Columnists

Walking a Fine Hydrologic Line

by Robert V. Sobczak, National Park Service, Big Cypress National Preserve.
Reposted from his blog, The South Florida Watershed Journal.

Are Florida’s Lake Okeechobee and Colorado River’s Lake Mead comparable?

After all, a Hoover Dam (or dike) surrounds them both.

Lake O bounces from deep drought to levee-lapping flood stage from one year to the next. We’ve had two deep drops into drought this past decade: the first in 2001 and the second (and longer one) in 2007, plus those couple high years during the hurricane frenzy of 2003-2005.
Keep in mind the difference between extreme drought (9 ft above sea level, 1.7 million acre feet) and extreme flood stage (18 ft above sea level, 5.3 million acre feet) is less than 10 feet.

Compare that to Lake Mead’s decade-long decline:
In 1999 it was flush at over 1200 ft above sea level high and holding 28 million acre feet of water, but has steadily dropped ever since.
Current stage is around 130 feet lower and only 10 million acre feet (and dropping). Here’s a recent article describing how water planners are trying to cope.
Why the difference?
Flat south Florida is rain rich but storage poor, while the arid West has storage galore (with its deep canyons) but not much rain …
And more recently, hardly any snow melt either.

“The drought can’t last forever,” Western water planners seem to think/hope.
Here in Florida, as much as we like seeing those storms veer away “safely out to sea,” the Lake is a couple more near misses and a dry (and warm) La Niña winter ahead from a plummet into spring time drought.
On the other hand, all it takes is one big “rain maker” to send us up into flood stage.
Florida walks a fine line between flood and drought.

Nowcasts: Forecasting's Achilles Heel

by Cliff Mass, University of Washington
Adapted from a post from this weekend on Cliff Mass Weather Blog.
On Saturday we experienced a noticeable forecast failure and one that in some sense was self-inflicted.
Here in Puget Sound country it was going to be a beautiful day…lots of sun and temps rising into the 70s. You could look outside or view the visible satellite picture.

On the other hand the National Weather Service forecast RELEASED THAT MORNING painted a less optimistic picture.
And Friday’s forecast was even more pessimistic.

The computer forecasts on Friday showed the break between systems (see example) and certainly on Saturday morning it was clear.

Why didn’t the message about a spectacular break on Saturday get out?
I think there are three main reasons:
1. The National Weather Service forecast cycle is only updated every 6 hr in most cases and there is a lack of emphasis on nowcasting–describing what is happening now and during the next few hours.
2. There is a distinct tendency for the National Weather Service to broadbrush their forecasts–smear out clouds and weather over an extended period and not to put emphasis on breaks in the weather…even when they are pretty obvious.
3. Finally, there is the tendency in the NWS to maintain forecast consistency–staying with the same story–even when new guidance suggests otherwise. This is based on an internal philosophy not to jerk the forecast around as numerical guidance changes.
Personally, I think this all has to change…and in fact this blog is partially a reaction my feelings.
I believe that that providing frequent updates on current and expected weather is a hugely important area for development and that society has much to gain from this direction. For many of us, knowing what is happening and what will happen in the next 6 hrs is hugely important…and has great value for saving property and lives. To be fair, when severe weather is occurring the NWS does do more nowcasting, but I think they need to do so on a more regular basis.
In a day with smartphones, internet-capable cell phones, and computers on the internet everywhere, the ability to deliver real-time weather information exists. New software applications, better computer modeling, and a huge increase in observations will make the information available. We just have to put the package together–and society has much to gain from it.
The nightly weather on the local news is great, but people need weather information all the time…and we have to find a way of delivering it. An idea: every major city could have a nowcasting weather broadcast on the internet, updating the current weather situation every 15 minutes.

If Climate Isn't Stable, Are We?

