Columnists

AMS/UCAR Congressional Fellowship Application Deadline Approaching

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by Jack Fellows and Paul Higgins
Every year the AMS and UCAR together send one member of our community to work for a member of Congress or a congressional committee through its congressional science fellowship program. The deadline for applying for next year’s fellowship is rapidly approaching, so consider now how this opportunity could enhance your career while giving you a chance to help shape the future.
The program has two goals: (1) to ensure that Congressional policy makers have ready access to the best available scientific information; and (2) to provide policy experiences for community members who think they’d like to pursue a policy career (i.e., develop key decision makers for the future).
David Reid-Miller, the 2010-2011 AMS/UCAR Congressional Fellow, served as a Legislative Fellow in Sen. Mark Udall’s (D-CO) office advising him on an array of energy issues.  David says of the experience: “The deadlines were often fast and usually changing – and the request never the same.  Whether it was clean energy R&D at DOE, fossil fuel subsidies, developing renewable energy on public lands, or crafting the DOD Energy Security Act – I not only learned how to balance the many interests in a “purple” state like Colorado, but I gained enormous insight into the policymaking process and expertise in a range of topics outside my dissertation research.  It was a phenomenal experience – the only regret about it is that it only lasted one year!”
The Fellows bring to the Congress new insights, fresh ideas, extensive knowledge, and education in a variety of disciplines. Not only are the Fellows provided with the opportunity to make a significant public service contribution, but they also obtain firsthand experience in the legislative and political process. Fellows gain a perspective which, ideally, should help them understand how the research community effectively communicates with the larger society on important national policy issues. Fellows may have the opportunity to make significant contributions to public policy making within Congress on disaster preparedness and response, global change, water and energy policy, defense technologies, AIDS, pollution, communications technologies, and many other issues.
The AMS/UCAR fellowship is managed along with over 30 other professional science societies by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  The AAAS reports that these fellowship programs continue to have significant impact based on: (1) the number of Fellows has increased over the years; (2) there are many more congressional requests for possible assignments than there are Fellows; (3) former Fellows are assuming senior positions in Congress, the Executive Branch, academia, and in the private sector; (4) overall, large numbers of qualified individuals continue to apply to the various sponsoring organizations for the fellowships; and (5) reports from the Congress about individual Fellows and the program have been highly laudatory.
What Fellows Do.  Fellows perform every type of work normally asked of the permanent congressional staff, whether they are in members’ offices or with committees. The range of activities is illustrated by these examples:

  • Assist in preparation of major parts of legislation from preliminary agency reviews to House-Senate conferences and final enactment into law;
  • Work on legislative and oversight activities on budgets for various agencies, such as NOAA, NASA, EPA, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Defense;
  • Assist with oversight investigations into major national problems such as global change, hazardous wastes, natural disasters, ground water, acid rain, etc.;
  • Help prepare Members for debates on the floors of the House and Senate;
  • Write speeches and other materials for Members on a wide range of topics;
  • Provide liaison and coordination with committees to which a Member is assigned;
  • Give briefings and arrange for public hearings; and,
  • Meet with lobbyists, members of the public, agency representatives, and many others.

For example, Kim Mueller, the 2011-2012 AMS/UCAR Congressional Fellow, is currently serving with the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resource Committee. As part of her assignment on the committee, Kim primarily works on climate change issues, helping to organize briefings for staff and members of Congress, preparing members of the Committee for hearings and events, and researching climate change legislation. Kim also participated in the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban South Africa last month.
Fellowship Term, Stipend, Administration, and Application.  Fellowships usually run from September through August. The stipend for the Fellow is $55,000, plus allowances toward relocation, in-service travel, and health and dental insurance premiums. AAAS organizes a two-week orientation period in Washington in early September. This orientation includes seminars on the Congress and the Executive Branch; meetings with former Fellows, members of Congress, and staff; and preparing for placement in the Congress. There will be over 30 Fellows in the class, sponsored by over two dozen different societies. Following orientation and interviews on Capitol Hill, the AMS/UCAR Fellow will select a position in the House or Senate. Throughout the year, the AMS/UCAR Fellow will join with other AAAS Fellows in participating in seminars, and social and other class activities sponsored by the AAAS. The AMS/UCAR Fellow will also be invited to attend and report on his or her activities at AMS and UCAR meetings.
We strongly encourage you to apply – see http://www.ametsoc.org/csf.  Applications are due to the AMS by March 15, 2012!

