Hurricane Katrina - 20 years later

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Almost 20 years after Hurricane Katrina hit the city, a drive through New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward takes you past boarded homes, empty, overgrown lots and block after block where there are few people or houses. In 2005, 15,000 people — mostly African Americans lived in this neighborhood. Today, the population is a third of that.

For many of the people who returned to rebuild their homes and lives after the storm, it's been difficult. Neighbors are gone, there are still few stores or schools and for some, Burnell Cotlon says, it's still a daily struggle.

"This is not a third-world country. This is New Orleans. Now, we're only 10 minutes from the French Quarter," Cotlon says, "And the people that's here in the Lower Ninth Ward, they're still suffering."

August 29 marks the anniversary of one of the worst urban disasters in U.S. history — when New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Twenty years later, parts of the city still haven't fully recovered. Today, it has about three-quarters of the population it had before the storm.

Some neighborhoods have come back and are thriving. But in others, like New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, recovery still seems elusive.

Cotlon's little market on Fats Domino Avenue is one of the handful of stores that has opened in the Lower Ninth Ward in the twenty years since the storm. It's just several blocks from the place where floodwalls toppled over on the Industrial Canal, unleashing a flood that washed away homes, including Cotlon says, the one he'd bought after retiring from the Army.

I lost everything. I had to start life all over. I had, like, 30 plus some neighbors. Today I have four. There's nothing back here, you know?" says Cotlon with a tinge of exasperation.

Born and raised in the Lower Ninth, Cotlon says he'd never heard the term "food desert" until after Katrina, when he found there was nowhere in his neighborhood to buy food. He purchased a concrete block building that survived the flood, rehabbed it and opened his shop, "Burnell's Lower 9th Ward Market."

Inside the store, he shows visitors where he first began serving customers.

"This was the grocery store window," he says, "everything went out this window. I sold milk, eggs, bread, cheese, you name it, it went out of this window. I did this for about three years."

Today, there are a few other businesses in the Lower Ninth Ward now — some gas stations, a Dollar store, but nothing like it was before Katrina, when there was a movie theater, hair salons, dry cleaners, he says.

But for years, Cotlon's store was one of the few signs of commercial activity in his part of the Lower Ninth ward — and it drew celebrities.

"This right here is my wall of fame," Cotlon says proudly pointing to a wall with pictures from famous visitors. "President Obama. Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg. We had T.I., the founder of Wu-Tang Clan, Latoya Cantrell, Alicia Keys, [NFL] Commissioner Roger Goodell, Wesley Snipes, Mitch Landrieu."

Among his favorites is Ellen DeGeneres who donated washing machines and dryers, allowing him to set up a laundry room for people in the neighborhood.

And after running the store for more than a decade, Cotlon's is no longer open every day. Now, he says, it's clear few additional former residents are coming back. Any growth and rebuilding in the Lower Ninth Ward will have to be from newcomers. And he hasn't seen many folks coming in.

"A lot of people don't like to see what they call gentrification. This is not gentrification. This is repopulation. I welcome anything that comes back here," Cotlon laments.

"People forgot about the Lower Ninth Ward. I got to stay strong, positive. But sometimes it hurts. It hurts because when I drive from my house to come here, I remember, they had a store here, they had a school here, we had a hospital here. We had everything back here," Cotlon says.

The Lower Ninth was once a vibrant, prosperous African American community
New Orleans City Council member Oliver Thomas says people who visit the Lower Ninth today may not realize what it was like when he was growing up here in the early 1960s.

At one point, we were a booming population of over 20,000 people, one of the largest African American communities, where 61% of us owned our own homes," Councilman Thomas says. "And it was a working-class community. We may not have lived in mansions, palaces, but the people in the Lower Ninth Ward owned their property. It was ours."

Cynthia Guillemet has fond memories of growing up in the Lower Ninth Ward.

