La Niña—the little girl—is the flip side of the El Niño southern oscillation cycle. Many meteorologists classify the shift as a ‘cold event’ as La Niña cools ocean temperatures along the West Coast of the U.S. The effect of this phenomenon on the long-wave circulation pattern is to produce an upper air trough over the central United States, with a southerly flow over the East Coast—feeding virtually every low-pressure system coming across the Atlantic.

In late August of 2007, Hurricane Susan jumped from a Category-4 to a Category-5 storm as it approached the U.S. mainland. As an awestruck nation watched helplessly, the storm’s sustained winds reached 189 miles an hour just before its eye snaked across Savannah, Georgia, The ESMA’s early warnings helped keep Susan’s death toll below a dozen, but the killer storm’s winds (which spawned seven tornadoes) caused more than 4 billion dollars in damages.

So powerful was Susan that it forced the ESMA to add an additional classification to the Saffir-Simpson Scale. A Category-6 storm (or super-cane) was now regarded as a La Niña-induced hurricane packing winds in excess of 175 mph.

Less than a year later, Super-Cane Abigail, the first official Category-6 storm, made landfall in Vero Beach, Florida. The system’s storm surge would rise thirty-four feet above sea level, flooding coastal areas from West Palm Beach up to Daytona, then clear across the Florida panhandle.

By 2015, the eastern seaboard of the United States was becoming a very dangerous place to live. Seven super-canes had formed in the Atlantic, two making landfall. The worst of the lot was Super-Cane Pamela, whose double eye finally collapsed over Wilmington, North Carolina, pummeling the evacuated city with her near 200-mph winds and two dozen tornadoes.

Nature was taking its vengeance upon modern man, and something had to be done to placate her.

The first attempt to modify a hurricane’s winds dates back to 1947 and Project CIRRUS. Warm ocean water and high humidity in the air produce a drop in pressure along the surface. Horizontal winds near the surface respond to this drop in pressure by accelerating inward. The more the surface pressure falls, the higher the winds become. As low-level air moves inward from greater distances, the process intensifies, building around the eye of the storm. Project CIRRUS scientists attempted to cool the cyclone’s ‘chimney’ by dumping dry ice along a storm’s inward wall, disrupting its pressure differential.

Unfortunately, CIRRUS aircraft were not equipped to monitor a cyclone’s dynamic and structural changes. Worse, the first hurricane they attempted to cool abruptly changed direction and struck Georgia, causing a political ruckus. CIRRUS was canceled, and crippling new limitations were placed on all future cloud-seeding experiments.