"It's about three months long, and if you touch land, you're out.
No way to picture where it touched land again, or who you'd be when it did.
A half-second after the front of the float touched land, the windows in the wheelhouse rattled.
"Peter came by boat to pick me up at my parents' house, which is on the water, and we never touched land," Ms. Golomb said.
So at last, blurred to near irrelevance, the boundary finally leaps into Rockaway Inlet and turns seaward in midchannel, never to touch land again.
Kicked up from the seabed, the tsunami amplified in size and slowed in speed as it moved into the shallows beside the Japanese coastline, and by the time it touched land it was a wall of water, black and smooth.
The fleet then passed near the Nicobar Islands ("Necuveran"), touched land again in Sri Lanka, or Ceylon ("Seilan"), followed the west coast of India and the southern reaches of Persia, and finally anchored at Hormuz.
With W.R.F., meteorologists will be able to make notoriously thorny forecasts -- like specifying how much rain will fall on a given location, or predicting where and when a hurricane will touch land -- far more exact.
GARDEN CITY, N.Y., Oct. 15 — It is 1,200 miles from the coastline where Hurricane Katrina touched land two years ago to the neat colonial-style home here where James Gray, a retired public relations consultant, and his wife, Ann, live.
