For almost 20 years, the electronic journal Earth Interactions (EI) has been publishing interdisciplinary research pertaining to the interactions between the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere in the context of global issues or global change. The diversity of EI‘s subject matter can by seen by perusing a list of its titles; a few recent examples include:
Case Studies of Tropical Cyclones and Phytoplankton Blooms over Atlantic and Pacific Regions
Effects of Topography on Assessing Wind Farm Impacts Using MODIS Data
A Spatially Distributed Model to Simulate Water, Energy, and Vegetation Dynamics Using Information from Regional Climate Models
The Ancient Blue Oak Woodlands of California: Longevity and Hydroclimatic History
The Influence of Loop Current Position on Winter Sea Surface Temperatures in the Florida Straits.
A joint publication of the AMS, the American Geophysical Union, and the Association of American Geographers, Earth Interactions has recently made some significant changes. While the journal will continue to be produced by all three organizations, as of January 1 the AMS has assumed all editorial responsibilities for it, from the submission process through to its publication. EI will set a flat publication fee of $1,200 for every article accepted for publication, with partial or full page-charge waivers available for those with funding limitations. And EI is now an open-access journal, meaning that all articles–past, present, and future–are available free of charge to all readers. This continues the Society’s commitment to providing widespread access to research published in AMS journals; research articles in the Bulletin are also completely open-access, and all other AMS journals provide open access to articles that are more than two years old.
EI was an early leader in making interdisciplinary research the focus of the journal, and providing open access to its articles is another example of the innovative spirit with which the journal is produced. The AMS and its publication partners hope these changes will help disseminate Earth Interactions research to the broadest possible audience, as well maximize the influence and impact of the journal. We invite readers to explore EI here, and authors can submit a manuscript by choosing the Earth Interactions link at this page.
News
Annual Meeting Session to Feature Solar Energy Contest Winners
The AMS Solar Energy Prediction Contest brought together participants from around the world to tackle the problem of improving solar energy forecasting. The contest was held on Kaggle , a website for hosting worldwide data mining and machine learning contests. Participants used a set of NOAA Global Ensemble Forecast System reforecasts as input for statistical and machine learning models that predicted the total daily solar energy at 98 Oklahoma Mesonet sites. Over the four-month span of the contest, 157 teams from six continents submitted over 2,500 sets of predictions. The winners were:
First Place:
Lucas Eustaquio Gomes da Silva (Belo Horizonte, Brazil) and
Gilberto Titericz Jr. (São José dos Campos, Brazil)
Second Place:
Benjamin Lazorthes (Toulouse, France)
Third Place:
Owen Zhang (New York, New York)
Top Student Winner:
Gilles Louppe (Liège, Belgium)
The first-place, second-place, and student winners will present their methods at a special session (Wednesday, February 5, 1:30-2:30 p.m., Room C204) of the AMS Annual Meeting. Specialists in renewable energy and data science as well as all interested attendees are invited to learn about the methods used in the contest and to discuss what value the contest results may provide for forecasts of renewable energy and other phenomena.
The contest is jointly sponsored by the 12th Conference on Artificial and Computational Intelligence and its Applications to the Environmental Sciences; the 22nd Conference on Probability and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences; and the Fifth Conference on Weather, Climate, and the New Energy Economy.
You can find more information about the contest here. The winners’ model approaches and codes are available here.
AMS Announces New President-Elect and Councilors
The AMS announced this week that Alexander E. “Sandy” MacDonald is the new AMS president-elect and will take over as the Society’s president in January of 2015.
MacDonald is the director of the Earth System Research Laboratory and the chief science advisor for NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. His career has focused on advancing science and technology toward the improvement of services. His leadership role with NOAA dates back to the 1980s, when he led a group within NOAA’s research laboratories that developed and tested systems to bring data streams and models together for operational forecasters. He received the Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award for his role in the development of the National Weather Service Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) model in 1993.
In 1998, he earned the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award after working with Vice President Al Gore to start the GLOBE program, a web-based initiative that promotes science education in classrooms across the world.
More recently, MacDonald invented Science on a Sphere®–a multimedia system using high-speed computers, advanced imaging techniques, and strategically placed projectors to display full-color animated images of satellite, geophysical, and astronomical data on a sphere–which is being placed in museums and science centers around the world. In 2007, he was awarded a Meritorious Presidential Rank Award for his invention. (Science on a Sphere exhibits will be the subject of a presentation at the upcoming Annual Meeting in Atlanta.) MacDonald has also led efforts within NOAA to use Unmanned Aircraft Systems to improve the accuracy of weather and climate predictions. He received a Distinguished Presidential Rank Award for his leadership of global modeling efforts at the Earth System Research Laboratory.
