Word: weathered
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...beat--is a regional entity that plays midway between Boston and nowhere. The Colts own the game's most heralded star, quarterback Peyton Manning--but also have owners whose local loyalty is suspect. The surprising Chargers, featuring the game's most unheralded star, running back LaDainian Tomlinson, are fair-weather favorites, though that's never a bad bet in San Diego. And the Philadelphia Eagles, with their own legions of long-suffering devotees, seem capable of winning their first championship since...
...Ross Hoffman has his way, weather will someday submit to the whim of man instead of the other way around. Hoffman, a principal scientist at the technology research firm Atmospheric & Environmental Research, in Lexington, Mass., forecasts a sunny future in which, say, stampeding typhoons could be safely corralled and driven back out to sea. The key to weather control, says Hoffman, is understanding that even the fiercest tempest is a delicate creature. And by exploiting the sensitivity of weather to tiny changes in the environment, Hoffman has successfully tamed two hurricanes, thus saving dozens of lives and billions of dollars...
...idea struck in 1977 when, as a graduate student at M.I.T., Hoffman was introduced to chaos theory. A chaotic system like weather appears to behave randomly but is actually governed by rules. It is also influenced by seemingly trivial tweaks to the system--hence the old romantic notion that a flap of a butterfly's wings in the rain forest of Brazil might give rise to a storm off the coast of Iceland. Perhaps, thought Hoffman, chaos and sensitivity, which make weather so difficult to predict, could be harnessed to purposely change...
...David Thompson pursued on of the first careers he considered, he might today be a guitarist in an alternative-rock band. But Thompson, 35, became intrigued with climate and weather, and just three years after he enrolled for graduate study at the University of Washington, he and his faculty adviser, John M. Wallace, published an attention-grabbing paper that announced the discovery of the Arctic Oscillation, an important new cog in the earth's climate machine...
...latitudes of the northern hemisphere. The AO encircles the whole of the Arctic and also extends from the sea's surface to the stratosphere, an ethereal region of the atmosphere some seven to 30 miles above the earth that forecasters thought had little bearing on day-to-day weather. Thanks to the discovery of the AO, that view of the stratosphere is changing. Among other things, scientists studying the AO have connected sudden warmings of the stratosphere to outbreaks of wintry weather in Europe and the U.S. Somehow, scientists think, these spikes in stratospheric temperatures weaken the winds that swirl...