that would involve some kinds of buttons to push that would generate running water, perhaps with one trained dolphin teaching others.

It is surpassingly unlikely that the Navy was contemplating mid-ocean dolphin playgrounds at the height of the Cold War. The veils of euphemism barely conceal that something considerably more germane to national defense was on the drawing boards at China Lake. Lilly himself, writing a few years later, was more explicit:

They could be very useful as antipersonnel self-directing weapons. They could do nocturnal harbor work, capture spies let out of submarines or dropped from airplanes, attacking silently and efficiently and bringing back information from such contacts. They could deliver atomic nuclear warheads and attach them to submarines or surface vessels and to torpedoes and missiles.

By 1961, the Navy had developed its own research program on dolphin communications and intelligence, and two years later a formal Navy facility for marine mammal study and training had been opened at the Naval Missile Center at Point Mugu, a little north of Los Angeles. Lilly, however, who was spending more and more time in his flotation tank trying to commune with his experimental animals, would soon be persona non grata at this facility, despite his having had a hand in its creation. The buzz-headed types had noticed that Lilly was getting a little, well, weird.

But the Navy was never Lilly’s only paymaster. Persuaded that he had glimpsed a genuine dolphin “intelligence” in the late 1950s, Lilly also succeeded in selling the nation’s nascent space administration on the idea that his dolphin laboratory could provide a model system for “breaking through” to a nonhuman mind. In the era of Sputnik this meant actual extraterrestrials, which may sound crazy now, but these issues lay on the cutting edge of national concern in those days: if we met the little green men (or, more likely, started receiving radio signals from deep space that looked to carry nonstochastic levels of information), what would we do? Lilly promised that dolphins offered a chance to rehearse, and he positioned CRI as a visionary organization conducting fundamental work in exobiology. In fact, by 1962, Lilly even presided as the “Grand Dolphin” over a kind of semiserious secret society of prominent astrophysicists, radio astronomers, atmospheric chemists, and computer engineers who called themselves “The Order of the Dolphin,” wore small, engraved Tursiops insignia (a little like a tie clip), and exchanged messages in binary code to test each others’ readiness for extraterrestrial contact.

One of these visionary “Dolphins” was a brilliant young Harvard astrophysicist named Carl Sagan, who made his way down to St. Thomas several times in these years to meet Lilly’s dolphins and muse about alternate forms of life in the cosmos.

By 1964, “Want to come and see my dolphins?” had become an irresistible invitation.

THAT WAS BECAUSE by the early 1960s Lilly and his dolphins had become a national, indeed an international, phenomenon. In the wake of the initial flurry of interest in his 1958 claims about the linguistic abilities of Tursiops truncatus, Lilly seized a trade-book contract and gave free rein to his exuberant imagination. The resulting volume—Man and Dolphin, published by Doubleday in 1961—offered an intrepid-scientific-explorer narrative of the building of the Nazareth Bay lab, together with some headline-ready suggestions about the future of human-dolphin interactions. Passages of startling weirdness (if dolphins prove as intelligent as the initial studies suggest, then “for a long time presumably they will be in the position of the Negro races in Africa who are attempting to become Westernized”) were buttressed by pseudo-technical appendices on neuroanatomy and illegible sonographs of Tursiops phonation. The book, with its tincture of Planet of the Apes fantasy and just-the-facts authority, thrust Lilly onto the national stage in earnest as the iconoclastic boffin of porpoise intelligence: an appearance on the Jack Paar Show followed, together with a photo-spread in Life magazine, talking dolphins in New Yorker cartoons, and glowing reviews throughout the national press. The initial print run of Man and Dolphin sailed off the shelves, and Lilly’s Rolodex swelled to include White House contacts, Hollywood film celebrities, and a host of enthusiasts, fans, and well-to-do hangers-on.

Inspired by Lilly’s depiction of CRI as a kind of Swiss Family Robinson outpost (Man and Dolphin played up the fact that Lilly and his beautiful new wife and their respective children all lived at the lab and participated in the research), the Florida-based Hungarian émigré film director Ivan Tors undertook to produce a film about a Lassie-like dolphin and the family it loves. The 1963 blockbuster Flipper not only gave Lilly a credit line (and research support out of the proceeds); it also gave the world its first “domestic” marine mammal—a lovable, faithful, gentle, and chuckling companion.