A native of Montana, MacDonald now lives in Boulder, Colorado.
The AMS also announced the results of the councilor elections and the Council’s selection of a fifth councilor. The new AMS councilors are Heidi Cullen of Climate Central, Steve Hanna, CCM, of Hanna Consultants, Susan Jasko of California University of Pennsylvania, Dennis Lettenmaier of the University of Washington, Michael Morgan of the National Science Foundation, and Wendy Schreiber-Abshire of UCAR’s COMET Program.
BAMS Report Editors Named "Leading Thinkers" of 2013
The September issue of BAMS included a special supplement, “Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective,” edited by Thomas Peterson, Martin Hoerling, and Stephanie Herring of NOAA and Peter Stott of the UK Met Office. This was the second edition of this annual investigation of the causes of recent extreme events. The supplement consists of short, concise studies by various author teams and thus serves as a demonstration of the latest methodologies for attributing specific events to longer term trends in climate. For their work on the report, Peterson, Hoerling, Herring, and Stott are lauded in this month’s issue of Foreign Policy magazine as “Leading Global Thinkers of 2013.”
Foreign Policy called the report “a breakthrough in climate science” for connecting extreme events like Hurricane Sandy to human-influenced climate change. The magazine praised the report’s four editors for “point[ing] problem-solvers in the right direction” on better understanding the causes of extreme weather and climate events. Upon learning about the honor, the four noted that the recognition highlights the value that studying extreme events can provide to global security and sustainability.
“It is clearly an acknowledgement that attribution of extreme events is an important scientific topic—that the results of event attribution research can help guide real-world, climate-smart actions,” Peterson told Climate.gov.
The editors also noted that the tribute “honors the collective effort” of all climate scientists studying extreme events, and specifically the 18 different research groups that contributed to the BAMS report. Of course, extreme events will be a featured topic at the AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta in February, as the theme of the meeting is “Extreme Weather–Climate and the Built Environment: New Perspectives, Opportunities, and Tools.”
Foreign Policy‘s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013 are divided into 10 categories ranging from “the innovators” and “the healers” to “the artists” and “the decision-makers.” The coeditors of the BAMS report were cited in “the naturals” category. Others who made the list of 100 include Vladimir Putin, Pope Francis, the Mars Rover Team, Mark Zuckerberg, Shinzo Abe, and the IPCC. Foreign Policy will be honoring the 100 Global Thinkers at a special event this Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
Watch for the third extreme-events supplement to be released with BAMS next September.
Explore the Annual Meeting with New Mobile App
There is almost 4 million square feet of space in the Georgia World Congress Center–the home of the 94th AMS Annual Meeting. The meeting will feature more than 1,500 oral presentations, close to 1,000 poster presentations, about 100 exhibitors in the main exhibit hall, 45 special events, 36 conferences and symposia, and 18 town hall meetings.
That’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot of activity to keep track of. And we haven’t even mentioned the Student Conference, short courses, lectures…and of course, the most important number of all: approximately 3,500 attendees just like you. 
The point is that there will be a lot going on at the meeting–so much that you could probably use a little help to keep track of it all. That’s where the new 94th Annual Meeting app for mobile devices comes in. It provides lists of sessions and events, abstracts of presentations, exhibitor information, and maps of the venue. It includes a scheduler that will allow you to set up your day-to-day calendar. It allows you to communicate with other attendees and it provides access to Twitter and Facebook activity. It links to news, photos, and videos related to the meeting that will be regularly updated. In sum, it does a lot to help make your experience at the meeting more enjoyable and more convenient.
The app is now available for iPhones and iPads (search the app store for “AMS 2014”), Android devices (search the play store for “AMS 2014”), and Blackberry and Windows phones (point your browser to http://app.core-apps.com/ams2014).
Early-Career Professionals to Come Together in Atlanta
The Board for Early Career Professionals (BECP) was created in 2012 to better meet the needs of AMS members who have completed their degrees, landed or are pursuing their first job, and who are looking for opportunities to advance their careers through professional development opportunities, networking, and support through a variety of AMS-sponsored activities. At the 2013 AMS Annual Meeting in Austin, the BECP hosted the First Annual AMS Conference for Early Career Professionals. It was attended by more than 50 upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and a cross-section of AMS members entering fields throughout the weather enterprise.
