Jeff

Beacons Will Light Up New Orleans

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by Ken Carey, Chair, AMS Membership Committee

On behalf of the Membership Committee, I am writing to encourage you to nominate as “Beacons” members of the AMS Executive Committee, Council, Commission, Boards and Committees for service during the upcoming 92nd AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.  The New Orleans meeting will be the second annual meeting at which Beacons will be present. By of explanation, here is an FAQ about the Beacons program:

What is the Beacons Initiative? The AMS Beacons program began in 2011 as an initiative of the Membership Committee and is firmly rooted in former Executive Director Kenneth Spengler’s legacy of fostering the AMS as an open, inclusive, and welcoming organization. The Beacons program is an ambassador program with a “member-staffed goodwill cadre” reflecting AMS’ initiatives to serve its existing, returning, and potentially new members.  AMS Beacons serve at the pleasure of the AMS Executive Director, and assist with Society and membership-related functions as deemed necessary or appropriate at AMS annual, STAC, and local chapter meetings and other functions.  Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines the word beacon as “a source of light or other signal for guidance; a source of light or inspiration.”  This adequately describes what Beacons aspire to be and why the current Beacons have chosen to participate.

Why do we need AMS Beacons? The AMS is the nation’s premiere professional organization in the meteorological and related sciences. It is a broad but close-knit community of weather enthusiasts, researchers, forecasters, practitioners, educators, and students, all working to advance the atmospheric and related sciences, technologies, applications and services.  Preliminary findings from AMS surveys and membership committee activities suggest that some members within our community are: (1) unaware of the full value of Society membership, (2) uncertain of or dissatisfied with the value of the membership, or (3) feel disconnected from the broader Society activities.  Feedback from some members and non-members also indicates that there is a perception that the Society is aloof, elitist, or academic-centric.  While these perceptions do not reflect the majority of viewpoints, they do represent a significant number that could adversely affect AMS membership and its growth potential. The Beacons Program is a “grass-roots” initiative at very minimal cost to provide resources and “friendly-faces” at the annual meeting and other functions with the goal of connecting and retaining current members, encouraging new membership, and reclaiming past members.

What will Beacons do at the Annual Meeting? Beacons will serve throughout the week making themselves available to answer questions about the Society and to visit with and assist participants as needed throughout the week. Beacons will have a significant presence at the New Attendee Briefing on Sunday, will be stationed at key locations (e.g., registration area, entryways, meetings with large gatherings, etc.), and informally greet and assist as they move throughout the venue during the week. Beacons will serve as a volunteer, complementary resource to the AMS staff and will be properly trained on what questions and information should be referred to AMS staff members.  In order to be easily recognized, Beacons will wear bright yellow (i.e., as in “Beacon of Light”) lanyards with AMS blue lettering. Additionally, signs, social networking media (e.g., the AMS Facebook site or Twitter) and future blog postings will notify attendees of the presence and function of AMS Beacons.

How does someone become a Beacon? This is where we are hoping for your involvement. Beacons are:  (1) full Members in good standing with AMS, (2) relatively knowledgeable of AMS policies and procedures, (3) open to meeting new people, and (4) willing to donate a few hours of their time at the annual meeting as needed.  In addition, Beacons should be individuals who are comfortable with discussing issues regarding the Society with Annual Meeting participants as appropriate.   If you are interested in volunteering as a Beacon, or in nominating a member of your Commission, Board, or Committee, or other worthy individual to be a Beacon, please contact Beth Farley ([email protected]) by November 1, 2011. Please include contact information for yourself or your nominees as well as a brief statement as to why the person is being nominated as a Beacon.

What happens after the Annual Meeting in New Orleans? After the 2012 AMS Annual Meeting, the membership committee will review the effort to compile a set of “lessons learned.” This information will be used to further develop and refine the fledgling Beacons program.

Rainbow Hunters Strike Optical Gold

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Usually when you go hunting for rainbows, you turn your back to the sun. And if you’re lucky, especially if the clouds are dark enough, you get not one but two richly hued bows.

