Jeff

At the behest of Congress, the National Academy of Public Administration is formally studying of “organizational options for a Climate Service within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).” Until the end of Sunday, 27 June, you can participate in the open discussion at the NAPA Climate Dialogue web site.
The input NAPA is seeking focuses on the following questions:

What climate information and services do you find most useful currently and why? Who provides them?
How could your access to climate information and services be improved?
What mechanisms would you recommend to enable ongoing communication of your climate information and service needs to NOAA?
How should the NOAA Climate Service engage with other providers of climate information and services to meet your information needs?

What is driving your need for climate information or services?

The range of input is already impressive and thought-provoking, discussing the future of specific NOAA offices, educational aims, data archiving, the role of prediction and research in the future Service, and more. For instance, while some comments address the possible savings by reducing overlapping climate responsibilities across Federal agencies, others criticize reorganization for reorganization’s sake:

There are already excellent programs in the federal government for calculating [hydro-climatic statistics], updating them, and delivering them to users.  The issue is that these programs are seriously underfunded and thus the information is seriously out of date.
It frequently seems that agencies respond to problems by reorganizing rather than by supporting the good programs that already exist.  In my experience this is usually a mistake.  A climate service should point people to these kinds of information and support keeping them up to date, but should not try to take this role.

Here’s another along a similar vein:

As a long time NOAA partner working in the field, I am very concerned about adding infrastructure in the Beltway, especially at a time when so much more is required of NOAA in the field. As an extramural partner funded by OAR that is ocean ecosystem goal-related, versus climate, I am concerned about what will happen to the rest of OAR when the NCS takes away more than half the program and budget.

Others have a more hopeful take on

Read more

The decision to change school schedules due to inclement weather is based on the best information available when the decision is made; however, we can never be sure how the weather will affect our area. Even meteorologists disagree on weather predictions.

Such, um…(cough, cough)…nonsense… deserves a chuckle when brought to good-humored life by photographer Harry Lim in this doctored image of Orlando, Florida, broadcast meteorologists. See Lim’s blog for the full image and description of the photo shoot for an upcoming issue of a local homeowners’ association magazine, Baldwin Park Living.

A posting today on the Weather and Climate Discussion blog of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading tackles the burgeoning subject of communicating forecast uncertainty.  It ends with a well-chosen quote from Francis Bacon:

If a man will begin with certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

This resourceful use of literary heritage sends us hunting for other like-minded quotations.  A quick check of a quotations reference yields plenty of quips and admonishments. Most are too metaphysical for meteorological musing. For instance, from Kahlil Gibran:

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

Hmmmm. Maybe that’s not the best thought for portraying ensemble modeling results. Fortunately, there are more suitable candidates, as in this one from the English poet, Robert Browning

Who knows most, doubts most;…

(Unfortunately, Browning’s corollary is not so reassuring)

…entertaining hope means recognizing fear.

On this side of the Pond, communicating uncertainty becomes even more heavy-handed. From 20th Century American legal eagle, Clarence Darrow comes this motivation:

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.

Clearly, the thesaurus is a dangerous place to hang out: “doubt” is the downer scientists avoid with “uncertainty.”  Better to parse out Donald Rumsfeld’s oft unappreciated and surprisingly articulate case for ensemble modeling:

There are known knowns; these are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Meteorologist Paul Huttner’s writes on his Minnesota Public Radio blog, “Updraft” about the launch today of a new cable TV channel for weather, “The Weather Cast.”

From my perspective, this news may come as the equivalent of a nuclear bomb for national cable and satellite weather programming. This is the first time since The Weather Channel’s launch that a viable national alternative has appeared.

The distributor, and apparent instigator, of the new channel is the DISH Network, with 14 million subscribers. In its press release, the network explained it was responding to a proliferation of movies, features and other content on TWC that aren’t about the weather at hand:
“Our customers always tell us that the only thing they want in a weather channel is weather reporting,” said Dave Shull, senior vice president of Programming [for DISH].

