AMS Conference

We’re on the verge of the first ever all-virtual AMS Annual Meeting—yet another milestone in a time of milestones, but nonetheless our 101^st Annual Meeting. And like all of the mega-gatherings AMS has held for the weather, water, and climate community in the past, this coming week (starting Sunday, January 10^th), promises many opportunities to catch up with what colleagues have been doing over the past year, what they’re thinking about now, and what they’re planning for coming years.

Although we’ll miss the chance encounters, side conversations, and in-person meet-ups, this year’s virtual format offers a lot of interaction with its breakout rooms and ample time set aside both for concentrated contemplation of presentations and for back-and-forth between presenters and audiences. Indeed, the fact that thousands of people are not all in one place attending parallel tracks of conferences and symposia with walls in-between them means that it may even be easier than ever to hop between sessions without running from room to room.

This Year’s Overarching Theme

The virtual experience may create an opportunity to take in multiple perspectives on the 101^st Annual Meeting theme: this AMS tradition of organizing all the parallel conferences together on one unifying theme can come alive with the new format if you’re willing to navigate your own pathway through the presentations with that in mind. This year’s theme is “Strengthening engagement with communities through our science and service.” While on the face of it that theme has the spirit of many Annual Meeting themes of the past, in this meeting those words have more direct relevance on the programming than you may think. We’ll show you how with an upcoming blog post.

In fact, this year’s theme is pivotal for a meeting at this moment. It turned out to anticipate central issues of the year we had in 2020 and the directions and solutions your colleagues are proposing in their presentations, in response to the unique experience of 2020. In an forthcoming post, we’ll lay out these thematic implications by proposing a simple crosscutting pathway through the week’s video presentations, touching on the meeting theme by hopping from symposium to symposium, taking advantage of the Annual Meeting as a virtual experience.

The usual way most of us approach the meeting, of course, is to focus on an area of specialization. That’s why it is organized as always as a collection of about 40 specific conferences and symposia running in parallel—for example the 35th Conference on Hydrology, the 30^th Conference on Education, and the 23^rd Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry.

But you can imagine many independent, personalized ways to navigate any AMS Annual Meeting, such as a focus on multidisciplinary work, or on award winners’ presentations. In the following blog posts, we’ll dream up a few such tracks for you to take next week.

A Closer Look

Most years, attendees look forward to the AMS Annual Meeting as a chance to catch up on what colleagues have been accomplishing. In 2020, as in any normal year, it’s the major weather events of the past year that shape the work this community does. So as our first example of a pathway through the virtual meeting—think of it as a personalized symposium—we’ll focus on how the Annual Meeting is an opportunity to reflect collectively on 2020 weather and the lessons learned from studying it and forecasting it, and helping the world respond to it. As in the past, the Annual Meeting next week offers a targeted discussion of the past year’s weather, in particular in a symposium on Major Weather Events and Impacts of 2020. These sessions are on Friday, January 15. Among the events covered will be the August Midwest Derecho, high-impact atmospheric rivers, a North Dakota blizzard, the hyperactive 2020 hurricane season, wildfires, atmospheric effects of COVID, and all the 10 separate billion-dollar weather disasters (tying a record number) of the year in the United States (as charted here in historical context from Adam Smith’s abstract).

Given the profusion of major disasters, all the papers about the year are not contained in one set of sessions or one conference. You can make 2020’s weather a multi-conference track through the meeting, if you’re so inclined. 2020 was that kind of year, of course! For example …

• in among the posters for the mesoscale symposium: Samuel Childs (NCAR) and Russ Schumacher (Colorado State) are presenting detailed observations of a severe macroburst on 9 June 2020 in Akron Colorado. The high-resolution in situ data show features like gravity waves in the outflow.

