On the evening of Saturday, August 27th, 2011, the volunteer fire department in Prattsville, New York held its annual clambake. The event has not historically been associated with temperance, but that year, the festivities broke up early. Prattsville is a sleepy town of fewer than 1,000 residents in the northern Catskill Mountains, about 100 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. It’s leaf-peeping country, not tropical storm country. But a hurricane was moving up the East Coast, and Sunday’s forecast called for rain. Meteorologists had predicted that the Catskills would get a peripheral spray, rather than the storm’s brunt, which was slated for New York City and Long Island. Still, Tom Olson, who was then fire chief, intended to be ready.
In his late 40s, with an average build and short, dark hair flecked with gray, Olson has lived in Prattsville all his life. Soft-spoken almost to the point of shyness, he delivers mail for a living, and cannot help but know most everyone in town. Until 2011 Olson primarily associated flooding with cold weather. When he was young, the Schoharie Creek — a gentle tributary of the Mohawk River that runs along Main Street, past the firehouse — used to jam with ice, forcing water onto the road. On such occasions, the fire department had often helped pump out waterlogged basements. He suspected that Sunday might be similar.
Olson woke around 6:30AM at his home in the hills above town. He got in his Dodge Ram 3500 pickup, a 2006 model that would not survive the day, and drove down to the station where he monitored the creek. Rain fell hard and warm through the humid air. Though he felt no panic, at 8AM, he decided to man the firehouse, sounding its alarm to summon to duty roughly 15 firefighters. As they arrived, he sent them on foot in crews of three and four to knock on the doors of homes he considered likely to flood. It might be wise, he thought, to suggest to people living in low-lying areas that they take shelter at the firehouse.
By noon, all of them were trapped
People living in low-lying areas of Prattsville, however, weren’t inclined to flee. To most, conditions that morning didn’t appear likely to inflict damage worse than what they’d seen many times before — water in the basement, perhaps some flattening of the lawn.
Pamela Young, who graduated from high school with Olson, lived in the same house where as a child she had visited her grandparents, who moved there in 1947. She saw no reason to drag her son and nephew — both nine — plus two dogs and a cat, out in a downpour. Peggy and Jim Young, who were both in their 50s — and who have no relation to Pamela — had spent the night before watching the Weather Channel, a favorite pastime. What they saw didn’t much worry them. With their adult sons, Brian and John, they used the morning to move items stored near ground-level in their home and their store on Main Street to higher, seemingly flood-safe locations. Scott Jackson, who lived with his four young children in a rented home across the street from the creek, was perhaps the least concerned of the bunch, spending the morning with coffee and TV. But by noon, all of them, together with perhaps several dozen others who lived and worked in downtown Prattsville, were trapped — on rooftops and on the upper floors of their homes, as floodwaters from Hurricane Irene, the ninth named storm of the 2011 hurricane season, submerged much of the town.
Tom Olson, in the Prattsville firehouse
Over the course of 12 hours that Sunday, between 11 and 18 inches of rain fell on the Schoharie Valley — roughly 30 percent of the region’s annual average. At their height, floodwaters on Main Street are thought to have measured perhaps six to eight feet deep. The US Geological Survey later estimated the Schoharie Creek’s peak flow rate during the storm at 120,000 cubic feet per second — 24 percent larger than what FEMA had projected might occur during a 500-year flood, and more than twice as large as the previous recorded high.
Set off by two creek overflows, the water surged suddenly, leaving little time to prepare or react. In late morning, it began spilling through the front doors of the firehouse. Olson led the roughly 20 people inside to the second floor. Through Main Street, the water moved in a rust-colored torrent, swallowing pavement and washing away cars and trailers, so that a goulash of hazardous debris roiled below the surface. The fire department, the town’s sole emergency team, had neither the equipment nor the expertise for water rescue, and their evacuation efforts came to an abrupt halt. "At a certain point, we had to stop," Olson recalled. "Because now, we’re putting our people in harm’s way."
