Jeff

After the Disasters, How to Be a Holiday-Ready Nation

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Weather took hundreds of lives in a record 12 billion-dollar disasters in the United States in 2011. Internationally, the disaster toll is even more startling. Tragedies have been a commonplace. The record-breaking year is a wake up call to the weather and climate community and to the nation as a whole.
Yet, on a holiday eve, a veteran of some of the worst weather of the year shows us how to give thanks. It was at a meeting, “Weather Ready Nation: A Vital Conversation” this month in Norman, Oklahoma, in an emotional presentation by Keith Stammer. If anyone knows what it means to be Weather-Ready, now, it’s Stammer, the emergency manager of Jasper County, Missouri, where basically a third of the city of Joplin was ripped apart by an EF-5 tornado nearly a mile wide.  (You can listen to Stammer’s description of the ordeal on-line.) Yet here’s how he started his talk:

The big thing you need to understand about Joplin is that at nighttime it is a city of 50,000 people; in the daytime it’s a city of a quarter of a million.  A lot of people come in for shopping, medical, for work. The one thing that translates, into in terms of this particular disaster, was that we are most grateful that it happened on Sunday evening, and not Monday evening, or the totals would have been absolutely different.

That’s a remarkable perspective to take after 162 people died, over a thousand were injured, and nearly 17,000 dwellings were lost. It’s a way to live after a year like 2011.
The discussion about making this country more resilient to the battering and bruising of a violent atmosphere, begun in Norman, will continue at our meeting in New Orleans next month. A Monday lunchtime Town Hall by the same name, organized by the leaders of the Norman conference, will be a highlight (12:15 p.m., Room 238). After Christmas, we’ll report on some of the Weather Ready Nation ideas and comments in The Front Page as preparation for the week’s deliberations.
But before refueling our minds for the Annual Meeting, a holiday is a time to replenish the heart and to experience community, so listen again to Stammer, who ended his talk thanking the 114,677 different people who stepped forward, registered as volunteers, and put in some 697,817 hours of service so far to help Joplin recover (more than a million cubic yards of debris removed so far):

All disasters are local, they start locally; they end locally, they may in fact rise to national prominence somewhere in between as ours did, but in the end, with all due respect, all of you foreigners are going to go away and we’re still left to have to handle it.  I think one of the things that helped us here is the fact that everybody was willing and able to look at this as a local effort. I can tell you that we did not have one organization or person that stood up and said, I’m in charge, you’re not, get over it. It was in fact a collaborative effort from the get-go and remains to be so today.

We are honored to celebrate a holiday with folks like that. We will be proud to make a Weather Ready Nation with them, too.

A Siren Song for Top-Down Emergency-Preparedness Thinking?

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Those of us of a certain age and place in the American experience talk a lot about the meaning of tornado sirens–how it defined our awakening to the omnipresent threat of severe weather. Such sounds stick with those of us who have made weather our business–Tim Coleman et al. admit this is part of the inspiration for their history of tornado warning dissemination published in the May 2011 BAMS. The role of community sirens is surging again in research following the horrible tornado disasters of 2011, as witnessed by presentations coming up at the AMS Meeting in New Orleans by Stephanie Mullins (Univ. of Alabama-Huntsville) in the Wednesday 25 January afternoon poster session (2:30-4 p.m., Room 252/53), Kimberley Klockow (Univ. of Oklahoma; same room and day, 11:30 a.m. oral presentation), Cedar League (Univ. of Colorado/Colorado Springs) on Tuesday 24 January (2 p.m., Room 243), and others.
But what we forget is that it’s not just weather experts and the weather-obsessed who respond deeply to the sounds of emergency sirens. Witness the public outcry to a suggestion by emergency managers to standardize times of regular siren tests across a county in northern Michigan recently, reported today in the Petoskey News. Officials were intent on cutting back from twice daily soundings that had become a community ritual. The Charlevoix fire chief told his city council

that many people report that “they don’t even hear the noon or 9:30 sirens anymore” — the exact condition the change in procedure is intended to avoid.