Disaster Risk Management Meets Climate Change Adaptation

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by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director, from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
An increasingly popular and visible feature of AMS Annual Meetings is a suite of so-called Town Halls. Often scheduled for the lunch hour (and therefore attracting primarily that minority of attendees who prefer food for thought to the competing invitation of physical sustenance with friends), these sessions are supposed to model the iconic town halls that once were the heart of the new England political process. They’re more about community input than any erudition of the speakers.

AMS Town Halls are typically used to roll out federal agency initiatives, strategic plans, and/or explore the interface between our community’s science and major developments within the policy arena. A sampling: yesterday one provided researchers a look at emerging directions for DoE’s climate and earth system modeling. Another looked at threats to the continuity of Earth observing systems – a topic frequently discussed in this blog.
I was a last-minute substitute panelist, for the panel on Risk Mitigation for Climate Adaptation and Natural Hazards. The session took its cue from a recently-released Summary for Policymakers of an IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX).
For those in the field, this special report has been required reading. Thirty pages or so of thoughtful, well-reviewed and well-documented material. [We can look forward to publication of the full document next month.] Here’s the bit that to me looks salient today: “Closer integration of disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, along with the incorporation of both into local, subnational, national, and international development policies and practices, could provide benefits at all scales.” [page 9]
The idea, in a nutshell, is that disaster risk management and climate change adaptation share much in common. The Town Hall announcement highlights the difference this way: risk management draws from history, while climate change looks to the future. The idea is the incorporating this forward-looking perspective into more traditional hazard risk management will lead to more resilient communities.
This is a great thought…but also maybe a no-brainer.
On reflection, this session also provides opportunity to reflect anew on five ways (there are undoubtedly others) we might make hazard risk management itself (and by implication, climate adaptation) more effective.
Embrace No-Adverse-Impact policies. Environmental impact statements have been with us a long time. You know the idea. When you and I contemplate construction, land use, etc., we have to assess the environmental consequences of our actions. In a similar way, we could and should assess the benefits and/or risks our plans and actions imply for community resilience.
Learn from experience. When it comes with natural hazard rsik management, we should adopt the learn-from-experience habits of aviation, as embodied in the work of the National Transportations Safety Board.
Measure progress. Hazard loss figures are noisy year-to-year and uncertain. But the discipline of continually honing our ability to estimate losses will in itself contribute to the awareness needed to motivate loss reduction when averaged over years.
Foster public-private collaboration. Such collaborations are not optional in today’s free-market societies. However, there’s considerable room for improving the level of such collaborations. They should not be fragmented, haphazard, merely tactical. They should instead be truly collaborative, ongoing, strategic.
Revitalize a venerable institution. Much has been made recently about a notional move of NOAA from the Department of Commerce into the Department of Interior. Dr. Lubchenco was questioned on this in her talk of yesterday. With NOAA embedded in Commerce, a good case can be made that the Department of Commerce provides an excellent home for achieving these several goals of hazard risk reduction and climate adaptation. However, this potential has been recognized and ignored for decades. If it’s never to be realized, then a move to Interior makes more sense.

Top 10 Reasons For Attending the AMS Annual Meeting

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by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director, from a post on the AMS project, Living on the Real World.
Our community has already begun to assemble in New Orleans for this year’s AMS Annual Meeting, which formally runs from Sunday, January 22 through Thursday, January 26. Before the last paper’s presented and the last exhibit is repacked and shipped home, maybe some 4000 people will have come through. That’s not counting the thousands of members of the general public who may show up for Sunday’s WeatherFest.

