Sometimes meteorology surprises me.

While power-lounging on Saturday I caught the news of Katrina's northward twist. I was tuning in during the commercials of Super Volcano on the Discovery Channel; a fictional documentary about the eruption of the volcano beneath Yellowstone.

Watching the path of the radar imagery, the eye of the storm seemed to make a two-pixel shift North-Northwest after travelling nearly due West for some time. From this they extrapolated a huge arc from it's current position just West of Florida through New Orleans and into Indiana. Yes, Indiana.

I believed them, but it made me chuckle a little at how bizarre it looked, predicting such a drastic change from such a small apparent shift.

I knew they had more information than the radar imagery from which they were making this prediction. There were pressure areas and wind directions and thermals that they were aware of that didn't show up on the picture I was looking at.

Last night, before turning in, I watched a little more of the now "front page" coverage of the storm. I'm a little concerned as I have friends and loved ones in the South. Most are in California, but two specifically are in Alabama, and others are in Arizona. All within the reach of this massive storm.

Heck, if the storm comes through Illinois on the West side of the last prediction I saw before turning in, we might get some of the storm. Our storms tend to be of the white flurry kind, but I recognize the atmospheric monstrosity that a hurricane of this size represents, and understand it might go a few hundred miles inland before running out of fuel, especially if the Mighty Mississippi gives it some.

I don't know the science behind what keeps a hurricane going enough to even guess; I know it has to do with differences in temperatures below and above, and pressures and the like.

This morning the hurricane had been downgraded to a "4" from a "5," as its winds had slowed some overnight. It also made landfall a little more East than they predicted overnight. I wondered how much of those predictions was to sensationalize for the purpose of sucking me into the news for an extra half hour. It kind of worked.