Quite probably true. But people hear even when they’re not listening. Thanks to Dr. Klockow for pointing us particularly to this passage in the article:

Many of those favoring leaving the siren soundings in place pointed to the soundings as a hallmark of a small town. Many said they have fond memories of their kids or themselves being called home for the evening by the siren’s sound. Others said if the siren was discontinued they’d feel like they were losing yet another part of what make Charlevoix unique.

A Slam-Dunk Choice for a Gift This Season

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Admit it, you want them for the Holidays. Mike Smith already confessed as much on his blog, Meteorological Musings.
They’re NBA star Kevin Durant’s line of Nike basketball shoes, called the “Weatherman”, replete with temperature shadings, isobars, and, on the tread…radar scans of precipitation. We’ll count the number of pairs we see when we’re together in New Orleans.

KD-IV Weatherman, from Nike, available starting December 10.

A step up in all-weather fashion.

Durant of course plays for the Oklahoma City Thunder. But an even better–indeed a slam-dunk–choice for a holiday gift is recommended by Cliff Mass: the Washington Weather Calendar, co-produced by  Q-13 Fox News in Seattle and the AMS Student Chapter at the Univ. of Washington. For $13.99 plus shipping you can soothe your meteorological soul, if not your sole.
 

The Services Response to the Tōhoku Disaster a Focus of the 2012 AMS Meeting

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The science ministry in Japan reported last week that more than 30,000 square km–eight percent of the country–is contaminated by radioactive caesium from the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster that stemmed from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March. The radiation was washed out of the skies by rain and snow. As much as four-fifths of the caesium ended up in the ocean–much of it having blown northeastward toward Alaska–and currents carried it to the U.S. coastal waters within a week of reactor releases. By one week later some of the micron-sized particles had traveled around the world.
Because the geophysical dimensions of the earthquake-tsunami-meltdown last March are evident in so many ways, so are the demands it placed on scientific services–from the warnings of giant waves to forecasts of tainted precipitation and groundwater to modeling global ocean currents. Not surprisingly, the disaster literally redefined the job of the Japanese Meteorological Agency.
On the first day of full sessions at the upcoming 2012 AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, the epic Tōhoku cataclysm will be discussed from numerous angles, particularly the premium it put on enhanced operational response. “The earthquake and tsunami increased vulnerabilities to meteorological disasters such as sediment disasters, flood, and inundations, in the affected area, by shaking and loosening the soils and damaging the embankments and drainage facilities,” notes JMA’s Junichi Ishida.
Ishida’s presentation is the special keynote address of the Interactive Information Processing Systems (IIPS) conference (11 a.m. Monday, 23 January, Room 356). Ishida will talk about how JMA took increased vulnerabilities into account, by

  • changing criteria for heavy rain warnings to account for runoff and landslide vulnerabilties
  • lowering criteria for coastal inundation warnings (the earthquake actually lowered coastal ground levels, changing tidal configurations)
  • introduced extreme temperature warnings to account for reduced electricity capacity
  • enhanced aviation support (in particular due to traffic for relief flights) because of flight dangers including radioactive clouds

11 March Tsunami sweeps through Sendai Airport, where waters reached the second level of buildings, destroying key operations equipment, scattering mud and debris, and stranding more than a thousand people for two days. The airport eventually reopened as a hub of relief work. Photos copyright Japan Meteorological Agency, with thanks to Junichi Ishida, who will deliver the IIPS conference keynote at the 2012 AMS Annual Meeting.

