Jeff – Page 15 – The Front Page

The Revolution Needn't Stop Now

April 6, 2012 by Jeff

In 2005 researchers from NCAR and the University of Colorado decided to change the weather community. They started a program called, “Weather and Society*Integrated Studies”, or WAS*IS. As the name implies, what “was” is no longer good enough. This unique program started with a workshop aimed to entice physical and social scientists to enter a room because of their separate agendas, yet emerge having formed unexpected alliances in solving common problems. The workshop quickly grew into a grassroots movement. That movement is now a revolution in progress, facing its greatest challenge so far.
WAS*IS encourages students, researchers, and practitioners in the weather community to see that they can make progress by taking interdisciplinary approaches. Organizers realized that meteorologists have burning questions that require social science methods, and social scientists often have questions that require physical science understanding. This required a fundamental shift in the way we approach the goals of the meteorological community. Julie Demuth of NCAR and her colleagues explained in the November 2007 BAMS,:

…the ultimate purpose of weather forecast information is to help users make informed decisions, yet much remains to be done to translate
weather forecast information to societal benefits and impacts. To work toward this goal, a closer connection
between meteorological research and societal needs is essential, because problems are not meteorological or societal alone.

This simple notion spread collaboration like a wildfire.
By the time of the BAMS article, some 80 people had become WAS*IS denizens, pursuing projects that fuse meteorological and societal expertise.Demuth et al. took the unusual step of listing every one of these participants and affiliations in their article. There was a method to the rolodex approach: as a grassroots endeavor, WAS*IS was looking to hook up likeminded people–to create a community within a community that would share ideas and identify holes in the knowledge. As anyone who has done interdisciplinary research will tell you, five years ago was still the dark ages for support for integrating social scientists in meteorological work. Acritical mass of demand needed to be created; the hope was that readers would see who was involved and get in touch, fueling more questions and more interdisciplinary projects and more clamoring for changes in funding and attitudes toward research and services.
Already, just five years later, the WAS*IS community numbers some 276 people, many of them just starting out careers, searching for ways to connect the physical sciences with the social sciences, undaunted by the funding landscape they’d inherited.
With no money to give out, the revolution could promise cameraderie. WAS*IS, says AMS Policy Director William Hooke, “was the portal, the gateway, to a transforming experience”:

You’d be encouraged to join other entry-level professionals who had participated in an intense one-week dialog bringing together meteorologists and social scientists, helping them bridge their respective disciplines, network, and start projects that they could (and would, and continue to) build on over years.
Sound good? It was. The couple of hundred people who participated never stop talking about it, sharing their experience and their hopes and aspirations with the likes of you and me. They’ve come from the ranks of weather service forecasters. From broadcast meteorologists. From research scientists. From economics. Psychology. Sociology. They’ve caught the fever.
And they’re still changing our community. They provided part of the interest in and some of the traction and juice behind the NOAA National Weather Service thrust toward a Weather-Ready Nation.

Now for the bump in the road part. Earlier this week Jeff Lazo, director of NCAR’s Societal Impacts Program, sent out disturbing news:

Due to the tough budget times and NOAA’s choices about the allocation of their funds, we regret to say that external funding of the Collaborative Program on the Societal and Economic Benefits of Weather Information (aka the Societal Impacts Program) has been discontinued.
We have thus discontinued or suspended non-research related activities including WAS*IS, the Societal Impacts Discussion Board, the Weather and Society Watch, the Extreme Weather Sourcebook, and other information resources. As such we will be “taking down” these webpages as we will not be able to maintain them.
The Societal Impacts Program Discussion Board will be reinvented very shortly as a community service supported by Rebecca Morss here at NCAR. Please look for a message from her in the next week or so as we hope that a new incarnation of the board comes back online.

Hooke writes that it “is a tremendous loss”, but points out that

Meteorologists and social scientists trying to spin up the Weather-Ready Nation must choose whether to be deflated by this news or soldier on. It won’t be easy. Ironically, the sense of shared community and common purpose fostered by WAS*IS gives all parties a fighting chance to succeed.