Motives for participating? They’re varied. Here’s a notional Top Ten list.
Let’s start by eliminating the one people tend to think of first. Travel to an exotic meeting site? Or the local cuisine? Fact is…it’s winter air travel, folks. Think flight delays. Jet stream turbulence. Jet lag under the best of circumstances; exhaustion under the worst. A year ago our meeting was in Seattle, where the Pacific Northwest is today struggling with a foot of snowfall in some places, power outages, massive flooding, and flight cancellations and delays. Picture our members from there trying to get here this year. Business travel is held in high regard by people who don’t have to do it.
Instead, start with:
10. Give talks. If you’re like me, this is a perennial motivator…maybe you even work for an organization that’ll fund your trip only if you can point to an accepted paper in an oral or poster session. Back when I was a federal manager in the NOAA labs I found this carrot to be a great productivity enhancer. I could count on everyone publishing several papers a year so they might go to the meetings.
9. Hear talks. But the reality? The real reason I was happy to send them to meetings was that I knew their experience would be like mine. Every year I’d get excited about what I was doing and think it was really cool stuff. Then I’d get to the meetings and be stunned to find that everyone else had done REALLY COOL STUFF. I knew my people would come back energized from the meeting, and their subsequent work would be higher quality and more relevant because they’d have seen what their peers and colleagues were doing.
8. Spot talent and potential. As a first-level supervisor of scientists and engineers I used to love the opportunity to spot the up-and-comers. I wasn’t the only one trolling for new hires. Government, universities, private-sector – we were all on the prowl for the next-big-thing and the super stars of tomorrow.
7. Networking. We didn’t call it that years ago, but the idea was the same as it is today. For each of us, the meeting experience is like fine wine…it keeps improving with age. You never say goodbye to those contacts you made in the course of your earlier work…at each meeting, and as your work changes direction, you add contacts and connectivity, and the stimulus provided each time around goes up exponentially, factorially. Here’s a metric: each year, it takes you more time to make it down the meeting hallway. [An aside: early-career professionals find this networking shtick a tough slog, and in these days of constrained funding, they’re finding it more difficult to make the meetings themselves as well. We should all applaud the efforts of volunteers who are working to institute special functions and mentoring for young professionals.]
6. Committee work. Speaking of volunteers, over time, you get sucked in…the experience is great and you tire of being a free rider…you want to give back. You find yourself volunteering, or at least not-ducking, any one of hundreds of roles on the Society’s different journals, or specialist areas or Boards or Commissions, or program committees for a Symposium or Conference embedded within the Annual Meeting, or maybe even the AMS Council. And then the year comes when you realize you’re spending as much or more of your time in side meetings and hallway conversations as you’re spending in the technical sessions. All that volunteer effort works a palpable improvement in the quality and relevance of the sessions, the joint sessions, and many of the special features that add value to today’s meetings.
5. Exhibiting. I’ve never been an exhibitor. At each meeting the Policy Program has a desk at the AMS Resource Center, but our contributions are barely worthy of the name. But as a staffer, I’ve developed a powerful appreciation for what the exhibitors do to add value to the meeting. On the exhibits floor, the content of all those talks on satellite instruments and radar algorithms and surface sensors comes to life. Members get a flavor of the exploding variety and utility of private-sector services. And the Monday- and Wednesday evening receptions on the exhibits floor provide a venue for even more networking and informal discussion. It’s an incubator for business and ideas. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The private sector makes significant financial contributions to the health and the spirit of the entire enterprise. If you’re enjoying a cup of coffee between sessions or a bite to eat at a committee meeting, chances are good you have a contribution from the private-sector to thank. Most of us take this for granted when we should instead be walking from booth to booth in the exhibits area thanking all those corporations and agencies who make the Society’s meetings possible and relevant.
4. International. Another dimension I’ve come to appreciate only belatedly? The special influence provided by our international members and partners. The few dozen heads of National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS’s) worldwide who come to our meeting from every continent are small in number, but they punch above their weight. Their engagement reshapes the Annual Meetings fundamentally. In aggregate, they represent additional markets for products and services, and so swell the ranks and contributions of exhibitors. They attract U.S. domestic leadership – public, private, and university – to the meeting. They and the scientists who come from abroad enable a worldwide dialog.
3. WeatherFest. Why not, then, also draw in the public from the city where we’re holding the meeting? Over the past decade, we’ve started to do this, with gratifying results. Nowadays, each year on the opening Sunday of the Meeting, hundreds, if not thousands, of families and individuals from the local area drop by. They meet their broadcast meteorologists and other area personalities. They accumulate a little swag. Along the way, the kids (and maybe the occasional adult) pick up a few tidbits on weather, climate, and water. Everybody wins. An example? Picture kids getting a plate and some Play-Doh. They shape a coastal area and a coastline out of the Play-Doh. They surround that coast with water on the plate, add a few sugar cubes to simulate coastal construction. A hair dryer simulates a hurricane. The storm surge and spray damages the sugar cubes…don’t you wish you were here? Everyone has a good time, but more importantly, young people are getting jazzed about science…and about reducing disaster losses.
2. Celebrate the progress of science and technology. Step back…give yourself just a little distance from all the individual elements and myriad proceedings…and you’ll find in the sweep of what you see something to celebrate…the extraordinary pace with which our disciplines and their related technologies are advancing. The progress is far quicker than forty years ago, and continuing to accelerate. Truly exhilarating! To be part of such continuing accomplishment?  Nothing else in life compares…
Except for…
1. The best reason for being here…the application of this accumulating body of knowledge for the benefit of mankind, not just at any single meeting, but over a sustained period of years. You see, the AMS, unlike any purely scientific society, considers such application an integral part of the community’s work…not just a hoped-for side benefit. To see the natural science and the social science come together, to see their integration into decision support in agriculture, emergency management, energy, environmental protection, public health, transportation, water resource management, and much more? To be part of a close-knit, high-minded community that holds this shared value above all others and ahead of self?
Priceless.