"Everyone knew everyone. You either knew each other from church or from school," says the 81-year-old Guillemet. "We had a great childhood."

She recalls an earlier flood from Hurricane Betsy in 1965. In that storm, levees on the Mississippi River and the Industrial Canal breached, flooding the neighborhood. The difference, she says, is that after Betsy, the neighborhood bounced back.

After Betsy in '65, everyone returned because the water went away quickly," she says, "and everyone started rebuilding. The residents at that time, the parents were younger. So that made a difference between then and coming back with Katrina."

Guillemet is a client service specialist with the Lower Ninth Homeownership and the president of the Lower Ninth Neighborhood Association. She laments that many residents didn't return after Katrina. She says people who've moved away tell her, "I don't see anybody in my neighborhood. And by that they meant [on] their block. You know, if I had some of my neighbors coming back, I'd come back."

Councilman Thomas says the distribution of money after Katrina discriminated against residents in the Lower Ninth Ward and other neighborhoods by basing grants on their homes' value before the storm, not on the cost of rebuilding. Now, two decades on, he says many who couldn't return have left their properties to their children.

"A lot of it was tied up in red tape with families and heirs, liens, taxes on properties. That's one of the things that probably would have helped if the state and the city would have helped cut the red tape," he says. "So who had a right to property? And then a lot of the speculators bought up hoards of blighted property or vacant property, and many of them are still holding onto it now."

Glimmers of hope in the midst of despair
Here and there in the Lower Ninth there are some good things happening. The old Holy Cross High School, shuttered since Katrina, has been redeveloped as an apartment building, with the promise that it will attract new residents to the community.

And as you drive from the French Quarter, over the St. Claude bridge into the Lower Ninth, one of the first businesses you see is a new produce market. It was opened by Sankofa, a local non-profit. Rashida Ferdinand is its director.

"Sankofa is a word from Ghana in West Africa, and it's a concept that means go back to the past to build for the future," says Ferdinand proudly.

In the market, there are tomatoes, greens, eggplants, okra, sweet potatoes — much of it locally grown. It's the only place in the neighborhood to find fresh produce. Ferdinand grew up in the Lower Ninth and she's a trained ceramic artist. She evacuated to Atlanta before Katrina hit.

"I think as soon as I came home, I wanted to be involved in that energy to really support rebuilding this area," she recalls. "And folks were getting together and trying to do some good things and I wanted to be a part of it."

She founded Sankofa more than a decade ago to help rebuild the place where she grew up. The market, she says, is one of several projects in the works.

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour stands before a wall-size satellite image of Hurricane Katrina as it headed for landfall on Aug. 29, 2005.

"The eye came in right there over the Pearl River, which is the boundary between Louisiana and Mississippi," he says.

It was packing winds of 120 miles an hour and a storm surge nearing 30 feet. "The most powerful winds and storm surge are in the upper right-hand corner. And that hit us," Barbour recalls.

Barbour is walking through a new exhibit at the state-funded Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson. It's called "Hurricane Katrina: Mississippi Remembers" and features photographs of the aftermath by Melody Golding.

While much of the focus marking 20 years since Hurricane Katrina is on New Orleans, where federal levees failed and flooded the city, the historic storm also decimated the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The state's entire 70-mile shoreline was inundated with Katrina's three-story-high storm surge. It knocked out bridges, buckled roads, and washed away homes and businesses. The storm killed 238 people in Mississippi and nearly 1,400 overall.

"It looked like the hand of God had wiped away the coast," Barbour recalls. "Utter obliteration."

He says some 60,000 structures were uninhabitable, and more than 25,000 were flat out gone. "We created a new verb," he says. "I've been slabbed." As in, there's nothing left of my house but the concrete slab it was built on. Coastal flooding reached 10 miles inland, and hurricane-force winds stretched well into north Mississippi.

