Like many other meteorologists around the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of August 26, 2005, Alan Gerard was monitoring the latest computer model forecasts for Hurricane Katrina—which had just emerged over the Gulf of Mexico after striking South Florida as a Category 1 storm. Gerard, then meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s (NWS’s) office in Jackson, Miss., saw that the newest projections indicated that Katrina would track farther south than previous model runs had predicted. “It was a big change,” he says—and a concerning one because it meant that the storm would have more time over warm water to strengthen and that Katrina’s path had shifted westward, toward Mississippi.
With the weekend fast approaching and several hours before the official forecast would be updated, Gerard quickly e-mailed Mississippi’s emergency management agency to warn them that the state was facing a worse hit and that they needed to start preparing right away.
Just three days later, on August 29, Katrina rammed into the coast at the Louisiana-Mississippi border with a 20-mile-long wall of storm surge estimated at 24 to 28 feet high. (The exact heights that the surge reached aren’t known because most of the gauges, buildings and other structures that would provide evidence of a high-water mark were obliterated.) In the subsequent hours, the levees around New Orleans failed, releasing torrents of water into the city and making Katrina the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. in nearly 80 years.
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READ MORE: Is New Orleans Safer Now Than When Hurricane Katrina Hit 20 Years Ago?
Despite the disaster that unfolded because of human mistakes, Katrina had been a well-predicted hurricane; the forecast errors involved were lower than the average at the time. But Katrina, along with the rest of the blockbuster 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, helped spark a dedicated, government-funded effort to make hurricane forecasts even better. Over the past 20 years, that project has nearly halved the error in predictions of where a storm will go and has given communities an extra 12 hours of warning time. By one estimate, these and other improvements have saved the nation up to $5 billion for each…
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