"You realize there are times - very rarely, once every few years - when you would be subject to a rotating outage and everything would crash including your computer and traffic lights, and you don't want to do that," said Arthur Rosenfeld, a member of the energy commission.

Reducing individual customers' electrical use - if necessary, involuntarily - could avoid that, Rosenfeld said. "If you can control rotating outages by letting everyone in the state share the pain," he said, "there's a lot less pain to go around."

While the proposals have received little attention in California, the Internet and talk radio are abuzz with indignation at the idea.

The radio-controlled thermostat is not a new technology, though it is constantly being tweaked; the latest iterations were on display this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Pacific Gas and Electric, the major utility in Northern California, already has a pilot program in Stockton that allows customers to choose to have their air-conditioning systems attached to a radio-controlled device to reduce use during periods when electricity rates are at their peak. But the idea that a government would mandate use of these devices and reserve the power to override a building owner's wishes galls some people.

"This is an outrage," one Californian said in an e-mail message to Rosenfeld. "We need to build new facilities to handle the growth in this state, not become Big Brother to the citizens of California."

ake Sidney Lanier, metro Atlanta's main source of water, has about three months of storage left, according to state and federal officials.

That's three months before there's not enough water for more than 3 million metro Atlantans to take showers, flush their toilets and cook. Three months before there's not enough water in parts of the Chattahoochee River for power plants to make the steam necessary to generate electricity. Three months before part of the river runs dry.

"We've never experienced this situation before," state Environmental Protection Division Director Carol Couch said of the record-breaking drought and fast-falling lake.

In two weeks, Couch plans to give Gov. Sonny Perdue a list of options to further restrict water use by businesses and industries, along with an analysis of potential water savings and estimated job losses. Some exemptions to the state's ban on outdoor watering in north Georgia could end, including those applied to water-dependent businesses such as car washes, pressure washing companies and landscapers. Couch's staff is still working on the details.

"It's not unheard of for the area to experience a dust storm, but it's not an everyday type of thing," said meteorologist Jaime Meier in the weather service's Oxnard office.

Like the rest of California, the Antelope Valley has been bone-dry this year, receiving less than two inches of rain. The dryness means dirt and sand are not packed down in the ground and are more likely to swirl in the face of strong winds.

"It's just loose and is able to impact visibility just the same way as a blizzard," Meier said.

Rattlesnakes - everywhere. More than Bo Slyapich has seen in his 20-year career as a snake wrangler. The prolonged drought and extreme heat have combined to drive the thirsty and venomous creatures too close for comfort - back decks, play equipment - anywhere they can find shade.

What do they want?

"Food. Just like you go to the supermarket to go shopping, they come to our homes to go shopping," Slyapich says.

Not too far from the steps to homeowner Tom Mahan's family pool, there was a four-foot rattlesnake.

He's found them even sipping from his pool. Now he's taken protective measures.

"Half-inch grid galvanized fencing around the three-acre perimeter here, which keeps 99 percent of any kind of snakes out," Mahan said.

Deer and coyotes are coming down from the hills, too. A disoriented bear climbed up a utility pole in triple-digit heat.

"It is uncharted territory," said Paul Edelman of the Santa Monica Mountain Conservatory. "It is the equivalent of the stories you see on the big droughts in the African Serengetti plains where the animals drop three feet in front of the water hole."

On May 7th one of our satellite providers, DigitalGlobe, jumped into action and gathered imagery of the region for search-and-rescue teams. Today we are making this before-and-after imagery available as a Google Earth overlay. We think you'll agree that the imagery is quite powerful, and we hope it is a valuable resource for rescue teams, residents, and all of those touched by this natural disaster.

A new study by NASA scientists suggests that greenhouse-gas warming may raise average summer temperatures in the eastern United States nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s.

"There is the potential for extremely hot summertime temperatures in the future, especially during summers with less-than-average frequent rainfall," said lead author Barry Lynn of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, New York.

The research found that eastern U.S. summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low-to-mid-80s (degrees Fahrenheit) will most likely soar into the low-to-mid-90s during typical summers by the 2080s. In extreme seasons – when precipitation falls infrequently – July and August daily high temperatures could average between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed nearly 30 years of observational temperature and precipitation data and also used computer model simulations that considered soil, atmospheric, and oceanic conditions and projected changes in greenhouse gases. The simulations were produced using a widely-used weather prediction model coupled to a global model developed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The global model, one of the models used in the recently issued climate report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was utilized in this study to identify future changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns due to the build up of greenhouse gases. This information was then fed into the weather prediction model to forecast summer-to-summer temperature variability in the eastern United States during the 2080s.