Michael Grossmann found this tertiary rainbow in May, in Kaempfelbach, Germany.

Until this year, that was all there was to the pot of gold that enthusiasts of optical phenomena could hope for. Then last year Raymond Lee, a U.S. Naval Academy meteorologist, went a step further from his classic studies of rainbows and light scattering in the atmosphere to predict that a third (tertiary), and even a fourth (quaternary) bows are possible if you look just 40 degrees from a bright sun surrounded by dark clouds.
Lee’s historical survey yielded just four potential observations of these elusive bows in more than two centuries of records. They’re barely visible, and only if you know where to look.
All of a sudden now, thanks to Lee’s guidance, two more observations have been added by rainbow chasers in Germany. They published their observations in a special issue of Applied Optics last week. To preserve the weakly lit bows on camera required special post image processing. Nonetheless we know gold when we see it. No longer is it enough to turn your back on the Sun.
Triple and quadruple bows photographed in June by Michael Theusner.

Oklahoma Mesonet Station Stands Tall in EF-4 Tornado

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The morning after the tornado: still standing tall.

by Chris Fiebrich, Oklahoma Climatological Survey
It was bound to happen eventually.  The Oklahoma Mesonet has 120 weather stations across the state, about one every 30 km.  Since 1994, we’ve had a lot of close calls with severe weather, but the highest wind speed ever recorded had been 113 m.p.h. at our Lahoma station during a thunderstorm in August 1994.  That all changed on May 24, 2011 when a strong tornado clipped our El Reno station.   The graph below shows that winds gusted to 151 m.p.h. shortly after 4:20 PM.  Along with the wind gust, the station recorded a strong pressure drop.

At this time, the tornado has been rated as “at least EF4”  (see http://www.srh.noaa.gov/oun/?n=events-20110524-pns1 for the latest on the tornado ratings).  The tornado was on the ground for 75 miles.  It’s center was likely several hundred yards north of our station as it blew through.
A piece of flying debris sheared off the station’s 2 m anemometer just after it reported a wind gust of 126 mph.  The station’s temperature aspirator was also damaged, and one of the tower’s guy wires was snapped. A piece of metal debris was found wrapped around the tower. Despite minor damage, the tower stood tall and the official 10 m anemometer survived in perfect condition with a piece of metal debris wrapped around it.  A large nearby tree was found uprooted and thrown across the roadway.
More pictures can be found on the Mesonet Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/mesonet.

Policy Buzz: Senate Hearing Follows Tornado Outbreak

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by Caitlin Buzzas, AMS Policy Program
On May 3, Dr. William Hooke, Director of the AMS Policy Program, testified before Senator John Rockefeller (D-WV) and other members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. He was joined by Bob Ryan, Senior Meteorologist at ABC7/WJLA-TV, Dr. Anne Kiremidjian of Stanford University and Dr. Clint Dawson of the University of Texas, together they discussed “America’s Natural Disaster Preparedness: Are Federal Investments Paying Off?”
As the hearing was convened in part as a response to the earthquake in Japan, Dr. Kiremidjian focused her testimony on earthquake and tsunami issues. Dr. Dawson discussed advances in storm surge modeling.
This hearing (full video here) took place soon after one of the worst weather disasters in the U.S. of the last century with tornadoes killing at least 327 in the South East. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this may have been the largest tornado outbreak in U.S. history. Although this disaster was horrific in terms of the many lives lost and the huge economic toll, the hearing gave our community the needed opportunity to highlight what we do and the importance of accurate weather forecasts and earth observation systems.
Dr. Hooke stated in his testimony that these systems and science play an especially important role in the United States:

Because of its size and location, the United States bears a unique degree of risk from natural hazards. We suffer as many winter storms as Russia or China, and as many hurricanes as China or Japan. Our coasts are exposed not just to storms but to earthquakes and tsunamis. Dust bowls and wildfire have shaped our history. And 70% of the world’s tornadoes, and some 90% of the truly damaging ones, occur on our soil.

