News

The AMS Annual Meeting: Much More than Science

The Annual Meeting is upon us! This year, we return to the beautiful city of New Orleans expecting yet another great meeting full of stimulating ideas, valuable information, and new products.
The Annual Meeting is well known for bringing together more than 3,000 scientists, researchers, professionals, educators, students, and others across the weather, water, and climate community. The more than 2,000 presentations and 900 posters cover an incredible array of topics and disciplines that represent the cutting edge of scientific thinking, technology, research, collaboration, and understanding.  Rue_Bourbon_street
Yet you probably realize the success of the meeting goes beyond merely showcasing vital science and services. The Annual Meeting is also a great opportunity to engage in networking and career development for early-career, midcareer, and even late-career professionals. We hear every year from attendees who tell us how much networking means to them, and how much they appreciate a chance to meet with peers and colleagues, some of whom they see only this one time a year.
The weather enterprise has grown and changed immensely over the past decade, and many expect that to continue in the years to come. Today, we see areas of science coming together more intensively than ever to share, work, and collaborate. People in fields like energy, agriculture, transportation, and the social sciences work closely with physical scientists. These are important developments for those who are interested in starting–or changing–their careers.
This year’s meeting offers attendees many opportunities to listen to talks and presentations on careers in the public, private, and academic sectors across the enterprise.
Sunday’s Conference for Early Career Professionals will feature numerous helpful discussions—from advice on networking and interviewing to help with finding a mentor and mastering “soft skills.” The conference will also include a panel discussion of professionals who will share their perspectives on atmospheric sciences careers.
The AMS Board for Early Career Professionals will also host a Town Hall Meeting on Monday on “ ‘Outside the Box’ Skillsets for Staying Relevant and Landing the Next Job,” which will highlight skills that may not be required in an academic curriculum, but could be valuable in a resume.
Wednesday’s Town Hall Meeting on “Demystifying Careers in the Atmospheric Sciences” will present an overview of employment in the weather, water, and climate sciences. What skill sets are most important to employers?  What employment trends and changes are occurring, and what are some areas of future growth? This meeting will explore those and other career-related questions.
For budding broadcasters, Tuesday’s Town Hall Meeting on “The Work Behind the Scenes” will provide a glimpse at some of the research broadcast meteorologists work on when they’re not in front of the camera—showing that there’s more to the job than may meet the eye.
And for students, this Saturday’s Career Fair will allow attendees of the AMS Student Conference to view available job opportunities, network with government-agency and private-industry employees, meet graduate school recruiters, and schedule interviews with school representatives and potential employers.
This is just a sampling of the career-related events taking place during the week. The Annual Meeting is a great chance to better connect to your career goals and directions. It’s also a great opportunity to meet others while networking with peers and colleagues engaged in the work of benefitting society with the science of weather, water, and climate.
 

Flowing with the AMS Annual Meeting Theme

The 96th AMS Annual Meeting is just around the corner, and there are many reasons to be excited about spending a week devoted to making connections across the weather, water, and climate enterprise. The meeting promises to be an intensive focus on the incredible work you’re doing, but before we get there, now’s is a good moment to take a closer look at this year’s theme, Earth System Science in Service to Society.
AMS President Alexander E. “Sandy” MacDonald’s provides an inspiring explanation of how he came up with that theme to “bring the many parts of AMS” together. Here’s what he says about the first three words, “Earth System Science:”

The “Earth System Science” theme emphasizes that the growing knowledge of the academic and research communities about our Earth system is a strength of AMS.  AMS brings together the physical, chemical, and biological study of the Earth, allowing important decisions to be made by policy makers and the public.  An example of the physical domain was the forecast of Hurricane Sandy, which was predominantly atmospheric and ocean model driven. An air quality forecast would exemplify the chemical and physical domains.  The fate of global carbon illustrates the overarching importance that includes physics, chemistry, and biology.  All of Earth’s biology participates in the carbon cycle, in which the chemistry of the ocean and atmosphere is of crucial importance, and which are controlled by the physical ocean and atmosphere. The Earth system also includes the human-centered “domains of action”: (1) Observing, (2) Analysis and research leading to understanding, (3) Modeling and prediction, and (4) Social sciences – how people deal with Earth. The AMS integrates these different disciplines in a common intellectual and operational framework with an Earth system emphasis – I believe that the AMS is the scientific society where the whole Earth System fits most comfortably.