Another Hungarian, the physicist Leo Szilard, also boosted Lilly’s cachet in this period, citing him by name in a biting and popular satire on the nuclear arms race, The Voice of the Dolphins. This futurist tale, which emerged out of Szilard’s conversations with Lilly in the late 1950s in Washington, depicts a Soviet-American scientific research institute that departs from Lilly’s work and seemingly succeeds in communicating with dolphins; they prove to be brilliant strategic thinkers, and help steer humans away from thermonuclear devastation. (They are the Delphic oracles—get it?)

The general hubbub attracted a steady stream of high-profile visitors to St. Thomas in the early 1960s, perhaps none more important to the emerging vision of the bottlenose than the quirky and brilliant British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, already well known as an avant-garde social theorist with an appetite for cybernetics. After reading Man and Dolphin, Bateson wrote Lilly an admiring letter, pressing him to think still harder about the ways that Tursiops truncatus could serve its human interlocutors. Indulging his appetite for ethnographic speculation concerning the minds of others (together with an immoderate enthusiasm for semiotics and psychology), Bateson laid out a sweeping theory of cross-species language development: human beings, in his view, possessed a language disproportionately preoccupied with stuff. This was our joy and our pain, since the evolution of such thing-centered linguistic abilities had gone hand in hand with the extraordinary material culture of Homo sapiens, from moldboard plows to supersonic cruise missiles. Yet in Bateson’s view this same evolution had left us with a grotesquely impoverished intelligence in the domain of social relations: those intersubjective complexities, he averred, “are very poorly represented in language and consciousness.” Homo faber was, in this sense, “stunted,” and the consequences, for Bateson, were clear: war, social conflict, pervasive psychological maladjustment.

Enter the bottlenose. Permit a human-sized intelligence to develop over millions of years in a highly social animal, which—on account of its aquatic evolution—possessed no hands, and thus no real capacity to manipulate a material culture, and it was reasonable to hypothesize that the cognition of such a creature would be radically, fundamentally, pervasively social. Theirs would be a language not of things but of beings. As Bateson put it to Lilly, “If I am right, and they are mainly sophisticated about the intricacies of interpersonal relationships, then of course (after training analysis) they will be ideal psychotherapists for us.”

The Navy definitely had no need for dolphin psychoanalysts, and neither did NASA. But around the end of 1964, Lilly—whose second marriage was in free fall, and whose much-hyped research was generating nugatory publishable results—needed all the help he could get. More than ever he needed to listen to the dolphins; and he needed to hear them. 

SO HOW DO YOU “break through”? Well, this had always been Lilly’s basic preoccupation as a scientist of the mind. And indeed, over the course of his decade of intensive dolphin research, Lilly can be understood to have more or less sequenced through the whole battery of Cold War techniques for dealing with a tight-lipped foreign asset held in captivity. Initially committed, in the late 1950s, to that spookish tool kit of techno-maniacal assaults on the cranium (picture a Frankenstein-like cap with electrodes penetrating the skull), Lilly gradually moved, at CRI, to less invasive approaches with his animals. But he nevertheless continued to draw on the playbook of those psy-ops intelligence services that shaped his early training in neurophysiology. For instance, by the early 1960s he was testing code-breaking techniques, having been granted access to one of the very earliest programmable electronic computers, which he used to try to sieve recordings of dolphin vocalizations for patterns, deploying the same statistical methods as Cold War cryptographers. A little later he began experimenting with “chronic contact” scenarios, which involved “isolating” a dolphin in constricted quarters with a human agent, on the assumption that a conversion of loyalties would result. To this end, Lilly even redesigned the St. Thomas laboratory with floodable living quarters, and initiated a set of long-term cohabitation experiments in which a male dolphin and a human female in a leotard and lipstick (to help the dolphin see her mouth move, of course) spent weeks interacting in a confined space. Lilly had her read Planet of the Apes to prepare for the work.

