Studies of local TV news have been telling us this story for years: weather is what drives people to the media. Now, Nielsen Co. is saying the same thing about smart phone applications use. Weather app downloads rank near the top for all platforms.
Here’s a chart from their study, announced today at the AppNation conference in San Francisco, as reported by SDTimes.
The US Global Change Research Program published its “US National Climate Assessment Objectives, Proposed Topics, and Next Steps” (also available here in html) in the 7 September 2010 issue of the Federal Register. The program requests public comments on this document, which describes the objectives of the National Climate Assessment (NCA) process, provides an outline of the next NCA synthesis report (scheduled for publication in June 2013), and describes the next steps in planning for and implementing the NCA process. Public comments on this document will be evaluated and, if appropriate, used to inform the NCA structure and process. Updates on the NCA structure and process will be posted on the NCA web siteas they are available. Comments will also be provided to the Federal Advisory Committee for the NCA, the “National Climate Assessment Development and Advisory Committee,” when it is constituted this fall. All comments will be collated and posted on the NCA Web site. Please submit comments here no later than 11:59 PM EST, October 8, 2010.
Lawrence, Kansas, has been an epicenter of serious weather in the past–dating back at least to a killer tornado in 1913 and with numerous others documented there or nearby since. Right now, however, Lawrence has got to be the epicenter of the weather-art world. First an ongoing exhibit through October 4 at the Lawrence Percolator gallery entitled “Clouds Are Easy to Love” features works on the walls–and ceiling–inspired by things meteorological. Channel 6 Meteorologist Jennifer Schack gave a talk at the gallery about the science of clouds.
Meanwhile, a “flash” exhibit in a vacant downtown retail space lasting less than a month, through the end of this week, is featuring some cerebral and sensory explorations of themes that ought to sound familiar: “explores the material attributes of the passage of light and its blockage (through opacity and diffusion)…”
Called “TRANS*parent TRANS*lucent,” the show at 739 Massachusetts St. in Lawrence features a drawing/painting on suspended mylar called “Meteorology,” by Linnea Spransy. Writes reviewer Ryan LaFerney, "Meteorology," by Linnea Spransy.
[Spransy’s] work is about working within boundaries. She creates predetermined systems, underlying grids that her drawings and paintings are formed from. These grids serve as boundaries to be utilized and traversed. From these grids, which are determined by the artist, Spransy draws one single continuous line that blossoms into a labyrinth of molecular-looking abstractions. For Spransy, these limits generate surprise and even freedom. Meteorology is no different. The only difference is the physicality of the piece. It is experiential, like all of her "Maelstrom," by Linnea Spransy.
work, but warrants a visceral response and physical interaction. Suspended from the ceiling, Meteorology, outstretched in transparent layers, reaches out to engulf the viewer. It is an inviting work that calls one to investigate the whirlwind of orderly detail from both sides ….The viewing experience is rendered not as one of solitude but as one best experienced in good company. Spransy ends up giving value both to the creative act and to community.
Sounds a lot like some atmospheric scientists we know. A sampling of Spransy’s meteorologically oriented works, from her web site confirms the connection.
"Weak Potential Energy," by Linnea Spransy "The Spectra of Light Emitted," by Linnea Spransy "The Quantized Values of Angular Momentum," by Linnea Spransy.
Mountains are already hard to miss, often hard to avoid, but in meteorology their prominence is only growing right now, according to John Horel and David Whiteman, chairs of last week’s AMS Conference on Mountain Meteorolog. Whiteman pointed in particular to new opportunities for modelers and observationalists to work together, bringing in new people to the field:
We’ve found over time that the models have improved at a faster rate than the observational equipment has improved, so what we tend to find is that there are people who are able to make their models work on smaller length scales but they find that they don’t have the observations to really evaluate how well the models are working. That’s been good for our community because we’ve also now been able to have a number of programs that combine these high performance models with an observational program….For the first time we can start to look at the very small features.
For more of Whiteman and Horel’s discussion with The Front Page, check out these video interviews (with apologies to John for the brilliant Sierra light in Squaw Valley!) from the AMS YouTube Channel, Ametsoc:
And for a more “down in the trenches” view of mountain meteorology (come to think of it, a rather nice view from the resort patio, between sessions), here’s another interview, with Thomas Chubb, Neil Lareau, and Temple Lee, recently uploaded to Ametsoc on YouTube:
Astronomy has its Galaxy Zoo, in which citizen scientists across the internet–and hence the world–help professionals comb through millions of astronomical images in search of key celestial objects. Now the climate community may move toward creating what might end up being their own equivalent “Zoo” drawing on the vast resources of internet users to crunch temperature data.
At least that’s one of the possible outcomes of this week’s workshop in Exeter on developing global land surface temperature databases, which has been attracting considerably more media attention than most WMO workshops. Attendees include Google executives and Galaxy Zoo organizers who might help climatologists figure out a grassroots method to help digitize old ships logs and other climate data recovery efforts that require intensive processing.