At the same time (11 a.m. Monday, in Room 338) Yukio Masumoto of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology will kick off a session devoted to the March 2011 disaster as part of the Coastal Environment symposium. Masumoto will speak about ocean dispersion of radioactive Caesium-137 and Iodine-131 after the Fukushima releases, including relationships with tides, surface winds and, in one case study, atmospheric fallout. In his abstract, Masumoto reports, “In the near-shore region, the wind forcing is a dominant factor that controls the flow field, while large-scale currents and eddies advect the radionuclides in the off-shore region.”
Several other Monday morning presentations in the Coastal Environment session feature rapid American responses last spring to adapt and construct viable modeling systems to depict Japan’s waterborne radiation hazards–speakers include Ronald Meris of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, William Samuels of Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), and  Matthew Ward of Applied Science Associates.
After lunch, in the same session (2 p.m., Room 338) Gayle Sugiyama of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will talk about how the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center provided analyses and predictions of the radioactive plume, estimating the exposure in both Japan and the United States. Guido Cervone of George Mason University (2:15 p.m., Room 338) will show how dispersion modeling helped reconstruct the otherwise unknown sequence of radioactive releases at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Masayuki Takigawa  (1:45 p.m., Room 338) will discuss results from regional transport modeling of the radioactivity dispersion on land and ocean, while Teddy R. Holt of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory will show passive tracer modeling capabilities with the Fukushima events in a coupled ocean-atmosphere mesoscale modeling system (1:30 p.m., Room 338).
In a parallel session of the Coastal Environment Conference next door (1:45 p.m., Room 337) Nathan Becker of NOAA/NWS will discuss calculations of detection times for various configurations of the sensors for the Pacific tsunami warning system, concluding that, “for global tsunami hazard mitigation the installation of about 100 additional carefully-selected coastal sea-level gauges could greatly improve the speed of tsunami detection and characterization.”
Interestingly, Monday’s Space Weather posters (2:30 p.m.-4 p.m., Hall E) include a presentation by Tak Cheung of the ionospheric disruptions caused by the great Japanese earthquake last March. Forecasts of ionospheric disturbances affect yet another service in the wake of the disaster: the communications provided by shortwave radio operators. And that will be a topic for Kent Tobiska (Utah State Univ.) in the Space Weather session at 5 p.m. (Room 252/253

Another Way to Work the Night Shift in Meteorology

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Meteorologist A.J. Jain dispenses a lot of good advice for young professionals on his blog, Fresh AJ. But in a post last week he aimed his thoughts to employers, giving them a tip on how to keep their forecasting talent from drifting away from the rigors of shift work.
Turns out that Jain finds the demands of job, family, and health wearing him down when he’s working through the night four days and then trying to reset his body clock for the other three.

I know there are many meteorologists out there that currently feel the same way I did.  Tired, groggy, and just wish there was another solution.    Well I want to introduce you to a new model that is being successfully run at a top aviation weather company on the west coast (I won’t name names…but I am a huge fan!).
The company allows their meteorologists to work from home.  Yes…home.   Yes you can sit in your pajamas all day or night and work from the goodness of your laptop.   How awesome is that!
And you know what is amazing…the turnover of the meteorology department at the aviation company has dropped considerably.  The employees are much happier…and the product they put out is just as great…if not better. And they’re still doing shift work!

Read the rest of his points about how telecommuting can be a successful strategy for meteorological shift work.

IPCC's New Special Report: Adapt to Extremes, but Prepare for the Presentation

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For a first reaction to the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report, Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, read William Hooke’s full post here, but keep in mind his take away message for now:

The world need not just this and the other IPCC reports themselves but also the body of diverse analysis and reaction the reports trigger. IPCC reports should and do stimulate thought and action. They don’t prescribe it.
What should you and I keep in mind as we read?
1. We should remember that the Earth does its business through extreme events and always has. Extremes are not suspensions of the normal order; they are its fulfillment.
2. Extremes leave no sphere of the natural or social or technological world unaffected and the disruptions in all those normally distinct spheres intereact with each other, compounding the challenge.
3. Social change matters more to what extreme events and disasters portend for our future than does climate change. .
4. We’ve got to get past reacting to the crisis of the moment