This sort of deracinating, intensive environment—colored with erotic potential—belonged, of course, to the world of counterespionage debriefings. Lilly did not explicitly advertise these dimensions of his project, preferring to talk of the need to treat the dolphin like a child, positioned to learn human language from the continuous attentions and baby talk of a new “mother.” But he was by no means unhappy when an Oedipal scene unfolded underwater: with all the inevitability of a classical drama, this newest effort at interspecies communication eventually climaxed in what is probably the very oldest form of human-animal intimacy—sexual contact.

Pressed by an increasingly desperate Lilly to recognize that she needed to open herself to the dolphin’s solicitations (and warned by him against succumbing to the blinders of her own cultural preoccupations and psychological blockages), the young experimenter eventually decided that the randy and terrifying buckings of her imprisoned subject animal were themselves nothing less than his effort to communicate. In the protocols of her experimental notebooks she recorded coming to feel that her sharp-toothed roommate was doing the best he could to solicit her in a more and more gentle manner; it fell to her to meet him halfway, stroking him to a shuddering calm.

Lilly chalked it up as a victory for interspecies contact. But Swiss Family Robinson it was not. Neither was Lilly’s final effort to hear what the dolphins were saying, which involved the use of lysergic acid diethylamide, otherwise known as LSD.

This now seems to us, perhaps, paradigmatic of the mid-’60s moment, and in this sense, inevitably, a little comic. But such a reaction trades considerably on hindsight. After all, Lilly’s use of pharmaceutical-grade LSD-25 on his experimental subjects was entirely consistent with the trajectory of his borrowings from the Cold War sciences of mind and behavior. Indeed, the drug was widely tested at Veterans Hospitals in the United States as an aid to psychotherapy, in that it was understood to break down inhibition and open pathways to hidden parts of consciousness. It was precisely these putative features of LSD that drew it to the attention of the CIA, which used this powerful psychotropic agent both with and without the awareness of human subjects in these years. As a federal researcher Lilly secured the product (which was a controlled substance) from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals under an NIMH contract, and was explicit about his intentions to give it to the dolphins. I am quite certain that no one evaluating the application would have batted an eyelash, since there were plenty of neuroscientists giving LSD-25 to captive animals in those days—including fish, dogs, and primates.  It made perfect sense to try it on the animal that seemed to offer the greatest promise of cognitive sophistication.

In fact, if the project was communication—if the inhibitions and blind spots of the experimenter were no less a hindrance than the resistance of the subject, if the aim, in the end, was nothing less than the commensuration of minds—then perhaps it was the scientist who needed the LSD even more than the dolphin? Or better yet, both scientist and dolphin could take it together, and then, for the first time, really, they might come to an understanding—floating in the blue water, listening to the strange sounds echoing through their heads.

Together they were drifting over a cultural watershed. Lilly and his dolphins had tuned in and turned on.

AND, SOON ENOUGH, they had dropped out. Or, more like, been kicked out. By the end of 1965, still short of peer-reviewed publications, and with rumors of his increasingly idiosyncratic experimental practices swirling among his professional colleagues (including several who had been folded into the Navy’s rapidly expanding marine mammal project), Lilly faced devastating evaluations from a visiting board of grant examiners—an assessment of his work that effectively torpedoed his research program and shuttered the Nazareth Bay laboratory. Incensed, Lilly fell back to Miami, writing furious letters to old allies and accusing the Navy scientists of staging a military coup in Tursiops research.

Perhaps they had, but the damage was done. In the thick of a second divorce, all his grants revoked or terminated, his fancy computer repossessed by the feds, a defiant and unrepentant Lilly very publicly released his research animals back into the open water whence they had come. Claiming flamboyantly that these brilliant and otherworldly animals had finally succeeded in “reprogramming” him, John Lilly—the star neurophysiologist now turned pied piper of delphinid spiritual awakening—set out for the West Coast, became a regular at Esalen, took to wearing futuristic jumpsuits, and increasingly promoted Zen Buddhism and the mind-expanding virtues of a variety of psychopharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, a number of Lilly’s erstwhile dolphin-researcher colleagues were doing their part to help the Navy win Southeast Asia.

This strange rupture effectively established the curious double legacy of the modern bottlenose: the flower children all learned that Tursiops truncatus was an erotically liberated, spiritually profound pacifist, intent on saving humans from their materialistic, violent, and repressive lives; meanwhile, over on the other side of Point Loma, a coterie of (equally) Lilly-inspired marine mammal biologists busily worked to teach these creatures how to recognize and neutralize enemy combatants.

