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BUT FIRST WE HAVE TO STOP, early in the morning, at the NOAA Laboratory in Key Biscayne, where Dunion and his colleagues conduct their research. I'm eavesdropping on a conference call between hurricane experts in California, Virginia and here in Florida. An intriguing mix of atmospheric activity is occurring off the Florida coast. There's a big plug of moisture—not unlike what Katrina looked like when it was lurking off the Gulf Coast in its pre-Cat 5 days—and an assortment of ingredients that might soon coalesce to produce a hurricane.

SEEKING ANSWERS: Jason Dunion '92 collects data on hurricanes while aboard NOAA aircraft.

From a certain perspective, what we have here isn't so much a disaster in the making as an opportunity. It is shaping up as a prospective "genesis" mission, whispers Dunion in an aside, which is to say, a chance to look at hurricanes before they're hurricanes. As the call continues, Dunion translates, "We're looking at sending a drone in. They're a brand-new technology, with nine-foot wingspans and instruments all over them." Later he tells me the best part—the drones are controlled with joysticks and launched off the top of speeding automobiles. So there are smiles and fun this morning, with big colorful flat-screen pictures to dissect, lingo to sling and teams to organize for a rendezvous sometime on Sunday in Key West. "Could be some weather issues for the drone launch," Dunion says. "Just something to keep in mind, OK? As soon as it passes you can take off."

He's flicking through a bewildering number of screens with swirling colors and gradients and pulsing data. He clicks away like a prodigy playing piano—effortless and calm, but really engaged. Dunion has the telltale characteristics of a scientist of catastrophe—a mix of informality, FM radio calm, sandals and tan Bermuda shorts and Banana Republic T-shirt, while inside bubbles a mild adrenaline rush. He leaves the building without knowing what's going to happen—drones, high altitude planes and a fairly sizable mobilization involving scientists from Monterey and Miami are all in the mix.

This drill encapsulates the 2007 hurricane season, which is still weeks from ending. It has been a season of ominous almost-but-not-quites. Just because there haven't been big news-making hurricanes the last couple of years doesn't mean the place where Dunion and his colleagues are looking—the Atlantic-Caribbean basin—isn't alive and cooking. "Most people think the last couple of years have been quiet," says Dunion, who flew into Helene in 2006, one of the biggest hurricanes of the year. "Trust me, it hasn't been quiet."

DUNION DIRECTED HIS FIRST SAHARAN AIR mission in the midst of Helene. Scientists were confused, says Dunion, because models predicted hurricanes that never came to be, or if they did, they strengthened much later than expected. "The models showed they should have spun up very quickly, but they didn't, and it wasn't clear why," he says.

The Helene mission was developed to produce some answers. A wide swath of Saharan air was hunkered off the southeast edge of the storm. For the first time, scientists knew it was there and could sample it. Once they had collected the data, they could factor in the presence of Saharan air (some of the plumes are thousands of miles across) and plug the numbers into the forecast models that give the National Hurricane Center its reads on where the storm will go and how big it will get.

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