Indeed, the Weather Ready Nation concept pushed by NOAA right now could prove to be the break that the revolution was looking for. Now fringe ideas are central to the goals of the entire weather enterprise; people in the halls of government are reaching for insights from neglected fringes. The cause of WAS*IS may have left the streets to be taken up by the establishment itself.

A National Network of Networks: The Discussion Continues

March 29, 2012 by Jeff

by James Stalker, CEO, RESPR, Inc., and Chair, R&D/Testbeds Working Group for the AMS Ad Hoc Committee on a Nationwide Network of Networks
The National Research Council (NRC) report, titled “Observing the Weather and Climate From the Ground Up: A Nationwide Network of Networks (2009),” provided the vision and inspiration for building a team of volunteers from across all three sectors (government, academia, and private) that investigated the
suggestions recommended in the report. This team, comprising six (6) working groups (Organization and Business Models, Architecture, Measurements and Infrastructure, Metadata Policy, R&D and Testbeds, and Human Dimension), spent more than two years considering how to refine the recommendations and tackle the challenges identified in the original NRC report. They also identified other challenges in shaping this type of Nationwide Network of Networks (NNoN), which will be of critical importance to our country’s weather-ready future.
This volunteer team has published additional recommendations compiled into a draft report available at the American Meteorological Society website. Several drafts of this team’s report had been made available to the larger weather and climate enterprise community for comments over many months. The most recent and final version of the report reflects the community input. The readers of this blog are encouraged to read this final report and provide their comments to the Committee Chair and/or any of the Working Group Chairs of the Ad Hoc Committee on Network of Networks.
These volunteer efforts, to date, have certainly tried to solidify the interest of the various stakeholders in a network of this magnitude and of national importance but a lot more work remains to be undertaken. Unfortunately, many challenges remain unresolved. For example, wide-spread support hasn’t been secured for the idea of a central authority for an organizing body of the NNoN. Despite the best efforts by the volunteer team, an appealing organization and business model for such a central body has not been settled on going forward. Other challenges include establishing how to:

make this organizing body an autonomous body that is not unduly influenced by any one sector,
make this body a financially sustainable entity in the long run,
reach all the major stakeholders and get them to support this idea and contribute to its success.

With respect to the third challenge listed above, many of the sought-after stakeholders may not be actively engaged in the weather and climate enterprise community activities and so finding effective ways to reach them becomes an even bigger challenge.
On a positive note, however, the NNoN efforts are going to be discussed again and support will be sought at the AMS Washington Forum in April 2012 and also at the Summer Community Meeting in August 2012 in Norman, Oklahoma. These two venues should prove quite useful for any interested Weather and Climate Enterprise participant and other stakeholders in the overarching effort to build a national asset that the current and many future generations will help nurture and benefit from.

AMS Members Surveyed on Climate Change

February 17, 2012 by Jeff

by Ray Ban, Andrea Bleistein, and Paul Croft, of the AMS Committee to Improve Climate Change Communication (CICCC)
Most AMS Members apparently agree that there is conflict among their colleagues in the Society on the issue of climate change. Those who perceive the conflict on this issue generally see it as at least a partly or somewhat positive thing, but at least some of them—29%, feel reluctance to bring up the topic of global warming at AMS meetings and functions.
Despite the perception of conflict, 82% of voting Members feel AMS should help to educate the public about global warming and 67% think AMS should help educate policy makers about it.
In fact, Members themselves are already involved in this outreach. They are spending significant time educating the public and policy makers about climate change—the median is 10 hours for this past year, and the mean is 55 hours!
Those are some of the key preliminary findings so far from our recent survey of AMS voting Members, e-mailed in December 2011. The survey was a collaboration between our committee, CICCC, and Dr. Ed Maibach at George Mason University. We asked all 7,197 AMS voting Members about their varied perspectives about climate change. Specifically, we hoped to learn about Members’ assessment of the evidence, perception of conflict among our members, views about AMS’s role in public education, and personal involvement in public education activities.
With a response rate of 26%, the survey results may not be easy to extrapolate to the membership as a whole. Nonetheless, we’ve made the preliminary results, which have been vetted by CICCC members and GMU researchers, available for you on the AMS website.
The AMS Commission on the Weather and Climate Enterprise established CICCC in early 2011 to facilitate communication among members of the weather and climate community so as to foster greater understanding about the spectrum of views on climate change. In addition to evaluating responses, the Committee and its partners held two workshops at the 2012 AMS Annual Meeting to facilitate dialogue about climate change within the AMS membership. More such events are planned for the near future.