Barbour was in his first term as governor of Mississippi, back home after years as a Republican power broker in Washington, D.C., including serving as political director in the Reagan White House and chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The first crisis after Katrina hit came immediately when he realized that federal aid was not on the way. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was overwhelmed and couldn't rush food and water to the Gulf Coast. "From almost the beginning, the logistical plan collapsed," Barbour says. "And we weren't getting what we're supposed to be getting."

The state turned to the military — the United States Northern Command — for help. The unit flew Army rations to Biloxi. After the initial bumps, though, Barbour says the federal response improved and the state got help, including reimbursement for cleaning up debris, an endeavor that took a year and a half. Barbour says Mississippi needed FEMA to begin the road to recovery.

"It would have been very, very hard to do without FEMA," he says, skeptical of the Trump administration's talk of eliminating the agency. "Could you organize it in a different way? Maybe. But to have no federal disaster assistance program would be a catastrophe. Often."

Barbour says major disasters require lots of outside help. For instance, 48 other states came to the rescue in Mississippi, sending National Guard units, law enforcement officers, and road and power crews. Some left their vehicles behind as replacements for the local police, whose fleets were flooded out.

But more than $5 billion in federal grants were key, Barbour says. It didn't hurt that Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran was the powerful chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee at the time. Barbour says he also found allies across the political aisle — Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank offered to corral votes in the House for Mississippi relief.

"It would have been very, very hard to do without FEMA," he says, skeptical of the Trump administration's talk of eliminating the agency. "Could you organize it in a different way? Maybe. But to have no federal disaster assistance program would be a catastrophe. Often."

Barbour says major disasters require lots of outside help. For instance, 48 other states came to the rescue in Mississippi, sending National Guard units, law enforcement officers, and road and power crews. Some left their vehicles behind as replacements for the local police, whose fleets were flooded out.

But more than $5 billion in federal grants were key, Barbour says. It didn't hurt that Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran was the powerful chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee at the time. Barbour says he also found allies across the political aisle — Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank offered to corral votes in the House for Mississippi relief.

Mississippi's recovery over the last 20 years has been uneven, with some places coming back sooner than others. In Waveland, you still see empty slabs dotting neighborhoods, and the downtown business district is mostly empty.

"That sense of main town, Main Street USA is missing," says Bernie Cullen, chairperson of the aptly named Ground Zero Museum in the city. "Here we were, ground zero."

She says it took years for the city to feel like home again, describing how the community would grasp onto small signs of progress. Like when power crews were able to get streetlights back up so it wasn't so dark, or when Walmart reopened.

Becky Hamel, 69, lost everything she had in hurricane Katrina. She was delighted to get back her Freshman high school ID card that she lost 20 years ago in Hurricane Katrina. Gulf Island National Seashore Park Ranger Becky Copeland (left) found the ID card on Horn Island, off the coast of Mississippi.

There's always hope," she says. "Even in the bleakest times, you take one day at a time. You say, 'I'm going to rebuild.'"

But not everyone came back. In the decade after the storm, Waveland lost nearly 20% of its population, which was 7,800 before Katrina.

The recovery here has been a long slog, according to Waveland Mayor Jay Trapani. "Ninety percent of the city was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina," he says. "I remember driving in from where I evacuated and hearing on the radio it would take 10 years for the coast to come back. And here we are sitting at 20 and we're still trying to recover."

One factor has been stricter building requirements due to the high flood risk here, which makes construction more expensive. For instance, he had to rebuild his beachfront house on concrete pilings 24 feet above sea level.

Waveland needed a new city hall, along with new police and fire stations. It wasn't until 2016 that the police department moved out of temporary quarters and into its new building. The force had to start from scratch after Katrina flooded the department, which had been located about 3 miles inland.

Police Chief Michael Prendergast was assistant chief in 2005. He recalls at the height of the storm, 27 officers and staff who hunkered down at the headquarters had to bust through storm shutters to escape the flooding building. They survived by clinging to a row of crepe myrtles out front, waves lashing around them.