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director
a portion of a series of essays from the AMS Project, Living on the Real World
In a short period of time (say, one or two hundred years), the human race has greatly grown in total numbers; has radically increased its per capita use of resources of every type; and has accelerated the rate of social change and scientific and technological advance.
In a short period of time? In science, a statement like that invites, maybe even demands a comparative. Short compared with what? Now you and I might look at this and say, “Well, a couple of hundred years is short compared with the age of the Earth itself, or with the ten thousand years of human civilization.” But here’s an additional list: Human success has occurred in a time short compared with

  • time scales of (“major”) climate variability;
  • the recurrence interval for natural extremes;
  • the time required for the emergence of unintended consequences;
  • the time required to prove we can “keep it up;”
  • the time required for the implications of our success to sink in.

Each of these realities enables us to make a prediction about a different aspect of our future. Let’s look at the first: time scales of (“major”) climate variability
In the climate-change debate, much has been made of this, by both sides. The Earth’s climate has at times over the past few billion years been at times much colder, and at other times much hotter, than it is today. But during the last two hundred years, the time of this extraordinary human success, climate has been fairly stable.
If climate hadn’t been so stable during this period, then we might not even have the word “climate” in our vocabulary. We wouldn’t think the concept was useful! And arguably, we might have been better off! Think a little bit about this. Suppose you’re in a job where you directly see the impact of weather on your labors. Such jobs are in the minority these days, but they matter – a lot. Take farming. To oversimplify: you want to base your decisions throughout the year on the weather – what to plant, when to plant, when to water, when to apply pesticides and fertilizers, when to harvest. But you have to make many of these decisions based on a time horizon much greater than any useful weather forecast.
Then it occurs to you. Although the weather is variable year to year, these variations occur around a set of average conditions: the average last frost of the spring, the average spring rain, the average summer temperature and sunlight, the average first frost of the fall, etc. So you go with that, and it helps. Then, as you start looking into it more closely, you realize that the average you calculate depends upon how many years you include in the calculation: do it for the past ten years, and you get one set of answers. Do it for the past twenty and you get another. Do it for ten years, but for a different ten years, and you get another answer still. Your head starts to spin…
Meanwhile, over this same period of 200 years, while the human race has been on a roll, scientists have made some remarkable discoveries. They started looking hard at glaciers and the landscapes around them and discovered that ice, as much as a mile thick once covered much of the Earth, as recently as 10,000-20,000 years ago. Whoa! And they discovered looking back that at times the entire Earth must have felt tropical – that it was hot and steamy pretty much everywhere. Who knew? So the reality is that the Earth and its atmosphere and its weather are resolutely variable, on all time and space scales. From the standpoint of coping with climate variability and change of whatever cause, we might be better off simply asking questions like: how and in what ways are temperature and rainfall patterns, etc., likely to change over the next few hours? The next few days? The next few centuries? We’d be making no artificial distinctions between weather and climate (certainly nature doesn’t draw any such line of demarcation). Scientists are working hard on all this! The stakes of getting the right answers for the right reasons couldn’t be higher.
In any event, for the past two hundred years, the climate has been remarkably stable. This narrow range of climate variability hasn’t challenged us so greatly. Humanity has been able to take the easy way out. We have tuned our decisions and actions in weather-sensitive sectors like agriculture, water resource management, energy-demand, transportation etc., to a rather narrow range of climatic variables. And we’ve been lucky! It’s worked so far.
But we know from the science that climate is constantly changing, in part just because of the nature of the atmosphere and oceans, but in part because we’re tinkering. We’re taking all that carbon that plant life took out of that tropical atmosphere from millions of years ago and deposited into sediments – and we’re burning it and putting it back into the atmosphere. It’s looking like our winning streak is about to play out.
This leads to a prediction: The future will be characterized by adverse climate shifts. We don’t know exactly how much, and we don’t know when. But we do know this. We won’t like them! We’ll view them as unfavorable. Why? How do we know they won’t be to our liking? Because we have tuned our climate sensitive activities – our human settlement and water use, our agriculture, our energy production and use, and many other aspects of our daily lives – to a narrow range of climate conditions.
Note that this disaffection will be true whichever way the climate changes. When and where it gets wetter, we’re going to wish it were drier (I planted wheat instead of corn. I wish I’d planted corn!). Where it gets hotter, we’re going to wish it were cooler (ski season in Colorado is shorter than it used to be; I invested in my resort hotel at just the wrong time). Where it gets cooler, we’re going to wish it were warmer (Brr! My condominium heat pump here in Georgia isn’t up to this cold snap). When things dry up, we’ll long for the moisture (our hydroelectric power in the Pacific northwest is no longer meeting as much of our energy needs).