On its YouTube channel, the UK Met Office, host of the workshop, posted the introduction from Peter Thorne, chair of the organizing committee:
Welcome back to school, kids. It’s the first day that your teacher has set up this newfangled “interactive whiteboard” in your classroom. She isn’t sure what you and your fellow first graders are going to make of internet connectivity and videos and powerpoints.
But as a budding meteorologist, you know what to do:
So yes, Doppler radar and a brief weathercast for your 6-year-old classmates. Here’s how teacher Stephannie Waller tells it:
I have a student meteorologist for the week & this bright student saw that what was on the promethean board was what he saw every morning on our computer when he checked the weather, so he asked, “Can I check the weather on that?” Seeing that it was a very teachable moment & that he could teach every other student how to be a meteorologist I said yes. So he clicked it on & then I asked him to click on the Doppler Radar (it was raining this morning & they would actually have something to watch) & then asked him to enlarge it & from there he went to town, like a natural.
While there’s plenty of disagreement amongst educators and parents about the value of smart boards, there should be no disagreement that this kid has a good start on an application for his AMS certification.
A Monthly Weather Review paper in press by Otto Hyvärinen and Elena Saltikoff notes that the widespread availability of weather photos on the internet presents an opportunity for meteorologists gathering storm data.
People of the generation born since 1982 have grown up using computer technology. Cell phones, text messaging and the Internet are all part of their culture. Now they are acquiring more and more devices with good quality cameras and Global Positioning System (GPS) abilities. They share photos and reports with friends and strangers alike. Typical messages can be divided into two categories: “this is what I saw” and “this is what happened to me”. At first glance, these data are unreliable, unorganized and uncontrolled. But the amount of data is huge and increasing and should not be ignored, and its reliability should be assessed.
Because shared photos on Flickr, for instance, are time-stamped and often with good location information, the authors were able to compare hailstorm identification using the online photos to gathering the same information the conventional way, with radar signatures.
As a result of this preliminary study, we think that further exploration of the use of Flickr photographs is warranted, and the consideration of other social media as data sources can be recommended.
Similar ideas were making the rounds at the AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta earlier this year. The Centers for Disease Control has been using Google search data to pinpoint influenza outbreaks (a Nature paper on the topic is cited in the new MWR article). Who knows? In the coming age of Web 3.0 the plodding old methods of gathering storm and climate data may go the way of hunter-gatherer societies. The information revolution may create myriad, as-yet-unimagined tools for the community–and not just as a means to deliver products.
Which brings us to the irony of using the habits of the populace to reinforce expertise, and a cautionary tale from Australian columnist Bryan Patterson that’s been making the rounds of the internet again these days:
An Aboriginal mate told me this story which maybe explains how the weather system really works.
It was April and the Aboriginals on a remote reserve asked their new elder if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was an elder in a modern society he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the sky he couldn’t’t tell what the winter was going to be like.
Nevertheless, to be on the safe side he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the tribe should collect firewood to be prepared. But being a practical leader, after several days he had an idea. He went to the telephone booth, called the Bureau of Meteorology and asked,
“Is the coming winter going to be cold?” The meteorologist responded, “It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold.”
So the elder went back to his people and told them to collect even more wood in order to be prepared. A week later he called the Bureau of Meteorology again.
“Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?” The meteorologist again replied, “Yes, it’s going to be a very cold winter.”
The elder again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find. Two weeks later the elder called the Bureau again.
“Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?” he asked. “Absolutely,” the man replied. “It’s looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters ever.”
“How can you be so sure?” the elder asked.
The weatherman replied,
“The Aboriginals are collecting firewood like crazy.”
Storm chasing is sometimes as much a gripping challenge of driving through nasty weather as it is a calculated pursuit of meteorological bounties.
So perhaps it’s not so surprising that it took a storm chaser…Dan Robinson’s his name…to start a web site about the fatal hazard of ice and snow on our roads. Over half of the weather-related deaths on American roads each year are in wintry conditions.
Robinson took the liberty of tacking road statistics into the preliminary NOAA numbers for weather hazards (recently released for 2009 here).
The effect is striking, indeed, and a good lead in to Bill Hooke’s report from a Federal Highway Administration workshop today on road weather and the future of intelligent transportation systems.
Clearly we’ve got a lot of work to do and a lot of lives to save…Hooke, the AMS Policy Program Director, makes the case and points out some of the bumps in the road to better weather safety in your car.
Ray Boylan, former chair of the AMS Broadcast Board, who died yesterday at age 76, was a Navy enlisted man who found his way into meteorology by a fluke. Maybe that’s why he never lost a homespun attitude toward celebrity and science that we ought to remember. Ray Boylan at his first station after retiring from Navy hurricane hunting.
