National Weather Service

This map shows the track of a tornado on May 3, 1999, in green; and the track of Monday's tornado in red. The similarity of the paths is coincidental, but the larger patterns of storm activity in "Tornado Alley" are due in part to the region's geography.

Do tornadoes follow well-worn tracks? Where do the deadliest twisters hit? Will climate change make such storms worse? Monday's devastating tornado in Oklahoma raises some questions for which scientists have ready answers, and others that could puzzle them for years to come:

Was this tornado a repeat of a famous twister in 1999?

For a time, Monday's storm followed a track that was similar to the path of a tornado with the fastest wind speed ever recorded, 318 mph (512 kilometers per hour), which occurred on May 3, 1999. That twister was one of 74 tornadoes that touched down in Oklahoma and Kansas in less than 21 hours, according to the National Severe Storms Laboratory. The 1999 outbreak of severe weather caused 46 deaths and nearly $1.5 billion in property damage.

The tracks weren't all that similar, however: Monday's tornado took a more southerly route as it moved east. And there's nothing unique about the area's geography to make it a magnet for super-powerful twisters, according to Bob Henson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

"If there were geographic features, that would tend to cause multiple tornadoes every few years," the meteorologist and writer told NBC News. "Well, why has this been happening only since 1999?"

The similarity in the tracks of these devastating storms is "a good example for how weather events can be clustered in ways that are striking yet ultimately coincidental," Henson said.

A classic example of this phenomenon, he noted, is Codell, Kan., which was hit by tornadoes on the same day — May 20 — in 1916, 1917, and 1918. The third tornado killed 10 people and destroyed a part of the community. "That's a good illustration of how sometimes things like this can just happen in clusters," he said.

NOAA SPC

The purple streaks on this map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center stand for tornado tracks from 1950 to 2011. The dark blotches indicate population densities.

But isn't Tornado Alley more prone to deadly twisters?

On a wider scale, the geography of America's midsection makes it more prone to tornadoes than any other region on Earth. The classic explanation is that the Rocky Mountains tend to impede the eastward flow of moist air, while the Great Plains allow frigid air to stream southward from Canada and meet up with warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico. However, the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center says this is a "gross oversimplification" for the origin of tornadoes.

Cliff Mass, a weather researcher at the University of Washington, cites an array of factors that include strong vertical instabiliity and a large amount of wind shear during the spring. "It turns out that nearly every geographical and meteorological aspect conducive to severe convection comes together here," Mass wrote in an explanatory blog posting this week.

"Tornado Alley" generally refers to the region centered in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and points north, where tornadoes are most frequent — but multiple studies indicate that the deadliest twisters occur to the east, in a region that's come to be known as "Dixie Alley." The reasons for that have to do with geography and demographics as well as meteorology in the southeastern United States: Storms tend to move faster, and they're more likely to strike at night. There are more trees and other obstructions to raise havoc. Population densities are generally higher, and the region has many manufactured homes that lack basements in which to take shelter.

The United States has the highest incidence of tornadoes, with an average of more than 1,000 every year, according to the National Climatic Data Center. But other regions of the world have twisters as well. Canada is No. 2 with about 100 per year, followed by northern Europe, western Asia, Bangladesh, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, China, South Africa and Argentina. Britain has more tornadoes than any other country, relative to its land area. "Fortunately, most UK tornadoes are relatively weak," the data center says.

Why do these tornadoes seem to be hitting all of a sudden?

After a relatively quiet start to the tornado season, tornadoes have been erupting from Texas to Minnesota over the past week. A cold front advancing to the east appears to be to blame. That pocket of cold air ran into warm air from the Gulf, causing the warm air to rise and spawning powerful thunderstorms. "It's kind of like the perfect setup," Jeff Weber, a scientist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, told LiveScience.

The earlier calm was due to the fact that jet stream had been dipping farther south than usual for this time of year. That kept the Gulf's warm, moist air from advancing into Tornado Alley early in the tornado season.

Will climate change make tornadoes worse? More frequent?

"The short answer is, we have no idea," Michael Wehner, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told NBC News. For years, Wehner has been studying the climate models for extreme weather, and he's a lead author for the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the federal government's latest national assessment on climate change.

One problem is that the observational record for tornadoes has not been uniform over time. "It has a bias to it, because more people are living where tornadoes occur, and more people are out looking for them," Wehner said. That contributes to the perception that tornadoes are happening more frequently than they used to.

The other big problem is that current climate models don't have the resolution that's needed to simulate the localized, violent activity of a tornado. Currently, global models are built up from atmospheric interactions on a scale of 100 kilometers (62 miles). Improvements in computer power could soon bring that down to a scale of 25 kilometers (16 miles). That should make it possible for scientists to simulate the weather phenomena that give rise to tornadoes, but not the tornadoes themselves, Wehner said.

On a larger scale, extreme weather events are expected to become more frequent in a warmer world, Wehner said. "The metric that I like to look at is the daily amount of rain for a storm that happens once every 20 years," he said. "That storm, in a much warmer world, would happen more frequently." For example, if the world follows a "business-as-usual" scenario, he projects that the average temperature would rise 11 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century, and that a once-in-20-years rainstorm would come around every five to 10 years on average.

That doesn't necessarily mean tornadoes would be more frequent, however. In fact, the current projection calls for wetter spring weather in the northern U.S., and drier weather in the Southwest — with Tornado Alley right in the middle. "There's some evidence that there might not be a change" in the character of a tornado season, Wehner observed.