• Also in the mesoscale symposium posters is an evaluation of the difficulty to forecast the August Midwest derecho, by Bruno Z. Ribeiro (SUNY Albany), Steven J. Weiss (SPC), and Lance Bosart (SUNY Albany). They write in their abstract: “This case demonstrates that improvements in the predictability of warm-season derecho-producing MCSs requires better understanding of the evolution from disorganized convection into a linear MCS.”

• In the 21st Symposium on Meteorological Observation and Instrumentation, Melissa Wagner (CIMMS) et al. relate satellite- and unmanned aerial system-based imaging and analysis of the damage path of the devastating Midwest derecho, with the additional benefit of “improving our understanding of how storm-scale radar signatures relate to wind damage.”

• Jordan Schnell (CIRES), Ravan Ahmaov (NOAA/ESRL), and colleagues will be discussing the difficulties operational air quality modelers had in forecasting the impacts of wildfires amid COVID reduced economic activity. According to their abstract: “We will present simulations conducted for August 2020–a period of widespread extreme heat and wildfires–and demonstrate the sensitivities of modeled PM_2.5 and O₃ to the fire, anthropogenic, and biogenic emission sources.” This is in the Atmospheric Chemistry Conference along with other papers on air quality impacts in 2020.

With wildfires, extreme heat, air quality…this presentation has the overwhelming feeling of simultaneous extreme events of 2020 wrapped up in a nutshell. Indeed, as the above NOAA graphic of billion-dollar disasters exemplifies, the experience of 2020 opened up as never before in the United States a public discourse about the relationship between climate change and vulnerability to extreme weather. Not surprisingly, the AMS Annual Meeting is going to offer many insights on this relationship. That’s yet another thread you can follow as from symposium to symposium you try to personalize the virtual experience of the meeting, We’ll propose that pathway in a follow-on blog post, and right after that we’ll trace several other cross-cutting themes in the Annual Meeting—themes you’d never have found so pervasive in any other years. The 2021 Annual Meeting is unique for the reasons that 2020 was unique.

More Cross-cutting Theme Tie-ins

Of course you’ll note the massive disruption of COVID as mentioned in Ahmaov’s presentation. The pandemic had more impacts than just on air quality, but we explore in a follow-on blog post how the pervasive theme of COVID is in itself a viable personalized crosscutting pathway through the 2021 Annual Meeting, as are some of the other salient societal themes of 2020—the fight against racism, the struggle for social justice and equity,  and the response of the sciences to such larger societal issues by seeking better community engagement—thereby making this year’s overarching meeting theme exceptionally timely. These pathways in the Annual Meeting trace the ways the tumultuous year 2020 has left an indelible mark on the weather, water, and climate community, as it did on all other people and professions and sciences.

As we mentioned in the first post in this series of potential “Virtual” Pathways through the rich AMS Annual Meeting program of parallel conferences, this year’s overarching theme is especially powerful:

“Strengthening engagement with communities through our science and services.” 

This is a statement of needs, accomplishments, and future priorities all in one. After the recognitions so many people have had in 2020—a year of isolation and social distancing, of reliance on community, and of recognition that science is at the heart of cures and solutions for society, but also the recognition that the progress of science depends on cooperation with the greater community—the Annual Meeting theme guiding the program offerings reflects not only powerful future directions for the weather, water, and climate community, but also the unique experience of the year 2020.

Community Engagement is a viable pathway through the meeting—we can only touch on a few highlights of this path, because AMS members have resoundingly responded to the call for presentations on the theme with many perspectives on the need for community engagement. Many of your colleagues have been forging ahead already by forming their science, services, and products as a part of a community engagement process.

As he often does, AMS Associate Executive Director William Hooke gets to the heart of the issue, encapsulating the theme in a marriage metaphor in his Core Keynote for the Conference on Societal Applications, “Let’s Get Hitched.”