The weather model showed that extreme summertime surface temperatures developed when carbon dioxide emissions were assumed to continue to increase about two percent a year, the "business as usual" scenario. These findings are too recent to be included in the latest IPCC report.

"We've never seen anything like this," said David Creed.

About 30 miles away, residents in Lake Marcel north of Carnation awoke Sunday to the fine powder blanketing the neighborhood.

"Living out here in 40 years, I've never seen anything like it," said Beth Marcey.

"Kind of volcanic. It reminded me of when Mount St. Helens blew," said Bey Braun.

Above all, it has everyone scratching their heads.

Persistent bands of squalls have swung up and down this part of central New York along the eastern shore of Lake Ontario since last Sunday, prompting Gov. Eliot Spitzer to declare a state disaster emergency in Oswego County.

The National Weather Service said Parish — about 25 miles northeast of Syracuse — reached a milestone early Saturday morning: 100 inches of snow over the past seven days. That was pushed to 110 inches by early Sunday with fresh snowfall. Unofficial reports pegged snowfall totals at 123 inches in Orwell and 131 in Redfield, but the weather service said those numbers included snow from a storm a couple of days before the latest run.

The winter wonderland was a magnet for snowmobilers, with one caveat — stopping was out of the question. Dan Hojnacki of Syracuse was having a blast, flying over snowbanks along Main Street until his yellow Ski-Doo ground to a halt in a small field and he struggled mightily to get it out.

"You can't stop or you're done," Hojnacki, 23, said. "I never got stuck until today, and I've been snowmobiling for 10 years."

Hojnacki figured to have plenty of company before the day ended. After a morning respite, the storm picked up in earnest just after noon Saturday, cutting visibility to near zero.

Power lines were down, highways were treacherous and spring-like temperatures were only a memory Tuesday in parts of the Northeast in the wake of the storm that earlier had plastered the Midwest and Plains with a heavy shell of ice.

The death toll from the storm was at least 46 in seven states.

The weight of the ice snapped tree limbs, shorted out transformers and made power lines sag, knocking out current to about 145,000 customers in New York state and New Hampshire on Monday, though service had been restored for roughly half of them by Tuesday morning.

"If you live here long enough, you just know the power's going to go out twice a year, at least. You don't worry about it," said Scott Towne, owner of Rondac Pet Services near Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where portable generators provided light and heat for about two-dozen dogs. "You make all the plans in advance that you can."

The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record and nearly identical to the record set in 1998, according to scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Seven months in 2006 were much warmer than average, including December, which ended as the fourth warmest December since records began in 1895.

Based on preliminary data, the 2006 annual average temperature was 55°F - 2.2°F (1.2°C) above the 20th Century mean and 0.07°F (0.04°C) warmer than 1998. NOAA originally estimated in mid-December that the 2006 annual average temperature for the contiguous United States would likely be 2°F (1.1°C) above the 20th Century mean, which would have made 2006 the third warmest year on record, slightly cooler than 1998 and 1934, according to preliminary data. Further analysis of annual temperatures and an unusually warm December caused the change in records.

These values were calculated using a network of more than 1,200 U.S. Historical Climatology Network stations. These data, primarily from rural stations, have been adjusted to remove artificial effects resulting from factors such as urbanization and station and instrument changes which occurred during the period of record.

The unusually warm temperatures during much of the first half of the cold season (October-December) helped reduce residential energy needs for the nation as a whole. Using the Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index (REDTI - an index developed at NOAA to relate energy usage to climate), NOAA scientists determined that the nation's residential energy demand was approximately 13.5 percent lower than what would have occurred under average climate conditions for the season.

Colorado launched a hay lift Tuesday to try to save thousands of cattle stranded by 10-foot-high snowdrifts left after back-to-back blizzards paralyzed life on the Plains.

"These cattle have already gone a number of days without food and water. They're just going to lay over dead if we don't do something soon," said Department of Agriculture Executive Director Don Ament.

Last week’s storm dumped as much 3 feet of snow on the already hard hit mountains and Plains, and state and municipal crews from the Rockies to the Oklahoma Panhandle to Nebraska were still digging out highways and trying to reach isolated homes on Tuesday.

Wildfires in 2006 have now burned a record 8,693,994 acres as of Wednesday morning, September 13, with records kept all the way back to 1960. That acreage is roughly equal to the land areas of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined!

On September 6, I wrote a blog about the wildfires up to that time and some of the factors involved. Since then, Nevada has taken over first place from Texas in number of acres burned.

