Earth Top 10: No. 4 - Katrina & Hurricane Science

[Editor's note: See the rest of the Decade's Top 10 Earth Stories]

The hurricane that made landfall the morning of August 29, 2005, at the mouth of the Mississippi River practically wiped out New Orleans. The giant Katrina whipped up a storm surge that flooded 80 percent of the city.  Nearly 2,000 people were killed and damage came to more than $80 billion -- the most costly disaster in United States history.

The images of death and desperation shocked the country.  Alongside the human suffering, the widely publicized descriptions of bureaucratic ineptitude of government emergency management efforts provoked a visceral political reaction among many voters that haunted the Bush Administration.

Katrina was part of the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record. In 2005, there were 28 named storms, including Rita and Wilma, two more giant, intense hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. This circumstance heightened public awareness and media interest in the possibility that global warming was making itself felt.

Does global warming mean more Katrinas? This question spawned several new investigations into a line of research that was first suggested by MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel in a study published a month before Katrina. His data showed an increase in the strength of North Atlantic hurricanes in the past 30 years. The final answer may not yet have been written, but the most recent research suggests while the number of Atlantic hurricanes may not increase, the warming ocean temperatures, which fuel the storms, is leading to more powerful hurricanes.

(Click on the image of the Front Page of The Times-Picayune to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning local news coverage of those desperate days.)