Young’s home eventually tore loose from its foundation and began to disintegrate
Trapped on the second floor of the firehouse in an open, wood-paneled room decorated with decades’ worth of trophies commemorating local parades, Olson watched the water rise. His truck, which he’d parked near the station, was likely already destroyed — flooded beyond repair. Prattsville had lost power. The radio Olson had been using to communicate with Greene County Emergency Services soon went down, too. His phone rang constantly. Olson’s neighbors were calling 911, and Randy Omerod, at the county emergency office, was calling Olson. Both men understood that there was nothing Olson could do, but they saw no option but to follow protocol. "I got a guy with four kids in a house," Omerod told Olson at one point. "He’s thinking about jumping." "Well," Olson replied, exasperated, "tell ‘em don’t jump!"
Not long after declining to leave her house, Pamela Young realized she’d made a mistake. She called Olson, her old classmate, on his cell. "Tommy, you gotta come get me," she said. Again, Olson was forced to demur. "I had to tell her, ‘Listen, Pam, I’m sorry. I can’t,’" Olson said later. He made a pea-pinching motion with his index finger and his thumb: "You feel about that big."
Young’s home eventually tore loose from its foundation and began to disintegrate. When she felt the house shift, Young led her son, Joey, and her nephew, Riley, onto the the flat roof of an addition, a distinct structure. By late afternoon, Young said recently, she had called 911 perhaps 10 times. But emergency responders outside of Prattsville seemed to be just as hobbled as they were in town. Young was told that boats were coming, then that a helicopter was en route, and then that the helicopter wasn’t coming, after all. Later, she learned that the first boat she’d heard about had capsized. During her last 911 call that day, Young asked what she might use, if necessary, as a raft. The dispatcher didn’t know. "Just don’t use a mattress," he said.
An abandoned Prattsville home, destroyed by Hurricane Irene
In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published a report on the state of weather observation in the US. "Observing Weather and Climate from the Ground Up: A Nationwide Network of Networks" indicated that the nation’s radar system remained the best in the world. Advances of recent years in inexpensive atmospheric observation technology — and fervent public demand for up-to-the-minute forecasts — had furthermore allowed thousands of players, including small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, and local and state agencies, to enter the field. Nonetheless, the authors wrote, "all [was] not well with atmospheric and related environmental observations."
While the radar, satellites, and supercomputers used by National Weather Service meteorologists excelled at big-picture projections, they could provide only limited, low-resolution information about conditions on the ground in specific locations. At the surface-level, data on things like rainfall, wind, and humidity was being collected from state to state in a chaotic, non-standardized fashion, using a hodgepodge of poorly coordinated networks. The report held a variety of negative implications for research scientists, but it also carried an urgent message. The US was ill-prepared to track weather on the mesoscale — systems that range from the size of a small city to an average Midwestern state — precisely the scale on which extreme weather events, like Hurricane Irene, occur.
Recent meteorological patterns make that fact disquieting. In August, shortly after a 39-hour Louisiana rain caused flooding that destroyed more than 40,000 homes and killed at least nine people, ClimateWire noted that in "the past year alone, catastrophic rain events characterized as once-in-500-year or even once-in-1,000-year events have flooded West Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina." Such events have become more common in recent decades — a spike consistent with human-caused climate change, complete with rising temperatures that increase atmospheric water vapor, producing intensified rainfall.
In the last 50 years, extreme rainfall in the Northeastern United States has increased by about 74 percent, more than any other region of the country. According to a recent study published by the American Meteorological Society, New York is among the states most economically vulnerable to the adverse effects of weather variability. Ten days after Hurricane Irene, Tropical Storm Lee, a lesser cyclone, hit New York. Together, the storms inflicted more than $1 billion worth of damage statewide and left 12 people dead. To date, in the history of New York, only the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 rival the storms for recovery costs.
The 2011 storms provided a timely, if unpleasant impetus for New York to apply the findings of the NAS report, which had gone largely unheeded at the state level. The authors of the report recommended a nationwide web of interlinked state networks, each comprised of surface-level observation stations — the titular network of networks. In theory, such a system would fill the informational gaps left by top-down apparatus, like satellites, and those unaccounted for by existing surface-level stations.