The theme indeed captures the wide spectrum of sciences in the weather, water, and climate enterprise. The AMS Annual Meeting serves a growing need to share the incredible work you do, across many fields of science, in order for the whole community to advance its understanding of how the entire earth system works, functions, and evolves.
Yet rarely do we take time to see that broader picture. Search “Earth System Science” in our journals database, and you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands of references to job and academic department titles, but a scant handful of actual article titles or abstracts overtly address that encompassing mandate. Instead, science papers generally are a tightly focused within specific disciplines. We all know that a single discrepancy between a dataset and a theory can consume an entire career, let alone a solitary paper.
That’s one reason the AMS Annual Meeting is so special. Normally, we are engrossed in furthering our specific tasks, even at conferences. This meeting, however, is also a rare period of time set aside to look around us and explore our broader scientific context—to get into the flow of our times. Watch for that word “flow” as Sandy explains the rest of the theme, “In Service to Society”:

The second half of the theme title connects research to the benefits that society writ large gains from our science.  “Service to Society” includes information services, such as operational weather prediction, provision of timely and accurate weather literally at our fingertips, and scientific assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that help guide society’s actions.  It also includes the growing climate services from programs like NIDIS and the efforts to help society mitigate and adapt to climate variability and change. “Service to Society” explicitly evokes the integrated and complementary government and commercial enterprise that the AMS has done so much to foster over the last decade.  The strong AMS contingent of media professionals – the people who stand before TV cameras and explain what the coming storm will do – are surely at the forefront of serving society, as are the critical efforts of the National Weather Service and military weather services.  “Service to Society” also effectively uses social science to make the benefits and dissemination of our information most beneficial to the public. This meeting will address the effort to improve communications of geophysical threats to the public.
Finally – this theme conveys the flow inherent in the nearly 100-year history of the AMS.  Some people call it research to operations (R2O), but I like to call it “Science to Service.”   AMS has a proud history of making a positive difference in the lives of our citizens by continually making the advances of science available to the public and policy makers.  The 2016 meeting will bring these two great endeavors together.

Over the years, there have been many meaningful solutions to writing the Annual Meeting theme. The thing that really raises “Earth System Science in the Service of Society” above the routine is that “flow inherent in the nearly 100-year history of the AMS.” We are indeed a scientific society immersed in the research-to-applications flow. AMS keeps that river of ideas and technologies moving, at every stage. Embracing “Earth System Science in Service to Society” in New Orleans is a part of the primary directive of the AMS to “advancing the atmospheric and related sciences, applications, technologies, and services for the benefit of society.”
There is yet another flow embedded in the eddies of Annual Meeting week that is only implied in Sandy’s theme. When we emerge at the far end of Thursday, the theme itself will be transformed in our eyes. It will be rewritten by our observations and experiences in the conferences, conversations, and special events. Every year at the Annual Meeting, without fail, all of us travel further downstream in science and in service.

