He answered more than 50 calls Tuesday morning about cars in ditches west of Springfield.

In Colorado, Interstate 70 reopened early Tuesday after its eastbound lanes between Denver and the Kansas line were shut down for nearly 18 hours because of heavy snow. Interstate 80 remained closed across central Nebraska but was expected to reopen during the day.

The storm dumped as much as 28 inches of snow on central Nebraska on Monday, 20 inches in parts of South Dakota and half a foot in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Wind piled the snow into drifts 7 feet high in parts of South Dakota and Nebraska. Farther south, heavy rain caused flooding in the Dallas area.

By midmorning Tuesday, more than 7 inches of snow had fallen on parts of western Indiana, and wind up to 25 mph created whiteout conditions in some areas, the
National Weather Service said.

Indiana State Police reported dozens of accidents. School districts across central Illinois and western and central Indiana closed for the day.

The weather was expected to contribute to low voter turnout for Illinois' primary election, which includes gubernatorial and congressional races.

It hit after an unseasonably warm winter in which snowfall was 30 percent to 50 percent below normal in Indiana. Through mid-March, Indianapolis had used only about two-thirds of its $4.6 million snow-removal budget, officials said.

Indiana state climatologist Dev Niyogi said the erratic weather will likely continue, in part because of the impact of La Nina, the mild cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean that often coincides with stronger and more frequent hurricanes, a wetter Pacific Northwest and a drier South.

"I think the important feature of the upcoming season is not just going to be a really cold or really warm season ahead, but the swings we are going have," he said. "Some days will really feel like winter again and some days we'll start thinking that maybe that summer is already here."

Schools also remained closed for a second day Tuesday in parts of the Plains states. The Nebraska Legislature canceled its Tuesday meeting, and the South Dakota Legislature rescheduled Monday's meetings.

At least five deaths were blamed on the storm in Colorado, Nebraska and Texas.

"I got so stressed out and so freaked out about it. Initially when it came up I tried to be pragmatic," Yorke told New Music Express magazine in an issue out Tuesday. "But Blair has no environmental credentials as far as I'm concerned."

"It was like talking to Blair's spin doctors. It was all getting weird. It was just obvious there was no point in meeting him anyway, and I didn't want to," he said.

Yorke says the experience has soured him on political activism.

"I came out of that whole period just thinking, I don't want to get involved directly, it's poison. I'll just shout my mouth off from the sidelines."

Yorke is backing Friends of the Earth's Big Ask campaign, which is calling for international cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Radiohead will play a benefit concert for the campaign at London's Koko Club on May 1. The band recently announced a club tour in England.

They have been working on new material for the follow up to their politically-themed 2003 disc, "Hail to the Thief."

The highest recorded winds for Cyclone Larry, a category 5 storm, were about 180 miles per hour (290 kilometers per hour), compared with 125 mile per hour winds for the Category 3 Katrina when it struck land, said James Vasilj, a spokesman with the National Weather Service in New Orleans.

''If a Category 5 hurricane like Larry hit any populated area of the United States, the damage would be absolutely catastrophic,'' said Frank Lepore, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

''You're talking major wall failure on high-rise buildings. A Category 5 hurricane could lift a 2000-pound car and deposit it on a 4-foot-high wall,'' Lepore said in an interview. ''A 150-160 pound person wouldn't stand a chance.''

More than half the buildings in Innisfail, Queensland, a town of 8,000 people, were damaged by Larry, and about 30 people suffered minor injuries, according to Queensland's Department of Emergency Services.

''It looks like an atomic bomb hit the place,'' Innisfail Mayor Neil Clarke said on Australian television, the Associated Press reported. ''This is more than a local disaster, this is a national disaster.''

Hurricane Katrina caused the evacuation of 1.5 million people, according to the Hurricane Insurance Information Center. More than 1,300 people died and more than $87 billion so far has been earmarked for the rebuilding and recovery efforts.

Hurricane Andrew, which struck Florida in 1992 and caused 23 deaths and $26.5 billion in damage, is the last Category 5 storm to hit the U.S., according to the National Hurricane Center.

Category 5 storms must have winds of at least 155 miles per hour. The storms are known as typhoons in the Pacific Ocean and hurricanes in the Atlantic.

"Humpback songs are not like human language, but elements of language are seen in their songs," said Ryuji Suzuki, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) predoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first author of the paper.

With limited sight and sense of smell in water, marine mammals are more dependent on sound-which travels four times faster in water than air-to communicate. For six months each year, all male humpback whales in a population sing the same song during mating season. Thought to attract females, the song evolves over time.