The metaphor of a marital commitment between scientists and communities expresses a shared destiny, as Hooke explains in his abstract:

… we need to build community relationships that are founded on trust and equity; that celebrate cultural and other forms of diversity, but focus on shared purposes that can’t be achieved except through concerted effort; that can accommodate social change and accompanying scientific and technological advance; and that offer joy and satisfaction in the moment, while ratcheting the community and even the larger world toward a better place over the long haul. Success requires we remain motivated, (multi-) disciplined and evidence-based in our approach toward these ends over a sustained period of years. Sound familiar? Perhaps it should; it mirrors attributes of successful engagements of a more romantic sort.

Hooke sets the stage for seeing this ongoing integration of community engagement through many steps of the scientific process—as a natural outgrowth of the focus on social justice that many presenters are bringing to the AMS Annual Meeting.

In the previous Front Page post, we traced a virtual pathway through the meeting for attendees who are interested in social justice. So, naturally, one could construct a similar pathway through the meeting devoted to Community Engagement. We’ll propose an abbreviated path of that kind—just touching on a few of the highlights by hopping between some of the conferences. Naturally because this is the meeting theme itself, there are potential discussions about Community Engagement in almost every session. It’s going to be a special meeting and a busy week, if this is your particular interest.

And you might as well follow Hooke’s presentation with a double dose of community engagement in this Core Science Keynote from Vernon Morris (Arizona State University), bringing together the mutual interdependence of social justice and community engagement themes:

“A Tale of Two Cities: Comparing Lessons Learned from Community Engagement in Geohealth/Environmental Justice Studies in Washington, D.C., and Gondar, Ethiopia.”

From the abstract we learn that the presentation discusses dual projects in communities at the nexus of air quality – health research.  The work for an open-air hospital in Northern Ethiopia involved medical doctors, pharmacists, virologists, and microbiologists….and “the scope of the study was significantly modified based on community engagement,” Morris states. “The additional diversity in perspective inspired novel inquiry, drove creativity in the implementation of the study, and resulted in greater use-inspired research.”

Morris’s presentation is one of many that offer practical experience in community engagement.

For example, at the Conference on Transition of Research to Operations,”Nicholas Schmidt (National Ocean Service) is presenting  “NOAA’s Digital Coast—A Service Delivery Best Practice.” He writes:

The Digital Coast is … a website focused on providing the data, tools, and training coastal communities need to protect their citizens, infrastructure, and economy from coastal hazards and other threats. The Digital Coast …is successful because of the Digital Coast Partnership, a group of eight non-profit organizations who work with NOAA providing input for the effort. The Digital Coast is built on the interaction between the Digital Coast Partners and user community and the website… Effective implementation of service delivery requires relationships between information producers and consumers built on mutual trust and respect. Key to developing and maintaining these relationships is sustained engagement and collaboration that will facilitate the integration of services into actionable information.

A number of presentations emphasize the need for translation of meteorological terms into Spanish as part of better service to Spanish speaking communities of the United States.

Community Feedback and Participation

The Annual Meeting will showcase a variety of ways to elicit feedback and participation from community members For example …

In the Conference on Environment and Health, Margaret Orr (NOAA, George Mason University)  presents “Lessons Learned from Heat Watch Interviews.” The interview process offers a hybrid of objective “Citizen Science” participation and subjective opinions from the community. She writes:

While satellite data is effective in identifying urban heat islands, ground-level measurements help tell the full story on a more personal and local level, and community engagement is necessary for publicizing data and galvanizing reform. The Heat Watch program, a collaboration between NOAA and CAPA Strategies, engages community scientists in taking air temperature measurements via car or bicycle to create detailed maps of urban heat islands throughout cities. Through interviews with city officials in the 2020 Heat Watch cohort, it was found that the program’s resulting data and anecdotal observations were significant and spoke directly to community concerns about heat. Participants indicated that the personalization of the heat island phenomenon, community engagement through citizen science, and the emphasis on heat’s effects on health and infrastructure were drivers for other city officials and agencies to implement solutions to the heat island problem.

