Astronomy has its Galaxy Zoo, in which citizen scientists across the internet–and hence the world–help professionals comb through millions of astronomical images in search of key celestial objects. Now the climate community may move toward creating what might end up being their own equivalent “Zoo” drawing on the vast resources of internet users to crunch temperature data.
At least that’s one of the possible outcomes of this week’s workshop in Exeter on developing global land surface temperature databases, which has been attracting considerably more media attention than most WMO workshops. Attendees include Google executives and Galaxy Zoo organizers who might help climatologists figure out a grassroots method to help digitize old ships logs and other climate data recovery efforts that require intensive processing.
On its YouTube channel, the UK Met Office, host of the workshop, posted the introduction from Peter Thorne, chair of the organizing committee:
Thanks to George Taylor (Applied Climate LLC) for pointing out excellent photos of snow rollers taken in 2009 by Tim Tevebaugh in Lewiston, Idaho, Here’s just one of several that can be found at the NWS-Spokane website:
. Taylor’s blog provides a good description of the phenomenon.
Welcome back to school, kids. It’s the first day that your teacher has set up this newfangled “interactive whiteboard” in your classroom. She isn’t sure what you and your fellow first graders are going to make of internet connectivity and videos and powerpoints.
But as a budding meteorologist, you know what to do:
So yes, Doppler radar and a brief weathercast for your 6-year-old classmates. Here’s how teacher Stephannie Waller tells it:
I have a student meteorologist for the week & this bright student saw that what was on the promethean board was what he saw every morning on our computer when he checked the weather, so he asked, “Can I check the weather on that?” Seeing that it was a very teachable moment & that he could teach every other student how to be a meteorologist I said yes. So he clicked it on & then I asked him to click on the Doppler Radar (it was raining this morning & they would actually have something to watch) & then asked him to enlarge it & from there he went to town, like a natural.
While there’s plenty of disagreement amongst educators and parents about the value of smart boards, there should be no disagreement that this kid has a good start on an application for his AMS certification.
In the early 1900’s, my grandfather faced a challenge at work. Though only a teenager, he was foreman in a foundry making cast-iron bathtubs in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His company was struggling. A large number of the bathtubs they produced were defective – so badly flawed they had to scrap them. They were losing money. What to do?
My grandfather was a baseball fan.[1] He solved the problem the way a baseball fan would. He got a big blackboard. He hung it on the foundry wall. He wrote every workman’s name on it. Next to each name he started keeping a tally: how many passable bathtubs had that worker produced that week? And what was his batting average? Of all the workers, who was the best that week? The Top Tubber? The MVP?
The workers reconnected with their competitive side. Almost overnight, the foundry’s output shot up. Defects went down. No one had to be threatened with loss of a job. No one had to be offered any more pay. Morale improved. All that was needed? A scorecard.[2]
Maybe we can scale this up. If we want to reduce disaster losses, why shouldn’t we start by
Nice Q and A in the Battle Creek Enquirer with National Weather Service meteorologist Brad Temeyer, of Sioux Falls, Iowa, who was in Michigan last month as the weather officer for the Balloon Federation of America national championships.
Photo by Trace Christensen/Battle Creek Enquirer
How did you go from meteorology to ballooning? Or did ballooning come first?
Ballooning came first, actually. I started by going out and just watching the balloons as a spectator back when I was three years old.
I wondered why the balloons were able to steer as they go up in altitude. As they change their altitude, a lot of times winds are different and that made me really curious. I started to look into that and one thing led to another. I ended up with a career in meteorology. Is it easy to find time in your life for both ballooning and your work in weather?
In some respects, I have an advantage because I know the weather ahead of time and I try to line up crew and get a flight lined up. The drawback to it is that Mother Nature never takes a break, so I’m working rotating shifts around the clock. Sometimes when it’s flyable, I’m stuck at work. That’s kind of unfortunate.
NASA’s GRIP mission (Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes) is sending aircraft into Hurricane Earl, coming up with some wonderful imagery from almost 20,000 meters above the ocean surface. Here’s how the eye looked from the Global Hawk unmanned aircraft at 9:05 a.m. Eastern, Thursday:
For more on GRIP, Earl, the Global Hawk, and the importance of having drones that can fly up to 26 hours in a single mission, this video interview with Jeff Halverson gives some answers with nice imagery:
Here are wind and waves for this Friday night:
So far so good: the wind is from the west and the waves are predictably building with increasing fetch from Illinois to Michigan side of the lake.
Now here are the predictions for Saturday noon or 15 hours later:
The winds have shifted to the north somewhat but are still predominantly west. The wind shift to the north was gradual. The waves are still gaining height from west to east.
But what happened to the wave direction?! Is it just me or does it seem odd that on the west side of the lake the waves have turned nearly perpendicular to the wind direction!
A Monthly Weather Review paper in press by Otto Hyvärinen and Elena Saltikoff notes that the widespread availability of weather photos on the internet presents an opportunity for meteorologists gathering storm data.
People of the generation born since 1982 have grown up using computer technology. Cell phones, text messaging and the Internet are all part of their culture. Now they are acquiring more and more devices with good quality cameras and Global Positioning System (GPS) abilities. They share photos and reports with friends and strangers alike. Typical messages can be divided into two categories: “this is what I saw” and “this is what happened to me”. At first glance, these data are unreliable, unorganized and uncontrolled. But the amount of data is huge and increasing and should not be ignored, and its reliability should be assessed.