AMS/UCAR Congressional Fellowship Application Deadline Approaching

February 8, 2012 by Jeff

by Jack Fellows and Paul Higgins
Every year the AMS and UCAR together send one member of our community to work for a member of Congress or a congressional committee through its congressional science fellowship program. The deadline for applying for next year’s fellowship is rapidly approaching, so consider now how this opportunity could enhance your career while giving you a chance to help shape the future.
The program has two goals: (1) to ensure that Congressional policy makers have ready access to the best available scientific information; and (2) to provide policy experiences for community members who think they’d like to pursue a policy career (i.e., develop key decision makers for the future).
David Reid-Miller, the 2010-2011 AMS/UCAR Congressional Fellow, served as a Legislative Fellow in Sen. Mark Udall’s (D-CO) office advising him on an array of energy issues. David says of the experience: “The deadlines were often fast and usually changing – and the request never the same. Whether it was clean energy R&D at DOE, fossil fuel subsidies, developing renewable energy on public lands, or crafting the DOD Energy Security Act – I not only learned how to balance the many interests in a “purple” state like Colorado, but I gained enormous insight into the policymaking process and expertise in a range of topics outside my dissertation research. It was a phenomenal experience – the only regret about it is that it only lasted one year!”
The Fellows bring to the Congress new insights, fresh ideas, extensive knowledge, and education in a variety of disciplines. Not only are the Fellows provided with the opportunity to make a significant public service contribution, but they also obtain firsthand experience in the legislative and political process. Fellows gain a perspective which, ideally, should help them understand how the research community effectively communicates with the larger society on important national policy issues. Fellows may have the opportunity to make significant contributions to public policy making within Congress on disaster preparedness and response, global change, water and energy policy, defense technologies, AIDS, pollution, communications technologies, and many other issues.
The AMS/UCAR fellowship is managed along with over 30 other professional science societies by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The AAAS reports that these fellowship programs continue to have significant impact based on: (1) the number of Fellows has increased over the years; (2) there are many more congressional requests for possible assignments than there are Fellows; (3) former Fellows are assuming senior positions in Congress, the Executive Branch, academia, and in the private sector; (4) overall, large numbers of qualified individuals continue to apply to the various sponsoring organizations for the fellowships; and (5) reports from the Congress about individual Fellows and the program have been highly laudatory.
What Fellows Do. Fellows perform every type of work normally asked of the permanent congressional staff, whether they are in members’ offices or with committees. The range of activities is illustrated by these examples:

Assist in preparation of major parts of legislation from preliminary agency reviews to House-Senate conferences and final enactment into law;
Work on legislative and oversight activities on budgets for various agencies, such as NOAA, NASA, EPA, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Defense;
Assist with oversight investigations into major national problems such as global change, hazardous wastes, natural disasters, ground water, acid rain, etc.;
Help prepare Members for debates on the floors of the House and Senate;
Write speeches and other materials for Members on a wide range of topics;
Provide liaison and coordination with committees to which a Member is assigned;
Give briefings and arrange for public hearings; and,
Meet with lobbyists, members of the public, agency representatives, and many others.

