The monster storm began as any other gust of wind above the rainy forests of Guinea. It wove clouds from humid wisps and wandered purposelessly into the ocean, where trade winds set it spinning and forecasters gave it a name: Ivan.
With 140 m.p.h. winds, Ivan is expected to slam into the Gulf Coast Thursday, pushing a false tide into shallow coastal water and up the gulf’s fat, shallow rivers like snow in front of a plow.
An unlikely series of events had to line up for Ivan to grow from a barely significant low pressure system at sea–Tropical Depression 9–into what was once a Category 5 hurricane, among the six strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic.
Even before Ivan hits land, its life story reveals how heat from the sea and weather systems hundreds of miles from the hurricane alter its power and exposes the limits of scientists to divine where it will go and how deadly it might be.
By Tuesday, Ivan had diminished into a Category 4 hurricane headed toward a 100-mile patch of coastline where Mississippi meets Alabama. It may gather strength again before hurling itself at the coast, as more warm water is rolling in the Gulf between shore and hurricane, like gasoline waiting for fire to find it.
Meteorologists at last feel confident about where Ivan is going and are beginning to marvel at the forces that marshaled the storm. Similar forces are now locked in a race to sustain or destroy it.
It probably began in August, insubstantial as fog rising off the African jungle. The fog was collected by an undulating stream of air that had pushed for days out of the west.
Lazily tipping back and forth–now north, now south–the wind passed over scrub and steaming woodland, pushing a loose knot of clouds ahead of it, clouds that grew taller and more numerous as they sponged up the hazy air off the African coast.
A thousand miles across the Atlantic, the clouds hit the trade winds north of the equator, a perpetual gust that drove explorers down the coast of South America and now spun the clouds’ leading edge. The storm that would become Hurricane Ivan was born.
A meteorologist noted the spot where the killer was first recognized: 9.7 degrees north, 29.1 degrees west.
“We could see it grow very clearly,” said Florida State University meteorology professor T.N. Krishnamurti. From then on, no one would take their eyes off it.
As it plodded across the warm Atlantic, Ivan exploded above the sun-soaked Caribbean Sea south of Cuba, guided there by winds more often inclined to doom hurricanes to quieter, cooler, more northerly tracks.
Even late last week, forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center expected Ivan to bully its way north and weaken in waters already mined for energy by Hurricanes Charley and Frances. But a high pressure system over the Bahamas held its ground.
Ivan skulked west, crossed into the Caribbean and fed on 85-degree water there.
The touch of land is deadly to a hurricane, which needs warm, open water to feed. Mountains tear at the storms’ winds, slowing and disorganizing them.
Ivan has avoided land, staying over open water.
“It’s like it had eyes. It approached Jamaica, then made a hard left, missed Jamaica, looked like it was going to hit the Cayman Islands, then made a left turn and headed toward the Gulf of Mexico,” said Chris Hennon, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “It’s like the storm doesn’t really want to land.”
After skirting Jamaica, it reorganized into a Category 5 storm with winds that can beat ocean waves into vapor. Sultry air rose in the storm’s center and spun down Ivan’s arms with terrible grace. Winds at the center topped 160 m.p.h.
It slipped around the high pressure system in the Bahamas and turned north on Monday afternoon. It crept between Cuba and Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, drawing warm water out of both the Caribbean and the still-warmer Gulf of Mexico.
So furious was the storm that a second eye started forming around Ivan’s first, Hennon said. Within hours, it stole energy even from itself.
The inner eye wobbled and dissipated in a phenomenon unique to massive Category 5 hurricanes. As the outer eye shrank to take its place, Ivan again became a Category 4 hurricane, with winds of 140 m.p.h.
But the winds Ivan packed over the middle Caribbean were enough to win it awed respect from atmospheric scientists, to say nothing of those who saw it pass.
At least 68 people have been killed so far, and its hurricane winds still cut a 200-mile-wide swath. Tropical storm-force winds can be felt across a diameter of 520 miles.
As Ivan churns north, residents from New Orleans to Apalachicola, Fla., have been warned to expect a strong Category 3 hurricane with 130-m.p.h. winds, or even a Category 4 hurricane. A storm surge will raise water levels 10 feet or more, with waves on top of that.
“You don’t want to be there,” Hennon said.
On Wednesday, Ivan could still feed on a displaced length of the Gulf Stream current, cut off from the main flow in the Atlantic only to float in a massive, 60-mile-wide blob into the central Gulf of Mexico, Hennon said.
But winds from weather systems ashore will begin tearing Ivan apart as it makes landfall.
On land, Ivan will die.
