The Weather Blog

Weather.com has a new interactive weather map on their site, and it's actually pretty cool. You can zoom in on an area and see real-time satellite weather data. It's all based on Microsoft Virtual Earth.

I can see that my area is currently in the center of a rather large snow storm, although with a small opening in an area about a square mile wide around my neighborhood. I'm looking outside, and it's right, no snow at the moment.

**edit** Five minutes later now, and it's snowing once again. Pretty neat!
Interactive Weather Map

Some New Yorkers, especially those out towards Buffalo, will get their first taste of this year's winter tonight with a couple inches of wet, heavy snow. This is nothing new for Upstate New York, which has had heavy storms close area schools as early as October 3.

Having lived in New York for many years, I'm not sure if there's another place in the country where summer heat turns to winter chill so quickly and so randomly. It can be sweltering heat one week in late September (the term "Indian Summer" pops up in the local lingo for about a week each year) and then you can be listening to the radio to find out which businesses have closed due to a snow storm the very next week!

The only area in the United States that seems to get more inconsistent weather is the mid-west during tornado season, when a storm can cause temperatures to dip 40 degrees in a few minutes. I guess I should be happy with my wet snow.
Weather Hazards for Buffalo, NY

Tropical storm Alberto will soon become the first hurricane of the season as it nears Florida's gulf coast. The storm gained a lot of power while developing in the Gulf of Mexico. It is not expected to cause any major damage, as it will not have time to develop into a large hurricane.
LiveScience.com - Alberto Aims at Florida

Al Gore has been doing a lot since winning the 2000 presidential election but losing the bid to a man with better lawyers and more lawyers in his pocket. In fact, most would argue that Al Gore has done a lot more since 2000 than George W. Bush.

Gore's newest endeavour is a movie about global warming. He claims that the world is facing a "platetary emergency" as a result of recklessly putting greenhouse gases in our atmostphere. Gore takes the high road when it comes to President Bush, when he could have attacked the president, who was once the CEO of an oil company that fell into bankruptcy under his watch. Bush is well-connected in the oil industry, and many of his friends have become very rich during his administration.

Gore ignores those facts, choosing instead to criticize Bush for not doing anything to reduce America's dependency on coal and oil until public opinion polls forced him to. Many forget that making America independent of coal and oil was part of Gore's 2000 campaign platform.

Gore plans to donate proceeds from the film to an environmental charity, which will hopefully combat the influence many major polluters have on the American political system under Republican control. He has said that he has no plans to run for president in 2008, despite the fact that many polls show him winning against all conceivable Republican candidates in a landslide (apparently Americans are really getting upset about the country going to hell under the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Senate, House, and Supreme Court.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Politician Gore appears at Cannes