INTRODUCTORY AND EXPLANATORY NOTE

The History

I have long been fascinated by the weather. Some years ago, I lived in Peru. Every so often I would escape the mayhem of Lima for Punta Sal, a little fishing village on the border with Ecuador. Hemingway used to fish there for marlin. Framed photographs of him grinning beside his huge catches adorn the walls of the ramshackle bars.

I went not to fish but to swim in the sea, bodysurfing the huge Pacific rollers. Normally you could only stay in for ten or fifteen minutes without a wetsuit because the Humboldt Current kept the waters cold, but one Christmas the waters were balmy! I stayed in for two hours, marveling at the difference, emerging nut brown and slaked in salt. El Niño had come, bringing with it warm waters. That’s where it is first felt, in the seas off that remote and underpopulated border. Typically, the Niño phenomenon is felt around Christmastime and hence acquired its name—El Niño—the Christ Child.

The fishermen’s children, playing in the unusually warm waters, knew El Niño had come. As did I. But none of the world’s media seemed to have picked up this event and did not do so for months.

It made me think: What if you had a weather-prediction system superior to the competition’s? You could make out like a bandit using weather derivatives.…

One gruesome note that bears witness to the devastation weather can bring and mankind’s brutal response: Two thousand years ago, the Moche civilization of Peru, master potters who lived along the northern coast of the Punta Sal area, sacrificed hundreds of their own people to assuage the weather gods during El Niño years. Massed skeletons were found at the bottom of cliffs in the surrounding areas. Archaeologists studied the depictions on the pottery and dated the skeletons and analyzed the soil and rock and pieced together the story of the Niño sacrifices. The warm waters that El Niño brings devastate the fish supplies and often produce heavy rains that wash away harvests. El Niño meant starvation for the coastal dwellers.

And human sacrifice.

Seeing the pottery of the Moche, swimming in their seas and walking their cliffs, brought home to me the power of the weather and its role in shaping human history. I’ve been fascinated by weather ever since … the roots of Ark Storm went down many years ago.

The Science

It’s a leap from prediction to manipulation of the weather. We’re familiar with cloud seeding, but the ionization technology in this book is a much more powerful tool/weapon than seeding. Making it rain, breaking all records, in the deserts of Arabia has a doomsday biblical slant to it. The science/technology is already here—just google rainstorms in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, in July and August 2010 (i.e., when rain is nigh on impossible) to see its power. And this technology has moved on some since then.

ARk Storm 1000 is a real and much-feared scenario. Personnel from multiple agencies in diverse locations would play key and active roles in the forecasting and emergency management of the scenario as it hits California, and for simplicity’s sake I have gathered the key players together and given them a fictional HQ at Stanford University. Otherwise, the facts, subject to the limits of my brainpower and comprehension, are as I state them.

—L. D., Suffolk, 2013