Suzuki and co-authors John Buck and Peter Tyack applied the tools of information theory - a mathematical study of data encoding and transmission - to analyze the complex patterns of moans, cries, and chirps in the whales' songs for clues to the information being conveyed. Buck is an electrical engineer who specializes in signal processing and underwater acoustics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Tyack is a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Suzuki, who began the project as an electrical engineering undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, worked with Buck and Tyack to develop a computer program to break down the elements of the whale's song and assign an abstract symbol to each of those elements. Suzuki wanted to see if he could design a computer program that enabled scientists to classify the structure of the whales' songs.

He used the program to analyze structural characteristics of the humpback songs recorded in Hawaii. To measure a song's complexity, Suzuki analyzed the average amount of information conveyed per symbol. He then asked human observers who had no previous knowledge of the structure of the whale songs to classify them in terms of complexity, redundancy, and predictability. The computer-generated model and the human observers agreed that the songs are hierarchical, confirming a theory first proposed by biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay in 1971.

Suzuki said that information theory also enabled the researchers to determine how much information can be conveyed in a whale song. Despite the "human-like" use of hierarchical syntax to communicate, Suzuki and his colleagues found that whale songs convey less than one bit of information per second. By comparison, humans speaking English generate 10 bits of information for each word spoken. "Although whale song is nothing like human language, I wouldn't be surprised if some marine mammals have the ability to communicate in a complex way," said Suzuki. "Given that the underwater environment is very different from our world, it is not surprising that they would communicate in rather a different way from land mammals."

The structure of the humpback whale song is repetitive and rigid. The whales repeat unique phrases made up of short and long segments to craft a song. There are multiple layers, or scales, of repetition, denoted as periodicities. One scale is made up of six units, while a longer one consists of 180-400 units. The combined periodicities give the song its hierarchical structure.

Suzuki compared his new technique for animal communication research with more traditional models, such as the first order Markov model that is used to analyze bird songs, which are often shorter and simpler in structure than humpback whale songs. The Markov model proved inadequate for the whale song's complex structure.

Information theory, in contrast, proved perfect for analyzing humpback whale songs because it provided a quantitative analysis of the complexity and structure of the songs. "Information theory was the right choice because it allows one to study the structure of humpback songs without knowing what they mean," said Suzuki.

"I hope that knowing the hierarchical structure in humpback songs will inform research in other fields, such as evolutionary biology," said Suzuki. The technique he developed is already being used by a postdoctoral fellow in Buck's laboratory to analyze recently recorded songs of humpback whales from Australia.

Bette Otto-Bliesner (NCAR) and Jonathan Overpeck (University of Arizona) report on their new work in two papers appearing in the March 24 issue of Science. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's primary sponsor. The study also involved researchers from the universities of Calgary and Colorado, the U.S. Geological Survey, and The Pennsylvania State University.

Otto-Bliesner and Overpeck base their findings on data from ancient coral reefs, ice cores, and other natural climate records, as well as output from the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model (CCSM), a powerful tool for simulating past, present, and future climates.

"Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global," says Otto-Bliesner. "These ice sheets have melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."

The two studies show that greenhouse gas increases over the next century could warm the Arctic by 5-8 degrees Fahrenheit (3-5 degrees Celsius) in summertime. This is roughly as warm as it was 130,000 years ago, between the most recent ice age and the previous one. The warm Arctic summers during the last interglacial period were caused by changes in Earth's tilt and orbit. The CCSM accurately captured that warming, which is mirrored in data from paleoclimate records.

Although simulation results depend on the assumptions and conditions within different models, estimates of warming from the CCSM are within the range projected by other climate models, according to the authors.

"Getting the past climate change correct in these models gives us more confidence in their ability to predict future climate change," says Otto-Bliesner.

The CCSM suggests that during the interglacial period, meltwater from Greenland and other Arctic sources raised sea level by as much as 11 feet (3.5 meters), says Otto-Bliesner. However, coral records indicate that the sea level actually rose 13 to 20 feet (4-6 meters) or more. Overpeck concludes that Antarctic melting must have produced the remainder of the sea-level rise.

These studies are the first to link Arctic and Antarctic melting in the last interglacial period. Marine diatoms and beryllium isotopes found beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet indicate that parts of the ice disappeared at some point over the last several hundred thousand years.

Overpeck theorizes that the rise in sea levels produced by Arctic warming and melting could have helped destabilize ice shelves at the edge of the Antarctic ice sheet and led to their collapse. If such a process occurred today, it would be accelerated by global-scale greenhouse-induced warming year round, Overpeck says. In the Arctic, melting would likely be hastened by pollution that darkens snow and enables it to absorb more sunlight.

In the last few years sea level has begun rising more rapidly, now at a rate of about an inch per decade, says Overpeck. Recent studies have also found accelerated rates of glacial retreat along the margins of both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.

NCAR's primary sponsor is the National Science Foundation. Opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations contained herein are not necessarily those of NSF.