A caricatured view of the 1960s depicts doves and hawks facing off on opposite sides of the barricades: daisies on this side, gun barrels on that. It is easy to think of the dolphin story as similarly drawn up in ranks: the Navy’s weaponized dolphins belonged to the hawks; the stained-glass dolphin decals on VW microbuses swam with the freaks and the hippies. But what Lilly’s several lives show, what the bottlenose story shows—indeed, what a host of deeper researches into the history of Cold War military technology, computing, sexual identity, music, and the drug culture all show—is that the two sides that would later come to blows, the Cold War and the counterculture, were initially quite intimate, were born, in fact, as Siamese twins.

And they continued to play footsie even as they were pried apart. For instance, the Navy’s failure to win the life-support contracts for the American space race (the Air Force prevailed) left the blue-water forces in the military on the sideline of the era’s flashiest techno-scientific research initiative. Fighting back, the Navy spent much of the 1960s touting the sea as Earth’s forgotten “deep space,” perversely overlooked in the country’s preoccupation with the remote and irrelevant heavens. Thus SEALAB and the Man in the Sea programs were conceived to parallel space-station work and manned interplanetary travel. With the oceans intensively reimagined in these years as our as-yet-unexplored “inner space,” Navy propaganda and research could not but reinforce the notion that dolphins were a kind of neighboring extraterrestrial, awaiting contact. In fact, one of the first undertakings of the new Navy Marine Mammal Program was to train dolphins to work in the open sea as messengers to underwater SEALAB stations. They even made a thirty-minute propaganda film—narrated by Glenn Ford, titled The Dolphins that Joined the Navy—that depicted Navy researchers testing a perfectly fantastic “Human-Dolphin Translator,” an audio-frequency converter capable of shifting the acoustic profile of human commands up into the sweet-spot of delphinid hearing. And (I could not make this up) the Navy scientists ultimately decided to try speaking to them in Hawaiian, on the grounds that this language seemed likely to be closest to their own. The big blue, it turned out, really did have its own little green men—but they were big and gray and always smiling. 

I leave Southern California on a Sunday morning, the flight banking slowly up over the Pacific. And as the Earth tips below, I can clearly see from one side of Point Loma to the other.

JOHN CUNNINGHAM LILLY set out to “break through” to a dolphin. In the end, suspended in his warm tank, addled out of ordinary experiences of human cognition, he did indeed find a “mind in the water”—his own. And the Age of Aquarius found its avatar.

All in all, it would not be wrong to say that the whole thing began in a small cinder-block structure on the southeastern tip of St. Thomas. Curious if the building remains, I spend several hours on Google Earth one afternoon, trying to match up a 1960 aerial photograph of the excavation of the dolphin pond with the modern coastal topography of Nazareth Bay. It is hard to say: hurricane damage along this stretch of beach has been extensive, as has been the commercial buildup in the last half-century.

My wife is from Puerto Rico, which pulls us close enough to St. Thomas that I can’t resist an off-season investigative day trip across the short channel separating the two islands. So I stuff the maps in a small backpack, together with a swimsuit and a towel, and I take the twenty-five minute flight in a chattery ATR-42, whose scimitar propellers sweep menacingly at the narrow cabin. Below, the pleasure boats cut their white arcs against the deep blue water.

Following the southern coast road in my rental car, I thread my way up to a ridge overlooking Nazareth Bay, where I pull over to consult the satellite images. If it exists, then the laboratory must lie down one of these descending spurs, unpaved paths that disappear into the brush. I park and grab a bottle of water for the hike. Slipping cautiously around a fresh-looking chainlink gate emblazoned with stern yellow signs reading KEEP OUT – PRIVATE PROPERTY, I drop down the steep track through the heavy cover. Bromeliads cup rainwater in the shade, and a hermit crab clacks into hiding in the scree. A single flying needle, a blue dragonfly, stays above me for a moment, seeming to point the way.

