Captain Calamity

摘要

Talk about a high-pressure job: Network the world's environmental sensors, build a system to integrate the petabytes of data they produce, and, oh yeah, pull it all together to predict when disasters (like Katrina's siblings) are about to strike. French geophysicist Jose Achache is one lucky geek. Earth is peppered with high tech monitoring hardware-from polar-orbiting satellites to instrument-laden buoys. Problem is, they're all operating in Babel-style disconnect. "We're spending billions a year on observation systems," Achache says. "But because of our fragmented approach, we're suboptimal." Achache-whose resume includes such nerdeaucratic posts as deputy director general of the French space agency and director of Earth observation at the European Space Agency-is leading the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, a 10-year endeavor to link the data-collection tech of 74 nations.