2016 Washington Forum to Focus on Risk Management

by Shawn Miller, Chair, Board of Enterprise Economic Development
The AMS Board on Enterprise Economic Development invites you to attend the 2016 AMS Washington Forum, April 12-14, 2016, at the American Assocation for Advancement of Science (AAAS) Building in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the AMS Washington Forum is to provide an opportunity for members of the weather, water, and climate community to meet with senior federal agency officials, Congressional staff, and other community members to hear about the status of current programs, learn about new initiatives, discuss issues of interest to our community, identify business opportunities, and speak out about data and other needs.
This year’s theme is “Leveraging Environmental Intelligence to Enhance Risk Management.” Following that theme, the Forum will focus on the use of weather, water, and climate data–together creating a foundation for environmental intelligence–to support risk management across the public and private sectors. This includes agencies and companies whose operations and planning are dependent on environmental factors, as well as agencies and companies whose primary mission is to identify, analyze, and/or mitigate environmentally induced risks. Several special topics are planned for interactive panel discussions, each with a special focus on risk management, including an overarching theme session, environmental security, water resources, space weather, big data, and renewable energy.
We will invite senior leaders from agencies such as NOAA, NASA, DoD, and FEMA to look ahead and provide updates on current weather, water, and climate programs and provide insights on new science initiatives and directions. We will also invite leaders from the Office of Management & Budget and the Office of Science & Technology Policy, and from Congress, who will discuss the latest programs and legislative initiatives in our enterprise to better serve the American people.  For our keynote, we have invited Dr. DJ Patil, U.S. Chief Data Scientist at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
We hope to see you in D.C. in April!

Letting Scientists Benefit Us All

Lately you may have noticed that AMS has garnered media attention by standing up for NOAA scientists who are the focus of Congressional scrutiny. This scrutiny was initiated after the scientists re-analyzed global surface temperatures with newly corrected data and found that the warming trend of the second half of the 20th century has been continuing unabated since 1998 instead of experiencing what sometimes has been portrayed as a warming “hiatus.”
AMS doesn’t step casually into political arenas. As a non-profit scientific and professional society, we remain solidly grounded in the world of science. We help expand knowledge and understanding through research and, as our mission states, we work to ensure that scientific advances benefit society. We engage the policy process to help inform decision making and to help ensure that policy choices take full advantage of scientific understanding.
This case is slightly different, however, because the scientific process itself is at risk. When the scientific process is disregarded or, worse yet, possibly derailed, a political issue can become an AMS issue.
The scientific process that AMS and other like-minded institutions have championed over the centuries is about taking careful observations, conducting controlled experiments, separating personal opinions and beliefs from evidence, and, perhaps most critically, exposing scientific conclusions to rigorous and repeated testing over time by independent experts. These repeated cycles of distribution and “trial by fire” happen most notably at meetings, in peer-review, and in publication.
Crucially, the process systematically removes as much as possible of our human tendency to see what we want to see and puts the burden of proof on reproducible steps. It is a disciplined, particular way of finding truths, no matter how elusive, while rendering biases, opinions, and motivations as irrelevant as possible.
This systematic approach to separating fact from opinion occasionally goes astray, of course, but its iterative nature means that science is continually self-correcting and improving; better data and understanding ultimately replace older thinking. Science encourages people to question and challenge thinking, certainty, and accuracy—but it requires they focus exclusively on what they can detect and measure and reason.
Even though all the data, logic, and methodologies are publicly available, the paper rejecting the global warming hiatus inspired Congressional requests for additional email and discussions. Asking for these correspondences—especially from scientists themselves—can easily weigh down the ingenious process by which science has continually advanced. And so AMS made public statements in favor of letting science freely work its wonders. It’s not the first time AMS has done so, and it probably won’t be the last.
We owe much of modern prosperity to an unencumbered scientific process, and it continues to provide some of the most profound and dramatic advancements in the world. This includes medicine, biology, chemistry, computing, agriculture, engineering, physics, astronomy, and, of course, meteorology, hydrology, oceanography, and climatology. Every one of us benefits every single day from what scientists have learned, shared, and provided.
And that’s yet another reason why occasionally AMS must speak out—because of our mission “for the benefit of society.” The point is not just to protect science but also to protect the benefits that knowledge can provide to all of us, no matter what we think of the results. In this, our scientific society actually has much in common with the politicians and policy makers in Washington, D.C.
AMS stands behind the scientific process and will defend that process when necessary, but our goal is to work with policy makers to promote having the best knowledge and understanding used in making policy choices.