The State University of New York at Albany has one of the largest concentrations of weather research scientists in the country. In the months after Irene, Chris Thorncroft, who chairs Albany’s Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, and other scientists at the university, took the first steps toward the adoption of an observation system that might mitigate the ravages of future storms. Known as a "mesonet," it was modeled after one in Oklahoma, which had enabled industry there to protect assets from oncoming storms, and helped public safety workers to remove residents from the paths of tornadoes.
The New York State Mesonet, which Thorncroft now oversees, is funded by a $30 million FEMA grant. Comprised of 126 observation towers, densely spaced at no more than 30 miles apart, the new network will make data transmissions every five minutes to a wide range of meteorologists, emergency managers, and private-sector partners. When it’s complete, New York’s statewide weather network will be the most advanced in the country — uniquely well-suited to respond to the sorts of extreme events associated with climate change. Currently under construction, it is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of the year.
A map of flood zones hanging in the the New York State Mesonet command center in SUNY's Albany campus
For the average smartphone user, the ready accessibility of forecasts understates the mysteries they seek to address. A canceler of ballgames and planner of picnics, modern meteorology is a workaday brand of divination — a wholly practical magic. During the 19th century, our understanding of our relationship to nature was substantially more fraught. The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, in 1859, was followed two years later by England’s first official weather forecasts, published daily in the London Times. Often surprisingly accurate, they were derived, like today’s forecasts, from a great mass of data — measurements of temperature, wind, barometric pressure, and rainfall — much of it culled from the logbooks of naval captains and explorers. The resultant predictions often aimed to reduce the risk of death at sea. But many found them upsetting — a source of existential angst. In their attempt to prophesy the future, weather forecasts could seem to spring from the same heretical abandon that had induced Darwin to probe the role of God in the makeup of the past.
The man largely responsible for those forecasts was Robert FitzRoy, an aristocrat and scientist who, 30 years earlier, had captained Darwin’s ship on the journey that would produce The Voyage of the Beagle. Even FitzRoy, however, struggled with the tension between science and faith. An intensely religious man, he doubted any theory contradicting the Bible. He once suggested that the dinosaurs, having been too ungainly for Noah’s ark, must have died off in the deluge.
As journalist Cynthia Barnett notes in Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, at the time, forecasting was widely considered "an immoral pseudo-science." The British press sometimes equated it with astrology, and in the 1860s, England enacted a ban on public forecasts, ostensibly to defend against inaccurate predictions. "Darker motives were also at work," Barnett writes. "For one, the large ship-salvage companies of Cornwall and Devon complained to Parliament that the forecasts were putting them out of business."
Forecasting was widely considered "an immoral pseudo-science."
If meteorology seemed to many Victorians perhaps vaguely redolent of witchcraft, the obsessive measurement-taking that underlay the nascent science nonetheless had an estimable pedigree. The first written reference to a rain gauge can be found in the writings of the Hindu philosopher and statesman Kautilya, circa 300 BC. King Sejong the Great, who ruled Korea from 1418 to 1450, demanded that even his most far-flung villages make use of a more advanced gauge to report back to him on rainfall. Thomas Jefferson also put great stock in his store of weathervanes, thermometers, and rain gauges. In Philadelphia, shortly after the Continental Congress adopted his Declaration of Independence, he found time to stop off at Sparhawk’s apothecary, purchasing a barometer to add to his collection.
In The Weather Experiment, an account of the birth of modern forecasting, Peter Moore writes of the Georgian era, "For many who believed that nature, after the Bible, was God’s second book, the quest to understand the natural world, to peek into the celestial machine, became a spiritual experience. A careful eye and inquisitive mind might…bring them, for a moment, closer to God." And yet, even the most devoted atmospheric observers of the time considered weather’s operation essentially mysterious — beyond human reckoning.