And then, the path opens onto the water and there it is: the shattered remains of the Communications Research Institute. It’s an oblique angle of a building, set on a stony promontory, and over the ruins hangs a twisted, overgrown sea grape tree. Stacks of marine plywood and piles of studs litter the courtyard, and an abandoned yellow cement mixer has begun to sink into the soft ground on one side. I walk around to the windward face of the structure, where crumbling steps lead precariously down to the water’s edge. For some reason, I am frightened as I feel my way down: it’s midday, and bright, but I am absolutely alone, and the hulking structure—roofless, stripped, bleached like bone, spiny rebar bristling from broken walls—looks cruel and dangerous. Small lizards slip along the dry grass beside the steps, and as I come to the edge of the dolphin pond a pair of rock crabs, hanging upside down like bats, scurry along the outer lip of the wave ramp, where the light surf splashes through a narrow inlet to fill and flush the pool.

I sit for a while here, looking up at the empty, floorless rooms, which are without graffiti—without, in fact, the least trace of all that went on here. A scaffoldlike wing of the building juts out over the rocky basin: once it held the dolphin “elevator,” in which the animals rose to enter the flooded rooms of the lab. In the incandescent endgame, Lilly imagined such a device configured so as to be operated by the animals, permitting them to come and go as they wished. The skeleton of this superstructure gives the dolphin pool the shadowy solemnity of a hidden grotto. A loose doorjamb swings pendular in the breeze before the encroaching vegetation. A storm-crumpled beach chair is embedded in the straggling limbs of a bougainvillea, itself nearly swallowed by the strangling vines.

Like the cavernous halls of the Natural History Museum, this too is a good place to contemplate the essential nature of the bottlenose. Or, perhaps better, this is a good place to dismiss the very idea of such an essence. Ruins have always been helpful this way, since they are so candid about the passage of time, so articulate about the inevitability of change. There are, in the end, no fixed definitions, only histories; no essences, only genealogies. Over time, and through the workings of an improbable series of personalities, technologies, and cultural preoccupations, the Dart River Beast became, as the anthropologists like to say, “good to think”—an animal through which we came to see ourselves in new and disorienting ways. 

As Thoreauvian beasts of burden, the dolphins have certainly done their share of heavy lifting. What they’ve been thinking along the way, though, remains very hard to say.

I DECIDE TO go look for some surf, and make my way back up to my car.  And it’s only as I start to drive back down the ridge that I notice a white paper sign wrapped in plastic and nailed to a tree. It announces a recent zoning hearing about this property, which is slated, it turns out, for a major commercial installation: “64 villas, 36 condos, 4 bungalows, swimming pool, tennis court, waste-water treatment plant, reverse osmosis plant,” and a host of other structures, all shoehorned into Lilly’s Edenic eleven-acre plot. Apparently the whole thing has gotten bogged down in an environmental controversy, owing to the discovery of a few endangered Caribbean tree boas on the property. Et in Arcadia ego. 

The development—if it happens—will be called “Dolphin Cove.” 

Q: From 1950 to 2004, how many tornadoes formed in Sacramento County?
A: Four tornadoes. The strongest was an F2.

Q: From 1950 to 2004, what California county experienced the most tornadoes?
A: Los Angeles County experienced 41 tornadoes.

Q: What was the country's deadliest tornado?
A: The Tri-State Tornado killed 695 people.

Q: How many tornadoes form in California annually?
A: An average of four.

Q: How many tornadoes rotate clockwise?
A: About 1 in 100.

Q: Most tornadoes rotate which direction?
A: Counterclockwise.

Q: Which month spawns the most tornadoes?
A: The month of May. June is second.

Q: Tornadoes have not occurred on which continent?
A: Antarctica.

Q: Why do most tornadoes form in the afternoon and early evening?
A: Because they form from thunderstorms, a lot of solar heating is needed.

Q: Most tornadoes occur during which time of the day?
A: Most form in the afternoon and early evening.

Q: What percentage of the country's tornadoes are considered violent?
A: Actually, only about 5 percent are violent (EF3 or higher).

Q: Where is "Tornado Alley?"
A: Roughly from central Texas through eastern South Dakota.

Q: What is a gust front?
A: A boundary separating cool thunderstorm air and surrounding air.

Q: How much water escapes Earth each day due to the polar wind?
A: About 1,000 gallons escape each day.

Q: What is the polar wind?
A: Charged plasma that travels into space from the upper atmosphere.