"It's a grim situation," said Herman Schumacher, the owner of a livestock market in Herreid, S.D., a small town near the North Dakota line where 37,000 head of cattle were sold from May through July, compared with 7,000 in the corresponding three months last year. "There's absolutely no grass in the pastures, and the water holes are all dried up. So a lot of people have no choice but to sell off their herds and get out of the business."

Drought experts say parts of the states most severely affected - Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming - have been left in far worse shape because of recent history: several years of dry conditions, a winter with little snow and then, with moisture reserves in the soil long gone, a wave of record heat this summer.

By late August, rain had fallen several times in some areas, but Bob Hall, an extension crops specialist at South Dakota State University, said it amounted to "a drip in a bucket."

"The bottom line is that even if we got relief starting today, at this minute," Dr. Hall said, "it would take a few years economically to recover."

Research conducted by a Nasa- affiliated scientist suggests that the frozen object that plummeted from the clear sky last Friday morning was one of the first "megacryometeors" to be recorded in Africa.

And Professor Jesus Martinez-Frias, head of the Planetary Geology Laboratory at the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, has warned that the microwave oven-sized ice object could be a portent of "serious environmental problems".

Frias is an authority in the megacryometeor phenomenon, having written a number of research papers on possible reasons for its development. According to his research, falling ice balls have been recorded since the 19th century.

And, six years ago, a plague of falling ice balls caused extensive damage to cars and an industrial storage facility in the Iberian Peninsula.

Located five to nine miles above the surface, the tropopause marks the limit of clouds and is important in the development of storms. Global warming may be making the tropopause colder, moister and more turbulent, creating conditions in which ice crystals grow like ordinary hailstones in thunderclouds, but much, much bigger. We recommend watching the skies and stocking up on umbrellas.

Heat bursts are caused by decaying thunderstorms and only develop in an extremely unique environment. The rare setup for a heat burst is dry air directly beneath a weakening elevated thunderstorm. When a thunderstorm is weakening air within the thunderstorm begins to sink. If this sinking air is very dry and high enough it will begin to accelerate toward the ground since it is more dense. Any remaining precipitation will fall through this dry air and quickly evaporate. As the air continues downward, it warms rapidly due to compression.

A heat burst is noted by a rapid increase in temperature, a drop in the dew point temperature and an increase in winds. Here are some readings that occurred this morning.

In some spots Thursday morning, the snow looked like it was tinted chocolate-brown, prompting calls from concerned area residents.

"It's pretty much statewide," said Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. "We've had reports from the San Juans, Winter Park ... all over."

Greene said exceptionally dry conditions in Northern Arizona contributed to the dust event, with a wind plume carrying the dust across most of Colorado.

Greene said the Copper Mountain ski patrol reported possible impacts to snow stability from the dust layers, with some easy shears occurring in the snowpack where new snow accumulated atop the dust.

The Dust Bowl, which lasted from 1931-1939, was a severe drought that struck a wide swath of the Great Plains. It was a catastrophic blow to the U.S. economy, which was already staggering under the weight of the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl was the worst drought in U.S. history, eventually covering more than 75 percent of the country. Solar radiation heating the parched and blighted land caused temperatures in the region to rise to record-breaking levels.

"1936 was the hottest summer ever recorded across much of the Midwest and East," said Abrams. "Many of the single-day and monthly record-high temperatures across the eastern two-thirds of the country are from that year."

The Dust Bowl was also noted for the huge dust storms that billowed across the Great Plains and swallowed millions of acres of farmland at a time. While a Dust Bowl-level drought could occur again, it is highly unlikely that the nation will see a return of the dust storms.

The country's average temperature for the month was 39.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 8.5 degrees above average for January, the National Climatic Data Center said Tuesday. The old record for January warmth was 37.3 degrees set in 1953.

On the other hand, while much of the United States was basking in warm weather, parts of Europe and Asia were being battered by bitter cold. Climate details for the rest of the world for January are expected to be available next week.

During the month the jet stream, a strong high-altitude wind that guides weather fronts from west to east, stayed unusually far to the north, keeping the coldest air in Canada and Alaska, the agency said.

Keeping that cold air to the north allowed mild Pacific air to moderate temperatures across the contiguous states, leading to the warm conditions.

"Don't ever ask the question, `What else could happen?'" said Marcia Paul Leone, a mortgage banker who was surveying the new damage to her Katrina-flooded home.

She would go no farther than the front porch of her house Thursday morning. Windows were blown out, and the building appeared to be leaning.

"I've been in the mortgage business for 20 years. I know when something's unsafe," she said.

Electricity was knocked out at Louis Armstrong International Airport, rounding passenger flights and leaving travelers to wait in a dimly lit terminal powered by generators. The storm also ripped off part of a concourse roof, slammed one jetway into another, and flipped motorized runway luggage carts.

