There’s no shortage of solutions proposed to solve the problem of global warming, some devised after long, painstaking, and expensive hours of research. But President Obama’s key energy expert has come up with what appears to be a low-cost no-brainer – paint the roofs of all buildings white.

According to U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, a Nobel prize-winning scientist, painting roofs and paved surfaces in white or other light colors would reduce global warming by conserving energy and reflecting sunlight back into space. He goes as far as to say that making all building roofs white would be the equivalent of taking all the cars in the world off the road for 11 years.

Chu’s premise is that when sunlight reflects off a white or light-colored surface, much of the light will pass through the atmosphere and back into space. On the other hand, infrared radiation emitted from warm surfaces is trapped by greenhouse gases, causing the atmosphere to further heat up and contribute to global warming.

Chu believes demands on air conditioning systems would be reduced if buildings have white or light-colored surfaces. Moreover, he added that painting vehicles in lighter colors would make them more energy-efficient in the summer, reducing demands on vehicle air conditioners.

While Chu’s idea is plausible, implementation on any massive scale would be challenging. I’m no expert on building construction, but how would you modify building surfaces in large cities like New York, where I live, with their diverse styles and constructions? Can one picture the Empire State Building painted white? What happens to all the landmark buildings where any exterior modification would require local legislative action and likely throw building historians into a tizzy?

I have a request for President Obama: Can you get Congress to pass legislation to give us tax credits to help us pay to paint our house roofs and dark-colored cars white?

Tornadoes are fast-moving but deadly events, able to carve out a wide path of destruction in just seconds. Now, scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other organizations hope to get a better handle on how and why tornadoes form, by launching what is reportedly the largest and most ambitious tornado study ever undertaken.

The collaborative international project, known as VORTEX2, will be conducted from May 10 through June 13. Scientists will deploy radars and other ground-based instruments across a 900-mile swarth of the Great Plains region, stretching from west Texas to southwest Minnesota. This is the part of the U.S. most prone to tornadoes.

The radar fleet will include ten mobile radars, which will have resolution as fine as 300 feet and time steps as small as 15 seconds. More than three dozen portable surface weather stations will blanket the area in and near a target storm.

“We still do not completely understand the processes that lead to tornado formation and shape its development,” said Roger Wakimoto, director of NCAR’s Earth Observing Laboratory and a principle investigator for VORTEX2. “We hope that VORTEX2 will provide the data we need to learn more about the development of tornadoes, and in time help forecasters give people more advance warning before a tornado strikes.”

In the New York City area where I live, the effects of coastal hurricanes are more of a concern than tornadoes. But while forecasters can now predict when and where hurricanes will strike with reasonable accuracy, current weather observation networks and radars often fail to accurately capture rapidly-changing temperature and wind changes that can spawn a tornado within minutes.

I have all too often seen video footage of the destruction tornadoes leave. Within seconds, tidy, well-kept homes are destroyed, with all the possessions families work hard to attain buried in a pile of rubble. Within seconds, families’ lives are turned upside down .

Let’s hope the study can help scientists better predict when and where these deadly storms will strike next.

“Push-Button” Climate Modeling Available on the Web

A new Web-enhanced version of the most commonly used climate modeling system, TeraGrid, will allow many more scientists to test theories about the Earth’s climate. Called the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), the new version is actually a collection of interconnected modeling systems. CCSM contains separate climate models using data from the atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces, and ice fields and then brings the models together in yet another system known as a coupler.

“Our hope is to roll this out to a broader community,” said Matt Huber, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University. “Researchers on the cutting edge of science can use this tool, but so can high school students who want to run their own climate models. They will generate equal output.”

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