Ryan emphasized in his testimony that amidst the many scientific improvements, the whole weather forecast process is a multisector enterprise that depends on the capabilities of, and cooperation with, Federal agencies.  The Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) is an example of that critical Federal capability. As Congress decides what to cut in the upcoming budget deliberations, programs such as the JPSS will have to get the recognition they deserve to keep functioning. The data and imagery obtained from JPSS will increase the timeliness and accuracy of public warnings and forecasts of climate and weather events, thus reducing the potential loss of life and property. This has a direct effect on the health and stability of our national economy. It is important, even in a time of economic hardship, to keep programs like JPSS fully functional for the long-term health of the country. Both Hooke and Ryan made this point. Said Ryan:

Some may argue that loss of polar orbiting data will not degrade our current weather/climate observing and forecasting skill . . . but, what if they are wrong! Polar and geostationary weather satellites are an integral and critical core element of providing very accurate weather forecasts and life saving planning and decision making for weather and other natural disasters from tornadoes and hurricanes to fires, drought, dangerous air quality and oil spills.

As Dr. Hooke highlighted in his testimony there are several other things that can be done to improve our current disaster preparedness:

  • Maintain our essential warnings system
  • Bring to bear not just meteorology and engineering, but also social science
  • Learn from experience
  • Build public-private partnerships
  • Explore No-Adverse Impact Policies for flood and other hazards
  • Track progress/keep score. (There’s more about this proposal on Dr. Hooke’s blog, Living on the Real World.)

The issues that our community deals with everyday, highlighted through a hearing of this kind, are not just important to the world of science and meteorology, but important to the health and stability of the American economy and public as a whole. I believe that Senator Rockefeller, Senator Nelson, Senator Boxer and others left the hearing with not only a greater understanding of our community and the important role that we play in the health of our country, but with a continued desire to highlight the importance of our work.

Lessons of Sendai: The Need for Community Resilience

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by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director, adapted from two posts (here and there) for the AMS Project, Living on the Real World
Events unfolding in and around Sendai – indeed, across the whole of Japan – are tragic beyond describing. More than 10,000 are thought to be dead, and the toll continues to rise. Economists estimate the losses at some $180B, or more than 3% of GDP. This figure is climbing as well. The images are profoundly moving. Most of us can only guess at the magnitude of the suffering on the scene. Dozens of aftershocks, each as strong as the recent Christchurch earthquake or stronger, have pounded the region. At least one volcanic eruption is underway nearby.
What are the lessons in Sendai for the rest of us? Many will emerge over the days and weeks ahead. Most of these will deal with particulars: for example, a big piece of the concern is for the nuclear plants we have here. Are they located on or near fault zones or coastlines? Well, yes, in some instances. Are the containment vessels weak or is the facility aging, just as in Japan? Again, yes. So they’re coming under scrutiny. But the effect of the tsunami itself on coastal communities? We’re shrugging our shoulders.
It’s reminiscent of those nature films, You know the ones I’m talking about. We watch fascinated as the wildebeests cross the rivers, where the crocodiles lie in wait to bring down one of the aging or weak. A few minutes of commotion, and then the gnus who’ve made it with their calves to the other side return to business-as-usual. They’ll cross that same river en masse next year, same time, playing Russian roulette with the crocs.
It should be obvious from Sendai, or Katrina, or this past summer’s flooding in Pakistan, or the recent earthquakes in Haiti or Chile, that what we often call recovery isn’t really that at all. Often the people in the directly affected area don’t recover, do they? The dead aren’t revived. The injured don’t always fully mend. Those who suffer loss aren’t really made whole. When we talk about “resilience” we instead must talk at the larger scale of a community that has been struck a glancing blow. Think of resilience as “healing.” A soldier loses a limb in combat. He’s resilient, and recovers. A cancer patient loses one or more organs. She’s resilient, and recovers.
What happens is that the rest of us–the rest of the herd–eventually are able to move on as if nothing as happened. Nonetheless, if we spent as much energy focusing on the lessons from Sendai as we spend on repressing that sense of identification or foreboding, we’d be demonstrably better off.
The reality is that resilience to hazards is at its core a community matter, not a global one. The risks often tend to be locally specific. It’s the local residents who know best the risks and vulnerabilities, who see the fragile state of their regional economy and remember what happened the last time drought destroyed their crops, and on and on.
Similarly, the benefits of building and maintaining resilience are largely local as well, so let’s get real about protecting our communities against future threats. Leaders and residents of every community in the United States, after watching the news coverage of Sendai in the evenings, might be motivated to spend a few hours the morning following building community disaster resilience through private-public collaboration.
What a coincidence! There’s actually a National Academies Natural Research Council report by that same name. It gives a framework for private-public collaborations, and some guidelines for how to make such collaborations effective.
Some years ago, Fran Norris and her colleagues at Dartmouth Medical School wrote a paper that has become something of a classic in hazards literature. The reason? They introduced the notion of community resilience, defining it largely by building upon the value of collaboration:

Community resilience emerges from four primary sets of adaptive capacities–Economic Development, Social Capital, Information and Communication, and Community Competence–that together provide a strategy for disaster readiness. To build collective resilience, communities must reduce risk and resource inequities, engage local people in mitigation, create organizational linkages, boost and protect social supports, and plan for not having a plan, which requires flexibility, decision-making skills, and trusted sources of information that function in the face of unknowns.”

Here’s some more material on the same general idea, taken from a website called learningforsustainability.net:

Resilient communities are capable of bouncing back from adverse situations. They can do this by actively influencing and preparing for economic, social and environmental change. When times are bad they can call upon the myriad of resouces [sic]that make them a healthy community. A high level of social capital means that they have access to good information and communication networks in times of difficulty, and can call upon a wide range of resources.

Taking the texts pretty much at face value, as opposed to a more professional evaluation, do you recognize “resilience” in the events of the past week in this framing?
Maybe yes-and-no. No…if you zoom in and look at the individual small towns and neighborhoods entirely obliterated by the tsunami, or if you look at the Fukushima nuclear plant in isolation. They’re through. Finished. Other communities, and other electrical generating plants may come in and take their place. They may take the same names. But they’ll really be entirely different, won’t they? To call that recovery won’t really honor or fully respect those who lost their lives in the flood and its aftermath.
To see the resilience in community terms, you have to zoom out, step back quite a ways, don’t you? The smallest community you might consider? That might have be the nation of Japan in its entirety. And even at that national scale the picture is mixed. Marcus Noland wrote a nice analytical piece on this in the Washington Post. He notes that after a period of economic ascendancy in the 1980s, Japan has been struggling for the two decades with a stagnating economy, an aging demographic, and dysfunctional political leadership. He notes the opportunity to jump start the country into a much more vigorous 21st century role. We’re not weeks or months from seeing how things play out; it’ll take weeks just to stabilize the nuclear reactors, and decades to sort out the longer-term implications.
In a sense, even with this event, you might have to zoom out still further. Certainly the global financial sector, that same sector that suffered its own version of a reactor meltdown in 2008, is still nervously jangled. A globalized economy is trying to sort out just which bits are sensitive to the disruption of the Japanese supply chain, and how those sensitivities will ripple across the world. Just as the tsunami reached our shores, so have the economic impacts.
This is happening more frequently these days. The most recent Eyjafjallajokull volcanic eruption, unlike its predecessors, disrupted much of the commerce of Europe and Africa. In prior centuries, news of the eruption would have made its way around the world at the speed of sailing ships, and the impacts would have been confined to Iceland proper. Hurricane Katrina caused gasoline prices to spike throughout the United States, not just the Louisiana region. And international grain markets were unsettled for some time as well, until it was clear that the Port of New Orleans was fully functional. The “recovery” of New Orleans? That’s a twenty-year work-in-progress.
And go back just a little further, to September 11, 2001. In the decade since, would you say that the United States functioned as a resilient community, according to the above criteria? Have we really bounced back? Or have we instead struggled mightily with “build(ing) collective resilience, communities … reduc(ing) risk and resource inequities, engag(ing) local people in mitigation, creat(ing) organizational linkages, boost(ing) and protect(ing) social supports, and plan(ning) for not having a plan, which requires flexibility, decision-making skills, and trusted sources of information that function in the face of unknowns.”
Sometimes it seems that 9-11 either made us brittle, or revealed a pre-existing brittleness we hadn’t yet noticed…and that we’re still, as a nation, undergoing a painful rehab.
All this matters because such events seem to be on the rise – in terms of impact, and in terms of frequency. They’re occurring on nature’s schedule, not ours. They’re not waiting until we’ve recovered from some previous horror, but rather are piling one on top of another. The hazards community used to refer to these as “cascading disasters.”
Somehow the term seems a little tame today.

