Likewise, I suspect that today's weather craze is no mere craze; rather it reflects the larger cultural mood circa the Millennium. Whereas Half Dome and the Grand Canyon just sit there, mute marvels of geologic change a millimeter at a time, and whereas astronomical objects typically creep at an imperceptible pace across the evening sky, the weather is ever changing¿the perfect natural entertainment for the "MTV generation," accustomed to films and videos with high-speed plots and millisecond editing. But the craze also reflects a deeper sentiment akin to the feelings poured into the environmental movement: a desire to escape from our increasingly artificial lives¿surrounded as we are, from cradle to grave, by the chrome-and-concrete, claustrophobic womb of Civilization. Our nomadic and agricultural forebears hauled carcasses of woolly mammoths or bags of berries home in the face of blinding rainstorms and shuddered in awe at every flash of lightning. The spirits were angry! True, few moderns would wish to return to prehistory, with its short, brutish lives. But many people today, huddled around "entertainment centers" in their air-conditioned homes, suffering through unhappy marriages and disappointing careers, wish nothing more than to recapture our ancestors' sense of awe--the sense that they were part of something greater.

To devoted weenies, myself included, nothing is more enthralling and educational than the nonstop melodrama of the atmosphere--the skyrocketing growth of thunderstorms, the writhings of the jet stream, the balletic choreography of fronts and air masses. In textbooks, Newtonian equations and Avogadro's law and fluid mechanics look dry and inscrutable, but in the heavens they come to vivid, sometimes violent, life. Nothing dramatizes the physical process of moist adiabatic cooling better than the formation of a cumulonimbus; nothing epitomizes angular momentum more shockingly than a tornado's buzz-saw mayhem. Weenies old enough to have obtained driver's licenses may spend every spring and summer in the Midwest chasing ominous-looking convective clouds that, they pray, will soon sprout twisters. "I have only one purpose in life¿to chase and photograph severe storms," one chaser declares on his personal Web site. "I am glad when I can contribute to scientific research and education about storms, but the driving force behind my lifelong passion is the incredible power and beauty of the storms themselves.