Uncertainty: A Mathematician's Perspective

by Sean Crowell, Dept. of Mathematics, Univ. of Oklahoma
One thing we enjoy in mathematics is certainty of our knowledge. This is because the things we know are logically certain (neglecting Gödel), and logic is all there is for mathematicians. In fact, unjustified certainty can be very disturbing to professors attempting to teach you to prove things rigorously in foundation courses. Never mind all of the debate in recent years about the philosophy behind these things. Most of us have some inner threshold beyond which we say “the definitions and axioms are satisfied, and so the theorem is proven!”
For a long time I had heard applied mathematics described as “messy.” Really this meant that the calculations done were unpleasant, or the proofs were complex and tedious and inelegant. But I’ve discovered a far more terrifying aspect about this work, one which nonmathematicians take in stride.
There is no certainty in science. There is merely evidence. Again, we have an inner threshold, only once it’s crossed, we say “I now believe the conjecture supported by the evidence.” How is this different from logical proof? The biggest difference is that we have no perfect measuring stick to go by. All data has errors in it. All models are flawed. And yet, through a mysterious bootstrapping process, data is used to improve models, which is used to improve observational techniques and to tell researchers what they should be observing.
The casual and especially mathematically trained reader will shake their head and say “Errors upon errors! How can we say we know anything?” At this point we can trot out statistics that point to the advance of science. Warning times for severe weather have gotten much better due to this process. New particles have been discovered by this process. Diseases cured and sheep cloned. All using noisy data and imperfect models. It works! For whatever reason, the universe that we can interact with, though mysterious, is far more regular than irregular. If we watch long enough, we can uncover its secrets.
(Editors’ note: This post was first published on Sean’s blog, A Mathematician in a Meteorologist’s World, on Wednesday 15 September. We liked it too much to merely excerpt it. Sean is a doctoral candidate in mathematics studying tornadic flow.)

Want to Reduce Disaster Losses? Keep Score.

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director
from the AMS Project Living on the Real World

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

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A Dose of Reality: The Social Side of Disasters

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director,
from the AMS Project, Living on the Real World
Reality: Disasters – that is, disruptions of entire communities, persisting after an extreme has come and gone, and exceeding a community’s ability to recover on its own – are largely a social construct. Consider this simple example. Meteorologists call a tropical storm a hurricane when its winds exceed some 75 miles per hour. The strongest hurricanes ever observed show wind speeds about twice this level, 150 mph, say. Physics tells us that the forces on buildings and structures should vary as the square of the wind speed (getting a little technical …). The strongest hurricanes therefore pack a wallop about four times that of the weakest; the area suffering hurricane-force winds also tends to be a bit bigger. But the damages from these largest storms may be 200 times as great. One contributor to this big difference? Building codes. These are county-based, and so vary somewhat across the 3000-some counties in the United States, but in hurricane-prone areas usually require that brick-and-mortar residential construction withstand wind speeds of about 120 mph – right in the middle of the hurricane-force wind range. [Manufactured housing, by contrast, is governed by a less-rigorous federal standard, which requires that such structures only maintain their integrity at wind speeds up to some 70-90 mph.] Change building codes, and you change this loss profile.
Alert! These are our choices, but they’re not necessarily bad choices. When it comes to building codes, we’re simply forced to set a realistic standard. Whenever we wish, we can elect to build homes that will withstand hurricane-force winds, or even the strongest tornadic winds, which might approach 300 mph. But these homes would be considerably more expensive. They might be built largely underground, looking more like World War II “pillboxes” than homes, with narrow slits for windows, etc. Remember, they have to bear up not just to the winds but also to the windborne debris: lumber, roofing, automobiles, etc. Most of us wouldn’t be able to afford them, and wouldn’t want to live in them even if we could. We prefer our views, the connection with the outdoors. So we build a safe room, or a storm cellar, and accept the remaining risk.
Building codes are but one example; here’s another – land use. Simply by choosing to build in the flood plain alongside rivers and on the coasts, we ensure that our future will be punctuated by repetitive loss. Build on an earthquake fault-line? Expect the same outcome. There’s much more to this topic. We’ll return to it down the road.
But, for now, let’s set it aside in order to introduce a more complicated notion. When we choose to urbanize – and over half the world’s population lives in cities now – we expose ourselves to other risks, and different kinds of risk at that. To live in cities requires critical infrastructure, ranging from the elevators that service high-rise buildings to networks of roads, sewage systems, water works, electrical grids, communications, financial services, health care, and so on. As a result, we’re now subject to outages of these systems, from whatever cause. An example from the Midwest flooding of 1993. The city of Des Moines, Iowa remained largely dry; only a small sliver of land

