Weather

THE "post-classic" era of winemaking is dawning, according to experts at the second Climate Change & Wine conference in Barcelona, Spain, at the end of last week. And it's going to be full of nasty surprises. What might "post-classic" wine be like? Scientists told winemakers and other industry professionals at the gathering to expect natural acidity to drop, colors to fade and alcohol levels to rise. Aromas could vanish. In short, wine may gradually lose the complexity wine lovers appreciate.

Although rains slowed throughout the Southland on Friday, a new storm is expected to arrive tonight, kicking up wind and surf and dropping more than an inch of rain in places. Downtown Los Angeles has received 12.82 inches of rain since July 1, the start of the National Weather Service's rain year. That's about 3 inches above average for this time of year, well on the way to the annual average of 15.14 inches.

Optimism ran high at the Auto Club Speedway last weekend that the massive Fontana track would draw perhaps its best crowd in at least two years for NASCAR stock-car racing. But when the weekend arrived, so did rain, and then most everything went very wrong. Races, practices and qualifying sessions had to be canceled or delayed. The weekend's marquee race, the Auto Club 500, started Sunday but ended Monday. Weather disruptions at sporting events are as common as changing weather.

. -- When the first thief drove off with nearly a ton of rock salt last month, pilfered from a road de-icing firm's supply stored behind a strip mall, local police officers in this affluent Chicago northwestern suburb were flabbergasted. "It was so strange," said Buffalo Grove Police Commander Steve Husak. "Salt?" Then, as winter storms continued to bombard the Midwest with snow and sleet, there were reports of a second salt heist.

New snowpack measurements from the Sierra Nevada released Wednesday dashed hopes that California's stormy winter would make a significant dent in the state's water supply woes. The measurements found that snowpack levels have returned to average because of a dry March. Wet weather beginning in November sent snow levels far above average, prompting officials to hope that conditions would continue into spring and provide more water. But California is back in familiar dry mode.

Snowmelt will raise half-empty Lake Powell 50 feet, opening a popular shortcut for boaters for the first time in five years, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said. The Castle Rock Cut -- still a stretch of exposed rock -- will let house boats get to beaches and Rainbow Bridge National Monument more quickly from Wahweap Marina by shaving a dozen miles off the trip. The peninsula is expected to be covered by enough water for boating by mid-June.

This could be a tumultuous year for tropical weather with 15 named storms, including eight hurricanes, if storm prognosticators William Gray and Philip Klotzbach are to be believed. The question is: Should they be? In issuing their revised seasonal outlook for 2008 on Wednesday, Gray and Klotzbach of Colorado State University reignited a controversy over whether long-range forecasts like theirs have any validity.

For weeks now, the men in black turbans have been coming. They travel in pairs or small groups, on battered motorbikes or in dusty pickups, materializing out of the desert with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers slung from their shoulders. With the advent of warmer weather, villagers say, Taliban fighters are filtering back from their winter shelters in Pakistan, ensconcing themselves across Afghanistan's wind-swept south.

High in the Himalayas, above this peaceful valley where farmers till a patchwork of emerald-green fields, an icy lake fed by melting glaciers waits to become a "tsunami from the sky." The lake is swollen dangerously past normal levels, thanks to the global warming that is causing the glaciers to retreat at record speed. But no one knows when the tipping point will come and the lake can take no more, bursting its banks and sending torrents of water crashing into the valley below.

After I'd lived in California for a while, my friends in the Midwest wanted to know what was different out here. I hated to break it to them, but I didn't find Southern Californians all that different from Midwesterners. Nor did day-to-day life seem that much more expensive, given that money spent on Midwestern winters -- such as on heating bills, heavy clothes, snow tires -- was money kept in the Californian's pocket. Cable TV offered the same shows. But there was one huge difference.