What to expect as Hurricane Isaias bears down on the Gulf Coast as a major storm
The fact that we can tell you Isaias will hit Friday night with 120 mph winds is a quiet miracle of physics. We know its category, its speed, its likely landfall, and yet the best anyone can do is get out of the way. There's something humbling about that, how precise our knowledge has become and how powerless it leaves us anyway.
I'd want to know how warm the Gulf waters are right now, because that's the fuel. A hurricane is basically a heat engine, spinning ocean warmth into wind and rain, and the hotter the water, the more it feeds itself. That connects straight to the bigger climate picture, but I don't need to spell that out. The storm does it for me.
What sticks with me is Michael Brennan at the National Hurricane Center calmly laying out what's coming. Forecasting has gotten so good that we forget how recently a storm like this would have arrived almost without warning. The wonder is in the prediction itself, not just the destruction it describes.