Jeff

The Year by the Numbers

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Here’s a statistic for you: 3,300.
That’s the number of attendees (as of Tuesday) at this AMS Annual Meeting.
Here’s another: 1,000.
That’s the lower estimate of attendance at our WeatherFest here in Austin on Sunday.
Here’s another: 2013.
No, that’s not the number of umbrellas sold to meteorologists in downtown Austin yesterday; that’s the year, which happens to be the International Year of Statistics. The American Statistical Association (ASA) and more than 1,400 organizations in 111 countries are combining energies in 2013 to promote statistics. “Statistics2013” will highlight the contributions of the statistics field to finding solutions to global challenges.
“For most people, statistics is an invisible science,” says Ronald Wasserstein, executive director of the American Statistical Association. “Through this yearlong, worldwide awareness campaign, we will remove the veil that cloaks statistics from the public consciousness.”
Such awareness is not difficult to acquire through the programming of the week’s meeting in Austin, with sessions on characterizing uncertainties, data assimilation, Big Data, climate trends, radar algorithms, and so much more. But there’s no better way to kick off Statistics2013 than to attend tomorrow’s poster session (9:45 a.m.) for the Symposium on the Role of Statistical Methods in Weather and Climate Prediction. Bias correction, microphysics parameterization, statistical downscaling, model postprocessing–it’s Gauss in Wonderland.
From the Statistics2013 website:

When many people hear the word “statistics,” they think of either sports-related numbers or the college class they took and barely passed. While statistics can be thought about in these terms, there is more to the relationship between you and statistics than you probably imagine.

And here’s that number, again: 3,300…that’s how many people here at the Austin Convention Center who would heartily agree.
 

Tropical Meteorology: All in the (Very Big) Family

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It’s normal to run into familiar faces in Austin this week–that’s what an AMS Meeting is all about. But running into your parents, your children, well that’s no so common.
Or is it? At Florida State Robert Hart and Josh Cossuth have been getting back to their roots, and embarked on a project to map the entire family of tropical meteorology, tracing lineage back to Bjerknes, Rossby and others. The tree of relations they present this afternoon (Room 19B, 4:15 pm) is intricate and rapidly expanding, with hundreds and hundreds of meteorologists on it. Chances are you may be on it, too.
It can’t feel bad to know you have professional cousins descended from Lord Rayleigh, or that you’re a relative of Enrico Fermi.
You’re with family here at AMS.

Thumbnail of the massive family tree for tropical meteorology. Blue oval highlights entrants to the specialty from other disciplinary training.
Thumbnail of the massive family tree for tropical meteorology. Blue oval highlights entrants to the specialty from other disciplinary training. Magnified version includes names and dates of training.

NOAA's David Titley to Address Satellite Future in Uncertain Fiscal Climate

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With dozens of presentations–and a handful of Town Hall meetings–addressing the early successes and possibilities of the new Suomi-NPP satellite, it is ironic that the intended successor missions are already in jeapordy two years before planned launch.
Last September NOAA released a report from a review panel chaired by former Lockheed Martin executive Thomas Martin that criticized the costs and oversight of NOAA’s upcoming operational polar orbiters (the Joint Polar Satellite System). Meeting the scheduled late 2015 launch is already iffy, but with the high cost of these multipurpose missions and low tolerance for Federal spending in general, the review panel findings pushed NOAA to look into trimming back the goals altogether. Among the alternatives would be to replace some of the sensors with older, less sophisticated equipment, or even to ditch some of the non-weather capabilities that serve the climatological community in particular
So while some attendees will be celebrating Suomi-NPP’s successes at a Town Hall (Ballroom G, 12:15 p.m.), at the same time (Ballroom A) other attendees will be contemplating the uncertain prospects for future satellite capabilities at a Town Hall on “The Role of Satellite Data in Environmental Prediction and the Challenges for the Satellite Programs in Today’s Fiscal Climate.” The presenter at the latter session is Dr. David Titley, Deputy Under Secretary for Operations at NOAA.