Wehner may sound a bit apologetic about the lack of clear answers in the short term, but in the long term, he's optimistic. "The reason I'm optimistic that we can get somewhere on this is that supercomputing technology is driving this very hard," he said. "We're just getting into the sweet spot for these kinds of issues, with the largest mainframes that money can buy."

Update for 1:50 p.m. ET May 24: We've revised the explanation of the factors behind Tornado Alley's susceptibility to twisters, so that it includes a more nuanced view from the University of Washington's Cliff Mass. 

More about tornado science:

• Why tornadoes seem as if they're on the rise
• Flash interactive: What causes tornadoes?
• Full coverage of the Oklahoma tornadoes

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with him by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding him to your Google+ circles.

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, visit his website. 

This story was originally published on Mon May 20, 2013 8:20 PM EDT

Nationwide polls may portray the presidential campaign as a neck-and-neck horse race, but less conventional data-crunching methods spit out a different picture, with President Barack Obama edging out GOP challenger Mitt Romney.

One big variable remains to be factored in: the effect of Hurricane Sandy. And one big state that's been relatively unaffected by the storm holds the key to the outcome: Ohio. "It's been that way for the entire election cycle," said David Rothschild, an expert on opinion modeling at Microsoft Research and Columbia University's Applied Statistics Center.

Rothschild, who lays out election forecasts at the Predictwise website and blogs about prediction science on The Signal at Yahoo, surveyed the state of the art this weekend at the New Horizons in Science symposium, presented as part of the ScienceWriters2012 conference.

In the final days of the campaign, the divergent spins on the election outlook have sparked a few fireworks. Statistician Nate Silver's analysis for The New York Times' Five Thirty Eight column, which has consistently favored Obama even as many others were reporting a tightening of the race, drew criticism from the National Review's Josh Jordan for including "a little bit too much hope of an Obama victory against what appears to be a surge of Romney momentum."

This week, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough virtually called for Silver's pundit license to be revoked. "Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes," he said on "Morning Joe."

Economist Paul Krugman went to Silver's defense in his own column for the Times, decrying the "war on objectivity" and saying that "all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may."

"This is really scary," Krugman wrote. "It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn't what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign."

Silver's analysis is based on a state-by-state assessment of polling data from multiple sources, translated into an electoral vote count. Political prediction markets, such as those studied by Rothschild, use a different method to come up with a surprisingly similar snapshot of the horse race.

The markets offer a glorified kind of gambling on political fortunes: The winner-take-all markets let players "invest" in the prospects of a particular candidate. If the candidate wins, the investor gets, say, $1 a share. If the candidate loses, the investor gets nothing. Leading up to Election Day, investors can buy or sell shares in candidates to match their expectations of success.

The shifting share prices reflect the perceived probability of success. For example, Intrade's market sets the probability of Obama's re-election at 63 percent. The Iowa Electronic Markets go with a little more than 63 percent, while the trading at Betfair puts the probability at 70 percent. That's in the same ballpark as Silver's 72.9 percent estimate.

IEM / Univ. of Iowa

A chart shows share values on the Iowa Electronic Markets in the winner-take-all market for the presidential popular vote. The blue line indicates Democratic share prices, while the red line indicates GOP share prices.

Intentions vs. expectations
What the prediction markets provide is a probability figure, not a vote share figure. It reflects expectations about a given outcome, just as the Vegas odds reflected the expectation that the Giants would win the World Series, even before they swept the Tigers. There was a chance all the way up to the final out that the Tigers could roar back and take four games in a row to win the series. But in this case, at least, the Vegas marketplace predicted the outcome.

So what's the success rate of prediction markets? How do surveys that gauge expectations perform, compared with traditional surveys that gauge what voters say they intend to do? That's where Rothschild's research comes in: He and a colleague, Penn economist Justin Wolfers, looked at the predictions produced by traditional polls ("For whom do you intend to vote?"), as opposed to less traditional surveys ("Whom do you expect to win?"), in 345 political races.

Most of the time, the predictions from the two types of forecasts were in agreement. But in those cases where the predictions were different, the expectation survey was right 76 percent of the time, while the traditional intention survey was right only 24 percent of the time.

Rothschild said the strength of expectation polls may lie in the fact that investors can absorb information from other sources to come up with a consensus that reflects the wisdom of crowds. "Asking people about expectations is equivalent to as if people went out to 10 random voters and reported the binary result," he said.

Based on the prediction markets, it's as if Obama is the favored team in the seventh game of the World Series. The betting odds have been in his favor for the past year — even though there have been ups and downs, such as his slump in the first presidential debate. Now that all the debates are done, most of the uncertainty has been wrung out of the campaign.

"There's one more unexpected event: this hurricane," Rothschild said.

After the storm
Lots of prognosticators have pointed to the uncertainties raised by Hurricane Sandy. The conventional wisdom was that Romney would benefit from a long-recognized anti-incumbent effect in late pre-election polling, as well as a race-tightening effect. However, Sandy changes the calculus.

"Generally, natural disasters benefit incumbents," Rothschild said. There's a tendency to put politics aside, rally 'round the flag and let the president look presidential. (That effect can go negative if the disaster response doesn't go well, as President George W. Bush found out in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.) Even before the storm hit, Scarborough said Romney's momentum could stall in Sandy's aftermath. "It changes everything with a week to go," he said.