On the other hand, these days the objective and subjective collection of community feedback and channeling of participation is possible through social media. Indeed, this presentation from Iain McConnell (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Modeling Public Attention to Weather Alerts in Social Media” takes advantage of microblogging in the public as a vehicle for understanding public attention and response to warnings, but it is easy to imagine how such techniques could also constitute an advance in community engagement through objective/subjective gathering of community feedback timely enough to empower participation in the weather warnings process. McConnell writes:

Here tweets are collected relating to US weather alerts reported by the National Weather Service. For each alert event the public’s interaction with the evolving weather hazard information system is documented. The severity of the alerts (e.g., warned or not) is compared to the degree of public interaction. The public response is then generalized via a model that predicts the public response to a given weather alert. The prediction includes the expected degree of response, and from which part of the public this would be expected, for example weather enthusiasts or the general public. This approach may uncover ways to strengthen engagement of the community with weather forecasting through Twitter.

Of course, you could argue that this is an advance parallel to the movement toward connected vehicles in surface transportation, an extension of the Internet of Things world to driving and weather forecasting—the real-time data-sharing and engagement between the community that drives and the scientific community that forecasts For more on that, see the presentation by Danny Cheresnick et al. (Global WeatherCorp), “Improving Operational Road Weather Forecasts with Connected Vehicle Data,” in the Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies.

In the Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry, Lucy Piacentini (City College New York) et al. are presenting a web-based means for connecting qualitative feedback from community members with high resolution satellite information. In “Connecting Communities and Research: The Urban Heat Island Effect in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York,” they write:

In partnership with the Magnolia Initiative community advocacy group in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, various facets to increase community engagement in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in general and in the geosciences in particular, were explored.

Using Landsat 8 and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Aqua satellite data, comparisons were made between the land surface temperatures of Bedford-Stuyvesant and other neighborhoods within New York City. Micro-level survey data was also collected from Bedford-Stuyvesant residents to assess factors that contribute to heat wave exposure and heat-related health risks. The COVID-19 pandemic has created an importance in connecting with the community in a socially distant setting. Interactive maps and a website were developed on an online platform for the community to emphasize how socioeconomic and geophysical factors compound to exacerbate the urban heat island effect in the community.

Preliminary results show that Bedford-Stuyvesant is one of the most heat vulnerable communities in New York City and highlight the importance of sharing mitigation and adaptation strategies with community-folk in a manner that they can comprehend and easily implement in a neighborhood bid for sustainability and the amelioration of heat-health risks. The survey and the interactive map have been implemented and have proven to be a positive community engagement tool!”

At the Symposium on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Carolyn S. Brinkworth (UCAR) et al. are presenting “Cocreating Hydrological Research between Earth Science Institutions and Indigenous Scientists and Communities: Success Stories and Lessons Learned.” Previewing it, they state:

In 2016, a group of Earth Science organizations and Indigenous scientists affiliated with the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences worked together to submit an ANSF proposal … to bring together NCAR scientists with Indigenous communities to co-develop research of mutual interest and benefit; to involve Indigenous undergraduate and K-12 students in that research as part of a pathway into the geosciences; and to provide Indigenous mentorship to the NCAR scientists to help them create culturally responsive spaces for the communities and students they were working with, and to develop guidance and good practices for Earth science institutions wishing to develop similar partnerships in the future.

Here we describe the challenges encountered in implementing the project as planned, the changes we made in order to be responsive to the situations, the ultimate successes that emerged from the communities and students we engaged through the re-imagined program, and the lessons learned for future collaborations.

