Captain Calamity Crunches Data for Global Warning System

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 José 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. Crunch enough data, the thinking goes, and scientists will be able to create better climate models and forecasts (theoretically giving us a head start on nature's cavalcade of calamities).

When Geoss is complete circa 2015, Achache expects that we'll be able to anticipate crop losses, water shortages, and disease outbreaks months in advance. "It's a system that's long overdue and badly needed," he says. "It's going to save money and lives." In other words, it will be the world's Emergency Alert System.