All five of the hottest years since modern record-keeping began in the 1890s occurred within the last decade, according to analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In descending order, the years with the highest global average annual temperatures were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004, NASA said in a statement.

"It's fair to say that it probably is the warmest since we have modern meteorological records," said Drew Shindell of the NASA institute in New York City.

"Using indirect measurements that go back farther, I think it's even fair to say that it's the warmest in the last several thousand years."

Officials at Grandfather Mountain said the upper limit on their anemometer is 200 mph, but the needle on the gauge went beyond its limit, leading weather observers to speculate that the wind speeds exceeded 200 mph. The highest wind speed ever recorded in the Eastern U.S. was 231 mph at Mount Washington, N.H. on April 12, 1934.

Grandfather Mountain's summit visitors center suffered extensive damage when the wind blew out three double-strength, steel-wire-reinforced windows, ripped up floor tiles, blew open a locked door; tore a wooden mantel off a wall and upended a 300-pound boulder that was cemented into the parking area.

When Libbrecht started making snowflakes in the laboratory, he took microscopic photographs in order to be able to study the basic physics of each flake. In 2001, he started capturing images of natural snowflakes.

Location is important.

"Fairbanks sometimes offers some unusual crystal types, because it's so cold," Libbrecht said. "Warmer climates, for example, in New York state and the vicinity, tend to produce less spectacular crystals."

"I visit the frozen North and wait for snow to fall," Libbrecht said in a recent e-mail interview. "I'm in northern Ontario right now."

"The answer is basically yes, because there is such an incredibly large number of possible ways to make a complex snowflake," Libbrecht said. "In many cases, there are very clear differences between snow crystals, but of course there are many similar crystals as well. In the lab we often produce very simple, hexagonal crystals, and these all look very similar."

Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, whose group carried out the analysis, says he is not yet sure if the change is temporary or signals a long-term trend. "We don't want to say the circulation will shut down," he told New Scientist. "But we are nervous about our findings. They have come as quite a surprise."

The North Atlantic is dominated by the Gulf Stream - currents that bring warm water north from the tropics. At around 40° north - the latitude of Portugal and New York – the current divides. Some water heads southwards in a surface current known as the subtropical gyre, while the rest continues north, leading to warming winds that raise European temperatures by 5°C to 10°C.

But when Bryden's team measured north-south heat flow last year, using a set of instruments strung across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas, they found that the division of the waters appeared to have changed since previous surveys in 1957, 1981 and 1992. From the amount of water in the subtropical gyre and the flow southwards at depth, they calculate that the quantity of warm water flowing north had fallen by around 30%.

A report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Sweden -- launched by Nobel prize-winner Professor Paul Crutzen and other top scientists -- warned last week that pollution threatened to "trigger changes with catastrophic consequences" like these.

Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as "likely". But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away.

The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Acquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen.

The deadly tornado that obliterated homes across a swath of southwestern Indiana was unusually intense and fast, packing winds that topped 200 mph as it roared through the night at up to 75 mph, meteorologists said Monday.

The storm's strength, its 41-mile path of destruction and the fact that it struck in the middle of the night in November are all unusual, said Dan McCarthy, warning coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

One resident of the trailer park told WFIE of Evansville she saw a tornado pick up a car with members of her family in it and toss the vehicle into a tree. Brandi Crawley said no one was seriously injured.

"The damage is very, very extensive," said Chad Bennett, an assistant fire chief in Newburgh in Warrick County. He said the area hardest hit was just north of the city limits.

"Now that daylight has come, it is making it a little more easy to see the scope of the damage, and it is very shocking."

Bennett estimated the damage path was about 3/4 of a mile wide and 20 miles long.

Ryan Presley, a weather service meteorologist in Paducah, Ky., said a single tornado touched down near Smith Mills in western Kentucky and cut a 15- to 20-mile swath through Indiana's Vanderburgh and Warrick counties.

The tornado appears to have been an F3, with winds ranging from 158 mph to 206 mph, and may have been even stronger, Presley said.

1. Total Destruction of Earth
2. Gulf Coast Tsunami
3. East Coast Tsunami
4. Heat Waves
5. Midwest Earthquake
6. Supervolcano
7. Los Angeles Tsunami
8. Asteroid Impact
9. New York Hurricane
10. Pacific Northwest Megathrust Earthquake

An early nor'easter reinforced by distant Hurricane Wilma on Tuesday pounded beaches with 20-foot waves, knocked out power to thousands of people and spread rain across the Northeast, where many residents were still cleaning up from flooding earlier in the month.

