Move over Katrina...

... there's gonna be some new sherriffs in town.

This link will take you to to a page holding near-realtime water temperature data in the Gulf of Mexico and along its coast. Water temperature is one of the stronger indicators for potentially devastating storms and hurricanes. Why? Oh, fine, I aced Earth Science in high school, so I'll explain. (Explanation and science behind it are subject to lapses in memory, high school was a long time ago.)

Water is one of earth's most powerful batteries for the storage of heat energy. Weather, that catch-all term for atmospheric phenomenon in general, is largely the by-product of the transfer of heat from one location to another. Actually, 'largely' is kind of misleading. It's actually almost totally the by-product of such transfers. The other contrubutor is actual changes in air pressure (but, I dryly note, those changes in air pressure are caused by changes in temperature).

Now, water, as I mentioned, acts as a battey for heat. I'm not going to get into the physics of it (And believe me, the particle physics properties of water cause many a physicist's head to get scratched, and vigorously! It's simply an excruciatingly technical and very dull subject, trust me.), for which you ought to be grateful. What I am going to say is that water, for a substance so common and (relatively) stable in all three states (solid, liquid, and gas), has an amazingly high specific heat. Specific heat is basically a measure of how much energy a particular substance needs to absorb before it will change states from solid to liquid to gas. That high specific heat is what makes water such a good battery for storing heat.

So, that means, something? Well, yes. What it means is, the warmer a large body of water gets, the more water molecules get turned into vapor. Water vapor is the most energetic state (Well, there's plasma, but water tends to break down into hydrogen and oxygen under conditions where it would plasm, and then recombines and plasms a lot, and that's pretty messy, so let's forget it and just stick with what we have, ok? Seriously, if the Gulf of Mexico plasms, hurricanes will be the least of your worries, turst me.) of water, meaning that water vapor holds a whole damn lot of heat, and lots of it getting pumped into the atmoshpere means that the atmosphere is getting charged with a lot, a LOT, of energy.

And that energy has to go somewhere. Remember, weather is all about moving heat from one chunk of air to another chunk of air with less heat. The more energy a particular chunk of air absorbs in the for of water vapor, the stronger that heat transfer is going to be.

As air cools, the vapor condenses, and you get rain. But the air also tends to sink as it cools, and create a down draft. The air under that downdraft gets pushed aside, and becomes wind, and as air rushes away from an area, the air pressure drops, and more water condenses, and more air cools, and it gets to the point where some neighboring air mass with more heat starts transferrring its heat to that location.

So, [weather] = [heat transfers in the atmosphere] and that means [lots of warm water] = [lots of trouble]. So, bookmark that site, and check in from time to time. Expect a hurricane when the water temp is over 88dF. Expect a whopper when it's over 92dF.