The Atmospheric Factor in Nuclear Disaster

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The tense nuclear power plant situation in Japan after the recent earthquake has raised questions not only about safety for the calamity-stricken Japanese but also about the possibility that a release of radioactive gas might affect countries far away.
Such questions would seem natural for the U.S. West Coast, where aerosols from Asia have been detected in recent years, creating a media stir about potential health risks.  Nonetheless, the risks from a nuclear catastrophe in Japan are considered very, very low. Yesterday the San Francisco public radio station KQED aired an interview with atmospheric scientist Tony VanCuren of the California Air Resources Board about how a worst-case scenario would have to develop.

VanCuren emphasized that until an actual release is observed and measured, it’s very difficult to quantify risks, but he also made a few cautious speculative points:

It depends upon the meteorology when the release occurs.  If the stuff were caught up in rain then it would be rained into the ocean and most of the risk would be dissipated before it could make it across the Pacific.   If it were released in a dry air mass that was headed this way then more of it could make it across the Pacific.

VanCuren says that such transport would not happen with just any release of radioactive gas. There has to be a lot of push from a fire or other heat source, similar to what happened in Chernobyl in 1986:

If there were a very energetic release–either a very large steam explosion or something like that that could push material high into the atmosphere…a mile to three miles up in the atmosphere–then the potential for transport would become quite significant. It would still be quite diluted as it crossed the Pacific and large particles would fall out due to gravity in the trip across the Pacific. So what would be left would be relatively small particles five microns or less in diameter and they would be spread out over a very wide plume by the time it arrived in North America.

VanCuren noted that the difference between the older graphite-moderated Chernobyl reactor and the reactors in Japan makes such releases less likely now, and that findings from Chernobyl showed that the main health risks were confined to the immediate area around the reactor.
Japanese scientists were among those who took the lead after the 1986 Chernobyl release to simulate the long-range atmospheric transport of radiation. A modeling study in the Journal of Applied Meteorology by Hirohiko Ishikawa suggested that the westward and southward spread of low concentrations of radioactive particles found in Europe may have been sustained by resuspension of those particles back into the atmosphere.
Such findings recall the tail end of a whole different era in meteorology.
Decades ago, the tracking of explosively released radioactive particles in the atmosphere was a major topic in meteorology–see for example, this Journal of Meteorology paper (“Airborne Measurement of Atomic Particles”) that Les Machta et al. based on bomb tests in Nevada in 1956. (In 1992 in BAMS Machta later told the story of how meteorological trajectory analysis helped scientists identify the date and place of the first Soviet nuclear tests.)
One finds papers in the AMS archive about fallout dispersion, atmospheric waves, and other effects of nuclear explosions. Of course, radioactive particles in the atmosphere were not only of interest for health and national security reasons. These particles were excellent tracers for studies of then-poorly understood atmospheric properties like jet-stream and tropopause dynamics.
In 1955 there was even a paper in Monthly Weather Review by D. Lee Harris refuting a then-popular notion that rising counts of tornadoes in the United States were caused by nuclear weapons tests. However, since 1963 most nations have pledged to ban atmospheric, underwater, and space-based nuclear weapons tests, stemming the flow of research projects (but not the inexorable rise of improving tornado counts).
While the initial flurry of meteorological work spurred by the Atomic Age inevitably slowed down (a spate of Nuclear Winter questions aside), the earthquake and tsunami in Japan will undoubtedly shake loose new demands on geophysical scientists, and maybe dredge up a few old topics as well.