For example, Kim Mueller, the 2011-2012 AMS/UCAR Congressional Fellow, is currently serving with the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resource Committee. As part of her assignment on the committee, Kim primarily works on climate change issues, helping to organize briefings for staff and members of Congress, preparing members of the Committee for hearings and events, and researching climate change legislation. Kim also participated in the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban South Africa last month.
Fellowship Term, Stipend, Administration, and Application. Fellowships usually run from September through August. The stipend for the Fellow is $55,000, plus allowances toward relocation, in-service travel, and health and dental insurance premiums. AAAS organizes a two-week orientation period in Washington in early September. This orientation includes seminars on the Congress and the Executive Branch; meetings with former Fellows, members of Congress, and staff; and preparing for placement in the Congress. There will be over 30 Fellows in the class, sponsored by over two dozen different societies. Following orientation and interviews on Capitol Hill, the AMS/UCAR Fellow will select a position in the House or Senate. Throughout the year, the AMS/UCAR Fellow will join with other AAAS Fellows in participating in seminars, and social and other class activities sponsored by the AAAS. The AMS/UCAR Fellow will also be invited to attend and report on his or her activities at AMS and UCAR meetings.
We strongly encourage you to apply – see http://www.ametsoc.org/csf. Applications are due to the AMS by March 15, 2012!

How does it feel?

February 7, 2012 by Jeff

Sunday was supposed to be National Weatherperson’s Day. Did you receive flowers? Did distant relatives call to congratulate you? Did adoring fans of your forecasts voice their support?
Or did the much anticipated holiday pass uneventfully while everybody was preoccupied by lesser events…oh, like the Super Bowl, for instance? Just a case of bad scheduling conflicts, or a conscious attempt to diss you?
If you’re a meteorologist, especially a forecaster, you know how it feels to be underappreciated, to be told you’re not right often enough, that your job is going to be taken by a computer. Not only might you get ignored on the very day meant for you, now you get replaced…by a cube:

cryoscope-580x316 — No substitute for the real thing.

Hook the device to your smart phone weather app and it adjusts its temperature to match the forecast temperature. So that’s how the weather feels! And how does it feel to be replaced by an aluminum box with a heating element and simple sink inside it?
Bob Dylan stuck the knife in with “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” but he twisted it cruelly with:

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone.

A forecaster’s fate? We think not.
Clearly this invention leaves much to be desired. In addition to being unable to prognosticate without a web app, after a decade or more of good minds trying to develop better ways of conveying uncertainty information in weather forecasts in a few words or pictures, here comes a giant deterministic step backward for communicating tomorrow’s conditions. And of course, although inventor Robb Godshaw of Rochester Institute of Technology insists that the Cryoscope compensates for the difference between conducting heat with aluminum versus air (and also effects of wind chill), it is difficult to imagine equating the touch of the hand to how it feels to move and breathe in the atmosphere. No, this box is not how it feels at all.
In fact, there’s a lesson here. Much as it is difficult to teach any scientific concept to a wide audience, let’s keep in mind that over the years people have developed an uncanny sense of how they feel, personally, when it’s 40, or 50, or 60 degrees Fahrenheit and so on (not to mention wiser folks who’ve learned all this in terms of Celsius). In fact, people probably have a much more acute ability to imagine what a 10 degree rise in temperature will feel like than what carrying a 10 pound increase in load will feel like.
The depth to which the temperature scale is ingrained with exquisite sensitivity into our consciousness is summed up by a viewer’s comment on the Cryoscope promo video page:

The step after that would be to hook up a water hose to it to tell you when it is rainy.

The Eyes of Texas Are on Steer-ing Level Winds

February 2, 2012 by Jeff

Jill Hasling, CCM, president of The Weather Research Center in Houston, kindly sent us confirmation of the latest forecast on this Groundhog Day. In front of 200 kids at the John C. Freeman Weather Museum,

Alamo, the Texas Longhorn, did not see his shadow so Texas should have an early spring. Texas is too big for a groundhog to predict its weather.

Maureen Maiuri, executive director of The John C. Freeman Weather Museum, and Jill Hasling make a long-range forecast by drawing a bullseye on the 500 mb level winds, bypassing the usual Groundhog Day method of digging into the surface data..