Everybody hung onto the trees," he says. "We were hugging each other, trying to keep each other warm and everybody mentally stable." Prendergast says it took about five hours for the water to go down. Then the reality of what they were up against set in.

"It was kind of like an apocalypse," says Lisa Parker, the chief's administrative assistant, the same job she had in 2005.

Nearly everyone on the police force had lost their homes and belongings. And they had no equipment, either. "We're the ones who are supposed to keep the law and order," she says. "But we were in the same boat as everybody else. You only had so much things you can do with no means to do it. No guns, no radios, no cars, no anything."

"Katrina didn't discriminate," says Prendergast. "Rich, poor, didn't matter. You know, how you lived or whatever. Katrina, like, wiped out the whole city."

Katrina also wiped away cultural treasures in Waveland, including the United Methodist Gulfside Assembly, founded a century ago as a sprawling waterfront retreat for African Americans.

“It hit Gulfside like a brick wall," says Executive Director Cheryl Thompson. For her, it was a gut punch to find nothing left. No hotel, or chapel, or auditorium, or anything.

"It felt like a relative or somebody I knew had died. It was just very emotional for me. And even now, it's like a disbelief. Like how could we have lost all of that?" Thompson grew up in New Orleans and spent her childhood summers at Gulfside Assembly, which she says was an anchor for the Black community in the segregated South.

"There were no other places for us to go where we felt free to stay in the hotel, to play, to swim in the water, to have our own place," Thompson says. "There weren't places where we could go to stay in hotels. I'm 77 years old. And so when I was growing up, that was not, it was not a thing." It was a place for weddings, reunions and civil rights strategy meetings, she says.

Twenty years after Katrina, the organization is still struggling to regroup and working out of a donated church building. "You grieve, but you have to, we have to move on. You know, it's not going to be what it was before, but we can still do our ministry," Thompson says.

The spirit of keep moving forward is something you hear time and time again talking to Katrina survivors.

"We're still here, thank goodness," she says. "This little town's gone through hell."

Crapeau and her husband rode out Katrina on the second floor of the building. She says the water got chest high and didn't start going down until the next day. "Scared as hell upstairs. We lost all communication."

People in Pearlington were on their own for four days before helicopters started dropping food and water.

Crapeau says they organized in the parking lot, handing out warm beer and serving what canned goods she could salvage from the flooded kitchen. Once help arrived, they set up a tent to feed people using generator power.

It was 2 1/2 months before Pearlington got electricity back. And it was six years before Crapeau repaired the bar — new roof, new electrical, new plumbing and a new kitchen, moved upstairs to higher ground. "It was a struggle but we did it."

At 69, and now fighting cancer, she still works the kitchen dishing up her signature cheeseburger but has fewer customers than she did 20 years ago.

Pearlington has lost about a third of its population since Katrina. The local elementary school closed. Crapeau says parts of town have never come back from the hurricane. "There's several homes that have been gutted just sitting there. There's some that's just crumbling."

But she's not giving up.

Barbour says his mother always taught him that crisis and catastrophe do not create character but instead reveal it. He sees that now in the perseverance of Mississippi's Katrina survivors.

Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré became a household name in 2005 when he led recovery efforts as commander of Joint Task Force Katrina.

Nearly 20 years later, as storms grow stronger and climate disasters are becoming more frequent, Honoré says the lessons of Hurricane Katrina remain urgent: Local leaders fail, warnings can be too late, and people without resources are often left behind.

He retired in 2008 but remains an active crisis consultant, advising on flooding, wildfires and even the security failures of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

As he flew into New Orleans by helicopter on Aug. 31, 2005, Honoré said he had to keep his emotions in check when the faces of thousands of residents came into view. New Orleanians who didn't have the means to leave the city had gathered at the Superdome, one of the the city's designated evacuation centers.