There's already some evidence that the rally effect has kicked in: For example, today New Jersey's Republican governor, Chris Christie, said hat Obama's response to the storm crisis was "outstanding" and that he didn't "give a damn about Election Day." Christie is due to tour devastated areas with the president on Wednesday.

The catastrophic aftermath of the storm may affect early voting as well as the Election Day turnout in places like New York and New Jersey. That could cut into the Democratic vote. Research has shown that obstacles to voting tend to hit Democrats harder than Republicans. But in Sandy's case, that statistical effect may not be critical because those states are relatively safe for Obama.

Sandy's effect may be more crucial hundreds of miles from the worst of the storm, in Ohio. For the past year, Ohio has been the "flip state" in Rothschild's calculations. Neither candidate has a clear path to victory unless he wins Ohio's electoral votes, Rothschild said. That's one reason why Romney was the headliner for a storm-relief rally in Ohio today — and why Vice President Joe Biden and former President Bill Clinton are canvassing the state while Obama tours the hurricane zone.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney reacts as he accepts a food donation from a supporter during a storm-relief event in Kettering, Ohio.

How will it all turn out? There are lots of statistical models floating around, and no matter which way it turns out, some will score a home run while others will strike out. In addition to the political prediction markets we've been talking about, here are a few more forecasts to watch:

• University of Illinois' Election Analytics favors Obama in the electoral vote.
• Moody's Analytics favors Obama in the electoral vote.
• Yale economist Ray Fair's Vote-Share Equations indicate that the election is too close to call.
• University of Colorado's election model, developed by political scientists Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry, favors Romney in popular and electoral vote.
• IHS Global Insights' Nigel Gault's model favors Romney, based on a formula that combines five economic indicators.

We'll be talking about the scientific angles to the political campaign at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show airing on BlogTalkRadio and in the Second Life virtual world. My guest will be Shawn Lawrence Otto, a founder of ScienceDebate.org and author of "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America."

Turn to NBC Politics for the full story about the final week of the presidential campaign, and keep a watch on our coverage of Hurricane Sandy's aftermath as well.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor and vice president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, which presented the New Horizons in Science symposium. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Hurricane Sandy is posing a monster challenge for weather forecasters and emergency agencies, due to an amazing combination of meteorological factors, but what's just as amazing is how well they've been able to predict what seemed to be an unpredictable disaster.

"It looks like we've been fairly consistent on this, even five days out," Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, told me today. "I think when all is said and done, on the track forecast, we're going to be quite accurate."

Sandy's path, which took a left turn from the Atlantic to slam head-on into the heavily populated Northeast, is just one of the unusual aspects of this storm. "The size of this system, the late-season nature, and the track — all these are fairly unique characteristics," Landsea said. To look for precedents, you have to go back to infamous hurricanes such as Agnes in 1972, Hazel in 1954, even the great storms of 1944, 1938, 1815 and 1804. But today, the region is so much more populous and developed that the impact is certain to be far greater.

Here are five factors that have turned Sandy into a superstorm:

Northerly track: Atlantic tropical storms most commonly tear through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and lose energy as they pass over the U.S mainland. This storm, however, crept along the Eastern Seaboard, where waters that were warmer than usual for this time of year kept the storm alive. As the storm moved northward, it morphed into a hybrid storm, drawing additional strength from the differential between the storm's warm air and cold northern air from the jet stream.

"There's a transformation that this system is undergoing," Landsea explained. "This is actually evolving into a winter storm, and later, a nor'easter." One result of this evolution is that the storm system has widened to more than 800 miles in diameter, stretching from the Carolinas to Maine and Canada.

NASA / NOAA

NOAA's GOES-13 weather satellite shows the storm system associated with Hurricane Sandy covering the northeastern United States even before landfall on Monday.

The left turn: Hurricanes that get so far north could drift off into the cold Atlantic to die — but they can also be pushed into the mainland, as Hurricane Irene was last year. Irene followed a path that was roughly parallel to the coastline, but Sandy took a hard left turn that put it on a course for a direct, perpendicular strike on the coast. That's because a cold front on the mainland is drawing the storm westward, while the current state of a weather pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation is blocking the storm from heading eastward. 

Storm surge: Sandy's top sustained winds of 85 miles per hour typically wouldn't rate as a superstorm, but its effects will be magnified, Landsea said. "Even though it's not a 'major' hurricane by any means ... there is substantial threat because of the storm surge and because of the rainfall. There's going to be flooding. Both of those factors are going to be killers," he said. The storm surge is projected to range from 6 to 11 feet. One of the big reasons for such a high surge is that the waters off the coast of New York and New Jersey are so shallow: As the surge from the deeper ocean nears the coastline, all that water piles up to create a higher wave.

Full moon: Another reason for the huge storm surge is the fact that the moon is hitting its full phase just as Sandy is making landfall. The celestial lineup of the sun, moon and Earth contributes to higher-than-normal high tides. 

Winter storm: Sandy is such a late-season storm that it's running into winter weather in the northeastern United States, which is adding an extra dimension to the misery. "I have not been around long enough to see a hurricane forecast with a snow advisory in it," Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told NBC's TODAY. The storm could trigger up to 3 feet of snow in the Appalachians, the National Weather Service reported. The Weather Channel's Tom Niziol said that "an amazing combination of factors" have come together to make Sandy a threat due to the snow as well as the rain.

Landsea and other forecasters may marvel at the factors behind what some have called a "perfect storm" or "Frankenstorm," and there'll surely be lots of lessons learned for future weather modeling. But that's not what's uppermost on their mind right now. "What's really important are the impacts," Landsea said.

