One of the costliest hurricanes ever to strike the United States was Hurricane Floyd in 1999. Shown here is a three-dimensional view of Hurricane Floyd as it approached landfall at Cape Fear on September 16, 1999. The view was made by the NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), which was adopted as the official operational hurricane-prediction model at the National Center for Environmental Prediction in 1995. The magenta and white arrows at the surface and top of the storm show gale-force winds; the color shading at the earth's surface represents the precipitation rate, with red indicating higher intensities.