Forecast: Plenty of Activity On the Weather Blog Front

If you've been long awaiting the formation of this season's first Atlantic tropical storm . . . hope is on the way.

But when hurricanes come, all levity vanishes. This is the true calling of the amateur weatherman. There are untold thousands out there in cyberspace counting on updates. Out come the charts, the statistics, the initial analyses.

After a breathless rundown of Charley's progress through Cuba, Ed Oswald, 25, a television production assistant who runs a weather blog in Philadelphia, writes at 7:06 a.m. Friday, "He still looks real nice on satellite and appears from hurricane hunter data to be strengthening again, with pressure starting to fall rapidly again. "

For days, Gothamist's Joe Schumacher has followed the progression of storms, every time predicting rain: "We'll try not to sound like a broken record, but as long as the front hangs out in our 'hood, and as long as tropical moisture streams our way, we don't have much choice in the matter."

Schumacher, 43, has a degree in meteorology from the same school as Al Roker. Another blogger at Gothamist, Kevin Porterfield, 32, studied music technology in college. His big weather blogging feat: He interviewed the man in charge of picking out elevator-type music for the Weather Channel. Asked to match a soundtrack to this weekend, Porterfield suggests the rock band White Stripes because it's "raw, unpredictable, in your face."

Recently, four CapitalWeather bloggers crowded around a computer contemplating just that -- exactly what conditions the brewing hurricanes will bring. The bloggers occasionally refer to a quote popular in the weather community, attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "Some are weatherwise; most are otherwise." In service of the latter they are particularly cautious about predicting storms. But in the midst of this restraint, Larson whispers the two words that, in the wake of Bonnie and Charley, could send weather bloggers into a frenzy this fall: El Niño.

Samenow hushes him before anyone gets too excited. Larson emphasizes it is far too early to be sure of anything, but the result could be -- and they qualify this with a thousand caveats -- a mild winter in Washington. In the meantime, the bloggers hope to avoid the one question they seem to hear more than any other.

"I'm sick of getting, 'Can you change the forecast?' " Larson says.

"Yeah," Samenow says. "People always ask me to serve up a nice, sunny, 75-degree day for tomorrow."

So, out of curiosity, any chance of that happening?

"No," he says, happily, looking forward to a storm.