This will be good preparation not only for reading the full report when it’s available online in February 2012 (the summary is now available here) but also for discussions with Roger Pulwarty and colleagues when the present the reports findings on the first day of the upcoming AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans (23 January, 11:30 a.m., Room 243). If you’re interested in hearing from the report authors now, check out the video from Friday’s press conference:

A Summer Spent Studying Disagreements

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Washington State University just published a profile of Rodrigo Gonzalez, a graduate student in the Laboratory for Atmospheric Research (LAR) who spent his summer interning for the AMS Policy Program:
“It’s not in my character to be in a lab doing research and publishing articles that are only useful for other scientists,” Gonzalez said. “I want to see the broader impacts. I like to see that what I do has an impact on the development of society.”…
Gonzalez has been long interested in politics. He studied environmental engineering in Mexico City as an undergraduate and participated in modeling studies of air pollution in that city.
During his summer in D.C., Gonzalez worked for the American Meteorological Society’s policy program, which helps congressional staffers develop science-based policy. It also connects scientists and policy makers. The idea is to help each other and give each other information, Gonzalez said.
There often has been a gap between scientists and policy makers, he said: “It’s very hard to communicate science to make effective policy.” The AMS policy program tries to cover that gap.
In 2009, the program made policy recommendations based on the professional and scientific expertise and perspectives of the AMS about a climate change legislative proposal. The legislation passed in the House of Representatives but never made it through the Senate to become law.
Part of Gonzalez’s work was interviewing the different actors on this legislation as well as experts and advocates surrounding the proposal. What were the electoral implications of the proposal? Why did it pass the House and not the Senate? Who and what gives momentum to the legislation?
“It is not necessarily the science or engineering that gives legislation its momentum,” he said….
Trying to get science into the public policy discussion can be frustrating, Gonzalez said. But it was more frustrating before he became involved.
“Now I understand how it works and what is involved,” he said. “It’s natural and necessary for humans to disagree. The source of policy making is disagreement. As frustrating as that can be, there is no better way.”
Gonzalez is working to complete a Ph.D. in air quality modeling. Since returning from his summer internship, he is pursuing his final year in the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in engineering sciences.
He would like to travel and eventually return to Mexico to help his country with its air pollution problems. Spending the summer in D.C….helped [Gonzalez] learn how to better communicate the science that he studies.
“It’s a different world away from the lab,” he said. “This has really made me a better professional.”
For the full article, by Tina Hilding, click here.

Latest Readings

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From our AMS bookmarks this week (for more, visit AMSFrontPage on Delicious, http://bit.ly/v7dMY2):

Sweden offers aerial Aurora Borealis tours…Mobile Radar in Utah-Style Storm Chasing This Month…Conversation With Paul Yeager, Writer/Meteorologist…Drought Adds Poignant Twist To Deer Season…National Snow and Ice Data Center wins sustainability award…History of atmospheric CO2–The Movie…Oregon State Univ. merges ocean, geoscience programs

The Great Blue Norther of 11/11/11

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For the 100th Anniversary of one of most noteworthy storms in the history of the Midwest, University of Missouri atmospheric science students Brian Crow, Evan Kutta, and Jennifer Power spent hours digging through historical records. They were trying to document the progress of the Great Blue Norther of 11 November 1911, tracking the situation through old newspaper articles and other documents. What they found showed how devastating weather can be when people have no warning, as a beautiful, sunny and warm fall day quickly turned into a deadly winter blast including tornadoes and derechoes.
Using the information about the impact of the storm, along weather data and reanalyses, UM Associate Professor Patrick Market reconstructed the storm and found a relatively close modern analog–29 January 2008. That storm had a slower but similar temperature drop (from 70°F to 15°F) and a similarly intense cold front.
Check out the  interactive map the students created that tracks the events of that fateful day 100 years ago

View 11/11/1911 in a larger map
 

Jack Townsend, Shepherd of Weather Satellite Technology

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The passing of AMS Fellow John W. (“Jack”) Townsend on October 29 serves as a fitting moment to register the evolving national relationship with space technology over six decades.