Neutralizing Some of the Language in Global Warming Discussions

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By Keith Seitter, Executive Director, AMS
The topic of anthropogenic global warming has become so polarized it is now hard to talk about it without what amounts to name-calling entering into the discussion. In blogs, e-mails, and published opinion pieces, terms like “deniers” and “contrarians” are leveled in one direction while “warmist” and “alarmist” are leveled in the other.  Both the scientific community and broader society have much to gain from respectful dialog among those of opposing views on climate change, but a reasonable discussion on the science is unlikely if we cannot find non-offensive terminology for those who have taken positions different than our own.
As Peggy Lemone mentioned in a Front Page post last week, some months ago, the CMOS Bulletin reprinted a paper originally published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences by Anderegg et al. that simply used the terms “convinced” and “unconvinced” to describe those who had been convinced by the evidence that anthropogenic climate change was occurring and those who had not been convinced. This terminology helps in a number of ways. First and foremost, it does not carry with it the baggage of value judgment, since for any particular scientific argument there is no intrinsically positive or negative connotation associated with being either convinced or unconvinced. In addition, this terminology highlights that we are talking about a scientific, evidence-based, issue that should be resolved through logical reasoning and not something that should be decided by our inherent belief system. (And for that reason, I work very hard to avoid saying someone does or does not “believe” in global warming, or similar phrases.)
The sense I have gotten is that those who do not feel that human influence is causing the global temperatures to rise would prefer to be called “skeptics.” However, I have tried to avoid using this term as a label for those individuals. Skepticism is a cornerstone upon which science is built. All of us who have been trained as scientists should be skeptics with respect to all scientific issues — demanding solid evidence for a hypothesis or claim before accepting it, and rejecting any position if the evidence makes it clear that it cannot be correct (even if it had, in the past, been well-accepted by the broader community).
I have seen some pretty egregious cases of individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics accepting claims that support their position with little or no documented evidence while summarily dismissing the results of carefully replicated studies that do not. On the other side, I have seen cases of climate scientists who have swept aside reasonable counter hypotheses as irrelevant, or even silly, without giving them proper consideration. Neither situation represents the way a truly skeptical scientist should behave.  All of us in the community should expect better.
We will not be able to have substantive discussions on the many facets of climate change if we spend so much time and energy in name-calling. And we really need to have substantive discussion if we are going to serve the public in a reasonable way as a community. Thus, it is imperative that we find some terminology that allows a person’s position on climate change to be expressed without implied, assumed, or imposed value judgments.
There may be other neutral terms that can be applied to those engaged in the climate change discussion, but “convinced” and “unconvinced” are the best I have seen so far. I have adopted this terminology in the hope of reducing some of the polarization in the discussion.