Because shared photos on Flickr, for instance, are time-stamped and often with good location information, the authors were able to compare hailstorm identification using the online photos to gathering the same information the conventional way, with radar signatures.
As a result of this preliminary study, we think that further exploration of the use of Flickr photographs is warranted, and the consideration of other social media as data sources can be recommended.
Similar ideas were making the rounds at the AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta earlier this year. The Centers for Disease Control has been using Google search data to pinpoint influenza outbreaks (a Nature paper on the topic is cited in the new MWR article). Who knows? In the coming age of Web 3.0 the plodding old methods of gathering storm and climate data may go the way of hunter-gatherer societies. The information revolution may create myriad, as-yet-unimagined tools for the community–and not just as a means to deliver products.
Which brings us to the irony of using the habits of the populace to reinforce expertise, and a cautionary tale from Australian columnist Bryan Patterson that’s been making the rounds of the internet again these days:
An Aboriginal mate told me this story which maybe explains how the weather system really works.
It was April and the Aboriginals on a remote reserve asked their new elder if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was an elder in a modern society he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the sky he couldn’t’t tell what the winter was going to be like.
Nevertheless, to be on the safe side he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the tribe should collect firewood to be prepared. But being a practical leader, after several days he had an idea. He went to the telephone booth, called the Bureau of Meteorology and asked,
“Is the coming winter going to be cold?” The meteorologist responded, “It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold.”
So the elder went back to his people and told them to collect even more wood in order to be prepared. A week later he called the Bureau of Meteorology again.
“Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?” The meteorologist again replied, “Yes, it’s going to be a very cold winter.”
The elder again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find. Two weeks later the elder called the Bureau again.
“Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?” he asked. “Absolutely,” the man replied. “It’s looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters ever.”
“How can you be so sure?” the elder asked.
The weatherman replied,
“The Aboriginals are collecting firewood like crazy.”
They got too close. Way too close. But thanks to Mike Smith for pointing out this close encounter with a waterspout, which was fun until it was no longer so fun…Which led us to find this even more slick, calculated approach:
So is waterspout hunting the latest crazy extreme sport? Let’s hope not, though sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time:
That’s far cry from what this waterspout does to a ship off Singapore :
Camerman to child: “You want to go up in an airplane? I don’t think it’s a good idea!”
Hmmm, maybe airplanes are how all this got started in the first place: Meteorologists' observation of a waterspout, Matecumbe Key, Florida, from the November 1967 Monthly Weather Review. Photo by Joe Golden.
by Peggy Lemone, AMS president (with thanks to Bob Chervin)
On 19 July, our community lost both a great scientist and a great communicator, Stephen H. Schneider. Dedicating his life to quantitative analysis of the physics of climate and climate change while still a graduate student, he soon became a leader in and major spokesman for the field. He spent most of his professional life at NCAR and then at Stanford.
My first real encounter with Steve Schneider was at an NCAR retreat in the 1970s. He was presenting a “back-of-the –envelope” calculation (on a hand-drawn envelope on the transparency) on climate change at a retreat in the Colorado mountains. He was energetic and enthusiastic, and able to distil his arguments into simple, easy-to-understand language. In the coming years, we all began to recognize that here was not only a gifted scientist, but a gifted communicator. It was not long before people in the media recognized that Steve had the ability to distil a complex problem into a short sound bite that was a lot more than “ear candy.”
Steve at the time was focusing on the cooling effects of aerosols, while his colleague Will Kellogg was investigating the warming effects of carbon dioxide. This inspired a display on our group bulletin board, with two newspaper articles, one about Steve and cooling, and one about Will and warming, beneath a copy of Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice.” In his aerosol research, Steve rapidly moved on from “nuclear winter” to “nuclear autumn” and the impact of carbon dioxide. Like a good detective, he refined his opinions as the evidence came in, and he drew in colleagues from multiple disciplines to track the causes and impacts of climate change. He quickly became NCAR’s ambassador for climate change, writing several books, and continuing to explain the rapidly-evolving science to the public through the news media.
Sadly, he ended up having to do far more than simply explain the science to the public and policy-makers: increasing resistance to the findings of climate-change science put him and other climate scientists on the defensive – not so much against other atmospheric scientists as to private citizens. Indeed, in recent years, he, like other climate scientists, have received multiple threatening emails. As in the title of his last book, climate science has in some sense become a “contact sport,”with confrontation rather than reasoned discussion. In Steve’s words (from an interview in Stanford’s alumni magazine)
…in the old days when we had a Fourth Estate that did get the other side [of debates]—yes, they framed it in whether it was more or less likely to be true, the better ones did—at least everybody was hearing more than just their own opinion. What scares me about the blogosphere is if you only read your own folks, you have no way to understand where those bad guys are coming from. How are you going to negotiate with them when you’re in the same society? They’re not 100 percent wrong, you know? There’s something you have to learn from them and they have to learn from you. If you never read each other and you never have a civil discourse, then I get scared.
Only time will quiet the vigorous and sometimes unpleasant debate. But, in the meantime, I hope that we in the community can also find times and opportunities to share this important science with the public in non-confrontational and user-friendly ways. We owe that to Steve, the public, and ourselves.
For more details on Steve’s rich and productive life, see the Stanford University web site, and also the 13 August 2010 issue of Science, and the 19 August 2010 issue of Nature
Jeff 
