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Disaster aversion:

The quest to control hurricanes

By Rivka Galchen

Like many a girl with a long-dead father, I refer to myself as a girl rather than as a woman, and I gravitate to places I suspect my father, dead fifteen years now, might haunt. My father was a left-handed professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, an Israeli immigrant who never saw the interior of a mall, who remained suspicious of proposed etiologies of global warming, who liked nothing quite so much as a Sunday morning of watching political “arguing shows,” and who regularly called my best friend in elementary school “the Huguenot,” for no other reason, I think, than that her last name sounded vaguely French and he liked saying the word. His office answering machine promised to return calls “as soon as feasible.” So, naturally, when the Whitney Museum put on a Buckminster Fuller-retrospective—one advertisement featured Fuller’s diagram for a weatherproof dome over forty blocks of Manhattan—I went.

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SEE ALSO: Biography; Rosenfeld, Daniel; Emanuel, Kerry A.; Meteorology; Galchen, Rivka; Hoffman, Ross N.; Views on hurricane modification; Weather control

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