We were a few hundred feet above the Bay of Bengal when the windshield cracked. From my window, I looked out at the black water below, roiling with foamy whitecaps. Gunmetal clouds obscured any trace of a horizon, and bullets of rain pelted the thin plexiglass that separated us from the storm. We had been aboard this Electra turboprop plane—a “hurricane hunter,” as it was known in the business—every day for a week, flying directly into the most severe monsoon storms we could track down, but this was the first moment I had felt fear.
I glanced over at Joachim Kuettner, a German atmospheric scientist and by far the most experienced member of our team. A veteran of field experiments around the world, Joach had volunteered to be the intermediary between the six scientists on board the plane and the pilot in the cockpit, relaying messages back and forth about our current coordinates or modifications to the flight path. It was Joach who had just calmly told us the windshield was cracked and that we would be dropping fuel and heading back to Calcutta. Now I tried to read the lines in his seventy-year-old face to ascertain how worried I should be, but his brow remained unfurrowed, his lips unpursed.
I scanned the rest of the team manning this flying laboratory; the world-renowned experts in the analysis and modeling of weather were perfectly silent. My Indian counterpart, a scientist named Dev Raj Sikka, studied his hands, which were folded tightly on the desk in front of him. Just behind Dev Raj, three scientists who had been chattering away all morning about the numbers on their screens had turned ashen and mute. Struck all at once by the same impulse, we began to pull mangoes and bananas from the baskets placed on board by the flight crew. With little else to do with the long moments before our demise, the six of us began peeling the fruit and taking large, joyless bites.
Just minutes before, we had all been focused on our various consoles, each executing his or her assigned task. As the chief scientist of the 1979 Summer Monsoon Experiment (MONEX for short), I kept track of the airplane’s flight path, monitored the incoming data, and announced when it was time to launch another dropsonde, a small, cylindrical sensor attached to a parachute. As each of these instruments descended into the bay, it captured an enormous array of data—altitude, temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind speed—that it sent back via radio signal to the aircraft’s recording devices as well as the computer monitors of the scientists on board. They pored over each batch of data as the plane heaved and stuttered through storm clouds that lined the sky like boulders in a creek.
The aircraft itself was also collecting information via nose and belly radar, multiple cameras, a radiometer, and a laser probe that penetrated the clouds. Meanwhile, our pilot maneuvered this flying laboratory in ever-descending elevations, carving the sky into a perfect layer cake of data until the plane was so close to the surface of the water, we could nearly count the fish below. It hadn’t occurred to me until the windshield cracked that all these fancy instruments along with all my new friends could possibly wind up in that choppy water.
As I watched gasoline stream past my window, I thought about the village I had grown up in, only a half day’s drive from the Bay of Bengal, where I had first experienced the power of a monsoon storm. I had never dreamed that one day I would be in an airplane with some of the most brilliant people in the world trying to understand what made one of these storms happen. Back then, I didn’t even know cars existed, let alone airplanes, and the storms that passed through the village each year seemed as unknowable as the jackals that howled from the edge of the fields at night. They came or they didn’t; no one tried to understand why.
During the weeks I had been in Calcutta for MONEX, communing with scientists from twenty-one other countries, many old friends and extended family members had made the journey from the village for a visit. It had been years since some of them had seen me; they remembered me as a barefoot kid kicking around a soccer ball made of old cloth and heaving cow dung into a bucket balanced on my head. Now I was wearing shiny shoes and a tie. I worked at NASA. My old neighbours looked as astonished by my new American life as I was. At thirty-five, l still felt very much like a boy from the village.
Maybe that’s because so much of the work I did studying monsoons was the direct result of seeing how vital the rains were for the people in my rural village, farmers whose families went hungry in dry years and whose livelihoods were ruined by ones that were too wet. If humanity could get better at predicting monsoon precipitation, those farmers would not be so vulnerable; they could plan ahead for difficult times, plant earlier or later, sow different crops. But so much was still unknown about monsoons—what triggered the onset of the rains, what influenced the intensity of the storms—and MONEX was the largest effort ever undertaken to bridge the wide chasms in our knowledge.
In fact, the Electra was not the only airplane collecting data for MONEX that day. Two other aircraft, a NOAA P-3 and a NASA CV-990, were also flying at high altitudes, their own cameras, radars, and lasers interrogating the atmosphere. Sixteen ships were sailing the Indian Ocean taking readings of the sea’s surface temperature. Rocketsondes—sensors launched by rockets instead of dropped from planes—were drawing arches through the stormy sky. Newly built micrometeorological towers on the east coast of India were recording wind turbulence. Weather balloons were drifting into the heavens at almost all hours of the day.
Ours was merely one phase of the Summer MONEX; earlier, there had been a two-month field experiment in the Arabian Sea. Scientists who had participated in the Winter MONEX in the South China Sea were already back at their home institutions attempting to wring meaning from the cache of data they had collected.
Incredibly, MONEX was just one of a half a dozen regional experiments happening under the banner of 1979’s Global Weather Experiment, an unprecedented effort to collect atmospheric and oceanic observations from around the world to improve the burgeoning field of numerical weather prediction. As ever-smarter supercomputers were giving humans the capacity to make millions of complicated calculations in mere seconds, we desperately needed a better understanding of the science behind those calculations—the interactions between air pressure, wind, mountains, humidity, radiation from the sun, cloud cover, the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and so on—not to mention the numbers to plug into them, vast tomes of data from places we had never collected it, such as the sky over the Bay of Bengal during the summer monsoon.
As the Electra shook with a sudden gust of wind, I gazed into the heart of the storm, hoping mightily that the plane, its passengers, and all this precious data would make it safely to the ground.
In 1961, a newly elected President Kennedy approached his science adviser, a man named Jerome Wiesner, and asked him for advice about his upcoming talk at the United Nations. Kennedy was looking for a flashy new project to propose, a scientific endeavour that could bring the world together at the height of Cold War tensions. Earlier in the year he had announced to Congress that the United States would send a man to the moon before the decade was over. Now he wanted to propose a similar challenge to his counterparts at the UN, something that would inspire cooperation and unity during a time of mistrust and deep division.
Wiesner, an electrical engineer who had made a name for himself developing microwave radar at MIT (he would later go on to serve as that institution’s president), polled his colleagues at the university. What pressing scientific needs should mankind address next? he wanted to know. His friend Jule Charney had an idea—a global weather experiment. Every day for one year, people all over the world would take as many detailed observations of the weather as possible, using existing infrastructure like the weather stations humans had been building for centuries but also deploying new instruments to farther reaches than ever before.
At the time, Charney was in the midst of revolutionizing the field of meteorology. Instead of making weather predictions based on what had happened in the past, as scientists had done for years, Charney produced weather forecasts using only a supercomputer, the laws of physics, and initial conditions—that is, the atmospheric conditions at this very moment. The initial conditions of today are almost entirely responsible for the weather tomorrow and the day after that. But in 1961—before satellites began orbiting the globe and before many countries had invested in legitimate weather services—gathering those vital numbers was still a challenge. Charney envisioned this global weather experiment as a scientific marathon that would demonstrate that more observations and more accurate initial conditions enhanced supercomputer—derived weather forecasts. An effort like this would not only improve countless lives around the planet but also remind the world that despite cultural and political divides, humankind had more commonalities than differences. We all lived under the same sky, after all.
Dr. Jagadish Shukla is a professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University. He is internationally recognised for his role in the development of weather and climate science. For his work as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th assessment, his team shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.