To keep on top of the storm, and to keep safe, keep an eye on NBC News' hurricane coverage:

• Sandy swamps coastal towns, cuts power to 700,000
• Live updates on Hurricane Sandy
• Your images of Hurricane Sandy

Update for 3:10 p.m. ET Oct. 30: The storm surge was clearly one of the biggest impacts of Hurricane Sandy, and for good reason: The National Hurricane Service reported that in some cases, the surge exceeded its own maximum prediction of 11 feet. At New York's Battery Park, for example, the surge measured 13.7 feet — and it was devastating. On another note, I've corrected the spelling of Landsea's apt last name since this item was originally published.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The tornado that devastated southern Indiana today may have shared some deadly twists with a similarly powerful storm that flattened Joplin, Mo., last year.

The Joplin tornado, which killed more than 160 people last May, was distinguished by a rare multiple-vortex structure: In such storms, the center of the wind funnel spawns two to seven smaller twisters, or subvortices, that circulate around the edge of the cloud at speeds that can range up to 100 mph faster than the winds in the main funnel. The subvortices typically last less than a minute each.

John Belski, a meteorologist at WAVE-TV in Louisville, Ky., said the tornado that ripped through Indiana's Clark County was a multiple-vortex tornado.

"Those individual vortexes are very destructive," Purdue University tornado researcher Ernest Agee told me today. He emphasized that he couldn't confirm whether the Indiana storm had a multi-vortex structure, but noted that today's tornado outbreak was clearly a "big super-cell storm."

"It's not uncommon for the stronger, more violent tornadoes to be multiple vortex," he said. One characteristic of such storms is a pattern of asymmetric damage. In some cases, one side of a structure might look relatively untouched, while the other side would be completely destroyed, he said.

The National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center says multi-vortex tornadoes are probably behind most reports of multiple tornadoes hitting at once — but on rare occasions, separate tornadoes can form close to each other as satellite tornadoes.

Agee marveled at the breadth of today's outbreak, stretching up from Alabama to Indiana and beyond. But he said it looked as if the area's residents might have fared better than the victims of the Joplin storm did last year.

"A lot of the people in the area had advance notice in terms of the forecast," he told me. "I'm sure it was pretty bad for the people who were affected, but the devastation could have been a lot worse."

Update for 10 p.m. ET: Storm-chaser Skip Talbot's photo of the Henryville tornado confirms that it had a multiple-vortex structure. I've also added a video from The Associated Press' YouTube channel that clearly shows the funnel cloud spawning subvortices. To read other reports from the field, check out the Stormtrack website.

More about tornadoes:

• Why so many tornadoes are hitting U.S.
• Interactive: What causes tornadoes?
• Weather coverage from msnbc.com

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Dave Martin / AP

A farmer drives his tractor past a flooded field of corn near Yazoo City, Miss. on Saturday, May 21, 2011.

A high-tech crop insurance company aims to make farming profitable — and itself — by writing policies that offer protection against floods, frosts, droughts and other bouts of crop-damaging weather that are on the rise.

Whether the increase in these weather events are due to human-caused climate change, the company said, is not their business, but the events are trending upwards and they have the technology to analyze the risk they pose to individual farmers and price polices accordingly.

"We are not trying to predict exactly what will happen, we are trying to create a distribution of outcomes of what might happen," David Friedberg, the CEO of The Climate Corporation, which is issuing the insurance, told me Thursday.

"It is the probabilistic distribution of things that might happen that allows us to figure out what price to charge for the insurance that we are selling."

High-tech risk analysis
This ability hinges on a system that crunches a deluge of data from state-of-the-art climate models, millions of weather measurements, and billions of soil observations. At any given time, more than 50 terabytes of live data are in its systems.

Farmers purchase policies for specific plantings (such as a field of corn or wheat) and are paid automatically when an identified type of weather hits that is known to cause production shortfalls, such as crop-wilting heat or drought. 

The Climate Corporation was founded by ex-Googlers who believe that these types of weather events are becoming increasingly common. Whether this increase in weather volatility is due to human cause climate change, however, the company doesn't have an opinion, Friedberg said.

"All that we can do is identify trends in climate data and use them to help us predict what is going to happen in the future," he said. 

For example, he said they can look at any city in the United States and see that temperatures have increased slightly over the last 30 years and seem to be continuing to increase, but that's not what they're interested in.

Rather, the impacts they are looking for are droughts, such as the one currently crippling Texas and the floods that hit Midwest farms in the spring.

"Those are the sorts of events that farmers and other businesses care about … and those are the sorts of events that we also see big trends in," Friedberg said.

Changing industry
While climate scientists caution people not to confuse the weather with climate change, the types of extreme weather events experienced this year are consistent with the predictions of climate change models.

Polls show a growing percentage of Americans now believe the planet is warming, but the issue remains a political hot potato. Most Republican presidential candidates — John Huntsman aside — eschew the idea that fossil fuel burning is causing the climate to change, for example.

Meanwhile, legislation to combat climate change has failed to make its way through Congress and climate scientists are routinely accused of manipulating data, though those claims have been proven mostly false.

But for the insurance industry, where money does most of the talking, whether anyone says it directly or not, climate change is decidedly real and will wreak havoc on life, property, and crops. As a result, the industry is becoming proactive in incorporating changing climate into its risk analyses.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners now, on a state-by-state opt-in basis, surveys companies about the risk climate changes poses to insurers and the actions insurers are taking in response to their understanding of those risks, for example.