A Conversation with T. Boone Pickens: Tonight Is about Opportunities

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Often, when people talk about T. Boone Pickens–the featured guest at the AMS Annual Meeting special session at 7:30 p.m. tonight (Ballroom D)–they remind you that he got his start as a paper boy. At age 12, Pickens took a newspaper route with 28 deliveries and turned it, through merger and acquisition, into a conglomerate of 156. A penchant for rapid expansion through acquisition was born, and the result was an investor-corporate dynamo.
But we’re AMS, so we’re not here to talk about how he made his billions with Mesa Petroleum or BP Capital Management. Tonight AMS Policy Director William Hooke will undoubtedly ask Pickens how he intends to make his next billion, and–from everything Pickens is saying–he’s going to do it by taking advantage of what science is telling him.

In that regard, Pickens is clearly not the common businessman. He explains, “The gambling instincts I inherited from my father were matched by my mother’s gift for analysis.”
So, instead of paper routes and corporate raiding, we’re going to remind you that T. Boone Pickens got his start in the oil business with a Bachelor’s Degree in geology. Indeed, while Pickens is the kind of businessman who takes opportunities where he sees them, usually that means seeing the big processes, the glacial but inevitable trends and not just the ephemera blowing in the wind. Actually, he also lost $150 million on wind energy already–abandoning one-time plans to build the world’s largest wind farm in Texas–and so in that sense no one is better qualified than Pickens to kick off the intensive discussions this week about how our science is working to make renewable energy a better bet these days.
Right now, the big picture is telling Pickens that natural gas is the alternative fuel of choice, as a means of ending American dependence on imported energy resources.

As ever, energy is, for Pickens, an opportunity, but it’s also about the big picture–really the biggest picture of where society is heading economically, strategically, politically, socially, geophysically. For us, then, the strategic move is to capitalize not on what science has to tell business, but on what business has to tell science, tonight, in Ballroom D.

Correction: You, Not the Birds, Are the First Line of Defense for Space Weather

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If you’re here in Austin, along with a few thousand of your closest professional colleagues, you’re not just here to share what you know. You’re here to learn what you need to know for the next great opportunity. Chances are, that opportunity is not at all where you were looking for it just a few years ago. It’s going to take a correction of professional course, and the AMS Annual Meeting is the place to start making that correction.
The next great thing in atmospheric science may be working closer with your colleagues who study the biology and chemistry of air-sea exchanges. It might mean getting to know how to deal with social science. It might mean looking above the clouds and not below, or taking input from different scales of time and space and applying them to your own, or thinking about renewable energy, not just potential and kinetic energy.
If you’re ready to take a hint from community leaders like NWS Acting Director Laura Furgione, UCAR President Tom Bogdan, and others, let alone the National Research Council, it’s time to start learning about the opportunities from outer space, too. In fact it is barely too soon to do so: our economic infrastructure is already completely wrapped up in technology that is highly dependent on the good graces of the sun. One little blip of activity for our massive sun, like a Coronal Mass Ejection, can wreak billions of dollars worth of havoc–and temporary infrastructure paralysis–on our little planet Earth. Space weather is not just one of those next great things in research and forecasting, it’s already crucial.
Yet research shows that right now, the birds likely know more about space weather than the average weather forecaster. That’s right: according to recent laboratory findings, birds have an innate ability, probably due to the chemistry and mechanics of their ears, that enables them to follow Earth’s geomagnetic fields on their long annual migrations. Birds use space weather to find their way. They can hear geomagnetic fields, we can’t.
A number of your colleagues will be correcting that right here in Austin. Some will attend the 10th Conference on Space Weather. (Yes, the 10th! Where have you been? In that time, not only has smartphone usage exploded, but the number of flight operations over the poles has increased by 28-fold–an amazing testament to rapid growth of vulnerability to Space Weather.) The good news for those looking for an opportunity to start making the correction now is that Sunday has two half-day short-course sessions on Space Weather. Students wondering what’s next after their conference ends at noon might be encouraged to know that the afternoon session includes interactive discussion with a blue ribbon space weather panel–and that students are eligible for reduced rate registration!
According to the short course description, “meteorologists are frequently the “first line of defense” for the public.” Clearly this is no job for birds. Time to make that correction, take that opportunity.
 

