His Eyes Are Always on a Storm

He’s bald, 64 years old and has a face that even he says “is made for radio.” But when a major hurricane threatens the East Coast, Jerry Jarrell is perhaps the most-watched man on television.

As director of the National Hurricane Center, Jarrell is often in the eye of the television camera, explaining to anxious residents who want to know exactly where the storm will strike. And he often doesn’t know.

“It’s taking an awful track,” Jarrell said Tuesday in a voice ravaged by a cold and overuse. “It’s just so close to the coastline. Just one little jog to the left . . . “

From a bunker-like building on the campus of Florida International University, about 12 miles west of downtown Miami, Jarrell directs a staff of about 50, most of them meteorologists, charged with forecasting the movements of an average 10 tropical storms and hurricanes that form in the Atlantic and Caribbean each year. The hurricane center is an arm of the National Weather Service here and operates on an annual budget of about $4 million.

The latest conundrum was named Floyd. Jarrell sat staring at a television monitor showing an endless loop of a swirling, multicolored blob that seemed to be devouring the Bahamas as it moved toward Florida.

Just one little jog to the left would take the powerful storm, packing winds of 140 miles an hour, across the coastline to uproot trees, smash homes and cause widespread flooding with tides of up to 20 feet above normal.

A hurricane as powerful as Floyd can easily kill. “This is an extremely dangerous storm,” Jarrell repeated over and over again.

Yet neither Jarrell nor any of the other seven hurricane specialists who work out of the weather service office here can predict with unerring accuracy just where Hurricane Floyd will strike. Most forecast models say the storm will make landfall late today near Charleston, S.C., the same area blasted by Hugo 10 years ago.

But what about the residents of North Florida, Georgia and further north? Are they off the hook?

“You have to go out and tell people to prepare even though they may not get hit hard,” said Jarrell, a West Virginia coal miner’s son who studied meteorology in the Navy and became director of the National Hurricane Center last year after serving as deputy director since 1988. “You can’t afford not to.

“But then we get into this dilemma of putting up warnings about winds that are not going to happen. Our predictive abilities are improving. But there is still overwarning.”

Indeed, technology and a more sophisticated understanding of meteorological forces have advanced the weather forecaster’s art in recent years. Planes with banks of atmosphere-measuring instruments fly in and out of storms constantly. Computers crunch readings from sea temperatures, pressure gradients and wind speeds to produce models of possible storm tracks. Satellites rotating above the Earth keep a watch on storms around the clock.

But 48 million people now live in hurricane-prone areas on the East and Gulf coasts, and Jarrell must weigh their safety with the knowledge that hanging shutters and evacuating may have been uncalled for.

In fact, the mandatory evacuation of tens of thousands of South Florida residents Monday turned out to be unnecessary. The Miami area got barely any heavy weather at all.

“We try to balance public safety and economics and the nuisance factor,” said Jarrell. “But we are not perfect.”

What is perfect is knowledge of where the storm has been. On Tuesday afternoon, Jarrell watched with growing concern as the 500-mile-wide storm whirled through the northern Bahamas. “I think the Bahamas are getting pounded right now,” he said. “I think we’re going to have a real disaster out there.”

Indeed, ham radio operators at the hurricane center received reports that wind gusts up to 180 mph had been recorded on the Bahamas’ Eleuthera Island.

About 15 feet away from the computers and charts where Jarrell and the other specialists make their forecasts--updated every three hours--a gathering throng of reporters was camped amid a forest of television cameras, lights, electric cables and junk food boxes.

Over and over, for the third consecutive day, Jarrell or one of the others slipped into the seat before the big-screen monitor of Floyd’s satellite footprint and looked into the lens of the pool television camera to update the storm’s plodding course toward the coast.

“This is an extremely dangerous storm,” Jarrell and the others repeated, emphasizing the destructive potential of a hurricane the size and strength of Floyd. “Do not take it lightly.”

Jarrell has announced his intention to retire at the end of this hurricane season. He hasn’t said whether he’ll follow several of his former colleagues into the lucrative world of TV weather reporting. He did say he wants to move back to Salinas, Calif., where he once worked for a private weather forecasting service, and where his grandchildren now live.

But there are more storms to come before retirement. “This is expected to be a heavy season. And we’ve only had half of what we expect,” he said. “So I’m not through yet.”