San Diego Gas and Electric has embarked on an ambitious weather-monitoring effort that should warm the hearts of meteorologists–whose help the utility may still need to solve a larger wildfire safety controversy.
SDG&E recently installed 94 solar-powered weather monitoring systems on utility poles scattered in rugged rural San Diego County, where few weather observations are currently available. The purpose is to help prevent and control forest fires during Santa Ana winds. The plan has won plaudits from local fire chiefs and meteorologists alike, since the data will be available to National Weather Service forecasters and models as well as the utility’s own decision makers.
“That makes San Diego the most heavily weather instrumented place on Planet Earth,” says broadcast meteorologist John Coleman in his report on the story for KUSI News.
SDG&E’s intensified interest in meteorological monitoring is precipitated by the hot water the company got into due to its role in forest fires in 2007: Electricity arcing from power lines is blamed for three fires that year that killed two people and destroyed 1,300 homes in rural areas around San Diego. While not acknowledging fault, the company has compensated insurance companies to the tune of over $700 million.
To improve safety the company came up with plans last year to shut off the grid for up to 120,000 people in rural areas if dry weather turns windy–classic Santa Ana conditions. The shut off would initiate in 56 m.p.h. winds, the design standard for much of the power system, and then power would be restored when sustained winds remained below 40 m.p.h. assuming the lines prove reliable. Southern California Edison used a similar cut-off tactic in 2003 with relatively positive reaction from customers, but the company later aggressively cleared areas around power lines and has not utilized the plan since.
SDG&E, by contrast, had been in federal mediation for months with customers angry about the shut-off plan. One of the main gripes about the plan has been that the power company didn”t expect to warn customers about the outages. The company said it couldn’t predict the winds on a sufficiently localized basis.
Clearly the controversy could be alleviated by enhanced meteorology with the newly established weather stations. Brian D’Agostino, the local meteorologist who helped SDG&E design the weather monitoring strategy told KGTV Channel 10 News:
We’re taking a lot of areas where we always just figured the winds were at a certain speed and now we’re going to know for sure….Right now, the National Weather Service gets its information once every hour. Now, we’re able to provide it with data every 10 minutes.
On his blog this week, Mike Smith, CCM (and an AMS Fellow) discusses the common air passenger’s frustration with seat belt warning signs that stay on for hours even when the weather is clear and turbulence-free. But Smith’s post is interesting reading also because it is a uniquely meteorologist‘s frustration with this form of over-warning. He argues that we know enough about clear-air turbulence (and thunderstorm avoidance) that it makes little sense to tie people down to their seats for so long.
As we know from experience, most recently the United Airlines flight on July 20th in which two dozen people were injured, the seat belt signs are indeed important. More than 90 percent of all injuries on turbulent flights happen when people don’t buckle up appropriately. But Smith observes,
I fear pilots are — too often — training their passengers not to observe the sign. Fly enough miles with the seat belt sign on but no turbulence and you’re tempted to get up, sign or no sign.
Overuse of the warning sign is well known in aviation circles. From the pilot’s point of view, there’s a lot more to this situation than just meteorology. Some pilots apparently forget the light is on (one critic here says, “I think pilots pay about as much attention to the seatbelt sign as the passengers do”) and in any case airline policies and pilot predilections vary. In the United States, in particular, airlines must deal with liability: passengers frequently sue them when injuries are caused by turbulence. (One wag dubs the seat-belt sign the “anti-litigation switch.”)
Can science overcome this situation? Clear air turbulence has been a topic of research since bomber pilots encountered the jet stream in World War II—the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics’ Project AROWA in the 1950s researched the problem of forecasting clear air turbulence (for example: this paper in the AMS archives). Research on radar techniques for detecting CAT started to take off in the 1970s, and much progress is being made even now (here’s a good example of recent developments in CAT forecasting); it remains an area of intense research and product development.