Sandy at the AMS Meeting: A Study in Adaptation, An Opportunity to Participate

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by Tanja Fransen, NOAA

Ninety-three.    That is how many annual meetings the American Meteorological Society has hosted.   Planning for an annual conference can take years, from selecting the location, securing the event center and hotels, to selecting the organizing committee.  The organizing committee then decides upon a theme at least 15-18 months in advance.   Individual conference organizers have their “calls for papers” ready nearly 14 months in advance.   Presenters have to have their abstracts submitted nearly 5 months before the annual meeting.

So…what happens when you have an event that is the magnitude of Hurricane/Post-Tropical Storm Sandy after all the deadlines have passed?   You adapt and overcome.

That is what happened this year.   Even the Major Weather Impacts Conference, which has a later abstract deadline than most conferences, was finalized a week before Sandy become one of the most significant events in decades.   Many individuals quickly realized the importance of including Sandy at the 2013 Annual Meeting, and a committee was organized.   Emails started flying back and forth, discussions were occurring on message boards and social media, and ideas were flowing, to the tune of hundreds of emails, phone calls, and social media messages.
Trying not to conflict with other conferences where committees had spent over a year planning them, AMS recommended a Town Hall Session to introduce Sandy formally into the 2013 AMS meeting.  And so it will be, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. on Monday, January 7, in Ballroom E at the Austin Convention Center. Committee organizers received feedback from many sources, and in the end, decided that invited speakers would discuss the major impacts of Sandy, the scientific issues, the warnings process, and more. The list of speakers (below) is diverse, representing, for example, NOAA, NCAR, the Capital Weather Gang, the Wall Street Journal.
Over the next few months, as further discussion, research and assessments are conducted on the meteorology, climatology, communication, preparedness, response and recovery of the event, other opportunities will keep Sandy in the spotlight.    That includes conferences from within the AMS, such as the 19th Conference on Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics from June 17-21, 2013, in Newport, Rhode Island, and the 41st Broadcast Meteorology Conference /2nd Conference on Weather Warnings and Communication being held from June 16-28, 2013, in Nashville, Tennessee, as well as the 2014 Annual AMS Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 2014.  The theme for the 2014 Annual Meeting nicely encompasses Sandy in “Extreme Weather – Climate and the Built Environment:  New perspectives, opportunities and tools.”   Other groups, organizations and agencies will also keep those discussions in the forefront.
We know there will be many questions that people will have for the presenters in the Town Hall Meeting in Austin.  With a short time frame to discuss them, attendees are asked to use Twitter to send the questions they have; the hashtag is #AMSSandy.  (Also, in general follow #AMS2013 for tweeting related to the Annual Meeting.) Organizers will group the questions into categories, and ask the top 3-5 questions, depending on time, to the presenters.
Here’s the scheduled agenda at this time:

7:30 PM. Introduction to Sandy and the Major Impacts — Louis W. Uccellini, NOAA/NWS/NCEP, Camp Springs, MD
7:45 PM. Hurricane Sandy: Hurricane Wind and Storms Surge Impacts — Richard D. Knabb, The Weather Channel Companies, Atlanta, GA
8:00 PM. Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy: Rain, Snow and Inland Wind Impacts — David Novak, NOAA/NWS/Hydrometeorological Prediction Center, College Park, MD
8:15 PM. A Research-Community Perspective of the Life Cycle of Hurricane Sandy — Melvyn A. Shapiro, NCAR, Boulder, CO
8:30 PM. Communicating the Threat to the Public through Broadcast Media — Bryan Norcross, The Weather Channel, Atlanta , GA
8:45 PM. Following the Storm through Social Media — Jason Samenow, Washington Post, Washington, DC; and A. Freedman
9:00 PM. Storm Response in New York and New Jersey — Eric Holthaus, The Wall Street Journal, New York, NY
9:15 PM: Q&A:  Moderators will present 3-5 questions submitted through Twitter to the panelists.