Munich Re, a multinational company that insures insurance companies, issued a report in July showing 2011 was already the costliest year on record in terms of property damage.

While natural disasters unrelated to climate change such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan make up for a big chunk of the losses, flooding in Australia has the fingerprint of climate change, Peter Hoppe, who runs the company's Geo Risk/Corporate Climate Center, told reporters as the report was released.

Natural events such as La Nina and El Nino, ocean cycles that alter weather systems, are certainly factors as well, but warming temperatures appear to be adding a layer "on top" of that natural variability, Hoppe said.

He also cited a climate connection between Australia's severe floods and rising ocean temperatures off the coast there. That means "more evaporation and higher potential for these extreme downpours," he said.

"It can only be explained by global warming," he added. 

Now that this acknowledgement exists, insurers such as The Climate Corporation are creating innovative tools to offer protection from the risk posed by the increased chance that bad weather can wipe out a year's income.

"If you are a farmer, you really can't afford to have another heat wave or another early freeze event or delayed plant period," said Friedberg. "We can really reach in and help."

More on climate change, insurance and farming:

• Warming: A $900 billion insurance risk?
• Insurers paying to rebuild greener homes
• Irene wallops floundering flood insurance program
• Scientists race to avoid climate change harvest

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Did forecasters, policymakers and media types overhype Hurricane Irene? It's not just a meteorological question: The debate over whether the outlook for damage was overhyped, or hyped just right, touches upon issues of risk perception and even the climate change debate. Like most natural disasters, Irene's deadly sweep over the U.S. East Coast has left behind some important lessons for researchers as well as regular folks.

Here are some of the lessons that Monday-morning commentators are chewing over:

What was right and wrong about storm prediction?
The computer models, and the meteorologists who wielded them, put in a "gold medal" performance when it came to predicting Irene's track — but there was much more uncertainty about the intensity of the storm. That's typical for tropical storms, said Frank Marks, director of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory's Hurricane Research Division. "Irene really exemplified the issues that we've been trying to tackle," he told me.

Hurricanes typically follow a pattern in which an outer ring of storms will tighten up to replace an inner ring surrounding the hurricane's eye, intensifying the storm system in the process. In Irene's case, that pattern (known as eyewall replacement) was interrupted, and the storm didn't gather as much strength as most of the models suggested. "Some of the models did represent it well," Marks said, but there wasn't enough confidence in those models to change the storm forecast.

Researchers have been working to reduce the error rate for hurricane track and intensity forecasts through the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, with the goal of a 50 percent reduction from 2008 levels by 2018. The University of Washington's Cliff Mass, an expert on weather modeling, said Irene showed that much more progress still has to be made on predicting a storm's intensity.

"The classic is good forecast for track, bad forecast for intensity," he told me. "Let's face it: This happens all the time. ... To get the intensity right, you have to be able to predict the inner workings of the storm, and that's what we don't do well yet."

But Mass said "we didn't even need the models" to know that Irene would become less intense as it moved up the coast, through the increasingly cool waters of the Atlantic. In fact, Mass contends in a blog post today that "there is really no reliable evidence of hurricane-force winds at any time the storm was approaching North Carolina or moving up the East Coast."

He argued that the National Weather Service should have downgraded the storm much more quickly than it did. "There's a tendency to be conservative," he told me. "We have to learn to be more nimble."

Did forecasters overhype the storm?
In his blog posting, Mass addresses the hype surrounding Irene: "Considering the tendency for media to hype storms, it is crucial for meteorologists to stick to the exact story and not overwarn in the hope of encouraging people ot take effective action. If the storm was known not to be a hurricane earlier, might the mayor of NY have held off closing the city down, thus saving billions of dollars?"

Marks said that the storm was assessed based on readings taken from above as well as on the surface, and that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration followed the standard procedures for those assessments. But he acknowledged that Irene was a tough storm to classify, in part because of its breadth. "From Cape Cod all the way inland to Pennsylvania — just think about the energy," he said. "It's really the energy of the storm, it's not the peak wind."

He said spin control isn't part of NOAA's mission. "We provide as much information as we can, based on what we know," Marks said. "What the public and decision makers do with that information is something that's out of our purview."

Marks acknowledged that some of the reports made the storm sound scarier than it really was. "If you looked at those scenarios that the media was getting ... the disaster scenario was extreme. That was for a major hurricane coming straight at them, not a weakening storm coming up the coast," he said.

How much was lost in translation?
So was this a case of journalists and policymakers making too much of the storm? Maybe so, said David Ropeik, a consultant on risk perception, Big Think blogger and author of the book "How Risky Is It, Really?" But maybe that's not so bad.

"Yes, the information the media presented was wrapped up in breathless alarmism," Ropeik, a former msnbc.com contributor, told me. "But we forget two things: First, surveys show that the public knows that about the media. And second, under all the alarmism was really important information that helped people stay safe: storm track timing, tips for preparedness, evacuation routes. It was alarmist in voice, but an informative tool. And that probably helped more than it hurt. ... There was no panic, there was no hysteria."

Ropeik said government officials also did the right thing: "In my opinion, they were overly precautionary, but most people want them to do that. One can only measure the accuracy of their precaution in hindsight, and you don't want to err on the wrong side. ... The evacuation, the closing of the subways, you don't want to make a mistake on that in the wrong direction."

