Reports – The Front Page

A 2024 AMS Summer Community Meeting highlight

The AMS Summer Community Meeting (SCM) drew exceptional attendance and engagement this year as people across sectors helped inform a major upcoming report on the Weather Enterprise. The AMS Weather Enterprise Study will provide a comprehensive picture of the shifting landscape of weather-related fields to inform our joint future. At the 2024 SCM, working groups discussed what they’d found about key issues facing the enterprise, and asked for feedback from the community.

Here are a few takeaways from the Research Enterprise working group, as reported by Daniel Rothenberg of Brightband.

Photo courtesy of Daniel Rothenberg.

How has the weather research landscape shifted in the last decade or so?

Two of the most important shifts have been a movement of exploratory and applied research from the public to the private sector, and the rise in importance of “data science” and other hybrid roles blending a mixture of domain expertise and broader engineering and technical skills.

Possibly the biggest example of these shifts coming together has been the advent of AI-based weather forecasting tools, although it also shows in trends such as the rise of private companies operating earth observation platforms.

What were the principal themes that came out of your working group’s discussions?

One major theme we discussed was the balance of responsibilities across the traditional weather enterprise. Initiatives such as building and launching satellite constellations or developing new weather models were at one point solely within the remit of the public sector (due to complexity and cost), but are now commonly undertaken by the private sector – sometimes even at start-up companies.

This re-balancing opens as many opportunities as it does challenges, and leads to another major theme: how we can best prepare for the workforce needs of today and tomorrow. Meteorologists will increasingly need to apply technical skills such as software development and data science alongside ones from the social sciences; preparing our current and future workforce for these demands will be a challenge in its own right.

A third major theme is that the weather enterprise is getting bigger. We’re not just a community of meteorologists anymore. Increasingly, critical work related to weather, water, climate, and their impacts on society is being undertaken beyond the traditional boundaries of our enterprise. There is a significant opportunity to improve society’s resilience if we as a community are able to build relationships with the new institutions working on these issues in a collaborative, interdisciplinary manner.

What are the main challenges you have identified?

Better accounting for how we ought to invest limited – and declining – federal resources will be a significant and contentious challenge, only complicated by the shifts in priorities and capabilities across the enterprise.

Those shifts motivate a second key challenge, which is clarifying who in the enterprise is accountable for, or has ownership over, certain areas. For example, NOAA makes available nearly all of the observations used in its operational forecast models, with some exceptions for proprietary data from commercial entities. But as more private companies try to sell data to NOAA, how will this balance hold? What if those private companies move towards selling actual weather modeling capabilities or services – perhaps a proprietary AI-based weather model – to the government? In the case of expanding commercial data purchases, who is responsible for maintaining and improving our data assimilation capabilities?

Coordinating many actors across the enterprise, in a manner that most effectively serves our mission to society, will be a key challenge we must navigate in the coming years.

What preliminary recommendations or future directions have you discussed?

Our tentative recommendations revolve around building robustness. We encourage academic organizations who train our future meteorologists to consider how to prepare these students to work in a multidisciplinary capacity, and to embrace data science skills. Not everyone needs to be an interdisciplinary scientist, but it’s vital that our students learn how to apply their deep domain knowledge as part of a team of such individuals.

We also acknowledge that the rise of AI/ML techniques is changing the demands of our computing and data infrastructure. Not only must our workforce learn to adapt to these technologies, but we must consider how the enterprise will support enabling them: for example, by ensuring that in addition to large, traditional high-performance computing resources, we provide access to GPUs and similar tools. As part of this re-evaluation, we must evolve the ways in which we as a community define our priorities for federal research funding

What did you hear from the community at the SCM?

We thank the community for the warm reception to our assessments at the Summer Community Meeting. Many of the themes we touched on – the re-balancing of capabilities across the enterprise, the emergence of AI/ML and its implications, as well as core workforce development concerns – were echoed across many other working groups, underscoring their importance.

Within our group, we also discussed the growing importance of convergence science, which was echoed several times throughout the meeting. Convergence science, which involves coordinating diverse, interdisciplinary research teams with real stakeholders to solve societally relevant problems, is likely to be an important mechanism of translational research in the future, but we (and others at the meeting) identified a need for federal agencies to devote more resources earmarked for this sort of work in order to complement traditional, siloed funding programs.

Want to join a Weather Enterprise Study working group? Email [email protected].

About the Weather Enterprise Study

The AMS Policy Program, working closely with the volunteer leadership of the Commission on the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise, is conducting a two-year effort (2023-2025) to assess how well the weather enterprise is performing, and to potentially develop new recommendations for how it might serve the public even better. Learn more here, give us your input via Google Forms, or get involved by contacting [email protected].

About the AMS Summer Community Meeting

The AMS Summer Community Meeting (SCM) is a special time for professionals from academia, industry, government, and NGOs to come together to discuss broader strategic priorities, identify challenges to be addressed and opportunities to collaborate, and share points of view on pressing topics. The SCM provides a unique, informal setting for constructive deliberation of current issues and development of a shared vision for the future. The 2024 Summer Community Meeting took place August 5-6 in Washington, DC, and focused special attention on the Weather Enterprise, with opportunities for the entire community to learn about, discuss, debate, and extend some of the preliminary findings coming from the AMS Weather Enterprise Study.

Earth hit record highs in global temps, greenhouse gases, sea level, and more last year.