The Value of Attending Scientific Meetings

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by Keith Seitter, CCM, AMS Executive Director
There was a time when I thought scientific conferences would change character dramatically as the tools available for remote connections among participants became more sophisticated.  I have come to realize, however, that as useful as videoconferencing can be in some situations, and despite the efficiency it offers in terms of reducing the need for travel, it cannot replace the value of physical participation in a scientific conference.  That is because hearing and seeing someone give a presentation do not represent the principal value of these meetings — it is the interactions among those who are present. When I was a graduate student, a senior scientist once told me that he went to conferences specifically for the discussions in the hallway. He said that is where the real scientific progress occurs.  While that may be an extreme way of looking at this, I eventually began to understand why he felt that way.
Over the course of a meeting, while we hear speakers present the essence of their results in their allotted 15 minutes, or describe what they can to fit onto the real estate of a poster board, we are challenged to make connections between what we are seeing and hearing and our own work.  The questions asked within a session, or that we overhear, may spark additional connections, and our discussions with colleagues — or new acquaintances we make through shared interest in the topic at hand — can forge partnerships and collaborations that lead to new innovative ideas or new avenues of study.  We are not just passively learning about other ongoing research at the meeting.  We could do that by simply reading prepared papers or reviewing electronic posters at our leisure.  Our being there among other attendees doing similar work and grappling with similar challenges energizes the scientific and creative process within all of us.  I suspect that most of us come back from a scientific conference with renewed vigor for our work and sometimes entirely new approaches to it.
For the annual meeting in Austin next month, it seems clear that a number of Federal employees who would normally be at the meeting will unable to attend due to the restrictions placed on government travel in light of budget issues.  This is truly unfortunate — especially given the meeting theme of taking predictions to the next level, which is such a core issue for those working in NOAA and other government agencies.
There are some individuals outside our community who question the need for scientific conferences, or at least, the expense of having many scientists traveling to these meetings.  It can be argued, however, that the cost of travel to a scientific conference is returned many times over by the things that can be accomplished by the attendees over the course of those few intense days, as well as by the creative productivity they bring back to their institution after the meeting.  I hope the value of scientific conferences to the nation will be more fully recognized in the coming months and we will not see ongoing travel restrictions of the type that have challenged the community in recent months.

Atmospheric Rivers Go Mainstream

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This week NOAA announced installation of four new special observatories in California dedicated to improving the understanding–and forecasting–of atmospheric rivers, the massive (but narrow) flows of tropical moisture aloft in the warm conveyor belt of air ahead of cold fronts.

Atmospheric river during 2010 Snowmaggedon storm. NOAA image.

