It takes a sharp eye to find something positive in the wreckage of the worst swarm of U.S. tornadoes on record: the 1974 Jumbo Outbreak. Millions of Americans are safer in the air because of Fujita's subsequent analysis of microbursts and tools developed by NCAR and collaborators.

Why seasonal forecasting can’t tell us with certainty what to expect this summer—and why we might soon have a stronger sense of what late 2014 and early 2015 are likely to bring to large parts of the globe.

How does the U.S. winter of 2013–14 rank against its predecessors? And was it a harbinger of more cold winters to come for parts of the country, or simply an outlier at a time of largely warming winters?

If the official weather forecast holds, Sunday's Super Bowl won’t have to be postponed. But the outlook would be far more uncertain if predictions today were as primitive as they were at the time of the first Super Bowl in 1967.

Next month’s Super Bowl will be the first ever held in an open stadium in the northern U.S. What weather might we expect two weeks from now, and how might research improve a forecast in that time range?