In community engagement at an even larger scale—for full cities, across the world: Susan C. Anenberg (George Washington University) is presenting an invited Core Science Keynote on “Recent Advances in Integrating Climate Change, Air Quality, and Public Health into Urban Decision-Making.” She writes:

Cities contribute the majority of greenhouse gas emissions globally, are challenged by high air pollution levels, and experience substantial health disparities. Many cities are committing to dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and in sustainability improvements. These actions have the potential to mitigate climate change globally and over centuries, as well as improve air quality and public health locally and in the near term. Decision-support tools to assess climate, air quality and health benefits of alternative emission policies exist at the national scale, but are not widely available at the city scale, where clean air interventions are often targeted. This talk will address recent advances …[among many things]… novel methods and tools for integrating climate change, air pollution, and public health into urban decision-making on clean air interventions, including in efforts led by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and C40 Cities.

An Invitation to Crowdsource: Citizen Science as Community Engagement

In this AMS Annual Meeting “citizen” or “community” science appears frequently, as it has in previous years’ meetings, but in the context of this meeting’s overall theme. The projects that solicit nonscientists to collect data and/or analyze data or imagery can be seen as a special participatory form of community engagement. In fact, in the spirit of crowdsourced science, we’ll go ahead now and invite you to share your favorite citizen science examples from the Annual Meeting—including your own presentations—in the Comments section of this Post. And furthermore, send comments with your recommendations for non-traditional viable virtual pathways that you see through the Annual Meeting program this year.

After a year of substantial social injustice-fueled upheavals, the 101^st AMS Annual Meeting builds on social justice themes all week and you could make social justice the theme of you own virtual programming, picking and choosing your way through the sessions if you’re so inclined, right from the centerpiece Presidential Forum on Sunday, “Building a Culture of Anti-Racism in the Weather, Water and Climate Community.”

The session promises to be a frank conversation on racism and its impacts on the weather, water, and climate community.  The panel will explore and discuss how racism against blacks, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC+) and other marginalized  groups has not only denied opportunities to a wide range of people but also limited our ability to advance the weather, water and climate sciences and services.  We will revisit our past and explore how even today social inequities are reflected in the provision of services to people living in underserved areas throughout the United States.  The panel will discuss what actions have helped in combating racism, steps that have been taken to address social inequities in the provision of environmental services, and highlight steps we, as a community and individually, need to take to make further progress.  AMS’s on-going activities in this area will also be highlighted.

Many presentations pick up on this keynote. Certainly, If you are interested in social justice issues, you will want to attend the Symposium on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which has valuable programming.

Addressing Social Justice within the Scientific Community

Session 8: “Advancing a Culture of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Geosciences” is the most inward looking of this key symposium in the social justice pathway through the AMS Annual Meeting—this session is a self-examination of these issues within the scientific community.

The Symposium is also holding a joint session with the Conference on Education: “The Dr. Janet Liou-Mark Memorial Session on Effective Strategies for Increasing Minority Participation in the Atmospheric Sciences.”

Also at the Conference on Education, Valerie Sloan (NCAR) et al. are presenting, “What Worked for Us? Student Experiences with Geoscience Summer Research Internships during Both COVID-19 and Heightened Racist Violence.” They write:

The successful engagement through remote internships this summer suggests that virtual programs prepare students to face new work environments, as conferences, courses, and collaborations continue to shift online. These may come to attract a broader range of students than those who have participated in the past. It is our hope that it will result in more equitable, accessible opportunities for students pursuing geoscience careers.

Session 1 of the Conference for Early Career Professionals invites attendees “to come together and create and experience inclusive environments—an improvscience workshop.” to explore simple, creative ways to cultivate diverse voices, equity, and inclusion.”

Also, there’s Town Hall Meeting—”Her Career, Her Stories“—from the 35th Conference on Hydrology:

This event will bring women of all career stages together to share experience, challenges, and success, to inspire and empower one another, and to foster the development of mentoring relationships. A diverse group of scientists will speak at the event as panelists, including Ana Barros, Terri Hogue, Ruby Lai-Yung Leung, Christa Peters-Lidard, and Britt Westergard.