“Jack Townsend was truly one of the seminal figures in the history of NASA, and certainly, in the history of Goddard,” said current Goddard Spaceflight Institute Director Rob Strain. “The story of the space program simply could not be written without a chapter devoted to him. He dedicated his life to the exploration of space and the study of our planet, and humankind is richer for the knowledge he helped generate.”

Townsend was one of the first employees at Goddard in 1959, where he directed the satellite applications efforts, at a time when the nation was racing to enter the Space Age. He had already cut his teeth on space technology, first in radar countermeasures aboard B-29 bombers in World War II and, by 1949, working with V-2 rockets. Townsend helped bring satellite meteorology to fruition in the 1960s as Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Science Services Administrator (predecessor to today’s NOAA). After a decade at Fairchild Industries, he returned to NASA after the Challenger disaster, and then for three years as Director of Goddard.

Townsend retold the story of the origins of weather satellites just a year ago in an interview with archivist/historian Doria Grimes:

[E]verything started with sounding rockets just after World War II. I went to work for the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) following my graduate degree in physics. The sounding rocket program had just started at NRL and it involved the Army, Navy, and Air Force…. Interestingly enough, at White Sands, New Mexico, we flew rockets out over the desert in the late 1940’s. We put cameras on them called gun sight aiming point cameras, “GSAPs”. The idea of the camera was that as the rocket went up and rotated, it took pictures of the earth in swaths. You would use those pictures to reconstruct the attitude of the rocket.

One day we had a shot in New Mexico in which we caught what looked like a storm in pictures off to the southeast. One of the guys who worked for me, Otto Berg, made a composite picture of nearly 1,000 tiny GSAP pictures, a total mosaic of a storm. It looked exactly like a hurricane, and attracted the Weather Bureau’s attention. It was in the early 50’s – all before Sputnik.

The pictures stirred interest from Harry Wexler at the Weather Bureau, and eventually a classified Army satellite project was moved into the new NASA, gradually became declassified, leading to the first weather satellite, TIROS. It was during this period that Townsend and other American science administrators were involved with negotiating peaceful uses of space technology with their Soviet counterparts.

The subject came up of transferring data. We, at that time, expected to launch the research meteorological satellites. They promised they were going to launch meteorological rockets and satellites. Incidentally, they never did. But they wanted the transferred data because Russian ground data was very sparse, and these data meant a lot to them as a country. With the free transfer of meteorological data and satellite pictures, we had an issue, a big issue. Who pays for the communication expenses between Washington and Moscow? We got into a big fight about that, and the agreement had been to share. The Russians said that since the U.S. owns all these communications facilities, the U.S. should pay for 90% of it. Then the Russians said that the ruble was not worth as much money as the dollar. Finally, I came up with one of the only brilliant ideas I ever came up with. I said sharing means 50/50. We’ll pay the bill for three months, and you pay it for three months….So I cut this deal with the Russians on how to pay for it. [His Russian negotiating counterpart] Blagonravov thought it was funny. He laughed, and said to me, “I am glad I am too old to send to Siberia.” He was a lieutenant general which is a five star rank in those days, and he also was a communist and believed in the system. He was a neat guy and I got to like him.

The whole interview (transcript here) has more on the origins of the space program, NOAA, and operationsl satellites. You’ll get the sense that the field was guided then by strong personalities and a country committed to technology. [For more on the early development of weather satellites, specifically TIROS, check out James Rodger Fleming’s presentation on “Transformative Technologies and International Cooperation in the Career of Harry Wexler” at the 2012 AMS Annual Meeting (11 a.m., Tuesday 24 January)].