There were political considerations, to be sure. Just ask New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who faced harsh criticism over the lack of preparedness for last winter's snowstorms — or former President George W. Bush, who was similarly criticized in the wake of Hurricane Katrina almost exactly six years ago.

But beyond the politics, the storm's toll — more than 30 dead, plus an estimated $7 billion in property damage — clearly demonstrates that Irene was more than just hype.

"I daresay the people who are saying there was overreaction are not those who are still without power, or who suffered property losses, or who lost loved ones," Ropeik said. "Risk is a matter of perception. It depends on who you ask."

Some commentators worry that hyping hurricanes will lead folks to disregard future warnings as a case of "crying wolf," but Ropeik said the public response to the warnings about Irene "puts the lie to that."

"Other storms have been hyped, and have not panned out, and yet people still took reasonable precautions this time," he said. "The 'cry-wolf' thing didn't happen."

Do more big storms lie ahead?
The concerns about Irene's effects could hint at the shape of climate debates to come.

Research published last year in the journal Nature Geoscience suggested that global warming was likely to produce fewer but stronger tropical storms. This year, a study in the journal Science came to a similar conclusion.

Such projections have sparked strong debate, as most claims about climate effects have done. It's impossible to link any single event, such as Irene or Katrina, to long-term climate trends. But in a posting to his Desmog Blog, science writer Chris Mooney argues that Hurricane Irene should get people thinking about what lies ahead:

"... Irene focuses our attention on our serious vulnerability, and we need to seize that moment — because too often our default position is to act like nothing bad is going to happen.

"There are several places in the United States, besides New Orleans, where a strong hurricane landfall could be absolutely devastating. These include the Florida Keys, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg and Houston/Galveston. But they also include some East Coast locations, and chief among these is New York/Long Island. ...

"So what are our major coastal cities doing to protect themselves? That's the question we should all be asking right now."

What questions are you asking? Share them as a comment below, and we'll see if we can get a discussion going.

Update for 5:30 p.m. ET: One of the first Irene-related research projects to come to light focuses on whether big storms could actually counteract the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Scientists at the Stroud Water Research Center and the University of Delaware are sampling the storm runoff at sites along creeks in Delaware to measure how much carbon is being transported. In a news release, the National Science Foundation says the project could reveal how much of a role soil erosion plays in sequestering carbon to prevent it from re-entering the global carbon cycle.

"The bigger the storm, the greater the disproportionate load, so you might have a single 100-year storm event move 25 percent of the material for an entire decade," said Anthony Aufdemkampe, a scientist at the Stroud Water Research Center. "This is important, because fresh waters and the carbon they transport play a major role in the global cycling of greenhouse gases."

Update for 6:30 p.m. ET: Climate Progress' Joe Romm notes that rising sea levels, which some see as an effect of global climate change, would heighten the destructive effect of coastal storms such as Irene because the storm surge would come on top of those higher seas. (The state of global sea levels is another subject of scientific discussion.)

More about Irene's aftermath:

• Twitter's top lessons from Hurricane Irene
• Readers capture Hurricane Irene
• Hurricane Irene spawns baby boom
• Stocks close sharply higher after Irene passes

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Nathalie Miebach

This wall piece, "The Perfect Storm," reflects weather data from the twin storms of 1990 that sank a fishing vessel off the coast of Massachusetts - and inspired a book and movie that were also titled "The Perfect Storm." Click through a slideshow featuring Miebach's musical scores and sculptures.

Nathalie Miebach decides what storms sound like.

This Boston artist spends her studio time turning reams of weather data — wind speeds, barometric readings and rainfall totals — into music and sculptures. 

Miebach's work has tracked temperate storms, documented the daily weather of beaches. In one particularly poignant project, she created a musical piece that documented changes in weather during the week following her father-in-law's death. For her work, Miebach was selected as a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow. 

Origins
It began when Miebach signed up for astronomy night classes at Harvard, while taking basket weaving lessons from a local artist during the day. "I was going to the lecture with my bucket and sprayer," Miebach said, "[I was] learning about astronomy ... about the deepest of space, and the deepest of time, but all I really got was a two-dimensional understanding of it all." 

But then something clicked: Miebach found herself thinking, "I could really use the basket to find a tactile way of understanding astronomy." 

Miebach's final project wove her daytime and nighttime pursuits neatly together. She made a basket which described an astronomical chart — the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which astronomers use to classify stars.

Miebach was hooked. "When you take data and put it into 3-D, things get revealed that don’t get seen in a normal graph," said the artist, who spent six years after her Harvard course working on art inspired by data from the stars.

And then one day, she got a call from two weather scientists at Tufts University. They'd gotten wind of her work, and asked her to spend a summer collecting weather data on a lonely patch of Massachusetts coast on Cape Cod.

The Cape Cod experience rerouted her attention to weather data, which she then started using as the raw material for her artistic work. To create the pieces she makes now, she uses a combination of data she collects by herself, from wind vanes and temperature gauges, as well as data available off the Internet: temperature and wind speed, measured over the course of days, weeks, or months.

Where the music happens
The musical bits coming out of Miebach's projects really started out as a happy accident, when she realized that what she understood as a graph of data could be re-interpreted by musicians. 

Miebach wasn't an expert herself. "I don’t know anything about music – I don’t play music and I can’t read music," she acknowledged. But she found musicians such as Janet Schiff, a Milwaukee cellist, who were willing to help her convert numbers on graph paper to music that musicians could understand. "That was my challenge," Schiff told me.