Summer Meeting Leads to Summer Tweeting

A primary focus of this week’s AMS Summer Community meeting in Raleigh, NC, has been communication, particularly about how best to present information on weather, water, and climate threats to the public. So it’s not surprising that the meeting has generated plenty of activity on Twitter. Here are a few of the highlights:

Twitter Abuzz during Extreme Precipitation Hangout

Last week’s Google hangout on extreme precipitation touched on a number of different topics related to preparing for extreme weather events and the larger goal of building a Weather-Ready Nation. It’s noteworthy that one of the key themes that recurred throughout the hangout was “communication,” as a healthy discussion was evident on Twitter during the event. We’ve captured some of the highlights here, just below the full video of the hangout.

 

Real-Time User Satellite Data: Partly to Mostly Available

By the AMS Committee on Satellite Meteorology, Oceanography, and Climatology
Accurate forecasting and creation of weather products require large amounts of input data. Satellite data and imagery provide a large percentage of that time-critical information, including the basis of timely warnings of tornadoes and hurricanes, solar storm-induced electric currents, and the spread and concentration of volcanic ash clouds.
But the role of satellites in saving lives and preventing havoc from atmospheric events is not limited to originating essential data and imagery. Satellites make possible reliable and continuous transmission of data to the meteorologists who issue warnings, watches, and forecasts. For example, warning and water-management data from remotely located, geographically diverse terrestrial sensors in streams, rivers, lakes, and coastal areas are transmitted via the GOES Data Collection System. Thanks to satellites, these data get to first-responders and disaster managers anywhere in the country via the Emergency Managers Weather Information Network (EMWIN).
Many government agencies and the private sector have partnered on an NWS initiative called “StormReady®,” which requires multiple methods—including satellite transmissions—to receive NWS and hydrometeorological monitoring of data. Rapid and reliable communications leading to life- and property‐saving responses have never been better.
Unfortunately, the improvements made by the NWS StormReady® initiative may be threatened by recent and future radio‐frequency spectrum auctions prompted by the growing demand to share federal spectrum. Sharing between commercial broadband and sensitive satellite ground stations may be a source of radio frequency interference, which will disrupt weather product dissemination. For the first time, there is a real threat of these warnings not being received by first-responders because of potential interference caused by commercial broadband providers who will now share the same bands as StormReady® participants.
Private sector and federal users receive the imagery and science data from GOES/GOES-R satellites to guarantee data availability with rapid receipt time. If terrestrial infrastructure is degraded, the direct broadcast guarantees continuation of data.
As AMS Fellow Michael Steinburg put it at a recent webinar (see link at the end of this post): “On the one hand . . . we recognize the continued need to evaluate and optimize federal radio spectrum assignments and allocations as consumer electronics, mobile technology, and the Internet of Things experience explosive growth–sector growth that in fact results in significant growth for America’s weather industry, as new devices and platforms arise all over the world. On the other hand . . . this growth cannot put in jeopardy the core delivery methods that are used by governments and America’s weather industry to reliably collect, aggregate, and deliver foundational weather data because what those do is they provide mission-critical, lifesaving weather products. We cannot–as a Weather Enterprise united in our common goals of saving lives and improving the quality of lives for the world’s citizens–allow this to occur.”
The products developed from these satellites lead to the answers for the following questions:

  • “How many miles of coastal population should we evacuate ahead of landfall for a tropical storm or hurricane?”
  • “When does a severe storm forecast need to alter operations for the energy production or generation industry in a region under imminent threat for severe weather?”
  • “How does a mariner obtain the best possible data to enable ocean freight to safely arrive at our ports?”
  • “At what point do volcanic ash clouds, severe turbulence, or near-Earth radiation demand changes in the heading, altitude, and direction of a commercial or private aircraft to protect the safety of passengers and crew?”