But there’s more to the business side of this decision than just trying to cater to viewers: DISH had been negotiating with TWC over fees, with a deadline of midnight Thursday.  The plan was for DISH to dump TWC (channel 214) and substitute the The Weather Cast (initially channel 213) assuming no deal with TWC.
A visit to the DISH web site didn’t yield any further information, but Huttner reports that fellow Minnesota meteorology icon Paul Douglas is producing the network through his company, Weather Nation.
Dare we imagine a day when weather junkies will be able to surf national cable channels the way politicos and news junkies surf Fox, CNN, MSNBC and other outlets?

We … call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.

The rhetoric from this letter to the 7 May issue of Science magazine may seem unusually overheated, especially considering it is signed by some 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. But the topic is, of course, global warming, and the heat—political and social—has turned up several notches this year, as you know. (Indeed, the firestorm of commentary on the doctored picture of a polar bear on an ice floe that Science chose to accompany the letter is instructive of the tempers spilling out of the climate change discussion of late.) The rhetoric is a sure sign that climate change long ago outgrew the Ivory Tower and now hinges on the court of public opinion, where appearances are as critical as ideas. But that’s well understood; what’s new is that science seems to have moved on to yet another court of opinion where the appearance of fairness trumps all other familiar criteria.
The tipping point for the Science letter was a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) issued in April by the office of Virginia Attorney General Kevin Cuccinelli as part of a fraud investigation of climate change research conducted at the University of Virginia. Specifically, the CID would have the university turn over all documentation, correspondence, work—anything basically—related to five grants stretching back to as much as 11 years ago for climate change research by Michael Mann, a leading climatologist who has since moved on from Charlottesville to Penn State University. The CID gave the university just three months to complete the state’s massive, time-consuming document search.
The outrage from scientists was joined last week by AMS Executive Director Keith Seitter and UCAR President Rick Anthes, whose letter to the UVA president seeks protection of the scientific process, while it is still possible to challenge the CID.

We feel strongly that the actions of the Virginia Attorney General represent an inappropriate use of government authority, and urge you to do everything within your power to uphold the tenets of academic freedom.

The university’s faculty senate, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Association of University Professors, and others had also cautioned that compliance with the CID could compromise academic freedoms. Even one of Mann’s most persistent critics (aimed mostly at his “hockey stick” graph of rising temperatures that has gotten considerable exposure through the IPCC and other citations) has condemned Cuccinelli’s tactic.  On Friday, UVA administrators announced they would use private funds for legal representation in this matter, saying “Research universities must defend the privilege of academic freedom in the creation of new knowledge.”
At the same time, Nature magazine joined the chorus of protest from scientists with an equally strong editorial in their 13 May issue.

Cuccinelli’s actions against Mann hark back to an era when tobacco companies smeared researchers as part of a sophisticated public relations strategy to raise doubts over the science showing that tobacco caused cancer, and delayed the introduction of smoking curbs for decades. Researchers found themselves bogged down in responding to subpoenas and legal challenges, which deterred others from the field. Climate-change deniers have adopted similar strategies with alacrity and, unfortunately, considerable success.

It is easy to see why Nature considers the Virginia fraud investigation part of a trend. Climate science has gotten more entangled in the legal system since the hacking of emails at East Anglia. In February, three states—Texas, Alabama, and, yes…Virginia—said they would challenge EPA regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The suit is based on doubts about the validity of anthropogenic climate change fueled by the East Anglia e-mails that were hacked (or stolen or leaked) last fall.
And while the legal system is now a venue for challenging the scientific basis of climate change, scientists in turn are using the same system to respond to attacks on themselves and their work. In March, lawyers for Mann took action to stop internet distribution of a video lampooning one of his emails in the East Anglia servers. Similarly, late last month, Andrew Weaver of the University of British Columbia, one of the lead IPCC authors (and former chief editor of Journal of Climate) filed a libel suit against The National Post of Canada. Dr. Weaver said, “I asked The National Post to do the right thing – to retract a number of recent articles that attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held. To my absolute astonishment, the newspaper refused.”
Already, plenty of words have been spilled on the pitfalls of scientists becoming their own advocates in the policy arena. Now climate change science steps out further, to be evaluated in a system that not so much determines truth as upholds fairness through a competition of advocacy. The rules of the game are even more obscure than before. The ball is officially in someone else’s court, and it is difficult to imagine this is any better for science.

