This is not much of a post, but it amazes me how unpredictable weather still is, even less than 12 hours out. The particular event that grabbed my attention today is the Nor'Easter hitting New England - well, most of the East Coast, really. I was slated to head to Hartford last night and was initially wary of the storm, but the forecasts didn't really sound all that bad. For unrelated reasons, I stayed in Rochester, and for kicks decided to check the radar on the route I would have been travelling. I would have been going through well-established snow bands of moderate intensity in the Eastern Berkshires, continuing to Chicopee, MA, and all the way down to Hartford, which was a very different picture from the estimates posted even five hours before I would have been there. And this morning - well, let's just say I'm glad I would have had a short walk to work. I guess it just goes to show that we have a long way to go before we can take all of the variables into account, and even then there may just be too many chaotic influences to be able to predict the weather. At least until we have that global weather control system installed! (Also check out here, here, and here. Mind you, I'm not saying any of these will work, but they're interesting, at least.)
It makes me think of an old
It makes me think of an old Ben Bova "juvenile", called The Weather-Makers, wherein noble studly scientist-heroes casually discussed using military satellites to "squirt a few lasers" at hurricans to make them go away.
Their biggest problems weren't with the weather, but rather with Big Bad Government Bureaucrats who wouldn't get out of their way and let them squirt lasers at cloud formations, damnit!
Energy beams to affect weather used in recent movies
I've seen parts of two movies in the last year in which orbital energy beam platforms were used to alter weather/climate. In one, there was some kind of superhurricane and, just as Bova's heroes would have wanted, the heroes use an orbital maser or laser to alter the behavior of the storm. In another, Earth is plummeted into an ice age from a cometary/asteroid impact and an orbital weapons platform is used to literally heat things up a bit.