Rollercoaster thrills

Extreme weather time. What's been going on lately? Hurricanes at maximum force line up to take one kick after another at a recordbreaking '05 season. Then once they are finished, level-one tornadoes swoop in for another piece of the action, which is bizarre because these guys have a season that runs before that of the hurricanes, not after. So this extreme weather - it's a bit extreme. Especially when it starts hitting places it usually doesn't.

On Hamilton mountain, it's currently volleyball season so imagine the setters' and spikers' surprise when a twister shoots through the gymnasium roof ("There's no twisters in volleyball!!" - it's no wonder there aren't with all the debris they send down onto the court... kneepads won't make much of a difference).

Hamilton is in an area of southwestern Ontario normally sheltered from major weather happenings. Occurrences are so rare here that it took the meteorologists a whole day to finally confirm what spawned all the wind damage.

And with this extreme weather comes extreme weather monitoring, which so far this year has been the part that concerns me. Extreme weather monitoring is not "let's go tornado-chasing in Niagara Falls this Thanksgiving," but rather endlessly looking at charts, reports and forecasts that detail the projected atmospheric conditions of next twenty days. And of course those long-range forecasts are never right. I don't know why I read them. They never mention 'tornado to hit gym' or 'you're going to see a few snowflakes come out of that passing thunderstorm'.