Ultimately, improved CAT warnings are at the mercy of the confidence that customers (in this case, the pilots) have. Even if pilots do know the latest science or know how to use the latest gadgets, low confidence in new tools can mean excessive warning, which means careless passengers, which in turn means frustrated meteorologists, and an ongoing challenge for the aviation weather community.
by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director Last-day thoughts from the AMS Summer Community Meeting this week. From a post in the AMS project, Living On the Real World
The term “community” shouldn’t be applied to any enterprise cheaply; there should be a high bar. Dictionary.com gives several definitions for “community.” The third of these is most pertinent here:
“a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the ): the business community; the community of scholars.” [italics in the original]
Coming across that last phrase was a pleasant surprise; it’s been with me since ninth grade. Then I was a student at Wilkins Township Junior High, just outside Pittsburgh. (The school was kind of tough and my ambition was to graduate with all my teeth, but that’s another story.) Our science course that year focused on the weather. The course made an impression on me that lasted over half a century. In part this was because the Earth sciences became my career, but in addition there were two other reasons. First, our teacher, though she was nominally the science teacher, was uncomfortable with science. (This was before the AMS started its Education Program; today’s science teachers have no excuse!). So, our textbook notwithstanding, we spent the entire semester (!!!) on weather superstitions/folklore…”mares’ tails make lofty ships carry low sails,” etc. The semester seemed to me to drag on forever; I’m sure she felt the same way. Second, the opening page of that textbook stated, and I quote, from memory, “Scientists are a community of scholars engaged in a common search for knowledge.” As the son of a scientist, even then the thought inspired me. I wanted to be part of such a community.
In college I majored in physics, and then entered graduate studies at the University of Chicago. I started out at the Institute for the Study of Metals. But there, and then, competition, not cooperation, was the word. It was dog eat dog. The field seemed over-populated. A lot of people were working on the same problem (the de Haas-van Alphen effect, which had been around about 35 years), not sharing progress but keeping results to themselves, etc. After one year, I transferred to the Department of Geophysical Sciences after a year. What a breath of fresh air! There were more than enough problems to go around. Nobody was going to win a Nobel Prize. Growing rich was not in prospect; the geophysical scientists had all taken vows of poverty. As a result, or maybe because the field attracted cooperative types, we all got along! The contrast with physics was palpable.
Today we can all feel more privileged than ever to be part of this community.
by William Hooke More thoughts on this week’s Summer Community Meeting, from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
Robert White, former head of the Weather Bureau (back in the 1960’s), and the first NOAA Administrator, tells the following story. President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and NOAA in the same year, 1970. He set up EPA as an independent agency. He had intended to move NOAA out of the Department of Commerce (DoC), but late in the proceedings he had a falling out with Wally Hickel, the former governor of Alaska who was then Secretary of Interior. At the last minute, in the letter that set things in motion, Nixon inked out “Interior” by hand, and wrote in “Commerce.” Bob claims to have the actual letter. Good move, Mr. President: A last minute switch put NOAA in prime policy real estate.
Since then, as NOAA’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the years, some occasionally opine that NOAA, like EPA, should have been established as an independent agency. But the actual truth of the matter? Quite different. In policy, just as in real estate, what matters is location, location, location. And for NOAA’s issues, the policy landscape of the Department of Commerce is prime property.[*]
NOAA has missed many opportunities over the years to take fullest advantage of its DoC address, and, it must be said, vice versa. Commerce has failed to wield its powerful tool. The stage had been set long before 1970 – in fact, in 1940. That year the Weather Bureau was moved from the Department of Agriculture, its home for half a century, to the Department of Commerce, in specific recognition that weather influences all sectors of the economy, not just the production of food and fiber. But this open invitation for Commerce to wield weather services to have their full impact on national affairs has lain essentially dormant for two-thirds of a century. Successive administrations have left a legacy, but have realized only a fraction of the full possibilities. Now, however, both NOAA and DoC may be about to RSVP.
But more about that in a moment.
