As Hurricane Katrina's fifth anniversary approaches this weekend, remembering the devastation of New Orleans, and the people still suffering in the storm's wake, is paramount.
The instruments of science can't capture the human dimension of such a disaster, but what they saw five years ago is in many ways just as dramatic.
This week, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has released a compendium of images and video captured of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath from a dizzying array of satellites. It shows what a monster she was, true, but more than that it presents a hope that every time something like this happens, we are able to learn something from it.
Watching this video, it's hard not to wonder, "if we had so many ways of poking and prodding the storm and seeing inside its guts, why couldn't we avoid this horrific disaster in the first place?" In some ways, we may never have a clear answer to that question, but it lies buried in a complex cocktail of political bungling and willful ignorance about what the natural world is capable of.
Still, as long as we keep watching, observing, and running ambitious experiments to understand and predict hurricanes, each new storm that spins up is an opportunity to reduce the chances of history repeating itself. Let us hope it never does.
Video: NASA/GSFC
Tags: Hurricanes, Meteorology, Natural Disasters, Scientific Discoveries, Weather
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