In the Mesoscale Symposium: Posters Kristen Rasmussen et al. will present, “Best Practices for Preventing Harassment in Atmospheric Science: Leveraging the RELAMPAGO and WE-CAN Field-Campaign Networks for Collaborative Change.” They report:

This project implemented and studied sexual harassment training, awareness, and experiences during the WE-CAN and RELAMPAGO field campaigns ….Both women and men who attended the training were more likely than those who did not attend to report feeling more trusting of coworkers, comfortable with reporting, and more willing to intervene in situations of harassment. We will present findings about attitudes and experiences of harassment in field work, and we will conclude with a discussion around how the atmospheric science community can facilitate collaborative change around sexual harassment within existing networks.

In the Conference on Education, K. Ryder Fox (University of Miami, Florida) et al. present on  “Mental Health Interventions for Marginalized STEM Individuals.”

Also in this conference, Leticia Williams (Howard University) will present “How to Have Difficult Conversations with Underrepresented Students: Best Communication Practices for Multicultural Mentoring to Increase Minority Participation in the Atmospheric Sciences.” In part, they write:

This study examined STEM faculty mentors multicultural mentoring practices and strategies to discuss protégés’ issues and challenges, and the ways that gender and race influenced their communication. Findings revealed that STEM faculty mentors communicated about discrimination and diversity, did not communicate about discrimination and diversity, or did not feel qualified to communicate about discrimination and diversity.

A Legacy of Racism in Science

The Symposium on History at the Annual Meeting also picks up on topics of past injustices in the science community—from the treatment of women scientists and the treatment of scientists from other underrepresented groups, to such issues as the under counting of disaster victims from socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, thus potentially skewing scientific and services priorities for many years. One presentation, for example, discusses how “land theft, eugenics, and scientific racism are interwoven into the history of geosciences.”

Social Justice in the Broader Society

Many presentations in the Annual Meeting show that scientists are realizing they have a role in society that is so that social justice issues for the scientific community, go far beyond the diversity and equity inclusiveness within the scientific workforce and its pipeline of future members. Your track of social justice in the Annual Meeting should include such insights.

For example, In one of the Core Science Keynotes, Vernon Morris (Arizona State Univ) tells “A Tale of Two Cities: Comparing Lessons Learned from Community Engagement in Geohealth/Environmental Justice Studies in Washington, D.C., and Gondar, Ethiopia.” Morris “will highlight what has been learned from ‘community-inspired’ environmental health projects at the nexus of air quality – health research, … centered in Washington, DC, and involv[ing] collaboration with activists and residents in low SES and politically disenfranchised communities whose air quality challenges have been exacerbated by gentrification.” Further:

One of the DC studies was able to demonstrate that neighborhood residents were already at risk for airborne particulate matter (PM) exceedances even without the presence of additional point sources. The results were provided in expert testimony at two District of Columbia hearings and a two-year stay from 2012 to 2014 was a direct result of the efforts. Unfortunately, the stay was later overturned and the battle to protect these citizen’s health continues. The other is a study in an open-air hospital in Northern Ethiopia (Gondar). This collaboration involves medical doctors, pharmacists, virologists, and microbiologists at the University of Gondar The Gondar study project combined environmental monitoring, atmospheric sampling, and atmospheric data analysis with the genomic mapping of sampled airborne microflora. Ambient aerobiological samples were collected in order to identify the changes in taxonomically diverse and novel bacteria present on airborne particulate. One specific application of this work was the development of a better understanding of the distribution and transmission of opportunistic microflora within the open-air hospital environment at the University of Gondar Health Sciences Campus. In each case, the original design and scope of the study was significantly modified based on community engagement. The additional diversity in perspective inspired novel inquiry, drove creativity in the implementation of the study, and resulted in greater use-inspired research.