Let’s redirect our attention to the AMS Summer Community Meeting in State College. This week, all week, the participants here have been on a roller coaster ride. At times they’ve found themselves carried high by
by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director A post from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
Back in the 1990s, while still working at NOAA, I was once part of a two-day U.S.-Japan bilateral discussion in Tokyo on science and technology issues. Bill Clinton was President. Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s former Vice President, was then ambassador to Japan. Tim Wirth, who at that time was Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, was leading this particular delegation. Wirth, Mondale and the rest of us from the U.S. side were in a big meeting room with the Japanese. Leaders from Japanese government and industry filled the room, under auspices of MITI, the Japanese Ministry for International Trade and Industry. The Japanese couldn’t comprehend why the United States was moving so haltingly on a range of environmental and hazards matters.
“You have to understand,” Tim Wirth was saying, “that if government and industry worked with each other in the U.S. the way you do in Japan, people would go to jail.”
Tim Wirth’s remark has everything to do with this week’s discussions at the AMS Summer Community Meeting in State College. Two points: First, and foremost, this is our history and our policy in America. Our nation decided long ago that we wanted a free-market society, with minimal government. We wanted government to focus primarily on regulations that would foster capitalism and business competition, and at the same time curb corruption, restraint of trade, monopolistic practices, and other abuses. Second, this approach is a policy, a choice, or framework of choices, not an inescapable reality. Other governments are free to adopt other approaches, and have, as the Japanese example illustrates.
Well, as is so often the case, you pick your poison. The Japanese approach spurred
Historians have long known—thanks to diaries and other first-person accounts—that weather played a small but possibly significant role in the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, August 10, 1861. This was the first important engagement of Union and Confederate forces west of the Mississippi River and was pivotal in determining the political alignment of Missouri early in the Civil War. NEXRAD for August 1861?... based on Univ. of Missouri historical weather research.
On the evening of August 9th the Confederate leader, General McCulloch, had decided to march on the nearby Union force, but rainfall starting around 9 p.m. convinced him to abandon the plan until morning, and to stay at camp to keep munitions dry. The rain delay enabled the smaller Union force, under Brigadier Nathaniel Lyon to creep up on Confederate encampment at dawn the next morning for a surprise attack.
All in all, the Confederates were able to rally themselves and ultimately force Union troops to back away—both sides suffering over a thousand casualties in the process. The Confederates parlayed their victory at Wilson’s Creek into control of a substantial portion of Missouri in the initial part of the war.
What historians lacked, however, was a good explanation of the weather situation that affected strategy in 1861. No weather stations were reporting from the area. Now, thanks to the enterprising research into analog synoptic maps, Mike Madden and Tony Lupo of the University of Missouri may have given students of the Civil War a credible meteorologist’s look at that fateful day in August 1861. For more on how Madden and Lupo did it, see the article by Randy Mertens in the Ozarks nature and science website, Freshare.net.
by Peggy Lemone, AMS President
A little over a year ago, when I was asked to choose a theme for the 2011 AMS Annual Meeting, I was drawn immediately to something to do with communication. Within my family, and among acquaintances, communication about climate change, and even in parts of the AMS, had sometimes turned from a conversation to an argument. But it wasn’t only that. It was becoming more and more difficult to find out real news: the media were increasingly flooded with lots of opinions, and one had to burrow down to find the facts. Ironically, coverage of the day-to-day weather seemed better than ever.
Or was it? Coverage of the French airplane crash over the Atlantic fumbled at first; no one seemed to have their facts straight. And Katrina reminded us of the importance of communicating with diverse groups of people. With numbers of journal pages increasing geometrically, and the field becoming broader, how well do we even communicate with each other as scientists? Some have asked if peer review even works. Finally, and perhaps most important, how well are we getting our messages to the public? Are we really communicating?
To address this broad theme is a real challenge, but we have settled on a few major events at the Annual Meeting in Seattle. On Monday, we will hear about issues encountered by the media in communicating about weather and climate. Bob Ryan, a long-time weather broadcaster, will moderate the panel, which will consist of Tom Skilling of WGN/TV and the Chicago Tribune, Claire Martin, the chief meteorologist of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Chairman of the International Association of Broadcast Meteorologists, and Doyle Rice, weather editor of USA Today, and a fourth panelist who has not yet been confirmed. Some questions to be discussed, though not an exhaustive list, include: how are stories chosen? Where does information come from? What is the impact of blogs and other modern methods of communication on what people learn about weather and climate? And finally – how can the AMS community help out?