Q: The Enhanced Fujita scale (EF) ranks what weather phenomenon?
A: The EF scale ranks tornadoes by wind estimates based on damage.

Q: What are tornadoes that form over water called?
A: Waterspouts.

Q: What is a veering wind?
A: A wind that turns clockwise with height.

Q: Are veering winds associated with warming or cooling?
A: They are associated with warm air advection.

Q: What is the opposite of veering?
A: Backing winds that shift counterclockwise.

Q: The average tornado moves in which direction?
A: From southwest to northeast.

Q: What state sees the most tornadoes?
A: Texas

Q: What is considered the windiest place on Earth?
A: Winds at Commonwealth Bay in Antarctica reach 74 mph every three days.

Q: 16,000 windmills provide power to how many homes in California?
A: Windmills provide power to 300,000 homes (1% of the state's power).

Q: The National Weather Service issues a wind advisory at what speed?
A: Sustained wind speed of 30 mph.

Q: How strong are the winds in a Category 5 hurricane?
A: 156 mph and greater.

Q: On a weather chart, what is stream line?
A: Steam line shows wind direction and trajectory

Q: What does chinook wind mean?
A: It means "snow eater" because of the warm nature of the wind.

Q: What is the term used for "foehn winds" in the lee of the Rockies?
A: Chinook!

Q: Should planes take off with a tail or head wind?
A: A head wind helps the plane get airborne.

Q: What wind reverses its direction seasonally?
A: The monsoon.

Q: A wind advisory requires that winds be how strong?
A: Wind advisories are for winds 31 to 39 mph.

Q: What is a multiple vortex tornado?
A: A tornado with mini-tornadoes inside it. This is different from multiple tornadoes.

Q: What is Beaufort Scale?
A: It is a system used to report wind speeds.

Q: What Beaufort wind scale is equivalent to hurricane force winds?
A: 12 to 17, which represents winds above 74 miles per hour.

Q: What is Katabatic Wind?
A: A wind that is created by air flowing downhill.

Q: In terms of wind, what is a knot?
A: 1.15 miles per hour, or 0.5 meters per second.

Q: What is a jet stream?
A: Relatively strong winds concentrated in a narrow stream in the atmosphere.

Q: Which center issues hurricane watches and warnings?
A: National Hurricane Center.

Q: What is a dust devil?
A: A tornado-like swirl of air that picks up dust off the ground.

Q: What U.S. city has been hit by the most tornadoes?
A: Oklahoma City.

Q: Where did the deadliest recorded tornado in the world occur?
A: Bangladesh. Estimates put the death toll at more than 1,300 people.

Q: Where do typhoons occur?
A: Typhoons occur in the western Pacific Ocean.

Q: What is the Fujita Scale?
A: It is a system of rating the intensity of tornadoes.

Q: What is the strength of a super typhoon?
A: It has maximum sustained winds of 130 knots (150 mph) or greater.

Q: What is upslope flow?
A: It is air that moves from lower terrain to higher terrain.

Q: What is a willy-willy?
A: A tropical cyclone of hurricane strength near Australia.

Q: What is a gust front?
A: The leading edge of gusty winds from thunderstorm downdrafts.

Q: Atlantic hurricane names recycle how often?
A: Hurricane names recycle every six years

Q: How many knots is a 10 mph wind?
A: 8.69 knots.

Q: What is the minimum wind in a hurricane?
A: 64 knots (74 mph).

Q: What is the range of wind speeds in a tropical storm?
A: 34 to 63 knots (39 to 73 mph).

Q: What is the maximum sustained wind in a tropical depression?
A: 33 knots (38 mph).

Q: What did Hurricane Ivan set a record for in 2004?
A: Most tornadoes spawned; Ivan unleashed 117 tornadoes.

Q: If chimney smoke descends rather than rises, what does this indicate?
A: Warm air aloft.

Q: What is the name of the scale to measure hurricane intensity?
A: The Saffir-Simpson scale.

Q: On average, how often do hurricanes hit Hawaii?
A: About once every 15 years.

Q: What is wind shear?
A: A variation of wind with height.

Q: Does wind shear help hurricane development?
A: It actually discourages it.