Seize the Janus Moment

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by Mark S. Brooks, State Climate Office of North Carolina
Ancient Romans worshiped and studied many gods. One such god was Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions. Janus is often depicted with two heads facing opposite directions. They simultaneously peer into the past and the future. He looked over pathways, causing all actions and presiding over all beginnings. Our first month, January, was named after Janus. The symbolic icon of Janus is a great metaphor for the 92nd AMS Annual Meeting’s theme – “how we got here and where we’re going”. Asking that question can lead one to think about the transition from past to future and put into motion a plan to bridge the gap between research and operations. I call that a Janus moment.
Where We’ve Been. Technological innovations enabled quick advancement of weather and climate services. Radar, satellites, numerical weather prediction–each helped revolutionize meteorology and its related disciplines. But to get here, the development and understanding of these technologies had to transition from research to operations. Each had a Janus moment.
Today, as our sensitivities to climate variability become more pronounced and the demand for climate data and forecasts steadily increases, it is time for another major push of innovation – a new Janus moment. I believe that weather and climate services can help society adapt to climate change by helping people mitigate its negative impacts and capitalize on its favorable impacts.
The Role of Innovation in Weather and Climate Services. My favorite category of innovation is the disruptive or discontinuous kind, which addresses existing market needs or creates new markets by enabling customers to solve problems in new ways. Such innovations change the world. We can all think of many examples. In the early days of the Internet, I tried to be disruptively innovative by creating weatherimages.org. Although now woefully outdated, the website changed the way people consumed radar imagery, surface maps, satellite imagery, forecast images, and the like. The site was ranked in the top 3% of the entire Internet in 1999 by Alexa Internet.
A new era of Weather and Climate Services is now possible — a discontinuous, disruptive, and transformative innovation helping weather and climate sensitive clients solve problems in new ways with new data products.
Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Weather and climate services should not be making faster horses.
Steps to Accelerate Innovation in Weather and Climate Services: 3E’s. So how do we answer the demands of society without simply producing faster horses?
1. Be engaged. At the end of many episodes of Star Trek TNG, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard sets course for a new destination and embarks on his next mission with his favorite word:

It was a metaphor for the entire story: to learn, teach, and improve humanity. Engagement, in the context of weather and climate services, is about increasing society’s climate literacy, learning about society’s weather and climate sensitivities, and building a mutually beneficial relationship so that data and science can be made useful. Engagement also includes increased collaboration with one another. Transdisciplinary engagement, that which transfers knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, is also needed to create a new generation of weather and climate services.
2. Be entrepreneurial. This may be peculiar and even uncomfortable to many of us, especially in government. However, Rosabeth Kanter writes in her book, On the Frontiers of Management, “Innovative accomplishments are strikingly entrepreneurial.” Entrepreneurship is about creating something new with value by demonstrating initiative, creative thinking, and by organizing social and economic mechanisms to turn resources and situations into practical outcomes. Saras Sarasvathy crisply summarizes the entrepreneurial way of thinking as

believing in a yet-to-be-made future that can be shaped by human action and realizing that, to the extent that such action can control the future, one need not expend energy trying to predict it. It is much more useful to understand and work with the people who are engaged in the decisions and actions that bring it into existence.

Entrepreneurial characteristics for weather and climate service providers include: communications excellence, focus, transparency, adaptive ability, cohesive partnerships, hands on management, and effective incentives. Entrepreneurial behavior is also tolerant of ambiguity and failure. Blogger Max Pucher, a long-time IBM engineer said as much recently:

Tom Watson had called a VP to his office to discuss a failed development project that lost IBM in the range of $10 million. Expecting to be fired, the VP presented his letter of resignation. Tom Watson Jr. just shook his head: “You are certainly not leaving after we just gave you a $10 million education.” In those days, failure was not a problem at IBM as long as it was turned into a learning experience….During my tenure in IBM’s Havant plant I had learned that I needed to turn my thinking upside down: Not failure is the outlier, but success is! Trying to understand why we couldn’t fully control and predict how a complex system would work led me to learn about evolutionary concepts and complex adaptive systems.