Based on the results of the recent auction, which generated more than $40 billion in revenue, the temptation of government officials to focus more exclusively on the enormous revenue these auctions can create will be great. We, who provide the American people with reliable and accurate weather forecasting and warnings, along with the state and local disaster managers who rely on this information, must make our voices heard.
We urge you to be vigilant as recommendations are made for radio spectrum auctions, which may be shared between the nation’s weather satellites and commercial use. Your input to the Federal Communications Commission on the importance of meteorological products to industry segments will be necessary in the next few months to communicate the importance this spectrum plays in weather forecasting. Comments to the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology can be directed to [email protected].
Two recent AMS-sponsored events discuss this situation in considerable detail. See https://ams.confex.com/ams/95Annual/webprogram/Session37898.html and http://swfound.org/events/2015/challenges-in-sharing-weather-satellite-spectrum-with-terrestrial-networks/.

AMS Washington Forum: Unleashing Big Data and Big Discussion

Today at her keynote address to the AMS Washington Forum, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker announced that NOAA is forming five new alliances to help bring its vast data resources to the public. The partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google, and the Open Cloud Consortium address the growing need for access to NOAA’s huge—and rapidly growing—environmental data resource.
That Secretary Pritzker’s announcement came at the opening of this year’s Forum is a testament to the sustained focus of these annual AMS gatherings in Washington, D.C. The Forum revisits recurring themes to build year-to-year unity—and progress—to the discussions. Last year, for example, the AMS Washington Forum participants focused on how data integration across disciplines and sectors drives the effectiveness of the weather, water, and climate enterprise. The Forum found that

Working across agencies and across sectors (e.g., health, energy) is becoming a new “normal” for solving problems. All agree the needs and demands for data, information and forecasts are continuing to change, so our enterprise must remain flexible and agile.

Though the context last year was more about the use of commercially provided data, this continuing Forum theme resonates with Secretary Pritzker’s announcement today. The new government-private sector partnerships are part of the overall movement toward “open government”–accessible, consistent data practices—that should enhance the flexibility and agility emphasized at the AMS Forum last year.
Forum participants also generally agreed last year that “while the private sector needs to take on a bigger role in the provision of weather data, the public and private sectors need more time to jointly determine the best path forward.” And indeed at that time NOAA was in an information-gathering phase preparing for the partnerships announced today. The agency issued a Request for Information (RFI) in February 2014 to see who might be able to help move NOAA data onto the cloud. Commercial partnerships would, according to the RFI, help pull together disparate NOAA sources and web sites and help people “find and integrate data from these sources for cross-domain analysis and decision-making.”
Data integration was not the only motivation. Being the main provider of its own data saddles government agencies with burgeoning information technology needs.
In a separate email news letter today, NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan elaborated on the scope of the Big Data need:

Of the 20 terabytes of data NOAA gathers each day — twice the data of the entire printed collection of the United States Library of Congress — only a small percentage is easily accessible to the public.

The cloud was a way to alleviate this situation, as the RFI stated:

NOAA anticipates these partnerships will have the ability to rapidly scale and surge; thus, removing government infrastructure as a bottleneck to the pace of American innovation and enabling new value-added services and unimaginable integration into our daily lives.

Private sector cloud services have a history of meeting such challenges. The cloud services are able not only to store the huge quantities of data NOAA produces each day but also to provide opportunities for cloud-based applications. This means information processing is possible remotely so that each user does not need to have his or her own advanced infrastructure to move and manipulate vast troves of data. Thus, working in parallel with traditional NOAA data distribution channels, cloud services are expected to enable widespread use of Big Data and to drive private-sector development of applications.
The continued AMS discussions here in D.C. over Wednesday and Thursday will further amplify such continuing themes as Big Data, providing an especially rewarding venue for participants who can return year after year to the Forum.  For example sessions tomorrow on “Rail and Trucking” and “Information Needs for Water Related Extremes” hinge in part on data dissemination. Surface transportation was one of the panel topics last year, as well, meaning repeat participants this year will have an opportunity to update their earlier impressions and find out how opportunities in that field are progressing.
By reaching out to the innovators of the cloud, NOAA stated it was

looking for partners to incite creative uses and innovative approaches that will tap the full potential of its data, spur economic growth, help more entrepreneurs launch businesses, and to create new jobs.