Is Meteorology Turning Into Computer Science?

January 25, 2012 by Jeff

by A.J. Jain, from his blog Fresh AJ
I was able to attend the student conference career fair on Saturday, the energy committee meeting for students on Sunday, and the climate, energy, and new economy talks on Monday. I was able to network with a lot of wonderful meteorology students, young professionals, senior level executives, energy trade floor meteorologists, and just readers of my blog too. The conference is still going on now, so I can only speak of the 3 days I attended. From what I saw, my friends at the AMS put on an amazing conference!
Now with that being said, let’s get onto my post. Is Meteorology turning into Computer Science?
Why am I asking this question? Well, in my previous post of “The Future of Meteorology”, I discussed that the three main areas of growth will be 1) Weather Modeling 2) Weather Derivatives and Insurance 3) Private weather forecasting. But I never got into what skills would be required for the future of meteorology. Today that’s what I want to discuss based on what I saw at the AMS student conference.
After attending the student conference at the AMS career fair, I spoke to each private employer that was hiring meteorologists. Some of the employers I spoke to at the booths were, Unisys, Climate Corporation, Wunderground, AccuWeather, Impact Weather, among others.
And here’s what was very intriguing: a majority of these employers are looking for meteorology developers (i.e., people who are excellent at programming but also understand meteorology).
Meteorology programmers are a growing trend in today’s meteorology job world. Whether it is programming using Python, C++, Objective C, or PHP, the “new” graduate in meteorology in today’s economic climate should probably have these skills under their belt. When I spoke to a few of them…they mentioned if someone is a M.S. or Ph.D. with programming skills, they would like to talk with you. Some of them even mentioned they were prepared to throw ridiculous amounts of cash if you met those qualifications…so if you’re interested in learning more, let me know!
Many of these private weather corporations deal with large data sets. Since there is a great demand from the private and public industry on high resolution and accurate modeling, many firms are hiring in these areas of the meteorology. So being able to understand database programming and statistics is very important too.
In addition to the student conference career fair, I also attended a presentation about how NOAA/NWS is working with the DOE and the private energy world in providing more resources for these companies to use. The concentration of the presentation was about the WFIP model and how they are working with private industry leaders to make short term wind forecasting more accurate.
I think the meteorology community has plenty of weather models to access now…but the hard part is integrating and customizing them into the private world for them to effectively utilize them. In addition, as I’ve mentioned before, the weather modeling world is continuing to enhance the features of the model, along with it’s accuracy and resolution. And that’s why I feel this is a growing trend and a need for programmers who understand meteorology.
This trend is very interesting to me because when I went to the student conference 10 years ago (yes now you know how I old I am), the majority of the positions I saw were operational meteorology jobs.
To be honest, none of the private employers I talked to at the student conference even mentioned they were hiring operational meteorologists. So in today’s tough economic climate, it requires you to think outside the box. And that also means taking other positions within weather companies (or government) in order to get your “foot in the door”. Once you have your foot in the door, it’s easier to work your way internally to where you want to be.
Bottom line, if the growing trend is to hire meteorological developers, and you happen to be a good developer…you should start applying to these jobs or contacting private employers. Even though you may want to be in forecasting…it’s better to at least “get in” to a company than “wait” for a forecasting job to open up. Hope that makes sense!
Are any of you seeing the same hiring trend out there for meteorologists? Do you think meteorology is turning into Computer Science? Would love to hear your perspective, and your thoughts on the AMS conference, too.
Thanks!

Driving Home the Point about Listening

January 25, 2012 by Jeff

Crescent City Pedicabbie, the taxi-blogger service here in New Orleans, writes:

The American Meteorological Society is holding their annual conventionin New Orleans this week. Late this afternoon I picked up a convention-goer, and as he settled into the seat, he asked me: “Is it going to rain this evening?”
I started to give him my best guess when I remembered who he was. I whirled around in my seat to look at him in disbelief. “Seriously? You’re asking ME?”
Looking back on the incident, I’m wondering if he was collecting data for the forecast. Maybe they factor the intuition of pedicabbies into it or something.

