Another Confession

In keeping with the title of my blog, and since it's good for my soul, I have another confession to make, though a relatively safe one.

I am a weather geek. The day that I get the weather channel in HD I will shed tears of joy and hallelujahs will echo through the halls of Buck Run and Southern Seminary. I have tried to control my addiction, but high pressure domes, cold fronts, and tropical storm development stoke my meteorological jones. I have Earthdesk, a real time worldwide satellite picture, as my desktop background so I can easily see the cloud cover on Mauritius. Earthbrowser provides hours of delight as I can survey the latest volcanoes, lightning strikes, and typhoons.

Recently I hit the mother lode. First of all, Johnny Collett, a friend and key team player at Buck Run, gave me a one-year membership with Weather Underground, a primo weather site (not the radical militant leftist organization of the 60's and 70's) that boasts all the geeky atmospheric information one could ever want. Do you need to see a map of global sea surface temperatures? Do you wish to know the history of atmospheric CO2 at the Mauna Loa observatory? Weather Underground will fix you up!

At about the same time I got on Weather Underground, I was online searching for something completely unrelated, when quite by accident I happened across a blog by Dr. James McFadden, Chief of Programs & Projects Staff for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dr. McFadden hunts hurricanes for a living. He's one of the brave souls who straps himself into an airplane and penetrates the eye wall of a hurricane, often at only 1500 feet above the ocean surface, in order to protect millions of people whose lives might be endangered by the storm. At altitude they also throw dropsondes out of the airplane which send back measurements of pressure, temperature, and humidity which help NOAA predict strength and direction of tropical storms and hurricanes.

For a memorable and harrowing account of what can go wrong on one of these missions, read Jeff Masters' recollection of what happened when they penetrated the eye wall of Hugo in 1984.

Jim McFadden's blog is an insider's look at what it's like to be a hurricane hunter. As I write this entry, Gustav, Hanna, and three other storms and depressions are lined up in the Atlantic, Carribean, and Gulf.



Two things come to mind about this. First of all, we need to pray for these few men and women who risk so much to protect so many. Pray for their safety and for their ability to process information that will indeed save lives.

But now I have one other thing: Dr. McFadden, if you are reading this, I am wondering if you have any room on one of those flights for a Baptist preacher? Though I would be terrified and might scream like a nine-year-old girl, I would LOVE the experience once it's over. It would be a sermon illustration for life! I can think of many different ways to use it--the peace in the middle of the storm, seeing the storm from a higher perspective, going through the storm to save others from the storm (you get the drift)--and it would make my multi-colored hair and beard turn all white once and for all.