The National Weather Service’s Hurricane Center is predicting that Fay will make a third landfall in Florida today, somewhere near Daytona beach. The image above is an infrared image of Fay taken at 7:15 AM, thursday, Aug. 21.

In response to high gas prices, the Bush administration and its allies are calling for new oil drilling that would take decades and eventually save only pennies-per-gallon.

Meanwhile, Bush’s Department of Transportation is undermining historic new fuel economy standards. They unrealistically assume gas will cost around $2.50 through 2020 and that hybrid vehicles won’t even exist until 2014. Because the agency balances the cost of new fuel economy technology against the gas savings the new technology provides, these outrageous assumptions are being used by the administration to reduce the automakers’ requirement to bring more fuel-efficient options to consumers.

According to the administration’s own analysis, if they simply used a more realistic gas price, the standards would save consumers enough fuel to equal about a dollar per gallon discount at the pump. This would dwarf the miniscule price drop from oil produced through new drilling without the environmental consequences of feeding our addiction to oil.

Although their language is sometimes a little hyperbolic, the UCS claims are right on target. If you want to get involved and write your member of congress, the UCS has made it easy - they have a letter you can edit and immediately send to your congressional representative when you go to: take action

The map above (from CNN) shows Fay’s projected path and strength over the next few days.

To learn more about hurricanes, see “The Coast” available from Facts on File or Barnes and Noble.

The Coast

Hazardous Interactions within the Coastal Environment

Hazardous Interactions within the Coastal Environment

Authored by Timothy Kusky, Ph.D.

The Hazardous Earth Set, 8-Volumes

Published: 7/1/2008
ISBN-10: 0816064679
ISBN-13: 978-0-8160-6467-0
Format: Hardcover
Dewey Number:
List Price: $39.50
Libraries Save: 10%
Discount Price: $35.55
Status: Available

NASA reports that “In places, the land is taking on the look of the Dust Bowl years. In the second decade of the 20th century, settlers to the High Plains plowed up millions of acres of native prairie and began planting winter wheat. The High Plains wheat boom was fueled in part by a global shortages created by the First World War. Near the end of the decade, with wheat prices falling, came one of the area’s regularly occurring droughts. With the prairies gone and wheat fields increasingly fallow, thousands of years of topsoil blew away in black dust storms, earning the decade the name “The Dirty Thirties.”

 To learn more about hurricanes and tropical storms, see The Coast, now available.

Credit to NASA

A magnitude of 6.7 earhquake struck  San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles on 1994 and led to 72 deaths, 9,000 injuries and $25 billion in damages.

Figure Credit: USGS

Dolly drenched popular tourist resorts on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula at the weekend but caused no damage.  Texas has put 1,200 National Guard troops and other emergency crews on alert.

The NHC has forecast that this year’s hurricane season would run until November and  be active with up to nine hurricanes and 12 tropical storms.

This visualization shows patterns of rainfall within the storm as observed by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite on July 16, 2008, at 4:46 pm local time (NASA). Reds in this visualization show areas which received intense rainfall, with yellow and green showing strong rain, and lighter rainfall in blue. At the time TRMM acquired these data, Elida was still a Category Two strength hurricane.

Image Credit to NASA

This series of images taken by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite chronicles the development and decay of the first hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season, Hurricane Bertha. TRMM (a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese space agency, JAXA) sees both the swirling clouds and bands of rain that define the structure of the storm with its combination of passive microwave and active radar sensors.
As shown by the images, Hurricane Bertha continued to drift towards Bermuda from July 4 to July 13. The center of Bertha passed the east of the island on July 14, bringing tropical-storm-force winds that knocked out power on the island. The storm also produced dangerous rip currents along the east coast of the United States. As of July 15, Bertha was expected to strengthen slightly as it pulls away from Bermuda off to the north-northeast.