On Tuesday, we use a “teachable moment” to illustrate our effect on the environment. Many of us have learned through experience that putting hundreds of people into a room with a poor air-conditioning system can heat up a room to uncomfortable levels. With a good air-conditioning system, we stay a little cooler, but more energy is required to cool the room. A group of students and vendors will be circulating through the conference the first few days to measure our impact on the air inside the Convention Center. The students will report back at lunch on Tuesday, and David Sailor, Director, Green Building Research Laboratory (GBRL) of Portland State University and Chair, AMS Board on the Urban Environment, will put this in context, showing how we are part of the energy budget of a city, influencing not only the climate in the convention center, but the city’s climate as well. This event is being coordinated by David Chapman, a high-school teacher form Okemos, Michigan, and Chair of the AMS Board on Outreach and Pre-College Education, and Daniel Wolfe, of NOAA/Boulder.
On Thursday, Ralph Cicerone, head of the National Academy of Sciences, will provide us a take-home message on what the scientific community in general and AMS in particular can do to increase its credibility with the public. He has been thinking deeply how we can improve the practice of science and the behavior of individual scientists. As much as listening, communication is based on some level of trust. And, just as the Tuesday event should provide a teachable moment about how we influence our environment, the climategate emails were a teachable moment about human frailty being a part of the practice of science. The current political climate has been reinforced by climategate and a few errors in the IPCC report in damaging the trust the public feels not only in climate science, but science in general. Viewing this in a positive manner, it gives us incentive to re-double our efforts in promoting ethical professional conduct and improving the way we do business and communicate our findings.
Even when the dialog between the sciences and the public become difficult, communications through the art can break through the barriers felt on either side. The arts can communicate the joy of witnessing a beautiful cloud formation or the concern we feel about the impacts of weather and climate. Thus Lele Barnett is curating an art exhibit featuring over thirty artists from the Seattle area, focusing on the conference theme of communicating weather and climate. Some of the artists will collaborate with a scientist to explore themes ranging from the influence of the landscape by weather to scale as visualized in clouds to processes taking place at the interface between parts of the earth system to the impacts of climate changes in the polar regions. At each step, we have benefitted from the considerable help of Marda Kirn, head of EcoArts Connections in Boulder, Colorado, who has organized a variety of arts/science events around the country.
Those are some big events in the 2011 AMS Annual Meeting at this stage in their evolution. We expect refinements, and there will be additional items to report on as the joint themed sessions and other parts of the meeting come together. We invite you to comment, share your thoughts about communication, or suggest questions you would like the Monday panel to address. We will report from time to time as the program continues to evolve. Hope to see you in Seattle! Editor’s Update, October: Thanks to the combined efforts of EcoArts Connections, Curator Lele Barnett, and AMS Conference Chair Peggy LeMone and Committee Member Steve Ackerman, many of the artists in the show have been paired with scientists to collaborate to create new works for Forecast.
Scientists come from universities and research centers in seven states in the US and Australia. In addition to Washington, the states are: Colorado, Illinois, Montana, New York, and Wisconsin.
The scientists’ areas of study include: Arctic sea ice; atmospheric boundary layer; atmospheric chemistry; climate dynamics and change; cloud physics; eco-meteorology; hydrology; mesoscale analysis, convection, forecasting, and meteorology; oceanography; optical sciences; paleoclimate; precipitation physics; radar; regional climate; weather; and wind energy.
by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director A post from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
A few years ago, my daughter, who is a social worker, introduced me to a new term (at least new to me). We were watching my grandchildren (her children and their two cousins) sitting on a floor ankle deep in toys. There was occasional noise. I said something about how they were all doing together, and she laughed and said, “Oh, Dad, that’s only parallel play. Just give them a couple more years.” What she meant was, they were occupying the same space, but they were really engaged in toddler’s solitaire, focused on a few toys and oblivious to the others around them, except when possession of a toy would come into dispute.