"It broke my heart when I saw a lady with a toddler and a shopping basket pushing the baby in the water," Honoré said in an interview with NPR's Michel Martin. "The water was up to the baby's chest and she was trying to get into the Superdome to save [the] baby and herself. And I said, 'We've got to get these people out of here.'"

The Superdome was a last refuge for many. And as supplies ran low, it became a symbol of misery.

Before Katrina hit, forecasters warned of catastrophe if people failed to evacuate. But New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin did not issue a mandatory order until Aug. 28, 2005.

Roughly 20% of the local population stayed behind, most of them being poor and elderly. "They want to stay because they know where the medicine is and many of them lived alone," Honoré said. In some cases, the system failed them. "The city did send people to pick them up, but at that time, you couldn't take an animal in an ambulance. And the elderly people said, 'I'm not leaving if I can't take my dog with me.'"

Since Hurricane Katrina, federal law has changed to include shelter for pets.

When the levees broke, more than 240,000 homes flooded in and around the city. State officials prioritized evacuation, food and water. But logistical challenges mounted, and people were desperate for basic essentials.

Reports of lawlessness spread, but Honoré said that people confused looting with survival. He criticized how law enforcement responded: "This pre-notion that the poor is going to loot, it's a sad commentary but it's built into our culture," he said. "In some cases, adjacent parishes and municipalities blocked people from coming in because they said these people are going to come and loot our stuff."

The local, state and federal response to Hurricane Katrina was widely criticized. "The storm overmatched the infrastructure and it overmatched the ability for them to deal with it," he said.

Honoré was one of the few officials praised for his no-nonsense leadership. He said he hopes people have learned from Katrina.

"Mother Nature can break anything built by man," he said. "When we get proper warning, we need to evacuate and we need to be prepared to evacuate."

In the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, hurricane scientists have made great strides toward understanding how climate change influences tropical cyclones, at the same time as they have vastly improved hurricane forecasting. Better forecasts, in turn, save the country billions every time a storm makes landfall, according to a 2024 analysis published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.

But the progress didn't come out of thin air, says Gabriel Vecchi, a hurricane and climate scientist at Princeton University. In 2005, Katrina, and other damaging storms from that era, like Rita and Wilma, spurred a concerted push to get better at forecasting hurricanes. That energy was harnessed into a federally supported research effort, called the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, that gathered together the best scientists from across agencies, private universities and national laboratories in an effort that has continued through today.

A five-day forecast of a hurricane's future track, for example, is roughly as good now as a two-day forecast was when Katrina struck.

But that progress, and future improvements, are now at risk, Vecchi says, because of the ongoing disruptions to federal agencies and the country's science enterprise imposed by the Trump administration, which has slashed the size of the federal government in the months since Trump took office.

"Improvements in our hurricane forecast models and our weather forecasts and our climate forecasts…are best viewed as investments, not as expenses," Vecchi says. "They're not equivalent to going out to a fancy meal. They're equivalent to a 401k," he says — and when the investments stop, the progress stops too.

The rise of HFIP
The 2005 hurricane season included a record-breaking 27 named storms — including Katrina, among the costliest hurricanes in American history.

The season stunned Americans and forecasters alike.

Scientists across the country immediately began to ask how they could improve forecasts. They had been making steady improvements to track forecasts — or figuring out where, exactly, a storm would go — but they were struggling to forecast how much, and how quickly, any given storm could intensify. In fact, there had been essentially no improvement in intensity forecasting for two full decades.

To solve the intensification problem, scientists knew they'd have to get better at modeling the storms and the weather that spawned them. They'd also need better observations — from satellites, the atmosphere around the storm or from the ocean's surface. And they'd need the raw computing power to meld it all together.

In 2007, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration introduced what came to be called the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program. It included NOAA scientists, along with researchers from universities and national laboratories. In 2009, it took on a congressionally mandated goal: to make forecasts of hurricane track and intensity 50% better within a decade.

