Auntie Em! Auntie Em!

You know the movie "Twister?" Of course you do. To a meteorologist, it's one of those movies where you shake your head at some parts and want to look at with scorn, but when if it's on TBS you refuse to change the channel.

Well, a group of scientists are taking the fictional "TOTO" to heart, with a new system called "VORTEX2" (or Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2, which is better than some acronyms you can find out there). With lots of funding in lots of places, their goals is to study how, when, and why tornadoes form. Over the next few weeks through the middle of June, researchers will try to locate these supercells and surround them with an plethora of instruments, such as radar, barometers, etc., to gain a three-dimensional picture of how the storms form and change. All this will be presented later this fall after they have a chance to crunch some numbers. Of course, the producers of Discovery Channel's Storm Chasers are filming these scientists in action. So if you can't get to Penn State to sit through the presentation, you could always tune in there.

Storm chasers are crazy, by the way.

Um, waaahh?

What do you do when a hurricane hits and knocks out the power for while? You're stuck at home since nothing is open and if you don't have a canoe, you really can't go anywhere. So you burn some candles, play some board games, make some babies?.

That's right. A Houston area hospital is actually expecting more babies to be born in June of this year thanks to Hurricane Ike, which impacting the Houston area in mid September of 2008. Let's just hope that the kids don't hear that story. The might end up scarred for life.

Little Ice Age?

So, did you hear that stuff about the new little ice age?. A lack of sunspots has been linked to the the Little Ice Age, which occurred back in the 17th and 18th Century. It was a period of unusually cold weather, not a full-scale, woolly mammoth ice age (or the movie. The theory goes that the prolonged decrease in sunspots, called the Maunder Minimum, caused this time of cooler temps. It's not a theory that is out-to-lunch by any stretch of the imagine. The sun is most active when there are a large number of sunspots. A less-active sun could mean cooler temps here on Earth.

That said, could this really lead to a new little ice age? Scienties have their doubts about that. While the connection between sunspot activity and temperatures on Earth are not well understood, their is a correlation there. But the other thing to keep in mind is that the Little Ice Age took place before the Industrial Revolution. There is more carbon dioxide in the air now than back then. With the current global warming trend, should a Maunder Minimum occur, all that may happen is that the warming trend will be knocked back a little. It would give the illusion that manmade global climate change is not occurring. Then when the cycle occurs once more, sunspot activity increases, and temps start to rise, we will be right back in the position we were in before. Which wouldn't be good.