The tradition endures. In 2011, wildfires swallowed more than 1.8 million Texas acres during a long drought, destroying hundreds of homes and burning up crops and businesses. Governor Rick Perry, who was at the time contemplating the White House, appealed to God:
I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 23, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.
Chris Thorncroft, chair of Albany’s Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences
By the time Hurricane Irene reached the US, meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center in Miami had been tracking the storm for weeks. Using satellites, radar, and complex multivariable equations executed by powerful computers, they followed it from its origins, on the West African coast. While it remained hundreds of miles away from the Eastern seaboard, they could predict its movements with fairly good accuracy. But once Irene arrived, meteorologists were unable to judge how conditions differed from minute to minute, or from county to county.
In New York, the National Weather Service was relying on ground-level data from a mere 27 observation stations. Most were at airports, and did not accurately represent the state’s varied weather or topography. Transmitting measurements only once an hour, they also failed to provide information in sufficient quality or quantity. While Irene bore down, New York was like a kingdom with farsighted lookouts on the ramparts, with no way of keeping track of invaders who managed to breach the castle gates. As the storm laid siege, the intelligence available to emergency managers — a broad category including local firefighters, state officials overseeing road and bridge closures, and federal disaster relief czars — was full of holes, making the hurricane’s assault impossible to analyze holistically in real time.
As the storm laid siege, the intelligence available to emergency managers was full of holes
A major part of the trouble arose from the highly localized character of extreme weather; even within one storm, conditions can vary vastly. Irene’s center, which passed through Brooklyn and Manhattan — where subways had been closed and pantries stocked — was relatively calm. Its strongest winds blew to the east, bringing down trees and electrical lines on Long Island. Irene’s most damaging effects, however, came from rain, which concentrated in bands on the storm’s western flank, over the Catskills, Vermont, and northern New Hampshire.
Curtis Marshall is the program director for the National Mesonet Program at the National Weather Service — a sporadically connected network of state-based programs established after the publication of the 2009 NAS report. He is also one of the principal authors of Building from the Ground Up. Marshall told me, "Our capabilities for observation have not kept up with our capabilities for forecasting." In effect, the basics have often been neglected: "We have sophisticated models capable of providing forecasts for short-term, high-impact events, but the results of your calculations are only as good as the observations you feed into them."
"We knew that it was raining," Thorncroft said of the 2011 storms. "But we did not know how much it was raining, or exactly where rain was falling. We didn’t know, until after the fact, that records were being broken."
In the early 1980s, when Ken Crawford, who was then head meteorologist at the Norman, Oklahoma office of the National Weather Service, began thinking about weaknesses in the state’s system, he noticed similar deficiencies. He felt vexed, especially by a number of recent severe floods, about which, due to a lack of data, almost nothing meaningful could be said.
Oklahoma relied on stations consisting of little more than "a stick stuck into a rain gauge."
Around that time, in a meeting with several Japanese meteorologists, Crawford, who is considered "the father of the mesonet," was shown a glossy plan for an island-wide system of automated observation stations. The Japanese scientists wanted to see Oklahoma’s equivalent. Crawford felt embarrassed. His state relied on stations consisting of little more than "a stick stuck into a rain gauge," he would later recall. Readings were taken manually, often by elderly volunteers who made frequent typographical errors. But that meeting became the seed from which the original mesonet grew. By the mid-‘80s, Crawford had developed a system not dissimilar from the one the Japanese scientists showed him, but funding lagged and the network didn’t go live until 1994.
Since then, it has repeatedly proven its merit. In May 1999, as several tornadoes moved through central Oklahoma, the mesonet was used to divert a law enforcement caravan when forecasters determined that a cyclone would cross the highway on which the vehicles were traveling. During the same set of storms, about 45 miles away, an emergency manager drew on mesonet data to evacuate a large mall minutes before it was destroyed. Late last year, as heavy rains caused historic overflows of the Grand River, mesonet measurements helped emergency managers to issue county-specific evacuation warnings in advance of devastating floods.