Most weather and climate service providers cannot afford such mistakes, yet the ability to tolerate failure and learn from it is critical because it will happen and enables failure to occur at earlier and cheaper stages of investment.
3. Evaluate progress. Success is a moving target. To make continuous improvements, all weather and climate service providers should employ a balanced suite of metrics and performance tools to evaluate performance. And of course we need to continue efforts to quantify the value of weather and climate services.
I am excited about the 2012 Annual Meeting because several sessions and papers strike me as embracing at least one of the above components. For example, the session about Risk, Vulnerability, and Decision Support for Weather and Climate Hazards on Tuesday (11 a.m., Room 335/336);  a papers by Awdesh Sharma et al. (11:15 a.m., Thursday, Room 242) on NOAA/NESDIS’s reasearch-to operations process, and the Town Hall (Monday, 12:15 p.m., Room 244) following up on themes from the AMS Summer Community Meeting on building a stronger weather and climate enterprise. I look forward to these talks and many others.
Where We’re Going
Back in the heyday of weatherimages.org, I was interviewed by a radio station about my prediction for the future of weather and climate information delivery. My answer: “One day, we will be able to simply push a button and get timely, relevant information for where ever you are and whatever you’re doing.” I stand by this prediction. Timely, relevant, actionable, translated weather and climate information for the farmer in the field, the truck driver on the highway, the airline diverting planes, the insurance company underwriting policies, the engineer constructing a building, the energy company trading watts, the municipality planning for future water demand, and yes, even the newly engaged couple picking a wedding date.
We see a growing, $1+ billion weather services industry. The same level of economic development is possible with climate services. Government, academia, and private sector each have a major role to play in growing this industry and making our world a better place.
That is where we’re going.
Make a Janus Moment
Janus moments are not exclusive to technology, science, or innovation. Janus moments may also be found within each of us. Ancient Romans viewed Janus as a representation of new beginnings and transitions. As you experience this week, think about how you got here and where you’re going. Meet people outside your area of expertise. Sit with someone new at each meal. If you’re following this conference from home, connect with your colleagues who are here and join the online discussions, on Facebook, Twitter, and in this blog. Where ever you are, consider how to bridge the gap between research and operations. Perhaps you will have a Janus moment.

Dealing With a Challenging Science Policy Environment

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by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director. Adapted from posts (here, here, here, and here) on the AMS Project,
Living on the Real World, discussing this week’s AMS workshop in Washington, D.C.
Our community suddenly finds the larger host society fiscally constrained and bitterly divided politically. And this seems to be true not just for America but for much of the world. The sources of funding that have fueled the progress in Earth observations, science and services in recent decades are not drying up – but they are looking to be intermittent, unreliable. And reductions – perhaps deep cuts – may well lie ahead. Historic bipartisan support for our work is fraying a bit; here and there we experience criticism, some of it harsh.
We face a twofold challenge. The work we do has never been more urgent…but the underpinnings for that work are in jeopardy. And – this is sobering – it seems this conjunction may not be accidental. Instead, these twin trials are related; they stem from the same cause. A population of seven billion people, on its way to nine, is straining both the Earth’s resources and its own intrinsic innovative capacity. And all of us are getting nervous and snippy with one another. If we’re not careful, worse lies ahead.
Discussions this past week at the AMS workshop on Earth Observations, Science, and Services for the 21st Century showed two divergent approaches to this challenging societal context. What was striking, without going into the details, was the contrast between work underway to (1) augment networks of surface meteorological sensors and (2) to deploy sensors in space. Both have had their recent successes. Shortly we’ll enjoy a substantial augmentation of surface carbon dioxide measurements – far sooner than most people had thought possible. And the successful NPP launch clears a huge hurdle for the world of aerospace and remote sensing of the Earth from space.
The distinction lies in what happens next. Those working on the surface networks see each sensor as seeding further sensors. They make comments like “…put this out in one state, and pretty soon other communities in that state will want their own sensor, and over time the network will build…” They’re looking to probing above the surface, characterizing not just conditions adjacent to the ground, but throughout the depth of the boundary layer (think the inversion layer that traps pollutants, or the layer just beneath cloud formation).
The folks at the satellite end find themselves by contrast on autopilot settings that don’t look as if they’ll change significantly until around 2025. The JPSS missions that will succeed NPP are scheduled to follow a script that’s relatively cut-and-dried. In the meantime, everything else in the host society that wants these space-based Earth observations will be morphing constantly, rapidly – if anything, at an accelerating rate. And this rigidity brings costs.
A big key? Being able to change direction…to recognize, acknowledge, and correct mistakes. How to accomplish this? Still up in the air.