"My No. 1 rule is that I don't touch the data," she said. The numbers get laid out on a graph. The graph is then embellished with things that Miebach saw, like the cloud cover, or the moon cycles. "A D on a piano keyboard might be a 5-mile-an-hour wind," Miebach said.

During a series of exchanges with the musicians, the notations are reworked, polished, and refined so that they make musical sense. The music ends up sounding a little like this, or this. Both of these are recordings of Miebach's "Hurricane Noel," which was made from weather data that tracked a storm's path along North America's east coast, all the way from Haiti to Nova Scotia. (The audio files are large, so give them a while to open.)

Miebach encourages the musicians who play her work — such as Janet Schiff and her colleagues in the Nineteen Thirteen Trio, or the Axis Ensemble — to personalize the work, as long as they keep the data intact. That's why the two recordings sound different.

Nathalie Miebach

The musical score for "Hurricane Noel" incorporates weather data from a storm that swept through North America's east coast over the course of three and a half days in 2007. Click through a slideshow featuring Miebach's musical scores and sculptures.

Artistry and awkwardness
It isn't until the score is perfected and packed away that Miebach begins sculpting. She picks one or two elements of the swirling data before her, and begins building, looping in layer after layer, creating wall mounts as well as woven sculptures.

The final products, arresting visuals with loud weaves and bright colors, at first glance look like something out of a kid's store, Miebach admits, but that's what draws people in.

"Only when they have their nose in the sculpture, that’s when they realize that this is all numbers. That behind all this playful presentation is a system of logic that puts it all together," she said. 

At that moment, there's an "awkward tension" that develops between the viewer and her piece, Miebach said, as they realize that what they're looking at could fit snugly in an art gallery, in a science museum and in a craft show. This awkward art appreciation is just what Miebach is looking for.

More about turning science into art: 

• Music of the genes
• Music of the spheres … and the stars
• The geometry of music
• Music made for monkeys

Click through a selection of Miebach's sculptures and musical scores.

Nidhi Subbaraman is the science and tech news intern at msnbc.com. Follow Nidhi on Twitter, and connect with the Cosmic Log on Facebook. 

Steven Cummer / Duke University

Duke University researchers have explained the dynamics of gigantic, spaceward propagating jets of lightning, such as the one seen here near the university. The jets can reach 50 miles high.

On rare occasions, jets of lightning escape from the tops of thunderclouds and shoot up into the atmosphere where they pose a threat to weather balloons and other scientific instruments. New research explains how it happens.

"In some instances there is enough energy and electric charge available for that lightning to just keep propagating up and up and up and it keeps going to about 50 miles high," Steven Cummer, a lightning expert at Duke University, told me today. 

The jets come to a halt at 50 miles high because they run into the ionosphere, the electrically conducting part of the atmosphere, which "sort of shorts it out and prevents it from getting any farther," he added.

Cummer is a co-author of a paper accepted May 5 for publication in Geophysical Research Letters that, for the first time, explains the dynamics that lead to the gigantic jets of lightning shooting from the tops of clouds into the upper atmosphere. 

Bolt from the blue
The jets, according to the research, appear to be related to a phenomenon called a bolt from the blue. This occurs when a lightning channel develops inside a cloud but is unable to find enough electric charge of the opposite sign to make it stop, so it shoots out the side of the thundercloud.

Sometimes when this happens, the channel will propagate a few handfuls of miles horizontally before it turns down and becomes a cloud-to-ground lightning stroke.

"That is called a bolt from the blue because if you were on the ground, you would be at best dimly aware that there was a thunderstorm 10 miles away and yet a lightning stroke came down and struck the ground whereas the sky above looks clear and blue," Cummer explained.

What appears to happen to allow the spaceward propagating jets is that a bolt from the blue starts to develop but doesn’t quite make it out of the side of the cloud. Then, a fraction of a second later another channel develops upward and escapes from the top of the cloud.

The first, failed bolt from the blue, Cummer explained, appears to deplete the upper cloud layer of any opposite charge that would normally stop the lightning stroke, opening a channel for the second part of the flash. It escapes from the cloud and turns into a gigantic jet that "just keeps going and keeps going." 

Cool, rare phenomenon
These giant, spaceward propagating jets of lightning were first observed about 10 years ago. Scientists think they are rather rare, though they are more difficult to observe than cloud-to-ground lightning because it's hard to see above thunderstorms. 

Researchers have viewed them a couple hundred miles away from the storms, with clear skies above and a view of the storm on the horizon. They have also been seen with cameras on satellites. From these counts, they are certainly less common than cloud-to-ground lightning, Cummer noted. 

However, they are common enough to pose a slight risk to weather balloons and other scientific instruments that spend time above the clouds but below the ionosphere. "You do have to be aware that there is a non-zero chance that a lightning bolt can shoot out of a thundercloud," he said. 

But studying the jets, Cummer admits, is mostly just scientifically interesting. Besides that, they have an undeniable "cool factor," he said.

More stories on lightning:

• Video shows how jets survive lightning strikes
• Lightning striking twice? Maybe not even once
• Scientists capture X-ray images from lightning 
• One mystery of sandstorm lightning explained 

Tip o' the Log to Wired Science

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

As if the Maya apocalypse wasn't enough to worry about, talk of a potential California superstorm or a catastrophic supernova have given a further boost to 2012 paranoia. Heck, even Hollywood is making a cameo in the 2012 saga.