Q: What was Hurricane Rita's minimum central pressure?
A: Data indicate a pressure of 897 millibars on Sept. 22, 2005.

Q: Hurricane Katrina made landfall as what category storm?
A: It hit as a Category 3 storm.

Q: What was Hurricane Katrina's minimum central pressure?
A: A central pressure of 902 millibars was recorded on Aug. 28, 2005.

Q: What was the smallest recorded tropical cyclone?
A: Tropical Cyclone Tracy, which hit Darwin, Australia, in 1974, measured only 60 miles across.

Q: What is the difference between a tropical storm and a hurricane?
A: Sustained wind speeds. Tropical storm: 39-73 mph; hurricane, 74 mph or greater.

Q: What is the lowest wind speed a hurricane can have?
A: 74 mph.

Q: Hurricanes can't form within how many degrees of the equator?
A: They can't form between the equator and roughly 5 degrees north latitude.

Q: Why can't hurricanes form within 5 degrees of the equator?
A: The Coriolis effect is too weak close to the equator.

Q: What causes a storm to spin counter-clockwise?
A: The Coriolis effect pushes motion to the right in the northern hempishere.

Q: Which solar phenomenon produces the aurora?
A: The solar wind.

Q: From where is the term "hurricane" derived?
A: From Huracan, the Carib god of evil.

Q: When does the North Pacific hurricane season begin?
A: It officially begins May 15.

The state House is considering a measure that would temporarily increase general excise and use taxes by a percentage point, to 5 percent, in an effort to narrow the state's $1.2 billion budget deficit.

Hawaii state lawmakers are advancing a bill to hike the taxes for the next five years on hard liquor, wine, beer and all other spirits.

Hesitant about the political and economic consequences of raising the state's general excise tax, state House lawmakers are walking through several potential alternatives, including another increase in income taxes and eliminating tax breaks for investors and nonprofits.

Neighbor Island mayors and other county executives went before state lawmakers yesterday to again fight to keep their shares of the hotel room tax revenues.

The state and the four counties are squabbling over nearly $100 million collected from the transient accommodations tax. Every hotel room is taxed by the state which then splits it amongst each county. But the state wants to keep that money for the next three years to help balance the budget.

The state Office of Elections has a new permanent chief election officer, but that was the only question resolved about the upcoming 2010 election season.

A large area of thunderstorms south of Hawaii has been showing signs of intensification and organization this morning, but the Central Pacific Hurricane Center says chances of development into a tropical cyclone remain low.

An unusual situation has popped up in the central Pacific Ocean about 1300 miles south of the Hawaiian islands. Even though Hawaii is well outside of hurricane season, forecasters are watching for possible strengthening and organization of a group of thunderstorms brewing near the Line Islands.

The Hawaii Tourism Authority is awarding more than $180,000 to Big Island-based programs aimed at perpetuating the Hawaiian culture.

Kona coffee farmers are losing out on up to $14.4 million in revenue annually to corporate marketers of 10 percent Kona coffee blends, according to a study released last Wednesday.

A one-of-a-kind miniature submarine that flies underwater is visiting Maui this month. It doesn't "fly" very fast - only 6 knots maximum or around 7 mph - but it works just like an airplane, said its crew chief, Dave Harper.

Crossing the “T”s and dotting the “I”s on a commitment it made last week, the Kaua‘i County Council on Wednesday unanimously approved two measures enabling Kaua‘i to become the last Hawai‘i county to have its own dedicated public-use helicopter.

NASA has been monitoring the storm from above and has released two satellite images from earlier this week. The first one shown above is from Wednesday via NASA's Aqua satellite. "Over the Pacific Ocean and the California coast, clouds assume the shape of a giant apostrophe, looking vaguely like a hurricane missing most of its center," the agency explains. "The storm's shape suggests a low-pressure system drawing in strong winds from nearby areas. Patches of clear sky allow glimpses of California’s Central Valley and Baja California."

The second one above is from Tuesday. It's not the most exciting of images, but is the first in a series that NASA used to make an animation of the storms passing over California between then and yesterday. You can view that video here in a small or large version.

The recent weather has brought mud slide concern to the foothills, recently burned by the Station and Morris fires last summer. NASA also monitored the fires, showing us several satellite photos of the smoke and burn scar.