The timing of the announcement could not have been better. Ocean-fed storms with the distinctive filaments of tropospheric moisture brought heavy rains to California and Oregon this past week. Lake levels in northern California surged by as much as 34 feet; rush hour in major cities like San Francisco were bedeviled with flooded streets and bridges blocked by overturned vehicles due to the high winds carrying blinding sheets of rain.
The timing was not just good from a weather point of view but also from the standpoint of public understanding. The announcement culminated the fast-track rise of “atmospheric river” from an obscure technical term to popular understanding. In anticipation of the weekend deluge (and the lesser encore Wednesday), media outlets from Oregon to Minnesota to Australia picked up the vibe and were talking about atmospheric rivers–and not just by the more time-honored and familiar regional name, “Pineapple Express.”
It was only 20 years ago the term “atmospheric river” was introduced in a scientific paper by Reginald Newell and colleagues; then atmospheric rivers got a brief spate of publicity during the late 1990s and early part of this century with airborne field projects over the Pacific Ocean, such as CALJET and PACJET. Attention ramped up again during 2010’s infamous Snowmaggedon on the East Coast.
So it goes with atmospheric sciences, where the prospect of applications can drive quick adoption of useful concepts: useful not just in forecasting but also in climatology. For example, at the upcoming AMS Annual Meeting, Tianyu Jiang of Georgia Tech will look at different resolutions of general circulation models to see how well they depict these detailed structures (as little as 25 miles wide) and linkages with East Asian Cold outbreaks in a Tuesday poster session (9:45 a.m., Exhibit Hall 3). In a Monday poster (2:30 p.m., Exhibit Hall 3) Nyssa Perryman of Desert Research Institute will explore how downscaling from a global climate model to an embedded regional climate model can affect the simulation of atmospheric rivers.
The importance of this relatively new concept is such that the AMS Education Program devoted several sections to atmospheric rivers and how they transport water vapor from the tropics in its newest edition of the AMS Weather Studies textbook. Released in August 2012 by the AMS Education Program, the book is currently being used by thousands of college students nationwide as an introduction to meteorology. A QR code was embedded in the text to provide readers with access to the most current forecast information and video loops available on the subject.
For more on atmospheric rivers, check out Ralph and Dettinger’s article in the June 2012 BAMS on the relative importance of atmospheric rivers in U.S. precipitation. Marty Ralph discusses the article in this AMS YouTube Channel video:
 

Policy Symposium Keynote to Focus on Tree-Climate Connnections

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by Caitlin Buzzas, AMS Policy Program
The keynote speaker for the 8th Symposium on Policy and Socio-Economic research at the AMS Annual Meeting in January will be author and journalist Jim Robbins. The Montana-based science writer for the New York Times just wrote a book on the connection between trees, forests and our atmosphere, The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet.
Robbins’ talk for our meeting (Monday,7 January, 11 a.m., Room 19a) is going to span many different aspects of our annual meeting including public health, climate, and weather. The topic, “The Few Things We Know and the Many Things We Don’t about the Role of Trees and Forests on a Warmer Planet,” could be of interest to just about every topic the symposiums cover.
If you want a preview, check out his TED talk on YouTube, where Robbins’ commitment to the science of trees in climate is explained:

They say that everyone must have a child, write a book and plant a tree before they die. But for the writer and freelance journalist of the New York Times, Jim Robbins, if we just do the last part, we’d already be off to a great start. The author of “The man who planted trees” tells how he became a rooted defender when he observed the devastation of the old growth pine trees on his property in Colorado because of climate change. For him, science still hasn’t studied deep enough about these beings that filer air, stop floods, recover desert areas, purify water, block UV rays and are the basis of medicines as well as decorate the view. Much beyond shade and fresh water.


The 2013 AMS Annual Meeting actually goes a long ways toward fulfilling Robbins’ vision of discovering more about trees in our climate, with dozens of related presentations. At Monday’s poster session (2:30 p.m., Exhibit Hall 3), for example, Juliane Fry is presenting lab findings that may eventually refine regional climate mitigation policies that rely on tree plantings to produce cooling secondary aerosols. Also, as victims of fire disasters, forests feature prominently in the Weather Impacts of 2012 sessions (Tuesday, 8 January, Ballroom E). Similarly, on Wednesday (2:30 p.m., Exhibit Hall 3) Anthony Bedel will present a poster on the connection between changing climate and increasing potential for forest fires in the the Southeast, due to thriving fire fuels.
Young scientists are also following this line of work: Sunday’s Student Conference posters (5:30 p.m., Exhibit Hall 3) include a presentation by Zeyuan Chen of Stony Brook on understanding airflow in a cherry grove to better help orchard managers save their trees from bark beetles. Another student, Meredith Dahlstrom of Metropolitan State University in Colorado, presents in the same session on interannual and decadal climate mechanisms related to fluctuations in the prodigious capacities for carbon storage in the Brazilian rainforests.