Some Take-Home Messages from Seattle

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by Peggy Lemone, AMS Past-President
Unpacking from my trip to Seattle, I mulled over the many ideas about communicating weather and climate gleaned from planning, the formal program, smaller meetings, and hallway and dinner conversations.  Below is but a partial list:  I would be interested in hearing what others think.
The first idea originated well before the meeting, when Raj Pandya, Steve Ackerman, and I were brainstorming about the Presidential Forum.  After we settled on a panel discussion on communicating with the public, we decided that we needed to include weather as well as climate to provide synergy between the two, to provide a fresh twist, and to transcend the negativity sometimes associated with communicating about climate.
What I saw at the meeting suggested that was the right thing to do.  Talking about “climate” alone has too often divided Americans, while talking about weather sets us at ease, and experiencing a severe storm or blizzard unites us.  Besides, it is not clear to me at least where one draws the line between weather and climate.  I suspect, as we learn more, we will be talking more and more about the changes that are taking place from year to year using terms that we didn’t even know thirty years ago – like El Nino and La Nina, Arctic Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and so on.  “Climate change” discussion will be richer with the inclusion of these phenomena.
Communication about polarizing subjects requires trust, which can emerge from long-term engagement.  As we learned from the Presidential Forum, people in the media not only bring us weather forecasts but also educate us about these new weather phenomena and new types of data like Doppler radar reflectivity.  People turn to their weather broadcaster for information not only about weather but also science.  Many weather broadcasters, like Tom Skilling, solicit questions from the public.  We feel more comfortable hearing difficult messages from these people, because we have a long relationship with them.  (However, as one of the panelists, Claire Martin noted, the media could do a much better job).
The importance of trust was reinforced in a small meeting on data-stewardship issues.  A colleague looked at us and said – “I see you all have wedding rings.  Anyone who has been married a long time realizes there will be disagreements, but you can handle them if you remember what you have in common.”  One of the newspaper advice columns said exactly the same thing.  If you have something difficult to talk about, start by reminding yourself about shared values before diving in.  If it gets too hard, then go back to those shared values before trying again.  A similar approach might work with other relatives and friends:  allowing a dialog that includes common values rather than giving a lecture on the science.
Ralph Cicerone’s talk on Thursday reminded us of two more important points related to developing trust.  First, we should work to the best of our ability to earn our trust as a scientific profession.  This means working hard to keep the peer review process robust, not only by selecting good editors and reviewers, but also by ensuring that data used in publications are available to check conclusions.
And secondly, we need to make ourselves available to help the public understand our science (and science in general) better.   Part of this is by making ourselves available to the local TV weather broadcasters, as suggested in Monday’s presidential Forum, and making ourselves available in other ways, such as giving talks to schools , civic groups, museums, and participating in scouting groups, etc. Cicerone quoted statistics that suggested that people respected scientists, but few actually knew any scientist, save perhaps their physician.  Building familiarity will allow better communication.
A third idea comes from a comment heard in the meeting of the Committee on Climate-Change Communication.  Amidst our struggling to figure out how to do this, someone said that we shouldn’t think of people as being only in two camps – to use polite terms1 – the “convinced” and the “unconvinced,” but rather we should allow people to have a spectrum of positions.  To illustrate the “either-you’re-with-us-or-against-us” attitude, a colleague at lunch complained that the “convinced” group pigeonholed him in the “denier” slot (o.k., this is a polarizing term, but this is a quote reflecting his feelings), simply because he wasn’t convinced about claims of a relationship of stronger tropical cyclones to a warmer climate.  About a year ago, I exchanged emails with a well-known colleague who in the press was described as an ally by those who deny climate change simply because of some rather benign – and useful – comments on a blog.  Upon being contacted, this person told me she was fully convinced of the importance of greenhouse gases in warming the planet.
Other conversations reinforced what we already know:  that there are those out there who don’t want to have a conversation, but simply want to attack.  This rarely happens with weather, but it certainly happens with climate.   To reflect on Cicerone’s comments again, we needn’t “pander” to them but we do need to maintain our scientific integrity and to be approachable to those desiring a conversation rather than an argument.
Looking back on this essay, I realize that all the points are closely related:  that we will do better about communicating about difficult topics if we develop familiarity and trust.  We can perhaps do this by having a conversation that allows common ideas and values to emerge.   But the chances for such a conversation increases when – either through common experience or shared values – we obtain a degree of familiarity and trust.
[1These terms were proposed by Anderegg, W. R. L., J. W. Prall, J. Harold, S. H. Schneider, 2010: Expert credibility in climate change.  CMOS Bulletin SCMO, 38, 179–183.  Thanks to Keith Seitter for pointing this out.]