In the Conference on Environment and Health, David Sittenfeld (Museum of Science) et al. are presenting “Wicked Hot Boston: Community Science for Building Extreme Heat Resilience and Addressing Public Health Disparities.” They write:

Urban communities face growing concerns from heat waves that endanger public health, threaten infrastructures, and exacerbate existing social inequities. These impacts fall disproportionately upon people of color, low-income communities, and the elderly. Using a machine learning algorithm. MOS researchers have been working with environmental and community members to produce high-resolution, hyperlocal heat maps that are being actively used by city and regional planners. This session will present results from the mapping activities, with a particular focus on emergent analysis about the heat impacts of urban form in the greater Boston metro area, historic redlining practices, and spatial correlations with … socioeconomic covariates and negative public health outcomes.

We mentioned this next one in our previous blog post delineating a COVID pathway through the Annual Meeting, as it intersects with social justice themes as well, much in the way everything in the production of knowledge, including science, can, either directly or indirectly. The presentation is by Gaige Hunter Kerr et al. in the Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry, “Impact of Coronavirus Lockdowns on NO₂: Successes and Challenges for Environmental Inequality in the United States.” They explain in their abstract:

This study highlights the potential for shrinking the gap in pollution exposure between population subgroups in the U.S. but simultaneously underscores the perennial challenges in reducing environmental inequalities.

In the Symposium on Societal Applications: Policy, Research, and Practice, Margaret Mooney and Steve Ackerman (both of CIMMS) give voice to student perspectives in a presentation “University Undergraduates Speak Out on Climate Change and Climate Justice.” From their abstract:

NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) at the University of Wisconsin – Madison collaborates with the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) to offer an online 3-credit course on “Climate and Climate Change” each summer. The class is structured to actively engage students in learning about and communicating about climate change, the later through a weekly discussion forum. Week 1 students upload a video describing their background and motivation for taking the course. Other weeks students respond and interact to varying topics that regularly feature current events. As a capstone activity, students upload an “elevator speech” imagining someone asks “what do you think about climate change?” 2020 prompted uniquely thoughtful discussion posts and passionate elevator pitches referencing racial disparities, climate justice, economics, and a global pandemic. This AMS presentation will share select anonymous responses to the week 5 discussion topic: “identify a scenario in the state or region you grew up where climate and environmental injustices combine to affect people of color more negatively than white people, then research the COVID19 cases for that location” and twelve particularly powerful elevator pitches sanctioned for distribution. In addition, responses to questions seeking to gauge frequency and comfort around discussing climate change and environmental issues obtained via a follow-up survey will will also be shared in this session.

In the Conference on Environment and Health, Adora Shortridge, Jennifer Vanos, and William Walker (Arizona State University) present a program to protect children in South Phoenix from extreme heat by preparing neighborhood schools. They write:

In Phoenix, heat is a priority for preparedness and policy plans at the city-level, yet these policies do not always encompass the most vulnerable regions and populations: elementary schoolchildren and low-income neighborhoods. South Phoenix has experienced historical environmental racism and injustice. Residents currently face challenges including higher air temperatures, air pollution, and economic disparities, which can impact children’s health, physical activity, and cognitive abilities. Although children are routinely stated to need additional heat-coping resources, no formal policy or evaluation toolbox exists nationwide to support systematic and effective efforts to protect children from negative consequences of heat at schools. The overarching goal of this research is to create an evaluation tool for “HeatReady Schools.”

In the same conference, Alexis Merdjanoff and Gabriella Meltzer (NYU) present “Falling from Grace”: A Qualitative Study of Disaster Exposure and Downward Mobility among Middle Class Families,” a study of emotional and financial impacts of on families due to Hurricane Sandy:

Prior to Hurricane Sandy, many families had steady paychecks, owned their homes, and had enough discretionary income that they were not constantly constrained by monthly expenses (i.e., middle class). Following Sandy, however, parents expressed that they were unable to participate in activities that they once enjoyed. Instead, once-discretionary income was spent entirely on home repairs, paying bills, or other essential expenses. While parents were clearly conscious of these financial difficulties and attempted to lessen any additional disruptions to their children … this qualitative data reveals the tenuous nature of being middle class in an era of more frequent and severe extreme weather events.