Her forecast verified. Today, the oldest is only eight, but already when those same kids are together, the engagement is on an entirely different plane. There’s talk, there’s laughter. There’s common purpose and shared energy. They’re cooking up projects. It’s amazing. I can hardly wait until we hit the next level.
Something like that is happening in meteorology. Back in the postwar world of the late 1940’s (see Billionaires follow lead of former private-sector meteorologist), Lewis Cullman and his fellow private-sector meteorologists were sharing the same space with the Weather Bureau, and frustrated by what they saw as unfair competition in the service delivery. It was only this one aspect that concerned them. Everyone conceded that the government would be responsible for the observations, for the communication and compiling of all that information. Numerical modeling still lay a few years in the future. The issue was who would deliver the paltry weather information of the time that last mile to the public, and to specialized users.
Fast forward sixty years. Today public and private sector are partnering up across every link in the chain from weather observations to use of that information to save lives, grow the economy, protect the environment, and foster national security. The government still owns many of the observing instruments and platforms. But the radars, the satellite sensors, the satellite platforms themselves, the data links, and the big computing facilities are all built by the private sector. And when it comes to surface sensor networks, federal government agencies today own only a small fraction of the sensors. The rest are in multiple hands. Go into any government computing centers, where the big numerical weather predictions models are being run, and it won’t be uncommon to find contractors working side by side with government employees, in operations and maintenance, doing model development, etc. Virtually all of the service delivery is in private hands – and a wide range of those to boot. What once was the purview of the daily newspapers, radio stations, is now everywhere – on the internet, on laptops, handhelds, in cars – you name it. And at every step, it’s hard, and in some sense, rather pointless, for users to separate out the respective roles of public- and private-sector players in bringing this information to them.
And this collaboration is facing complex new challenges. Let’s look at just one – wind energy. Every evening, when you and I are watching television, we see advertisements touting green energy, and more likely than not, showing a farm of wind turbines, majestically towering above the terrain, and turning slowly in the background. But there’s a complicated reality behind all this.
The towers are now 100 meters high (think of a football field turned upwards on its end). Wind speeds are variable from top to bottom of the turbine blades. In fact the blades are now so big that wind direction can be substantially different between top and bottom of the blades. The resulting stresses increase the need for maintenance, and reduce the turbine lifetimes. Don’t believe me? Go to Google Images, and type in “wind turbine damage.” You’ll see pictures of turbines missing blades, of blades so warped they look like something from a Salvador Dali painting, of turbines on fire, of burnt-out turbine hulks. At the same time, the complexities of temporally-variable low-level winds over the irregular terrain where we find many of these wind farms mean power output is less than what may have been hoped.
One of the keys to reducing the need for turbine maintenance, and increasing the power output from wind farms is better numerical weather prediction, not on global scales, but on the scale of the wind farms themselves, and for just a few hours. Turns out that such forecast capabilities have other uses as well – for solar power, or for agriculture, or to support ground transportation. So what should we do? And who should do it? And how will we pay for it? To tackle these issues requires that government, corporations, and academic researchers all pull together. The conversations here at State College are partly about sorting all that out, on strategic as well as tactical levels.
Today, here in State College, as the private sector, the public sector, and academic researchers convene, we’re only eight years old in weather,-water,-and-climate-services-and-sciences years. Our field is still young. But there’s talk, there’s laughter. There’s common purpose and shared energy. We’re cooking up projects. It’s amazing. I can hardly wait until we hit the next level.
For more posts by William Hooke, visit his AMS blog, Living on the Real World.
by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director
(Note:This is one of the first postings from Dr. Hooke’s new blog,Living on the Real Earth, an American Meteorological Society project probing some of the basic questions underlying the goals of our community as it serves society.)
Here’s a question. Why should a blog claiming to look for answers to big issues (what kind of world is likely? what kind of world do we want? what kind of world is possible if we act effectively?) zoom in on a few hundred people meeting in the middle of Pennsylvania for four days?