Doomsayers have predicted that a global catastrophe, or at least some kind of global change-over, could occur in 2012, but they're likely to end up as wrong as those who predicted a Y2K meltdown or a Second Coming in 1844. (Jesus' failure to appear during that year left thousands of Millerite Christians in the lurch and led to what is now known as the Great Disappointment.)

Just in case you need to build up your resistance to 2012 hype, here's the first in a series of roundups relating to the doomsday buzz:

Superstorm:
When scientists and emergency response experts developed their "ARkStorm" meteorological model for the California coast, the point was to figure out a worst-case scenario for weather disaster planning, which would parallel the planning for a seismic "Big One" in the Golden State. They came up with a doozy, proposing that Pacific weather patterns could produce "atmospheric rivers" that dump rain onto the West Coast for 40 days and 40 nights. ("ARk" stands for "Atmospheric River 1000.")

Experts say such a hurricane-style storm occurred over a 45-day period in 1861-1862, causing severe flooding and turning the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea. Today, that kind of storm could cause $300 billion to $400 billion in damage. The video above paints an apocalyptic picture, made worse because "the public at large does not comprehend the extreme danger the storm poses."

Well, they comprehend it now. All this talk of a superstorm scared the bejeebers out of a lot of people, and it's now become woven into the fabric of 2012 fears. Just do a search for "2012 California superstorm" and you'll see what I mean. There's already a backlash as well: Over at the "Watts Up With That?" blog, Anthony Watts takes the U.S. Geological Survey to task for getting into the "weather porn" business. "I don't dispute the historical evidence of the 1861-62 flooding, but scaring the crap out of the public won't really help them plan effectively."

We don't really have to wait until 2012 for a wakeup call on the threats posed by severe storms: All you have to do is look at what's been happening in Australia and Brazil this month.

USGS

A color-coded map shows rainfall levels that could be caused by a hypothetical "ARkStorm" hitting the California coast. The shades of purple indicate accumulations of more than 50 inches.

Supernovas:
Will the star Betelgeuse blow up by 2012, creating a supernova so bright it'll look as if there are two suns in the sky? We addressed this seven months ago: Sure, the red supergiant could potentially explode sometime in the next 10,000 years, or maybe 100,000 years, based on observations of its mass-shedding activity. But no one can really predict precisely when it'll go supernova, and when it does, it's shouldn't have a dramatic effect on Earth.

So why is Betelgeuse back on the 2012 scene? The reason is that it's just so darn tempting to bring up that date anytime a cosmic blow-up is being discussed. That aspect is amply addressed today by Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait as well as Discovery News' Ian O'Neill. Heck, some folks are still trying to talk up the idea that Betelgeuse is going bonkers because it's part of the Maya prophecy for 2012. This won't be the last time we here from "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!"

Superstars:
What do you get when you cross celebrity buzz with 2012 buzz? You get some widely re-quoted quotes from "Green Hornet" star Seth Rogen, who recounts a movie meeting during which "Star Wars" creator George Lucas "seriously proceeds to talk for around 25 minutes about how he thinks the world is gonna end in the year 2012, like, for real."

Despite Rogen's protestations, it's not clear whether Lucas was joking, or Rogen was joking, or whether it's just one of those weird Hollywood things. The most interesting spin on the anecdote comes from the New York Daily News, which details how various celebrities (from Ashton Kutcher and Woody Harrelson to Lil Wayne) feel about the impending apocalypse.

You can bet that we'll have more installments of "2012 Watch" over the next couple of years, and I think I'll make a habit of ending every installment with my favorite piece of advice from Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy": DON'T PANIC!

More on 2012:

• The end is not near
• Alien invaders vs. the truth squad
• Solar cycle sparks doomsday buzz
• French village flooded by doomsday survivalists
• 'End of the world' delayed ... by Mayan calendar

If you're looking for an additional antidote to 2012 hysteria, check out 2012hoax.org. Join the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the blog's Facebook page or following b0yle on Twitter. You'll even find a reference to 2012 hype in a chapter of my book, "The Case for Pluto."

USDA ARS

This is an image of a classic snow crystal viewed under the power of an electron microscope. May it serve as a reminder that snow is beautiful. Really.

With the gripes and groans piling up in the aftermath of the East Coast's first major blizzard of the season, let's remember that snow has a beautiful side, especially when studied under the power of magnification.

That's what the folks at the USDA Agricultural Research Service's Electron Microscopy Unit do in the service of science and improving our daily lives. They've made these images of snowflakes available for our viewing pleasure. Above is a classic image, showing what we often think all snow crystals look like ... but magnified 162 times. Below are needle crystals, which are often associated with heavy snowfall in the Northeastern United States.

Needle crystals are often associated with heavy snowfall in the Northeastern U.S.

For more about these images, check out this amazing slideshow from Wired.com.

The up-close imagery may leave you asking that perennial question: Is it true that no two snowflakes are alike? As we explained in our list of 10 wonders from a winter wonderland, the answer depends on how alike "alike" is, and the definition of a snowflake.

The detailed answer is drawn from Caltech physicist Ken Libbrecht, whose snow crystal photography was honored with Sweden's Linnart Nilsson Award in October. You can check out more of Libbrecht's work here. And for still more flaky science, follow the links below to learn more about snowflakes and winter.

• The science behind snowflakes, in verse
• Visit a winter wonderland of science
• 10 more wonders for wintertime
• Snowflakes on Christmas cards drawn wrong

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).