A Sustainable Investment in Sustainability

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by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director, from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
Early in the AMS annual meeting this past week, I happened to run into Tim Killeen, the NSF Assistant Director for Geosciences. He barely said hello before asking me, “Bill, have you heard about SEES?”
I hesitated, and we both agreed I’d flunked his test. “SEES,” he went on, “stands for Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability.” He added, “This investment area spans all the NSF directorates, and will amount to about ten percent of our budget. It ought to be the topic of conversation here at the Annual Meeting, and yet there’s virtually nothing about it anywhere in the conferences and the sessions.”
!!!! Ten percent of NSF’s annual budget – some $7B/year – is real money.
Thankfully, Tim graciously went on to let AMS and me off the hook. “We could have done more to publicize this at the NSF,” he said. “But please let people know about the dear colleague letter which is still on our NSF website.”
The letter merits careful reading in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt:
“The SEES Portfolio will support research and education projects that span all eleven NSF Directorates and Offices, including:

  • research at the energy-environment-society nexus
  • novel energy production, harvesting, storage, transmission, and distribution technologies, and their intelligent control that minimizes environmental impact and corresponding adoption, socioeconomic, and policy issues
  • innovative computational science and engineering methods and systems for monitoring, understanding and optimizing life-cycle energy costs and carbon footprints of natural, social and built systems (including IT systems themselves)
  • data analysis, modeling, simulation, visualization, and intelligent decision-making facilitated by advanced computation to understand impacts of climate change and to analyze mitigation strategies
  • study of societal factors such as vulnerability and resilience, and sensitivity to regional change
  • short and long term research enabled by a new generation of experimental and observational networks
  • support for interdisciplinary education/learning science research, development, and professional capacity-building related to sustainability science and engineering
  • creation of research and education partnerships around forefront developments in sustainability science and engineering, both nationally and internationally
  • development of the workforce required to understand the complexities of environmental, energy, and societal sustainability
  • engaging the public to understand issues in sustainability and energy
  • development of the cyberinfrastructure and research instrumentation needed to enable sustainability science and engineering
  • support of the physical, cyber, and human infrastructure necessary to achieve SEES goals”

Probably you’d agree that it would be harder to prove that your work, whatever it is, doesn’t fit under this umbrella, than that it does. And that said, it’s quite probable that many of you have already responded to requests-for-proposals under these auspices. [In fact, that may well be true of the American Meteorological Society also; in my conversation with Tim, I just wasn’t quite quick enough to connect the dots.…]
We can make a forecast. This articulation of a sustainability investment area won’t prove to be a one-off. More likely, it signals the start, or next step, in a series, doesn’t it? Increasingly, as society grows more concerned about the Earth as resource, victim, and threat, we’re going to see further calls for research proposals in these areas and along these lines. We can and should thank Tim and other NSF leadership for their vision here.

At Least It's a Start: Coordinating Federal Climate and Health Programs

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by Skyler Goldman, Florida Institute of Technology, Student Correspondent
The Interagency Crosscutting Group on Climate Change and Human Health (CCHHG) is the US Global Change Research Program’s effort to focus and coordinate wide-ranging, climate-relevant federal efforts in environmental health. As I learned during the Town Hall Meeting on Monday, 24 January, CCHHG is trying to prepare the public for climate change by aiming “to build communities that are healthy and resilient to climate change impacts.” The purpose of the meeting, however, was to determine what AMS Annual Meeting attendees thought were important topics for CCHHG to address.
Interestingly enough, the first suggestion came from a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who said that “funding does not allow for [this kind of] interdisciplinary work.” The rest of the audience seemed to agree. It seems that there is either money available for climatology work, or money available for health work. Put the two together, however, and little funding is available.
John Balbus of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was quick to say that interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the first goals of the CCHHG, and hopefully funding will come soon as a result of the group’s work.
Another attendee wondered if the CCHHG can achieve its goals. “Existence of this group is reason to be hopeful,” Juli Trtanj, the coordinator of NOAA’s Oceans and Human Health Initiative, said. “We now have an opportunity to be forward-looking, [but there’s] a lot of work to be done to make it happen.”
The simple creation of the CCHHG doesn’t seem like a lot of reason to be hopeful in bridging the gap between climate changes and the public, yet it is a start—maybe even a start along a path to potentially making a big difference. Perhaps the larger goal of creating those healthy and resilient communities can one day be realized.
“If we don’t do a better job of bringing the topic to the public,” Trtanj added, “we’re never going to get there. We’ll be here ten years from now going through the same thing.”