That’s pretty much the same reason leaders of the weather, water, and climate enterprise return year after year to the AMS Washington Forum.
 

Hanging Out with Women in Weather

Today’s Google hangout on “Women in Weather,” cohosted by AMS and the American Astronautical Society and presented by Northrop Grumman, featured an insightful and wide-ranging discussion about what it means to be a woman in the atmospheric sciences. But the conversation wasn’t just among the panelists–it was also active on Twitter. If you missed the live broadcast of the hangout, you can watch it below, and check out the sampling of tweets underneath the video.

 

 

A Year Ago in Oso: Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

At 10:36 a.m. on 22 March 2014, near Oso, Washington, the earth began to move.  At first the lower section of slope rising from the North Fork Stillaguamish River slipped. Then the rise above that collapsed, ultimately sliding so fast that nothing could stand in its way. An eyewitness near the river saw water tossed aside and turn black. A 30 m high wall of turbulent earth roared across and along the valley. About 8 million cubic meters of dirt and rock buried the village of Steelhead Haven and killed 43 people. The slide ultimately dammed the river as it raced at 60 km/h along a 1 km wide, 1 km long swath. USGS_MR_Oso_Aerial_clipped_adjusted

The Oso landslide (aftermath photo above, Mark Reid/USGS) was a scientific mystery. There was no obvious geological trigger, like an earthquake. And the slope itself, while prone to slides, was not precariously steep. Meteorologically, it was a rain-free day in a week of no precipitation. However, two new studies—one of them forthcoming soon in the Journal of Hydrometeorology—show why Steelhead Haven was in the wrong place at the wrong time, both geologically and meteorologically.
An overview paper this January in Earth and Planetary Science Letters showed how the Oso landslide underwent two stages of motion. The lower slope slipped slowly for about 50 seconds until the more radical collapse from above led to a high mobility liquid state called a “debris avalanche.” As the landslide spread across the river the debris picked up more moisture. The flow of dirt and rock spread the damage far beyond the initial slip of earth. The gushing mud and rock actually splashed against the opposite slope across the river and spread back upslope on top of itself.
Previous landslides in the Oso area had never attained that extremely mobile second stage. The slope of the 180 m high rise above the river is less than 20 degrees, and scientists have found highly mobile landslides usually start with greater than 20 degree slope—typically more than 30 degrees. What made this one different?
The paper’s authors, Iverson et al. say one reason was the porous geology of local sediments and silt. This porosity may have increased suddenly as the base of the slope started to slip. Then as ground slid the pores contract, raising water pressure and increasing liquefaction that greases the skids for faster movement and more contraction. Furthermore, as rock and dirt overran the river, the slide picked up another 50,000 cubic meters of water and scoured the river bed for more debris.
But if a critical sensitivity to initial geological conditions existed why did the land give way on a sunny day like 22 March 2014 instead of during an earlier, rainier part of the season?
The analysis by Brian Henn et al. in Journal of Hydrometeorology shows that the precipitation in the three weeks before the landslide was unexceptional (such periods are expected every two years or so) if compared to the soaking that the area can get during the rainy season. But the rain was exceptional (an 88-year expected return period) when compared to similar March periods of the past, and that is a bad time to get wet.
Since March is late for the rainy season, this meant additional water charged deep soils that were already wet. Heavy rains earlier in the year encountered soils that contained less moisture. The late rains came on top of an already wet season as well as four wet years before that.

OsoFigure

As a result, six days before the landslide soil moisture for the water year peaked and was wetter than would be expected every 40 years at that date. The soil moisture had surged beyond median levels in just a few weeks. [See figure above from Henn et al. 2015]
In other words, Oso was primed for a landslide, even on a dry day, partly because some of the rain had fallen late in the season—poor meteorological timing for the village of Steelhead Haven.