It was an ambitious goal, says Vecchi — and "an all hands on deck approach."

How exactly they would achieve it was another question.

Modelers go to work
Hurricane forecasts are created with computer models, often nested inside other, bigger models of global weather and climate.

"With any kind of hurricane forecast, you're limited by how good your computer models are," says Jeff Masters, a hurricane scientist who flew on NOAA's Hurricane Hunter planes for years and now writes for Yale Climate Connections.

An average hurricane is a few hundred miles in diameter. That's relatively small compared to the size of the planet and its big-scale weather, which is carried along in giant patterns like the jet stream. That big-scale weather often controls hurricane track, or where the storm will go.

But some critical factors that influence hurricane behavior are much smaller than the storm itself: a small patch of extra-hot water right at the ocean's surface could provide extra power. Turbulence just a few feet wide swirling on its edges could push it to grow, or help hasten its demise, depending on the conditions.

In the early 2000s, big weather models didn't have the computing power to create enough detail to accurately reproduce the physics controlling storm behavior — especially not the structure of the storm's inner core, which scientists thought was the key to understanding them.

So scientists needed to figure out how to make the storm-scale models nested inside the big ones better. And both needed to look at smaller and smaller-scale details.

In the mid-2000s, NOAA kicked off a project to develop a new high-power computing system at a laboratory in Boulder, Colo. Scientists worked in tandem: some developed models using the ever-increasing amount of computing power available at the Boulder site. Others worked on improving the models using the more limited computing resources available elsewhere. And every year, they'd trade learning back and forth, iterating to make both sets of models better.

Quickly, the different groups got better at taking in data from the satellites or other observations, understanding the smaller and smaller-scale physics controlling storm behaviors, doing the math on all of it faster and blending together the results from many different models to get one that was more likely to be right.

Computer chips, satellites and planes
Making the models better improved forecasts. But there was another critical piece to improve: the models needed good information to start from.

"It's garbage in, garbage out," says Andy Hazelton, a hurricane expert at the University of Miami who worked at NOAA's National Hurricane Center until the Trump administration's cuts to NOAA eliminated his job. Better observations of the real atmosphere and ocean, in real time, are critical to good forecasts.

Doppler radar measurements taken from aircraft that flew through the storm gave the models near-real-time information about the shape of whirling storms. Data from dropsondes, small parachuted devices dropped out of the aircraft that collect data as they fall toward the ocean's surface, added more insights.

"The improvement in forecast and track forecast has been shown to be up to 24% greater when a jet is flying," says Masters.

But hurricane hunter planes can't fly through every storm. So scientists needed other new sources of data to fill in some of the blanks.

In the early 2000s, satellites orbiting Earth could provide pictures of the top of the cloud layer. Those pictures were getting more detailed: by 2017, the GOES-16 satellite could beam down crystal clear images with a resolution of under 1 kilometer. But peering below that top layer, into the middle part of the atmosphere and the storm itself, was critical.

That started to change in the mid-2010s, when NOAA and other agencies began to get data back from several different microwave-focused satellites, including one run by the Department of Defense.

The microwave data is like running an MRI on the storm, explains Kim Wood, a hurricane scientist at the University of Arizona. Microwave-focused satellites "help us peer inside the storm and get a sense of structurally speaking, is it primed to get strong really fast?" Wood says — show how much energy and potential precipitation is hidden inside a storm.

HFIP, and the parallel improvements in computing and observations, worked. By 2023, forecast accuracy for hurricane tracks improved by 50%. In all, a five-day-out forecast was now as good as a two- or three-day forecast had been in 2005.

As for intensity, the improvements were similarly impressive, says Wood. Errors in intensity forecasts dropped by 56% from 2007 to 2023. By 2021, the National Hurricane Center had boosted its ability to forecast rapid intensification by about 25% over the center's mid-2010s performance, which was itself already better than 2005.

