Portland, Oregon has long had a Weather Ball -- a series of lights that tell you, in rough terms, a weather forecast. It's located downtown, on top of a building. From many locations in Portland you can spot the ball and get a general sense of upcoming weather. In Portland, the lights are coded like so (thanks to Lyza Gardner for the explanation): It can tell you one of six things, that is: 1. It's going to get hotter (steady red) 2. It's going to get colder (steady white) 3. It's going to... READ ON

For months now, Seattleite Ben Tesch has been working on cumul.us, a next-generation weather prediction site. The site launched just a few weeks ago, and represents a new approach to weather forecasting based on the wisdom of crowds -- in short, the notion that a bunch of people (both expert and amateur) predicting the weather will make better predictions in aggregate than single sources alone. More details: Firstly, the site will combine as many possible sources of weather forecasts as possible.... READ ON

I found Edward Lorenz while doing some research on chaos theory for an upcoming m_f article. Who would have thought the guy who gave us one of the thorniest fields in all science was actually a glorified weatherman? Here's what I wrote: "Chaos theory got started with a computer simulation of the weather, albeit one that didn't work. In the early '60s, a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz came up with 12 equations describing temperature, air pressure, and so on, and programmed them into a... READ ON

This just in from NASA: Last month, the globe experienced an extreme phenomenon referred to in the technical literature as "heat," shown in this satellite... READ ON