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Remembering Katrina and New Orleans

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director, from the AMS project, Living on the Real World

“…we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”– Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg address

The last few posts, as we’ve started to think about disasters, we’ve asked, what’s it worth to see a disaster coming? Katrina shows vividly that it’s worth relatively little if we can’t or won’t act. People had been vocal about the growth of vulnerability in New Orleans for decades, even as the vulnerability and risks ratcheted up. The warnings didn’t seem to be enough.
Some salient features of this landscape? Well, for one, the 2002 series of articles by Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “Washing Away: how south Louisiana is growing more vulnerable to a catastrophic hurricane.” For another, the 2004 article by Shirley Laska in The Natural Hazards Observer, “What if Hurricane Ivan had not missed New Orleans,” and her June 2005 talk as part of an AMS environmental science seminar on Capitol Hill, in the Senate Hart Office Building, on the topic of “New Orleans, hurricanes, and climate change: a question of resiliency.” That afternoon, one hundred policymakers were in the room, including U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA, who to her credit had always been concerned about this threat and working hard, first to avert it, and since to recover from it).
Dr. Laska, a sociologist at the University of New Orleans and then director of the Center for Hazard Assessment, Research, and Technology (CHART), laid out the whole scenario. She touched on the growth in Louisiana population, the development of the Port of New Orleans and the offshore oil extraction and the associated refineries. She recounted a century of bad engineering along the Mississippi, the degradation of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands and the subsequent loss of their natural protection. She discussed the risks in depending upon evacuation as a strategy: the vulnerabilities of the lone evacuation route over Lake Pontchartrain and the fact that at any given time, 100,000 people would be too poor to find a ride, and 2000 people to sick to move. She estimated it would take 90 days to dry out the “bowl” (that portion of New Orleans under sea level and most vulnerable to flooding), and twenty years to recover. So far, as we say in our trade, that forecast seems to be verifying.

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Knowing What the Earth Will Do Next? Priceless.

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director

from the AMS Project, Living on the Real World
When it comes to valuation…what is a product or service worth?…maybe the MasterCard folks say it best. Let’s paraphrase them. Cost of the Earth’s observing systems, satellite- and surface- based (ocean and land)? Some very few tens of billions of dollars per year[1]. Cost of the engineers and scientists to handle the communication of the data, build the models, and convert the results into decision support, knowledge and a predictive understanding? No more than another ten billion dollars or so annually. Knowing what the Earth will do next – that is, adding to our knowledge base of the resources such as food and fiber, water, and energy, on which we depend; distinguishing between habitats, environments, and ecosystems that are robust and those which are threatened and need our immediate help; and foreseeing the onset of natural extremes such as flood and drought, heat and cold, and the approach of storms? Priceless.
At last week’s AMS Summer Community meeting, one of the senior participants suggested that those of us in Earth-science-based services and supporting research ought to do a better job explaining the value of our work. In the context of that discussion, he was absolutely right, but his idea presupposed that we had the quantitative foundation to make our case. The fact is that what little we know about the value of Earth observations and their use is rudimentary, fragmented, anecdotal, and therefore, somewhat suspect. This is a nascent field.
Happily, the Value of Information (VOI) workshop held at Resources for the Future in late June sowed seeds for changing this picture [2]). The summary report, released yesterday is itself worth reading. It contains a nice framing of

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A Community Living Up to Its Name

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.

A New Role for a Venerable Institution

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

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