Social Justice Issues with AI in Geosciences

In the Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science, Nicol Turner Lee (Brookings Institute) delivers a core science keynote on “The Importance of Fairness in Algorithmic Decision-Making.” Dr. Lee is a senior fellow in Governance Studies, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation, and serves as Co-Editor-In-Chief of TechTank. Her current research portfolio also includes artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning algorithms and their unintended consequences on marginalized communities.

In another invited keynote in the same conference, Ann Bostrom (University of Washington) explores “Three Risk Decision Traps for the Ethical AI Geoscientist.” Shew notes:

Three crises have gripped the sciences in recent years, each stemming from abuses of power. The first, irreproducibility, resulted arguably from incentives to publish and the use and abuse of statistical power in underpowered and overpowered studies. Inattention to power has resulted in, for example, spurious and unreliable findings capturing the limelight and inspiring fatal choices in some instances (e.g., COVID19 self-medication choices), and in other instances may have diverted attention from larger effects and the possibility of disastrous extremes (e.g., sea-level rise). The second, exclusivity—that is, lack of inclusivity and representativeness—results from the internal and societal power dynamics of the scientific enterprise, wherein those with power have tended to reproduce themselves and their epistemologies, to the exclusion of others. Our understanding of how power disparities in science have increased disparities between people continues to evolve, but the use of purportedly scientific arguments to perpetuate racism, and the unintended consequences of science-informed risk policies (e.g., early air bags) for women, children, and vulnerable populations come to mind. The third, inexplicability, has been enabled by exponential growth in computational technology and power, and is evident in the ever-growing complexity and scale of modeling across the sciences (e.g., genetics, climate and weather modeling, pathogeography), increasingly powered by AI. Each of these crises represents a class of power decisions and presents a risk decision trap for AI geoscientists who hope to be ethical. Addressing how these risk decision traps manifest in research designs and science behaviors requires understanding the default decisions and their roots in human judgment and decision making and social context.
The now pervasive use of AI in the sciences and in information and communication technologies (ICT) has captured the spotlight in recent years, bringing to light, for example, the insidious and devastating effects of algorithmic reinforcement of data biases, and the apparently socially destructive consequences of applying, for private profit, social and behavioral science on attention, persuasion, addiction and risky choice to massive microscale observational data. All three crises contribute to these, illustrating how the risk decisions that AI geoscientists now face have trapped other AI scientists. Ethical research design and behavior require AI geoscientists to attend to these risk decision traps. Echo chambers and an absence of common sources of information dominate information use even at the highest levels of government—including for scientific information—increasing the spread of misinformation and disinformation and the exploitation of scientific uncertainties for private ends. Thus, at the same time as science in general has continued to enjoy a relatively high level of confidence and trust from diverse publics, increasing use of social media for news has contributed to the social amplification of scientific risk and uncertainty, with concomitant damage to public good. The three crises highlighted—irreproducibility, exclusivity, and inexplicability—have gained notoriety primarily in other sciences and contexts. But in the AI geosciences too, missteps in risk decisions are likely to have unanticipated consequences. AI geosciences have immediate applications to and consequences for global health and the environment, and for trust in science. Understanding risk decision traps is imperative for the ethical AI geoscientist.

The Themes Keep Coming

So far we have introduced four themes that cut across conferences and symposia of all types in the 2021 AMS Annual Meeting, and viewing any number of the video presentations and posters highlighted is easy despite our enormous conference … because for the first time it’s virtual. View at your convenience. Part 1 in our blog series has taken a closer look at major weather events and impacts in 2020 outside of that main program; Part 2 extended our crosscutting approach to weather extremes and climate change; Part 3 was everything COVID-19; and of course Part 4, here, the critical discussions of social justice. The link to the right or here takes you to the Part 5: Community Engagement, now posted.