But financing for a full mesonet system remains out of reach for most states. In New York, FEMA’s contribution covers only construction. The network’s operating budget will rely on specialized services offered to the private sector for a fee. Agricultural clients will receive reports tailored to mitigate damage from insects and disease, and others to optimize spraying, irrigation, frost protection, planting, and harvesting. The mesonet will supply energy producers with improved wind and solar data, as well as customized short-term forecasts designed to limit profit loss during extreme weather events. Additional revenue is likely to come from freight and travel-related industries. To a significant degree, it is New York’s sensitivity to erratic weather that will provide the mesonet’s lifeblood.
New York State Mesonet command center at the SUNY, Albany campus
The New York State Mesonet command center is located below ground, in a building on the SUNY Albany campus. A visitor there might well be treated to a quip about the fact that the office, which is devoted to the observation of outdoor phenomena, has no windows. It can be reached through the tunnels that snake below campus, affording students and faculty shelter from inclement weather. I met Chris Thorncroft there on a warm, humid day in July. He wore a navy polo shirt untucked over brown khakis, frameless ovular glasses, and short gray hair.
On one wall of an open, low-ceilinged room, a large flat screen displayed 49 panels in a seven-by-seven grid. Each panel showed a feed from a camera affixed to a mesonet tower somewhere in the state: Westmoreland, Wallkill, Whiteface Mountain, Camden, Morrisville, Elmira, Cold Brook. It was an incomplete array. As of 10 minutes earlier, Thorncroft said, 55 sites had been completed. Finished towers begin broadcasting readings immediately. Basic mesonet data is available free to the public online, and also gets transmitted directly to the New York State Office of Emergency Management and the National Weather Service, whose forecasts trickle down to newscasters, weather apps, and the like.
Thorncroft has been working on a method for predicting, from the moment a system leaves the African coast, whether it will become a hurricane
Thorncroft examined another flat screen, showing a radar image of an approaching storm, and we set off for a tower in Schaghticoke, about 20 miles away. The Schaghticoke tower stands on property occupied by the town’s Highway Department. By the time we arrived, the storm had, too, and we waited out the rain in Thorncroft’s car. Deep puddles formed in the dirt parking lot and lightning broke through the late afternoon sky, which was dark gray, urgent with swift clouds. Thorncroft pointed to shreds of ashen vapor that seemed to be tearing away from one another, leaving wisps between them. When you see that sort of thing, he said, you know that there’s a lot of stirred up energy in the atmosphere—an ambient upset that tends to resolve itself in rain.
Thorncroft speaks with a clipped but genial frankness common to many people who are British and also to many people who are very good at math. Thorncroft is both. His research focuses primarily on the relationship between Atlantic hurricanes and the West African low-pressure systems from which roughly 85 percent of them develop. Hurricane Irene began as such a system. For some time, Thorncroft has been working on a method for predicting, from the moment a system leaves the African coast, whether it will become a hurricane. He regards the solution to the problem as his Holy Grail.
During a break in the storm, we walked past mounds of mulch and soil to where the tower stood, protected by wire fencing, on a patch of grass. Thirty feet tall and made of bright metal, its slender frame extended arms and instruments at intervals, like a bird feeder offering various meals to different species. The meteorologists I spoke with were all quick to point out that the mesonet will work in concert with extant stations, rather than replace them. The factor by which the new network increases observational capacity, however, suggests the depth of the old one’s inadequacy.
A mesonet tower
The mesonet’s improvements take two basic forms. The first is an entirely new kind of vertical profiling technology, present at 17 of the towers. Though its presentation is unglamorous — "It’s a box," Thorncroft says, "it looks like a mailbox." — Thorncroft calls it a "game changer." Using an electromagnetic beam, the box plumbs the ether to take a kind of atmospheric core sample six miles high. Each sample will show layers of temperature, humidity, and wind activity — a profile of conditions in flux through elevation — that represent statistical mana to meteorologists on the ground. "The control of our weather is coming from above," Thorncroft said. "Cyclones, anticyclones, fronts: these exist up into the atmosphere. In order to understand how they’re evolving, you need to know what is happening up there."