By AMS Staff

Last year, global high temperatures, warm oceans, and massive wildfires broke records and sparked increasing concern about climate change. Now the annual State of the Climate report, produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and peer reviewed and published by the American Meteorological Society, gives us an in-depth global picture of 2023, a year of extremes.

According to the NOAA/AMS press release, the State of the Climate report this year includes contributions from more than 590 scientists from 59 countries, and “provides the most comprehensive update on Earth’s climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments located on land, water, ice and in space.”

Below are a few highlights from 2023.

Record-high greenhouse gases (again)

Global atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide all reached higher concentrations than ever recorded. CO₂ was 419.3±0.1ppm, 2.8 ppm higher than in 2023 and 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. This is the fourth-largest recorded year-to-year rise in CO₂.

Record-high global temperatures

2023 officially beat 2016’s record as the hottest year overall since records began in the 1800s, partly due to the transition from La Niña to a strong El Niño. Globally, 2023 was 0.99°–1.08°F (0.13°–0.17°C) above the 1991–2020 average. The years 2015–2023 have been the hottest nine years on record.

Global Surface Temperatures Were Above Average Across Most of the World (Plate 2.1a in State of the Climate in 2023): During 2023, much-warmer-than-average conditions were observed across most of the world’s surface, with the largest positive temperature anomalies across parts of the higher northern latitudes, shown here as areas shaded from orange to red. Limited areas experienced near-average to cooler-than-average conditions (blue shading). *[Note: graphic shows 2023 average temperature anomalies above or below the 1991-2020 average global temperature.]*

North America overall experienced its warmest year since records began in 1910, including a heat wave in Mexico that killed 286 people. The Caribbean also experienced its warmest recorded year, and Europe its warmest or second-warmest depending on the analysis.

In Kyoto, Japan, the cherry trees reached peak bloom on March 25, the earliest bloom in the city’s 1,200-year record. Photo: Balazs Simon on Pexels.

Record-high ocean heat

El Niño also contributed to the hottest oceans ever recorded. Mean annual global sea-surface temperature was 0.23°F (0.13°C) higher than 2016’s previous record, and August 22, 2023 saw an all-time high daily mean global sea-surface temperature of 66.18°F (18.99°C). Marine heat waves were recorded on 116 days of 2023 (vs. the previous record of 86 days in 2016) and global ocean heat content down to 2,000 feet also reached record highs.

Record-high sea levels (again)

Global mean sea level rose 8.1±1.5 mm in 2023, to reach a record 101.4 millimeters above the average from 1993, when satellite measurements began.

Massive wildfires caused by heat and drought

37 million acres of Canada burned in 2023, twice the previous record, causing evacuations for more than 232,000 people and with smoke affecting cities as far away as western Europe. Australia experienced its driest August–October since 1900, leading to millions of acres burned in bushfires in the Northern Territory. The European Union experienced its largest wildfire since 2000 (in the Alexandroupolis Municipality of Greece). Notable wildfires also occurred in Brazil, Paraguay, and in the U.S. state of Hawaii.

Warm poles and a greener Arctic

2023 was the fourth warmest year in the Arctic in the 124-year record, and the warmest recorded June–September. Sea ice reached its fifth-lowest extent in the 45-year record (with many monthly and daily records set), and multi-year ice declined. Despite above-average spring snowpack in the North American and Eurasian Arctic, rapid melting led to record and near-record lows in snow-water equivalent by June. The Northern Sea Route and Northwest Passage both opened, and the Northwest Passage saw a record 42 ship transits. Arctic tundra vegetation reached its third-greenest peak in the 24-year record.

Much of Antarctica also experienced well-above-average heat. In addition, eight months, and 278 days, saw record lows in sea ice extent and area in Antarctica; daily sea ice extent on 21 February was the lowest ever recorded.

*Clean infrared image of Hurricane Otis making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico. Image captured on 25 October, 2023, at 5:20 UTC, by the ABI instrument aboard the GOES-East satellite. Source:* *NASA Worldview*.

Below-average tropical cyclone activity, yet notable storms

There were 82 named tropical storms in 2023, below average. However, global accumulated cyclone energy was above average, rebounding from 2022’s record low, and there were seven Category 5 cyclones. Tropical Cyclone Freddy became the longest lived tropical cyclone on record, lasting from February 6 to March 12; it made landfall three times and caused 165 fatalities in Mozambique and 679 fatalities in Malawi due to flooding and landslides. Typhoon Doksuri/Egay was the costliest economically, causing US$18.4 billion in damages; Beijing saw its heaviest recorded rainfall and 137 residents died in flooding. Rain and floods from Storm Daniel killed at least 4,300 people in Libya. Hurricane Otis underwent the most extreme rapid intensification on record—Category 1 to Category 5 in only nine hours—and became the strongest landfalling hurricane to hit western Mexico, devastating Acapulco.

Persistent ozone hole

The stratospheric ozone hole over Antarctica appeared earlier in the year and lasted longer than normal, and reached its 16th largest extent in 44 years.

The full State of the Climate report includes regional climate breakdowns and notable events in every part of the world. Read the full 2023 report here. Read a summary of key takeaways here.

Image at top: Ice Worm Glacier in the North Cascade mountains of Washington, United States, which was under continuous annual monitoring from 1984 onward and disappeared in 2023. Large photo: The location of former Ice Worm Glacier on 13 August 2023. Inset photo: Ice Worm Glacier on 16 August 1986. Photo credits Mauri Pelto.

How is Weather Research Changing?