Editor’s Letter

Storm Season

Our summertime storm tracking comes with an extra dose of pride this year

Written by MARIE SPEED

o here we are again. Soft damp morning air blazing into a tropical heat by noon, black skies gathering by 4 p.m., dark mountains of clouds that send monsoons into the streets by rush hour. It’s summertime, the season that never ends, and it’s a love-hate thing for most of us who grew up here. We love that we have the place to ourselves; we love those days floating in warm water the color of Brach’s Ice Blue mints. It’s a time when Florida feels most like itself—except when you start seeing waves off the coast of Africa barreling our way. In this issue, we talk to a few people on the forefront of storm prediction and science (page 64), people who long ago linked global warming with changes in the number and intensity of hurricanes. And with no El Niño this year to ward them off, we can expect a late summer crescendo of ever-escalating water temperatures that turn the Gulf into a power charger for summer storms, and our east coast into an evacuation zone.

It’s a time of year we engage in the waiting game, and this year it’s no different. What is a bright light in all this is how we’ve navigated another storm entirely—the year of COVID that no one could have predicted. In our Best of Boca article in this issue (page 54), we salute the city’s response to this particular storm, and its leadership in the tri-county region for establishing safety measures, giving back to businesses hurt by the lockdown and all the ways it communicated every step of the way. We salute Boca’s resilience, its strong comeback, its steady and brilliant quality of life now, as always. It’s always fun to celebrate the city every year in this article, but in 2021, that kind of tribute assumes a whole new dimension. Storms? Bring them on. The city and its people have weathered much worse lately, and we’re ready. Here’s to summer; here’s to us.