This is particularly true for near-term, extreme weather forecasts. Up until now, New York has relied on just three sites for atmospheric profiles. Launches in Long Island, Buffalo, and Albany send up high-altitude weather balloons twice daily. But their transmissions are relatively few, somewhat irregular, and they account for only a small portion of the state.
"If you want to know if the next few days are going to be sunny or stormy, a coarser-resolution [balloon-based] network will give you the gist of the information you need to make a forecast," Curtis Marshall told me. "But if you want to know over the next 12–24 hours if a hurricane or a squall line is going to impact a locality or region, you need to have to have this finer-resolution observational data." He continued, "How levels of wind and moisture change with height in the atmosphere — that tells you the most about how these smaller scale systems will evolve in time, where they will go and what they will do."
"It’s like looking out the window every five minutes at 125 places around the state."
It’s not clear whether 17 enhanced sites will be sufficient to capture atmospheric happenings statewide, but Thorncroft is optimistic. "Once you make a profile of a site, that information gets shifted downstream — it’s in a model. When you’re taking a profile every five minutes, that will give you a very accurate picture of the whole state, not just of the 17 sites." Here, the distance between observation and forecast can shrink, eliminating the dizzyingly complex, variable-rich intermediary equations used for longer-term predictions. The resultant practice is called Nowcasting, and can be useful to monitor and warn for the erratic, highly localized behavior of extreme weather. "When you know how the weather has been evolving in the last hour, you can project what’s going to happen in the next hour," Thorncroft said.
The mesonet’s second major improvement lies simply in the volume, density, and quality of its uptake. Each tower transmits basic measurements including rainfall, air temperature, wind speed, wind direction, surface pressure, and humidity. In cold weather, they will register the time and location at which falling water turns from freezing rain to snow, from sleet to hail. "It’s like looking out the window every five minutes at 125 places around the state," Thorncroft said. The sites also collect data that has been largely neglected, but which is essential to anticipating the kind of flooding precipitated by the 2011 storms: soil moisture and temperature, radiation, snowpack.
In addition to aiding forecasters and other decision-makers in moments of crisis, both vertical profiling sites and standard mesonet towers will supply data to longer-term forecasting models that fall under the canopy of Numerical Weather Prediction. The province of the aforementioned horrifyingly complicated algorithms, Numerical Weather Prediction addresses a range of time scales, from three days out to the vast arcs of climatic change. Naturally, each data point, equation, model, and prediction informs myriad others: to understand that an Atlantic hurricane began as a series of weak rain showers in West Africa requires one kind of knowledge, predicting that storm’s course over a five-day period another. It can also say how much it has been raining and for how long in a rural county in Upstate New York — to know that the soil there is saturated and that soon, the rivers will flood — and other kinds still.
Entrance to the the New York State Office of Emergency Management center
The New York State Office of Emergency Management stands in a gray, labyrinthine office park not far from the mesonet command center, in Albany. It too occupies subterranean quarters: a Cold War-era bunker a la Dr. Strangelove, constructed to function as a temporary state government base of operations in the event of nuclear attack. Inside, the OEM’s halls are decorated with framed photographs commemorating disasters both irrefutably man-made and ostensibly natural: the 1995 Sunrise Wildfire, on Long Island; wreckage from September 11th and from the crash of TWA Flight 800; destruction wrought by Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy and Tropical Storm Lee.
One afternoon this summer, Kevin Wisely, the director of the OEM, led me through the office’s Emergency Operations Center. During an event that requires maximal state-level response — a "full activation" — the center bustles with representatives from 29 agencies, including the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Department of Transportation, the Office of Fire Prevention and Control, and the National Weather Service. During my visit, the center was dormant — cool, dim, and empty. CNN, MSNBC, and the Weather Channel flickered silently from wall-mounted flat screens.
It’s difficult to summarize the activity of the OEM, but Wisely, a bald and solidly built man with the warm, soldierly manner of a good-hearted State Trooper, tried to sketch out the general order of operations: information flows up, beginning with emergency managers and local executives in towns and villages, while resources, or "assets," and direction move down from centralized agencies, in accordance with received intelligence.