After training at airman’s prep in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1953, Boylan was casting about for the next assignment when he noticed that the Aerographer’s mate school was in Lakehurst, New Jersey—near home and best of all near his girlfriend.
So it was off to New Jersey for a career in meteorology. The Navy service was his only formal training in weather, and included some 2,000 hours as a hurricane hunter flight meteorologist. First assignment—flying straight into Camille in 1969:
Back in those days the Navy had the low level mission and the Air Force had the high level mission. Whatever the lowest cloud level was, we went in below those so that I could see the sea surface to keep the wind just forward of the left wing. That’s how we navigated in. I remember a fellow at a Rotary meeting who asked,
‘How many times do you hit downdrafts?’
‘Just once.’
Realizing that viewers had a realistic yes/no experience with rain, Boylan resisted using PoPs on the air, according to today’s Charlotte Observer obituary:
“I’d rather say, ‘It’s going to be scattered like fleas on a bulldog’s back – and if you’re close, you’ll get bitten.’ Or, ‘like freckles scattered across a pretty girl’s face.'”
Lamenting the hype of local TV news these days, Boylan told the WeatherBrains on their 19 February 2008 podcast,
One of the things I see now, is that every weather system that approaches a tv market is a storm system. Not every weather system is a storm system, but that vernacular is there.
Sometimes the medium gets in the glow of the medium’s eye. It’s kind of a narcissistic thing. The media looks at itself as absolutely invaluable. And it can be invaluable, but not if the media thinks so.
The work of the on air forecaster is not to impress, but in
Trying to get the forecast as right as you possibly can. Building the trust of the audience so that they’ll forgive even when you are wrong, And there’s no one out there in our business who hasn’t been wrong, and won’t be again, including myself. …If you can build that confidence and trust base, they’ll forgive you some of the small ones if you get the big one.
Speaking of building trust, Lakehurst turned out pretty well for Boylan. Fifty-five years later he would say, “The science and the girl are still with me.”
(Click here to download the audio of the full 20-minute WeatherBrains interview with Boylan.)
Atmospheric science may not seem like a particularly subversive job, but from an information science perspective, it involves continually dismantling the infrastructure that it requires to survive. At least that’s the way Paul Edwards, Associate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan described climatology, and one other sister science, in an interesting hour-long interview on the radio show, “Against the Grain” last week. (Full audio is also available for download.)
In the interview Edwards describes how the weather observing and forecasting infrastructure works (skip to about the 29 minute mark if that’s familiar), then notes that climatology is the art of undoing all that:
To know anything about the climate of the world as a whole we have to look back at all those old [weather] records. …But then you need to know about how reliable those are. [Climate scientists] unpack all those old records and study them, scrutinize them and find out how they were made and what might be wrong with them–how they compare with each other, how they need to be adjusted, and all kinds of other things–in order to try to get a more precise and definitive record of the history of weather since records have been kept. That’s what I call infrastructural inversion. They take the weather infrastructure and they flip it on its head. They look at its guts.
In his book, The Vast Machine: Computer, Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, Edwards points out that people don’t realize how much of this unpacking—and with it multiple layers of numerical modeling–is necessary to turn observations into usable, consistent data for analysis and (ultimately) numerical weather and climate predictions. The relationship between data and models is complicated:
In all data there are modeled aspects, and in all models, there are lots of data. Now that sounds like it might be something specific to [climate] science, but …in any study of anything large in scope, you’ll find the same thing.
In part because of this “complicated relationship” between observations and models, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what scientists mean when they talk about “uncertainty” in technical terms rather than in the colloquial sense of “not knowing”. Says Edwards,
We will always keep on finding out more about how people learned about the weather in the past and will always find ways to fix it a little bit. It doesn’t mean [the climate record] will change randomly or in some really unexpected way. That’s very unlikely at this point. It means that it will bounce around within a range…and that range gets narrower and narrower. Our knowledge is getting better. It’s just that we’ll never fix on a single exact set of numbers that describes the history of weather.
Climatology is not alone in this perpetual unpacking of infrastructure. Economists seem like they know all about what’s going on today with their indexes, Gross Domestic Products, inflation rates, and money supply numbers. That’s like meteorology. But to put together an accurate history of the economy, they have to do a huge amount of modeling and historical research to piece together incongruous sources from different countries.
There is a thing called national income accounting that has been standardized by the United Nations. It wasn’t really applied very universally until after the Cold War….Just to find out the GDP of nations you have to compare apples and oranges and find out what the differences are.
And to go back as recently as the 1930s?
You would have to do the same things the climate scientists have to do…invert the infrastructure.
Right now, however, Lawrence has got to be the epicenter of the weather-art world. First an ongoing exhibit through October 4 at the Lawrence Percolator gallery entitled “Clouds Are Easy to Love” features works on the walls–and ceiling–inspired by things meteorological. Channel 6 Meteorologist Jennifer Schack gave a talk at the gallery about the science of clouds.