Here’s the answer. Because this handful of people, due to a convergence of circumstances – some strategic, and some accidental – holds some of the keys to the kingdom.
Let’s begin with a look at who’s here in State College for the 2010 AMS Summer Community Meeting. Participants are for the most part in the business of answering the first question: what kind of world is likely? That is, they provide weather and climate products and services, or they are doing the research that provides the basis for those products and services. That said, they have a range of backgrounds. They’ve come from all over the United States. Some are from the public sector, from government agencies. Some are from for-profit corporations. Some work in research universities. Within each sector, participants run the gamut from bench-level scientists and forecasters to managers of such work to high-level policy officials and corporate leaders. A considerable number have played several different roles over extended careers. Ask them whether they are private-sector or public-sector, or scientists or leaders, and they’ll either tell you what their job title is at the moment, or confess that they’re conflicted.
Secondly, if asked what kind of world they might want, they wouldn’t try to oversimplify that world. They wouldn’t seek to control climate or weather, or limit its variability, or even eliminate hazardous events; they wouldn’t see that as realistic. They’d say instead that they want a world where regardless of what the weather and climate might do next, these changes can be anticipated, in time to seize the benefits (the water for crops, the good weather for transportation or recreation, etc.) and moderate the hazards (the cycles of flood and drought, the damaging storms, and so on). They’d hope their science and services could be used to save lives and property, foster economic growth, protect the environment and ecosystems, and promote geopolitical stability.
Neither would they try to oversimplify the coping strategies. They wouldn’t see the job as all public-sector, or entirely corporate. They wouldn’t see decisions and actions as
Science teaches us not to answer questions in black and white terms—the meaning of data usually has many shades of gray. So it is with figuring out the micro and macro effects that different roof coverings might have on global warming or energy efficiency. The answers are starting to look more complex, and more promising, than ever. Assessing the indoor and outdoor climatic benefits of roofs with mixed cover.
For example, it would seem natural when studying rooftops and their effects on climate large and small to focus on extremes of albedo—in other words, black and white surfaces. This is sometimes the case in simplified modeling studies. But at this week’s AMS 9th Symposium on Urban Environment, in Keystone, Colorado, Adam Scherba of Portland State University submitted findings that moved beyond simple comparisons of white (“cool”) roofs versus black roof coverings. He and his colleagues mixed roof coverings, notably photovoltaic panels and greenery (which has the advantage of staying cooler during the day but not, like white roofs, getting much colder at night). The mix makes sense when you consider that roofs are also prime territory for harvesting solar energy. Scherba et al. write that
While addition of photovoltaic panels above a roof provides an obvious energy generation benefit, it is important to note that such systems – whether integrated into the building envelope, or mounted above the roof – can also result in an increase of convective heat flux into the urban environment. Our analysis shows that integration of green roofs with photovoltaic panels can partially offset this undesirable side effect, while producing additional benefits.
This neither-black-nor-white-nor-all-green approach to dealing with surface radiation makes sense from both energy and climate warming perspectives, especially given the low sun angles, cold nights, and snow cover in some climates. For instance, a recent paper, in Environmental Research Letters, uses global atmospheric modeling to estimate that boosting albedo by only 0.25 on roofs worldwide—in other words, not a fully “cool” scenario of all white (albedo: 1.0) roofs—can offset about a year’s worth of global carbon emissions.
And the authors of a recent modeling study (combining global and urban canyon simulation) published in Geophysical Research Letters simulated a world with all-white roofs but showed that:
Global space heating increased more than air conditioning decreased, suggesting that end-use energy costs must be considered in evaluating the benefits of white roofs.
Delving directly into such costs this week at the AMS meeting is a paper from a team led by Anthony Dominguez of the University of California-San Diego. They looked at the effects of photovoltaic panels on the energy needs in the structure below the roof, not the atmosphere above it.
Did they find that a building is easier to keep comfortable when covered by solar panels? Well, if you need to air-condition during the day, yes. If, however, like many people on the East Coast this summer, you need to keep cooling at night, then no. This is science—don’t expect a black-and-white answer.