Hurricane Irene was what the OEM calls a "notice" event: one the state specifically anticipated. Assets were mustered well before landfall: sandbagging units and swiftwater rescue teams, light towers, generators, high-axle vehicles, ready-to-eat meals, and other items. But they were deployed largely in and around the New York metropolitan area, where forecasters had predicted that the storm would land its heaviest blows.
By the time the OEM had received enough information to establish a reasonably complete picture of statewide conditions, travel had become difficult. Long Island fire crews that needed to be transferred to the Catskills and the Adirondacks were hampered by sinkholes. Asphalt had torn away from roadbeds. Long stretches of the New York Thruway were closed. In Prattsville, Tom Olson was told that he’d have to wait for assistance to arrive from Newburgh, more than 80 miles away; dozens of other emergency managers faced similar predicaments. Rescue teams did not reach Prattsville until late afternoon, when floodwaters had already largely receded.
Kevin Wisely, director of OEM
It’s impossible to say with certainty how upstate New York might fare if a hurricane were to pass through next year, with the mesonet in place. Every storm is different, and the chaos of extreme weather does not permit perfect planning. But by the end of 2016, the informational gaps that plagued emergency response in 2011 will have been substantially closed. Mesonet towers will equip the OEM with a continually updated view of meteorological goings-on statewide, so that if conditions worsen suddenly, emergency managers will know exactly when and where. Mesonet intelligence should largely eliminate the sort of paralysis that occurred during the 2011 storms.
To make optimal use of mesonet data, in August 2015, Governor Andrew Cuomo introduced New York Responds, a $1.5 million initiative to supplant the patchwork of county-specific emergency management software then in use with a statewide network. The new software integrates real-time measurements from mesonet stations — plus forecasts and models created by the National Weather Service from the raw data — with incident reports, resource requests, and status updates from emergency managers. Officials at every level can access a "common operating snapshot": power outages, reports on infrastructure, traffic cameras. To make emergency response nimbler, the OEM has established nine supply depots across the state, whose inventories can be augmented in advance of storms.
A true nationwide network of networks would provide something like a comprehensive vision of the hyper local
The advantages of the New York State Mesonet and the emergency infrastructure it informs are nonetheless limited. Neighboring states, visited by weather that has passed through New York, will benefit from the X-rays the mesonet provides. For now, though, those neighbors have nothing analogous to offer. How many other states ultimately participate in a system like the one described in the 2009 NAS report will likely depend on the benefits, humanitarian and financial, that New York derives from Chris Thorncroft’s mesonet.
A true nationwide network of networks would provide something like a comprehensive vision of the hyper local — a technical apotheosis of the methods applied by Sejong the Great, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert FitzRoy, enabling accurate Nowcasting across the country. Such a system would leave many meteorological questions unanswered, like which West African low-pressure systems will become hurricanes — Thorncroft’s Holy Grail — but it would also vastly improve the accuracy of mathematical models used to sketch global patterns, like the the progress of climate change.
It’s odd to consider that our understanding of historical atmospheric shifts depends on the careful tallying of minutiae. Odder still to think that despite leaps in technological and analytical wisdom, parsing the relationship between humans and nature has become, if anything, more complicated. Although "scientists detect the force of climate change in an increasing number of extreme weather events," Cynthia Barnett writes, they "can’t tie the tragedy of any particular deluge or drought to human-caused climate change." As one scientist told her, "Rainfall and other weather events happening today are happening in a different climate than one hundred years ago, and so they are behaving differently than they would have a hundred years ago. The question is how much."
Over time, the New York State Mesonet will help to begin answering that question. But for many, a "peek into the celestial machine" now involves a reckoning with the startling power of our species. Where weather wonks of centuries past sought in rain gauges and barometers something like a brush with divinity, in the pointillism that emerges from today’s observation stations, we hunt, strangely, for traces of ourselves.