In one of the classic understatements of aviation history, Eric Moody turned on the flight intercom of his British Airways 747 and reported to his 248 passengers:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

The date was 24 June 1982, and Moody’s 747 was south of Java, en route from Heathrow to Auckland, amidst an ash cloud from Mount Galunggung in Indonesia. At first it looked as if the only hope was to ditch the plane in the ocean. However, the crew was able to glide the plane (let’s all nod now  to engineers who managed to create a jumbo jet that descends only one meter for every 15 flown without power) until successfully restarting three of the four engines, but the damage from the cloud made for a harrowing landing over the mountainous terrain around Jakarta. In 1989, another 747 temporarily lost use of all four engines due to a volcanic plume (from Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt).
Not surprisingly, since the British Airways incident, volcanic plumes—previously studied more closely for their climatic effects—have become a preoccupation of weather forecasters. The world meteorological and aviation communities have collaborated on the International Airways Volcano Watch, whose advisories Thursday led to the cancellation of flights across northern Europe due to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjalla volcano. It will be hard to overstate the  consequence of this eruption for travelers around the world; it is already being compared to the no-fly days after 9/11.

When I met Joanne Simpson, she greeted me like a long-lost sister—it was so exciting to meet another woman in the field!”

This little cameo just confirms that no history of women in science (this being, after all, National Women’s History Month) could be adequate without at least some mention of Joanne Simpson, the first woman Ph.D. meteorologist, whose distinguished research career brought her in contact with her female peers all over the country. She was the pioneer who made all the other pioneers possible.
While one would scarcely know it upon meeting and talking to Joanne, the weight of this responsibility blazing a path for her female colleagues took a toll. She said

I have always felt that I’ve been carrying a big burden for other women, because if I mess up then the chances for other women to get the same kind of job are going to be diminished.

Of course Joanne Simpson, who died early Thursday less than three weeks before her 87^th birthday, did not mess up.  She has long been a legendary pioneer of meteorology. Winner of the AMS Rossby Award (and our president, in 1989) as well as the IMO Prize, she turned meteorology on its head with the discovery that energetic processes in clouds don’t just signify the atmospheric circulation, they help drive it. She went on to extend her concept of “hot tower” clouds to explain the inner workings of the heat engine of hurricanes, then fought for the satellite observing systems that would later show such clouds in action.
Simpson basically created from scratch the discipline of cloud studies as we know it today, then mentored the people and fostered the technology to make sure it would thrive. (For more of Simpson’s inspiring story, be sure to read John Weier’s biographical article at NASA’s Web site, or the AMS monograph, Cloud Systems, Hurricanes, and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, A Tribute to Dr. Joanne Simpson.)
It was quite obvious to the multitudes who knew Simpson that she was in this science for the love of the science itself; consider what she told LeMone in a 1989 interview:

My greatest wish would be to be like Grady Norton, who died of a heart attack while forecasting a hurricane, or like my early hero, Rossby, who keeled over and died in the middle of giving a seminar. I don’t like the idea of when I won’t be a Meteorologist anymore. It’s just inconceivable to me.

Inconceivable indeed, with thousands of people following her path, studying the observations she made possible, using the ideas she formulated. Nothing could ever stop Joanne Simpson from being a meteorologist. Not then, not now.
No real story of meteorology could be written without telling hers. We invite you to do exactly that and share your own part of her story in the comments section.

Guest Post by Bob Henson, UCAR
I consider myself forever lucky to have met Don Kent.  On a bright, mild afternoon last September, I drove to New Hampshire with AMS archivist Jinny Nathans and NCAR archivist Kate Legg to interview Don for the AMS-UCAR oral history project.  Knowing that I was at work on a history of television weathercasting (Weather on the Air, to be published this June by AMS), Jinny suggested the time was ripe to get the full interview that Don and his illustrious career so richly deserved.