The vast improvements make a clear point, says Masters: "Funding works. If you want a better forecast, invest in the research to do that."

A good forecast is worth billions
But a question remained: Was all this improvement helping people and property?

An accurate forecast should, in theory, help decision-makers and families decide how to prepare: to evacuate, close businesses or not, tape down windows, buy emergency supplies or take other actions to protect themselves. Warning too many people could slow down economic activity unnecessarily. But warning too few, or too late, could lead to safety risks and infrastructure damage.

In 2024, a team of economists evaluated the value of the country's increasingly accurate forecasts. They found that from 2009 through 2019, the HFIP spent roughly $250 million.

The value of the improved forecasts, in contrast, adds up to roughly $2 billion for every single major storm that makes landfall

"It was one of those investments in research that paid off," says Vecchi. "That benefit is much, much larger than the total cost."

In fact, the amount of money saved because of improved forecasts for a single hurricane — let alone the dozens that hit the country each year — is larger than the cost of the entire federally funded weather forecasting operation.

Climate change increases hurricane risk
In 2005, there was a theoretical understanding that climate change would enhance some of the risks, says Andra Garner, a climate and extreme weather scientist at Rowan University. But by 2025, researchers are virtually certain that tropical cyclones are becoming more destructive.

A hotter planet means a hotter ocean. Hot water is like food for a hurricane, providing energy the storms can use to grow and strengthen, says Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico have crept up by 1 degree Celsius since the 1950s and have smashed historical records in recent years.

A hotter atmosphere can absorb more water, like a thirsty sponge. A patch of air can hold seven percent more water than another patch just one degree Celsius cooler (the planet has warmed by more than 1.2 degrees Celsius, or 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit, since the late 1800s). That means there's more water suspended overhead, ready to be wrung out from the hurricane as rain.

"Water is by far the major killer and source of damage in hurricanes," says Emanuel. "And yet when we say the word hurricane, most people conjure up, even I do, an image of a wind storm. Well, of course it is a wind storm, but the thing that really kills is water."

Scientists have found that climate change made storms like Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area in 2017, drop an extra 15% of rain.

Storms are also traveling farther northward. The latitude at which they reach peak intensity, Emanuel says, has crept northward — leaving cities like New York, or regions like inland North Carolina, in the path of storms that were unlikely to reach them before.

Still more to learn — and major hurdles emerging
The improvements in hurricane science since 2005 have been vast, says Masters. But the work is far from over.

HFIP assigned itself new goals in 2017. It now aims to create functional models of a storm's inner core, critical to an accurate forecast, a full seven days out from landfall. And it plans to improve, and lengthen the lead time for forecasts not just of wind speed and rapid intensification, but storm surge, rain, and severe gusts — factors that are harder to model, but are valuable to the emergency managers helping people stay safe.

Crucially, says Hazelton, the new iteration of HFIP also incorporates social science — because the best forecast in the world doesn't matter if it's not received by those in harm's way.

But, Hazelton stresses, all the HFIP's goals — and the country's ability to track and forecast hurricanes more broadly — is now uncertain.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration aggressively slashed staff and budgets at agencies like NOAA. Many of the staff who fly and maintain the Hurricane Hunter planes and provide their forecast-critical information were fired in the early rounds of layoffs that swept the federal government.

And data from the microwave satellites that provide the MRI-esque view of the storm's innards were nearly halted abruptly this spring, though the decision was later reversed after outcry from scientists.

The president's proposed budget for NOAA would reduce support for researchers who work on many aspects of hurricane modeling and observations, along with one of the major modeling research centers at Princeton University.

Wood worries about the disinvestment in research "We didn't get this far by saying, 'Yep, we figured out hurricanes. We're done,'" they said. And even now, there are many more theoretical and practical questions to answer.

But the changes across the federal government and to NOAA not only endanger future progress, says Hazelton, they undermine the gains that have already been made.

"We're setting ourselves back years," says Hazelton.