The first quake struck at 3:17 p.m. local time and its epicenter was 60 kilometers (35 miles) northwest of the city of Copiapo, which has a population of 125,000, the USGS said on its Web site. The depth of the quake, described as ''strong'' by USGS, was 7 kilometers. It hit 715 kilometers north of Santiago.

There were nine aftershocks with a minimum magnitude of 5 by 7:04 p.m., the USGS said. The biggest, a little over two hours after the main earthquake, had a magnitude of 6.3 and struck offshore 70 kilometers northwest of Copiapo at a depth of 10 kilometers.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage. Chile is regularly hit by earthquakes and is situated in the region where the Nazca and South American plates meet. Quakes of magnitude 5 and more can cause considerable damage, depending on their depth.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake left 11 people dead in the north of the country in June last year, the Chile government said at the time. In 1960, 5,000 people died when the nation was hit by a magnitude 9.5 earthquake, the largest recorded in the world, according to the USGS.

CloudSat and CALIPSO blasted off aboard an unmanned Delta rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 6:02 a.m. EDT (1002 GMT) after a week of delays for weather and technical issues. The Boeing-built booster originally had been slated to fly last year, but a machinists' strike forced several months of delays.

CloudSat has powerful radar instruments to peer deep into the structure of clouds and map their water content. Although only about 1 percent of Earth's water is held in clouds, it plays a crucial role in the planet's weather, scientists working on the mission said.

"CloudSat will answer basic questions about how rain and snow are produced by clouds, how rain and snow are distributed worldwide, and how clouds affect the Earth's climate," principal investigator Graeme Stephens of Colorado State University said.

Using instruments 1,000 times more powerful than common meteorology radar CloudSat was designed to render three-dimensional maps of clouds that will identify the location and form of water molecules.

Complementary and virtually simultaneous studies by sister probe CALIPSO will pinpoint aerosol particles and track how they interact with clouds and move through the atmosphere. CALIPSO is an acronym for Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations.

Aerosols are formed by natural phenomena like forest fires and human activity such as driving cars. Aerosols are considered a key factor in understanding why the planet is growing warmer and if anything can be done to stem or reverse the change.

Computer models predict average surface temperatures on Earth will increase between 3.5 degrees Celsius and 9 degrees F over the next 100 years.

The uncertainty stems from the role clouds play in moderating heat. Aerosols in the clouds can either cool the planet by reflecting solar energy back into space, or increase temperatures by trapping heat in the atmosphere.

"We need to understand the aerosol effect on climate because it counteracts the effects of greenhouse gases," said CALIPSO principal investigator David Winker of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

"When you have winds from 80 to 100 mph it can do damage similar to that of a tornado," said Jesse Moore, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. "That can do some very, very big damage."

Just south of the Oklahoma border in Gainesville, wind and hail broke windows and ripped roofs on houses, said city spokeswoman Kay Lunnon. Some areas were still without power late Saturday.

Forecasters said the city has more than 3 inches of rain.

At the Gainesville Municipal Airport, hangars were damaged and private planes that were outside were pushed into each other by the high winds, said airport director Matt Quick. About 15 planes were damaged, he said.

In Waco, Baylor University freshman Shelby White was about to go to bed when the wind began pounding her family's house.

"I dove in the back corner of my room and all the walls collapsed," White said. "When the window shattered, I thought we had a really strong wind. But when the wall started collapsing, I didn't know what to think."

The National Weather Service said that while a tornado was briefly spotted around Waco, straight-line winds of at least 70 mph likely did most of the damage.

Officials also reported wind-damaged homes and felled trees in San Jacinto and Liberty Counties, around Houston. About 4,000 customers in the Houston area lost power during the storm, CenterPoint Energy officials said.

"Sudden strong winds along with heavy rainfall destroyed roofs on five factories and more than 200 houses in Hlainethaya township," it said.

The injured had been sent to two hospitals and Yangon's military commander had set up relief camps for families whose houses were heavily damaged, it said. It was unclear how the woman died.

Witnesses, however, said the damage was more widespread with about 28 factories destroyed.

Military and police were blocking roads to the affected areas and had started cleaning up, the witnesses said.

Cyclone Mala has been moving up the coast of western Myanmar bringing strong winds and causing some flash floods and power blackouts.

Several buildings in the coastal resort town of Gwa, northwest of Yangon, were destroyed on Saturday but there were no immediate reports of casualties, the Red Cross said.

Mala was downgraded from a category four storm after losing intensity as it made landfall and moved inland through western Rakhine state, a weather official said.

The wild weather battered the Shandong cities of Heze, Linyi, Zaozhuang, Jining and Liaocheng from Wednesday to Friday last week, Xinhua reported. The news agency cited Shandong's civil affairs department as saying that 2.18 million people were affected by the storms, without elaborating. Twelve people died and 58 others were seriously injured.

The hail and rainstorms destroyed 3,243 houses and damaged 155,000 hectares of farmland, resulting in an economic loss of 2.2 billion Chinese yuan ($305 Cdn), according to Xinhua.

The provincial government has sent teams to the disaster areas to organize relief efforts, Xinhua said.

The epicenter was 40 kilometers (24 miles) west-southwest of the town of David in Panama and 60 kilometers south-southeast of Golfito in Costa Rica, the USGS said. The quake struck 40 kilometers below the surface, at 2:48 a.m. local time.

David has a population of 77,000 and Golfito 10,000, the USGS said. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage from the earthquake, which was classified as ''strong'' by the USGS.

The Central American countries are in a region where the Cocos and Caribbean plates meet and rub against each other.

Delivering a special series of lectures this week at the University of Western Ontario, Louis Guillette has been drawn into London's lawn-care debate during question periods and talk-show interviews.

"The use of these compounds just for cosmetic reasons, just because you don't want to make dandelion wine from your yard or whatever, I think is inappropriate," Guillette, who is associate dean for research at the University of Florida, said in a lecture yesterday at UWO's Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Based on his own scientific investigations, Guillette said there's enough evidence pesticides put children, wildlife and the ecosystem at risk.

"Just because you can go buy them at the local stores doesn't meant that is appropriate use," he said.

A zoologist, Guillette has spent the last decade studying the influence of environmental contaminants on fetal development and reproductive systems of wildlife and humans, including the differences between alligators living in contaminated Florida lakes and those in cleaner ones.

He found abnormalities in sex organs, dramatic differences in egg-hatching rates and hormone levels.

Penis size of the animals from the polluted lake was smaller than animals from the less-polluted lake.

"This is important because it is not just an alligator story. It is not just a lake story. We know there has been a dramatic increase in penile and genital abnormalities in baby boys," Guillette said.

A followup study by another scientist involving healthy couples with 5,000 healthy babies also found reduced penis size with higher contamination levels.

"Are (their penises) so small they are actually having problems? We don't know. These are baby boys," he said.

But rodent studies have indicated more difficulty with fertility and other aspects later on, he said.

The researchers also found the alligators from contaminated water had abnormal ovaries. Some of the abnormalities were traced to chemical compounds with estrogen, a sex hormone. Estrogenic-type compounds are found in some pesticides, including atrazine, mostly widely used in North America for weed control.

Guillette said he doesn't support a total pesticide ban, saying their use is proper for public health and probably in agriculture. But when people can reduce their exposure they should, he said.