A Pastime That Can't Be Postponed Due to Weather

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by William Hooke, Director, AMS Policy Program. Excerpted from a post on the AMS project, Living on the Real World.
Google the expression “Weather-Ready Nation” and you’ll see a rich set of offerings. That’s because the National Weather Service is using this label to describe a comprehensive initiative to make America safer in the face of weather hazards. Recall that America has what is arguably the most hazardous weather on the planet – as many winter storms as Canada, China, or Russia; as many hurricanes as southeast Asia, Japan, etc.; and a virtual lock on the world’s store of tornadoes. Nine separate weather disasters each totaling over a billion dollars in losses this year alone. So a Weather-Ready Nation? No trivial ambition.
But weather doesn’t have to be severe to be high-stakes.
The latest example? Yesterday’s decision by Major League Baseball to postpone the sixth (and possibly deciding) game of the World Series, originally scheduled for last night in St. Louis, until tonight.
Baseball games – even World Series games – have been called on account of rain before. What makes last night’s call unusual was that it was made several hours before game time, while the field was still dry – based on a forecast, rather than an unplayable fieldper se.
The sports press has been full of this story. Want a sample? You can find St. Louis coverage here and national coverage here. Discussion of the possible consequences, and the range of implications, has been extensive. Here’s a sample.
Some saw the decision to postpone this way: as diverting a potential disaster for Fox, the network carrying the game. A rain delay, and a game which might possibly decide the Series (the Texas Rangers are ahead of the Cardinals 3-2 in games) being concluded late, with trophies awarded only in the wee hours of the morning, after viewers had gone to bed, would not be Fox’s preferred outcome. Others noted that the one day delay expands the pitching options available to both managers; their starters have all gotten an additional day’s rest. Cardinals have had one more day to brood about the mis-communication between dugout and bullpen that hurt their chances in Game 5. The Texas Rangers, undoubtedly eager to wrap things up, have had to pace their hotel rooms an extra day.
It’ll be difficult to assess the impact of the decision; the World Series is not part of a controlled experiment. [We didn’t get to clone the teams and explore alternative universes, one in which they tried to play the game last night, and another when they played this evening.] But this Series has been so close that a one-day delay may well be seen to matter in hindsight.
And the funds at stake are substantial. The difference to individual players on the winning and losing teams amounts to something like $100,000 apiece. Team revenues for the Series also vary. But the real stakes become apparent the following year. The winners can look forward to increased season ticket sales, higher advertising revenues, a larger fan base and other economic plus-ups.
What’s striking in all this press coverage? No negativity about the NWS role. In fact, here’s a quote attributed to MLB executive vice president Joe Torre:  “It really wasn’t difficult because every single weather report that we’ve had for about three days has predicted rain during the game,” he said on MLB Network, adding that a good forecast for the next two days helped influence the move. “If we’re not right (with the early postponement), we wanted to make sure we were doing it on the safety side,” he said. “That’s why we called it so early.”
This takes us back to all that discussion over the summer about the importance of NOAA’s polar orbiting satellites to the day-to-day consistency in forecasts of approaching weather for decision-making. [You can find material from this blog here.] Note that baseball executives made the call based not just on the forecast for last night’s weather, but the outlook for St. Louis tonight and tomorrow night, in case a Game 7 is required.
This particular forecast was relatively visible nationally, but the fact is that our country uses National Weather Service forecasts to place multi-million-dollar bets every day. The smart money doesn’t wait for the weather to change. They’re acting on the forecasts of that change. Utilities forecast energy demand, not just for the country as a whole but region by region and metropolis by metropolis. Airlines are cancelling and rerouting flights based on weather predictions. Water resource managers are looking ahead to demands and stresses on their watersheds. Agribusiness is constantly adjusting its decisions on when, what and where to plant, the application of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, and how to hedge against sudden changes in international market supply and demand. The lists and the stakes are growing. The Nation grows more weather-ready by the day.
Play ball!