“Our inaugural conference in Austin was a resounding success and demonstrated the Society’s commitment to supporting early-career members,” says BECP chairperson Andrew Molthan. “For 2014 in Atlanta, we have two outstanding conference chairs–Erik Pytlak and Matt Lacke–who have arranged a series of focused, interactive group and panel discussions targeting professional development. We’ll have great information and feedback from mid- and late-career members of all sectors, candid conversations on the topics you’re interested in, and a chance to interact with the AMS leadership team. It will be a great opportunity to network with your colleagues while bolstering your technical skills with other ‘soft skills’ required for success in the workplace.”
The Second Annual AMS Conference for Early Career Professionals will take place from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, 2 February 2014, as part of the 94th AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. The conference will kick off with rotating group discussions led by professionals in the atmospheric sciences. The focus will be on what to do after getting that first job and what skills to consider developing. Topics will include how to keep a current job, how to get the next job, how to become a leader, and how to handle working with others.
The second half of the conference will include two interactive panel discussions. One panel with AMS leadership will discuss how the Society can benefit members who are beginning their careers in the atmospheric sciences. The second panel with other early- and midcareer meteorologists from the private, academic, government, and television sectors will discuss early-career experiences and offer advice on topics brought up by attendees.
Following the conference, attendees and other Annual Meeting participants are invited to attend the Fourth Annual AMS Reception for Early Career Professionals planned for Sunday evening.
For more details, visit the Early Career Professional Conference program online here. Additional information on the BECP can be found on Facebook, in the July 2012 issue of BAMS, and in Q&A articles with early-career professionals in recent issues of BAMS.
A New Kind of Climate Model Project
Many scientists these days are asking how they can better communicate their research to the public. One group of climate researchers has found a solution–by putting themselves into the spotlight (literally) in the 2014 Climate Models wall calendar.
Scheduled for release this December, the calendar will include pictures of 13 climate scientists as well as information about them, such as their favorite dataset or climate phenomenon. Their ultimate goal, according to their website, is to “increase awareness of climate change and its impacts by engaging the public with scientists and what they’re learning about Earth’s climate.” In the process, the scientists reveal a side of themselves that most of the public doesn’t regularly get to see, and they hope to inspire colleagues to be equally creative in sharing their research with the public. You can get a sneak preview of a few of the models in the video below.
In addition to their work in front of the cameras, the scientists, who represent Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, will also be presenting a poster about their novel communication efforts at December’s AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
You can help support the calendar by donating to its Kickstarter campaign.
One Year Later, Sandy Still Resonates
The scars from Superstorm Sandy remain evident, even a year after it blasted the North Atlantic coast. In some areas, the cleanup and rebuilding continue in very tangible ways, while for others, the damage cannot simply be repaired with tools and lumber. And while the healing continues, so also does the effort throughout the scientific and emergency planning communities to understand exactly what happened—and to ensure we’re better prepared for the next storm.
At NCAR, scientists have been studying simulations of Sandy in the Advanced Hurricane WRF, NCAR’s hurricane-oriented version of the Weather Research and Forecasting model. Some of their research was discussed at August’s AMS Conference on Mesoscale Meteorology, and a paper detailing their work will be published shortly in Monthly Weather Review. Their key finding was that Sandy combined elements of many familiar phenomena that “hadn’t been previously shown to come together in such a way near a major coastline,” according to NCAR’s Bob Henson, who detailed the findings in this article. He wrote:
Strong winter storms at sea sometimes develop pockets of warm air within their cold cores—a process known as warm seclusion, first characterized by Shapiro and Daniel Keyser. However, in this case, the warm air being secluded was already present in Sandy’s inner core. This is the first time such a dramatic warm seclusion has been documented in a landfalling U.S. hurricane.
While Superstorm Sandy was a highly unusual phenomenon from a scientific standpoint, it also presented new and unique challenges in other ways; for example, its path through the northeast United States took it through heavily populated–and in some cases, particularly vulnerable–areas. Sandy’s impact on the built environment makes it an especially appropriate example of the theme of the 2014 AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta. During that meeting, the lessons that Sandy reveals about future extreme events will be explored at a special conference titled “Superstorm Sandy and the Built Environment: New Perspectives, Opportunities and Tools.” This conference will focus on three complementary elements of the storm: prediction and preparedness; response and recovery; and, particularly, new perspectives, opportunities, tools, and imperatives for the future built environment. The broad range of topics to be discussed include storm evolution and prediction; communication about the storm through the media; impacts on lives, property, and infrastructure; and preparation and response. The complete schedule for the conference can be found here.
