Last week, the United States Senate briefly flirted with the idea of actually doing something useful. Depending on whom you ask, the National Weather Service Improvement Act was either a positive step toward modernization or destructive enough to give Rick Santorum the quivers. Even though the bill is now dead and gone, the idea of fundamentally restructuring the National Weather Service is a debate worth having.

Forecasters did a great job predicting the track of Hurricane Iselle as it headed towards Hawaii last week. Even almost a week out when the storm was a thousand miles from the Big Island, meteorologists had the hurricane's track pegged to within 30 miles of where it made landfall.