Bridging Disciplines: Joint Sessions at the 2012 Annual

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by Ward Seguin, 2012 AMS Annual Meeting Chair
For many years, organizers of the Annual Meeting have encouraged conferences to join forces to host joint sessions for the purpose of sharing presentations of mutual interest.  A few years ago, organizers of the Annual Meeting proposed themed joint sessions that focused on the theme of the Annual Meeting.
Concerned that conferences participating in the Annual Meeting might not understand the purpose of joint sessions and, in particular, themed joint sessions, this year’s organizers decided to start the planning process early. At the 2011 Annual Meeting in Seattle, organizers for the 2012 meeting met with all of the conference committees holding meetings in Seattle to encourage future participation in the themed joint sessions.  This was followed by e-mail contacts in February designed to reach those conference committees not present at the Seattle meeting.
In April, the conferences were asked to propose themed joint sessions focusing on  AMS President Jon Malay’s 2012 theme of “Technology in Research and Operations–How We Got Here and Where We’re Going.“ The response from the conferences was outstanding, as 20 themed joint sessions are currently being organized. With so many conferences holding meetings in January, themed joint sessions encourage sharing of information among the government, academia, and the private sector in diverse subdisciplines. Participants are able to share their experiences of common problems and solutions, and attendees are able to take in papers related to the theme without having to move from one session to another.
Because the 2012 Annual Meeting theme is so broad, the range of topics being covered by the joint sessions provides an excellent opportunity for diverse conferences to come together. For example, one session–jointly hosted by the 10th Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications to Environmental Science and the 18th Conference on Satellite Meteorology, Oceanography, and Climatology–is titled  “Artificial Intelligence Methods Applied to Satellite Remote Sensing.” Another themed joint session, “Recent Advances in Data Management Technologies and Data Services,” will be hosted by the 28th Conference on Interactive Information Processing Systems (IIPS) and the Second Conference on Transition of Research to Operations:  Successes, Plans, and Challenges. Still another session will focus on “Extreme Weather and Climate Change” and will be hosted by the Seventh Symposium on Policy and Socio-Economic Research, the 24th Conference on Climate Variability and Change, and the 21st Symposium on Education.
The format of themed joint session will include distinguished invited speakers, panel discussions, and submitted papers. Jon Malay’s chosen theme is allowing some very diverse conferences to focus together on some of today’s research and operations challenges through technology.
The deadline for abstract submissions for these sessions is August 1, and abstracts can be submitted on the AMS website at the abstracts submissions page.

Oklahoma Mesonet Station Stands Tall in EF-4 Tornado

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The morning after the tornado: still standing tall.

by Chris Fiebrich, Oklahoma Climatological Survey
It was bound to happen eventually.  The Oklahoma Mesonet has 120 weather stations across the state, about one every 30 km.  Since 1994, we’ve had a lot of close calls with severe weather, but the highest wind speed ever recorded had been 113 m.p.h. at our Lahoma station during a thunderstorm in August 1994.  That all changed on May 24, 2011 when a strong tornado clipped our El Reno station.   The graph below shows that winds gusted to 151 m.p.h. shortly after 4:20 PM.  Along with the wind gust, the station recorded a strong pressure drop.

At this time, the tornado has been rated as “at least EF4”  (see http://www.srh.noaa.gov/oun/?n=events-20110524-pns1 for the latest on the tornado ratings).  The tornado was on the ground for 75 miles.  It’s center was likely several hundred yards north of our station as it blew through.
A piece of flying debris sheared off the station’s 2 m anemometer just after it reported a wind gust of 126 mph.  The station’s temperature aspirator was also damaged, and one of the tower’s guy wires was snapped. A piece of metal debris was found wrapped around the tower. Despite minor damage, the tower stood tall and the official 10 m anemometer survived in perfect condition with a piece of metal debris wrapped around it.  A large nearby tree was found uprooted and thrown across the roadway.
More pictures can be found on the Mesonet Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/mesonet.

Policy Buzz: Senate Hearing Follows Tornado Outbreak

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by Caitlin Buzzas, AMS Policy Program
On May 3, Dr. William Hooke, Director of the AMS Policy Program, testified before Senator John Rockefeller (D-WV) and other members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. He was joined by Bob Ryan, Senior Meteorologist at ABC7/WJLA-TV, Dr. Anne Kiremidjian of Stanford University and Dr. Clint Dawson of the University of Texas, together they discussed “America’s Natural Disaster Preparedness: Are Federal Investments Paying Off?”
As the hearing was convened in part as a response to the earthquake in Japan, Dr. Kiremidjian focused her testimony on earthquake and tsunami issues. Dr. Dawson discussed advances in storm surge modeling.
This hearing (full video here) took place soon after one of the worst weather disasters in the U.S. of the last century with tornadoes killing at least 327 in the South East. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this may have been the largest tornado outbreak in U.S. history. Although this disaster was horrific in terms of the many lives lost and the huge economic toll, the hearing gave our community the needed opportunity to highlight what we do and the importance of accurate weather forecasts and earth observation systems.
Dr. Hooke stated in his testimony that these systems and science play an especially important role in the United States:

Because of its size and location, the United States bears a unique degree of risk from natural hazards. We suffer as many winter storms as Russia or China, and as many hurricanes as China or Japan. Our coasts are exposed not just to storms but to earthquakes and tsunamis. Dust bowls and wildfire have shaped our history. And 70% of the world’s tornadoes, and some 90% of the truly damaging ones, occur on our soil.