Share Ideas on Climate, Influence Policy Options
The Front Page received the following note from John Nielsen-Gammon, Regents Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University; Texas State Climatologist; and a Fellow of AMS:
A Message To Fellow Physical Scientists
I’m part of a new journalistic endeavor called the Climate Change National Forum and Review. The purpose of this web site will be to provide a public forum wherein scientists can discuss the latest research on climate change and share and debate ideas on aspects of climate change especially relevant to policymaking. When the second phase kicks in, policy experts will join the discussion and compare the benefits and costs of possible responses.
I know what you’re thinking: “This sounds an awful lot like the IPCC.” Well, it’s not. Nor is it intended to replace the IPCC in any way. It has a different purview and a different set of goals.
- The IPCC is an international body. The CCNFR is focused on issues facing the United States.
- The IPCC scientists are selected from nominees from various countries. The CCNFR scientists consist of anyone who contributes regularly and constructively to the discussion.
- The IPCC produces reports every few years, whose summaries are edited and ratified by political representatives. The CCNFR web site is a living document, continuously updated to account for the latest science, and not subject to political interference.
- The IPCC’s purview is anthropogenic climate change. The CCNFR’s purview is climate change in all its causes and manifestations. Would it make sense to only adapt to anthropogenic climate change?
- The IPCC reports are written by experts within their subject fields. The CCNFR will draw upon the expertise and experience of scientists from a wide range of fields, not just insiders.
- The public gets to see the IPCC final report. The public gets to see scientists grappling with, understanding, and debating the issues.
For me, this last point is an important one. The public can benefit tremendously from being able to see how scientists think and reason scientifically. We ask them to trust our collective scientific wisdom without allowing them to see how we evaluate conflicting or flawed evidence and develop judgments. Presently, the only extensive example of this available to the public is the set of emails from Climategate.
Why should you participate? First, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of climate science. Perhaps you’ve just taken the IPCC reports on faith, trusting the experts to do a good job. Whether they did or not, you will be better able to articulate the issues and explain them to others after exchanging ideas, digging into some of the primary literature, and fleshing out any questions that might be nagging you in the back of your mind.
It should be obvious by now that you don’t need to be a climate scientist to participate, as long as you have a suitable technical background. Indeed, we need at least some people who know relatively little about the state of the art of climate science, for their intellectual journey while participating in the CCNFR is similar to the journeys we hope dedicated lay readers will take. Outsiders to climate science can better spot the unspoken assumptions and unjustified conventions.
Your learning will come through the course of online debate and discussion with other scientists. As you probably know from personal experience, discussion with other scientists is often the absolute best way to come to grips with a contentious or controversial scientific issue. Along the way, you will develop skills as a writer for an outside audience.
Finally, you will be doing a public service, simultaneously helping to educate the public about climate change and about science in general.
On the negative side, it requires time, though not a whole lot. We’re only asking for participants to contribute new essays once a month, plus participate in some of the online discussions with other scientists. Compared to starting your own blog, this is a relatively easy way to bring your ideas and judgment into public view.
Scientists who think they know everything about climate change are not welcome to participate. If you’re an expert in a particular branch and want to broaden your knowledge, or even if this is something outside your expertise entirely so that you have a lot you want to learn, then come join us.
The link above that John provides is a beta form of the CCNFR web site. To facilitate your postings explaining, debating, and discussing climate science–and to keep the site tied to issues in the news and policymaking–the CCNFR hopes to provide a steady stream of news and statements culled even-handedly from the media by a professional journalist.
As such, this is not only a time to consider getting in on the ground floor of a new public outreach project but also a time to consider making a donation. The CCNFR hopes to raise more than $60,000 to get a journalist on board soon.
AMS Glossary Goes Mobile
The AMS Glossary of Meteorology continues to evolve over time. Originally published in book form in 1959, with a second edition in 2000, the Glossary has more recently been available online for AMS members. Now, online and mobile versions of the Glossary are available to all.
The idea of an electronic, open-access, wiki-based version of the Glossary was presented to the AMS Council last fall by then-Publications Commissioner David Jorgensen, then-STAC Commissioner Mary Cairns, current STAC Commissioner Ward Seguin, and AMS Publications Director Ken Heideman. The Council approved the recommendation and appointed Cairns to a three-year term as chief editor of the new Glossary.
The online version was made freely available on the web earlier this year. With the launch of the mobile version last month, the Glossary is now even more accessible to students, young professionals, and others utilizing the newest technologies.
The electronic version of the Glossary has a convenient look-up interface and facilitates reader feedback. As chief editor, Cairns manages peer review of those suggested changes–including corrections and new terms–before they are approved. Initial response to the wiki aspect of the site has been very positive; a number of revisions and new terms have already been completed, suggesting that users are beginning to look at the Glossary as a “living document” that can regularly be revised, and therefore will remain up-to-date well into the future.