David Rikard, inside his home office. His home which previously sat on the same plat was destroyed by Irene
In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, Governor Cuomo declared Prattsville one of the state’s hardest hit communities. Each of its 22 businesses was damaged or destroyed. Eleven homes collapsed. Fifteen more were condemned. One hundred houses were so wrecked as to be unlivable without substantial rehabilitation. And yet, Prattsville was lucky. By late afternoon on the day of the storm, Tom Olson and his crew were able to walk out the front door of the firehouse. With the help of an out-of-town rescue team, Pamela Young and her son and nephew — plus the two dogs and a cat — made it safely to a neighbor’s house. The second storm, Lee, mostly passed the town by. It escaped fatalities; Spring Valley, New Scotland, Altona, and other New York towns did not.
Those who endured the storm in Prattsville are inclined to divide their lives into two epochs: before the flood, and after. I visited the town on a bright, cloudless day in June. At first, it seemed a kind of bucolic ideal in miniature. Crisp American flags hung from telephone poles downtown and gnome-sized lilies grew from the banks of the Schoharie Creek, which was running low and clear. Atop a distant green hill, a red tractor stood parked beside a neat, white homestead. Amid this rural idyll, the abandoned homes on Main Street had an eerie presence.
A red X still marked the storm door of the small, green house where Scott Jackson distracted his children with board games upstairs as the water rose to five feet in his living room. Nearby, boards obscured the windows of a home that might have once been purple or periwinkle, its low front porch had warped with rot, admitting intrusions of tall grass. Across the street, a paneless picture window looked into what had been a living room; an upright piano stood at an odd angle in the dark beside an overturned couch and an overturned swivel chair and a folded stroller, all covered in dust.
Peggy Young indicates how high the water had risen inside her home
David Rikard, a lawyer, judge, and a member of the fire department, told me that the day after the storm had been very much like this one, only hotter. Rikard had spent much of it on the second floor of the stationhouse with Tom Olson. His home was among those condemned and demolished after the storm; his daughter, Anastasia, had escaped from an upstairs window with the help of a water rescue team.
A man of sardonic wit and robust physique, Rikard had rebuilt on the same site and reestablished his practice in a first-floor home office, where we spoke as afternoon bled into evening. "Those blue, hot, cloudless skies," he remembered. "That heat. That feeling of steam coming off everything." Riverbottom mud, sticky, rank, and black, had coated much of the town. Volunteers, and representatives from state and federal agencies thronged Main Street. Overhead, helicopters beat the air. "Things felt surreal at that point," Rikard continued. "It reminded me of Apocalypse Now."
Pamela Young wasn’t in town on the day of my visit. She still owns the land where her grandparents once lived, but their house had been torn down. She has not rebuilt there. Instead, she settled closer to Albany, where she works. Househunting, a broker had shown her an attractive home in a country setting. Around back, a small stream cut through the yard. "Right away, I said, ‘No,’" Young told me recently. The broker was surprised; the stream didn’t seem to her remotely threatening. "I told her, ‘I’ve already seen how powerful water is,’" Young said. "It’s unimaginable. And the funny thing is, after [the storm] happened, you would drive a couple of miles out of town, and it was like nothing. And then you come to our town, and it’s like someone dropped a bomb and flew away. It’s bizarre. It’s just bizarre what can happen."
Peggy and Jim Young had rebuilt on Main Street, too, though neither their store nor their home had been as badly damaged as Rikard’s house. Peggy is slim and blonde, with light eyes. She and I sat on patio furniture upstairs at Young’s Agway and Hardware, a few hours before closing time. Taxidermied specimens of grizzly and Kodiak stood close by, as did a display of casual women’s wear. Peggy and her family had spent most of the storm on the roof of a sturdy outdoor shed, besieged by surging water. For hours that day, they believed they would die. Talking about it, Peggy’s eyes well up. She and her husband no longer watch the Weather Channel. For them, storm footage can cause an unpleasant flashback effect. Besides, they are skeptical of forecasts.
Editor: Michael Zelenko