Well….yes, actually (and we don’t just listen to cabbies with elaborate theories). Take, for example, the abstract for a presentation here at the AMS Annual Meeting on Tuesday, by Marcel Molendijk, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) In the Netherlands, the 35 official weather observation stations provide plenty of density for purely meteorological information, but equally significantly, the density of development in such a small country also means the need for ground truth of weather impacts is equally great. So KNMI has initiated a new weather alerts system that solicits feedback from citizens through an iOS app for mobile devices. The user of the app selects preset conditions and can attach a photo. The software applies GPS location and time stamp and sends the information to the weather forecasters.
So indeed, pedicabbies are now in the weather observation game and their intuition–at least their observations–are much appreciated by the professionals. Thanks for driving that point home, CrescentCityPedicabbie.

Disaster Risk Management Meets Climate Change Adaptation

January 25, 2012 by Jeff

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director, from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
An increasingly popular and visible feature of AMS Annual Meetings is a suite of so-called Town Halls. Often scheduled for the lunch hour (and therefore attracting primarily that minority of attendees who prefer food for thought to the competing invitation of physical sustenance with friends), these sessions are supposed to model the iconic town halls that once were the heart of the new England political process. They’re more about community input than any erudition of the speakers.

AMS Town Halls are typically used to roll out federal agency initiatives, strategic plans, and/or explore the interface between our community’s science and major developments within the policy arena. A sampling: yesterday one provided researchers a look at emerging directions for DoE’s climate and earth system modeling. Another looked at threats to the continuity of Earth observing systems – a topic frequently discussed in this blog.
I was a last-minute substitute panelist, for the panel on Risk Mitigation for Climate Adaptation and Natural Hazards. The session took its cue from a recently-released Summary for Policymakers of an IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX).
For those in the field, this special report has been required reading. Thirty pages or so of thoughtful, well-reviewed and well-documented material. [We can look forward to publication of the full document next month.] Here’s the bit that to me looks salient today: “Closer integration of disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, along with the incorporation of both into local, subnational, national, and international development policies and practices, could provide benefits at all scales.” [page 9]
The idea, in a nutshell, is that disaster risk management and climate change adaptation share much in common. The Town Hall announcement highlights the difference this way: risk management draws from history, while climate change looks to the future. The idea is the incorporating this forward-looking perspective into more traditional hazard risk management will lead to more resilient communities.
This is a great thought…but also maybe a no-brainer.
On reflection, this session also provides opportunity to reflect anew on five ways (there are undoubtedly others) we might make hazard risk management itself (and by implication, climate adaptation) more effective.
Embrace No-Adverse-Impact policies. Environmental impact statements have been with us a long time. You know the idea. When you and I contemplate construction, land use, etc., we have to assess the environmental consequences of our actions. In a similar way, we could and should assess the benefits and/or risks our plans and actions imply for community resilience.
Learn from experience. When it comes with natural hazard rsik management, we should adopt the learn-from-experience habits of aviation, as embodied in the work of the National Transportations Safety Board.
Measure progress. Hazard loss figures are noisy year-to-year and uncertain. But the discipline of continually honing our ability to estimate losses will in itself contribute to the awareness needed to motivate loss reduction when averaged over years.
Foster public-private collaboration. Such collaborations are not optional in today’s free-market societies. However, there’s considerable room for improving the level of such collaborations. They should not be fragmented, haphazard, merely tactical. They should instead be truly collaborative, ongoing, strategic.
Revitalize a venerable institution. Much has been made recently about a notional move of NOAA from the Department of Commerce into the Department of Interior. Dr. Lubchenco was questioned on this in her talk of yesterday. With NOAA embedded in Commerce, a good case can be made that the Department of Commerce provides an excellent home for achieving these several goals of hazard risk reduction and climate adaptation. However, this potential has been recognized and ignored for decades. If it’s never to be realized, then a move to Interior makes more sense.