Ryan emphasized in his testimony that amidst the many scientific improvements, the whole weather forecast process is a multisector enterprise that depends on the capabilities of, and cooperation with, Federal agencies.  The Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) is an example of that critical Federal capability. As Congress decides what to cut in the upcoming budget deliberations, programs such as the JPSS will have to get the recognition they deserve to keep functioning. The data and imagery obtained from JPSS will increase the timeliness and accuracy of public warnings and forecasts of climate and weather events, thus reducing the potential loss of life and property. This has a direct effect on the health and stability of our national economy. It is important, even in a time of economic hardship, to keep programs like JPSS fully functional for the long-term health of the country. Both Hooke and Ryan made this point. Said Ryan:

Some may argue that loss of polar orbiting data will not degrade our current weather/climate observing and forecasting skill . . . but, what if they are wrong! Polar and geostationary weather satellites are an integral and critical core element of providing very accurate weather forecasts and life saving planning and decision making for weather and other natural disasters from tornadoes and hurricanes to fires, drought, dangerous air quality and oil spills.

As Dr. Hooke highlighted in his testimony there are several other things that can be done to improve our current disaster preparedness:

  • Maintain our essential warnings system
  • Bring to bear not just meteorology and engineering, but also social science
  • Learn from experience
  • Build public-private partnerships
  • Explore No-Adverse Impact Policies for flood and other hazards
  • Track progress/keep score. (There’s more about this proposal on Dr. Hooke’s blog, Living on the Real World.)

The issues that our community deals with everyday, highlighted through a hearing of this kind, are not just important to the world of science and meteorology, but important to the health and stability of the American economy and public as a whole. I believe that Senator Rockefeller, Senator Nelson, Senator Boxer and others left the hearing with not only a greater understanding of our community and the important role that we play in the health of our country, but with a continued desire to highlight the importance of our work.

Neutralizing Some of the Language in Global Warming Discussions

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By Keith Seitter, Executive Director, AMS
The topic of anthropogenic global warming has become so polarized it is now hard to talk about it without what amounts to name-calling entering into the discussion. In blogs, e-mails, and published opinion pieces, terms like “deniers” and “contrarians” are leveled in one direction while “warmist” and “alarmist” are leveled in the other.  Both the scientific community and broader society have much to gain from respectful dialog among those of opposing views on climate change, but a reasonable discussion on the science is unlikely if we cannot find non-offensive terminology for those who have taken positions different than our own.
As Peggy Lemone mentioned in a Front Page post last week, some months ago, the CMOS Bulletin reprinted a paper originally published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences by Anderegg et al. that simply used the terms “convinced” and “unconvinced” to describe those who had been convinced by the evidence that anthropogenic climate change was occurring and those who had not been convinced. This terminology helps in a number of ways. First and foremost, it does not carry with it the baggage of value judgment, since for any particular scientific argument there is no intrinsically positive or negative connotation associated with being either convinced or unconvinced. In addition, this terminology highlights that we are talking about a scientific, evidence-based, issue that should be resolved through logical reasoning and not something that should be decided by our inherent belief system. (And for that reason, I work very hard to avoid saying someone does or does not “believe” in global warming, or similar phrases.)
The sense I have gotten is that those who do not feel that human influence is causing the global temperatures to rise would prefer to be called “skeptics.” However, I have tried to avoid using this term as a label for those individuals. Skepticism is a cornerstone upon which science is built. All of us who have been trained as scientists should be skeptics with respect to all scientific issues — demanding solid evidence for a hypothesis or claim before accepting it, and rejecting any position if the evidence makes it clear that it cannot be correct (even if it had, in the past, been well-accepted by the broader community).
I have seen some pretty egregious cases of individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics accepting claims that support their position with little or no documented evidence while summarily dismissing the results of carefully replicated studies that do not. On the other side, I have seen cases of climate scientists who have swept aside reasonable counter hypotheses as irrelevant, or even silly, without giving them proper consideration. Neither situation represents the way a truly skeptical scientist should behave.  All of us in the community should expect better.
We will not be able to have substantive discussions on the many facets of climate change if we spend so much time and energy in name-calling. And we really need to have substantive discussion if we are going to serve the public in a reasonable way as a community. Thus, it is imperative that we find some terminology that allows a person’s position on climate change to be expressed without implied, assumed, or imposed value judgments.
There may be other neutral terms that can be applied to those engaged in the climate change discussion, but “convinced” and “unconvinced” are the best I have seen so far. I have adopted this terminology in the hope of reducing some of the polarization in the discussion.