Twenty-foot waves eroded New Jersey beaches. Dozens of flights were canceled at Boston's Logan Airport and gusts to 70 mph were reported on Cape Cod.

The storm was drawing moisture from the remnants of Hurricane Wilma, which was passing far offshore after battering Florida a day earlier.

"It's getting some energy from Wilma, but it's its own separate system," said Alan Dunham, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton. The nor'easter is "going to be a good storm in it's own right."

"I have been worked for NOAA for roughly 15 years," said a NOAA employee speaking of both the Department media policy and the Teet email. "There has never been a blanket policy of needing approval before granting an interview with a national media outlet."

Another NOAA employee, also wishing to remain anonymous, concurred.

"This is a big change in our policy with the media," he said. "This comes all the way down from DOC," he added, indicating that such media decisions were formerly made at the local level.

"The number of tornadoes associated with tropical storms and hurricanes was extraordinary and can be partially blamed for the high number of overall tornado reports," McCarthy said. Tropical Storm Bonnie and five land-falling hurricanes—Charley, Frances, Gaston, Ivan and Jeanne—affected the mid-Atlantic and Southeast states during August and September. Tornadoes frequently occur in the northeast quadrant of northward advancing tropical systems or their remnants.

Hurricane Frances produced the most tornadoes for a tropical system with a preliminarily number of 117 reports. Frances tops Hurricane Beulah, which spawned 115 tornadoes in September 1967. Hurricane Ivan was close with 104 tornado reports, and a total of 16 tornadoes were reported in association with Hurricane Jeanne.

"Cars were forced to the other side of the road, bins went through car windows. Leaves, tiles and glass were all across the road," Hockley resident Estelle Skidmore said.

"I got home to find one tree crashed onto the front of my house, another crashed from my garden into my neighbour's garden, and chimneys smashed to smithereens after falling off my neighbour's house," said Liz Munro from Moseley.

"I don't know why I'm not burnt to pieces," said Chris Cruse, 48, after taking refuge in a shelter.

Four more bodies were found Wednesday. Fourteen of the victims were thought to be homeless. Authorities did not know if a man found by the side of a road Sunday had a permanent residence.

The other three victims were elderly women, including one whose home cooling system was not on, police said.

"Most of us just run from air-conditioned box to air-conditioned box, so it's hard to imagine how omnipresent the heat really is for the homeless here," said Phoenix police Sgt. Randy Force.

"Governments now have a chance to make rational choices for the future, before it is too late," said ABI director of general insurance Nick Starling.

"Making the right decisions based on first class assessment of the financial costs of climate change will ensure lower costs for the public in future."

With Spain well used to high summer temperatures, many residential buildings are equipped with air conditioning which helped limit the 2003 official death toll to 101, whereas in neighbouring France, at least 14,847 people died.

French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand has therefore promised the installation of a nationwide emergency system, including a requirement that all establishments for the elderly should have at least one air-conditioned room.

Italy was also on high alert, with the health risks linked to above-normal temperatures highlighted by the release of an official report saying that almost 20,000 Italians had died in the 2003 heat wave -- more than double the previous estimate.

The Europe-wide toll for the extraordinary heat wave of 2003 had previously been estimated at around 30,000 but the Italian figure would boost it to 40,000.

It's a technological first. A well-placed probe fitted with 7 video cameras—6 with a 60-degree field-of-view designed to achieve a full 360-degree field-of-view (one failed during deployment, resulting in a 300-degree field-of-view) and one pointing upward—captures footage inside a tornado, providing visual data on ground wind speeds where the storm does the greatest damage.

Temperatures will climb into the upper 80s and lower 90s today in parts of the Everett-Seattle-Tacoma urban corridor...more than 20 degrees above normal for late may. Excessive physical activity in heat this intense can be dangerous. The elderly...very young... sick...and persons with heart conditions are most at risk.

Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, predicted 12 to 15 tropical storms, seven to nine of them becoming hurricanes, and three to five of those major hurricanes, with winds of at least 111 mph.

"We can't predict this far in advance how many will strike land," he said. But given the active season, "be prepared for two or three of these to make landfall."

"This event registered a 9 on the K-Index, which measures the maximum deviation of the Earth's magnetic field in a given three-hour period," said Gayle Nelson, lead operations specialist at NOAA Space Environment Center. "The scale ranges from 0 to 9, with 9 being the highest. This was a significant event."

Possible impacts from such a geomagnetic storm include widespread power system voltage control problems; some grid systems may experience complete collapse or blackouts. Transformers may experience damage. Spacecraft operations may experience extensive surface charging; problems with orientation; uplink