Technological advancements don’t always involve brand-new applications; sometimes, progress can be made when older technology is utilized in new ways. Such is the case with aircraft used for scientific research. “Experienced” military aircraft have proven to be effective for many types of atmospheric studies, and with the news (subscription required) that a powerful combat plane used by the military for many years is to be reconfigured and given a new assignment, many are looking forward to even greater research capabilities. Originally developed in the 1970s, the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, better known as the “Warthog” or just “Hog,” is a twin-engine jet designed for close air support of ground forces. Now it’s being prepared to take on powerful storms.
For many years, the military plane of choice for research inside thunderstorms was the T-28. But as early as 1985, scientists recognized that this aircraft lacked the altitude reach, endurance, and payload capacity to adequately address many of their questions. After a number of workshops to study other options, the A-10 Thunderbolt was identified as a prime candidate to become the Next Generation Storm-Penetrating Aircraft. A subsequent engineering evaluation confirmed the scientists’ view of the A-10 Thunderbolt, but the U.S. Air Force was resistant to authorizing the jet for civilian use. With the advent of the Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS), a research center at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, an opportunity opened to put an A-10 Thunderbolt into service of the civilian science community. In 2010, the U.S. Air Force agreed to transfer an A-10 Thunderbolt out of mothballs to the U.S. Navy and, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and let CIRPAS (on behalf of the Naval Postgraduate School) operate it as it has operated a Twin Otter and other aircraft for the last 15 years. CIRPAS aircraft are equipped with basic meteorological, cloud, and aerosol sensors, and have ample capacity for additional instrumentation that collaborators from other universities or national laboratories may wish to use.
The A-10 Thunderbolt must be completely reassembled to be prepared for atmospheric research. A main part of this effort is wing replacement, but other activity includes evaluation of reinforcement and engine protection needs. The jet will also have its nose-mounted, 30-millimeter cannon removed, opening up more space for scientific instruments. The aircraft is scheduled to be ready for flight in the fall of 2012 and for flying actual scientific missions by mid-2013.
So other than its name, what makes the A-10 Thunderbolt so qualified to fly into storms? Perhaps most importantly, its heavy armor, designed and built to withstand machine-gun and cannon fire. Most planes avoid cumulonimbus clouds and thunderstorms because the hazards that may be encountered inside such clouds–such as severe turbulence, severe icing, lightning, and hail–can be fatal. Encountering hail is particularly dangerous, as striking golf-ball-size hail at 200 mph can smash windshields and damage the airframe and engines. But the A-10 Thunderbolt is rugged enough to deal with such conditions. As Brad Smull of the NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences noted, “It turns out that being able to survive wartime flak has a lot in common with being able to handle a strong storm.”
Also valuable are the A-10 Thunderbolt’s flight capabilities. Much is still unknown about cumulonimbus and thunderstorms, and the A-10 Thunderbolt has the potential to reach parts of storms that were previously off-limits. While the T-28’s maximum flying altitude is about 4.5 miles (7 kilometers), the A-10 Thunderbolt can fly at altitudes of up to almost 7 miles (11 kilometers)–high enough to reach the icy heights of thunderheads and gather data on hail formation. It also has the ability to stay in storms for up to 3 hours, compared to about 1 hour for the T-28, and because the A-10 Thunderbolt flies relatively slowly–about 342 mph (550 kilometers per hour)–the data it collects should be of particularly high quality. It can also fly lower than the T-28, making it ideal for air-sea interaction studies, and its heavy payload will support lidar, radar, and other imaging systems.
Ultimately, the versatility of the A-10 Thunderbolt may prove to be its most attractive trait. For example, it might help meteorologists understand what governs the evolution of a storm and its eventual severity; atmospheric chemists study how storms generate chemical species, transport material through the depth of the troposphere, and modify them in the process; atmospheric physicists investigate how clouds become electrified and how electrification may feed back to influence the microphysics and dynamics of storms; and scientists who observe storms using remote sensors (radars, lidars, satellite radiometers) and who try to predict storm evolution by use of models gather in-situ measurements to validate their observations.
[Portions of this post contributed by Haf Jonsson of the Naval Postgraduate School]
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iPhone Game Puts Satellite Data in Your Hands
The Los Angeles Times compares it to Tetris and calls it “the nerdiest game ever“. As far as we’re concerned, that’s a sure-fire journalistic badge of honor for Satellite Insight, the new iPhone game app from NASA and NOAA.
The object of the new game is to control real-time Earth and space weather data. Colored blocks falling into columns on a grid represent small pieces of data. To save lives and protect expensive instruments, the GOES-R weather satellite must not lose any data. Players bundle like data types together before the grid overflows. Data blocks fall slowly at first, but arrive faster as the game continues. Each speed-up also brings a power-up tool you can use at any time to help clear the grid. Keep it going as long as you can and try to beat your best time. Explains NASA’s web site:
No matter how thirsty you are, it’s not easy to drink from a fire hose. But that’s similar to the challenge of capturing and storing the huge blast of images and information that the new GOES-R weather satellite will gather.
And of course, as a NASA and NOAA product, the game has an educational mission too–the instructions include information about the upcoming real-life GOES-R satellite.
Satellite Insight is available free for iPhone and other iOS devices on iTunes. Check it out here.
The Services Response to the Tōhoku Disaster a Focus of the 2012 AMS Meeting
The science ministry in Japan reported last week that more than 30,000 square km–eight percent of the country–is contaminated by radioactive caesium from the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster that stemmed from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March. The radiation was washed out of the skies by rain and snow. As much as four-fifths of the caesium ended up in the ocean–much of it having blown northeastward toward Alaska–and currents carried it to the U.S. coastal waters within a week of reactor releases. By one week later some of the micron-sized particles had traveled around the world.
Because the geophysical dimensions of the earthquake-tsunami-meltdown last March are evident in so many ways, so are the demands it placed on scientific services–from the warnings of giant waves to forecasts of tainted precipitation and groundwater to modeling global ocean currents. Not surprisingly, the disaster literally redefined the job of the Japanese Meteorological Agency.
On the first day of full sessions at the upcoming 2012 AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, the epic Tōhoku cataclysm will be discussed from numerous angles, particularly the premium it put on enhanced operational response. “The earthquake and tsunami increased vulnerabilities to meteorological disasters such as sediment disasters, flood, and inundations, in the affected area, by shaking and loosening the soils and damaging the embankments and drainage facilities,” notes JMA’s Junichi Ishida.
Ishida’s presentation is the special keynote address of the Interactive Information Processing Systems (IIPS) conference (11 a.m. Monday, 23 January, Room 356). Ishida will talk about how JMA took increased vulnerabilities into account, by
- changing criteria for heavy rain warnings to account for runoff and landslide vulnerabilties
- lowering criteria for coastal inundation warnings (the earthquake actually lowered coastal ground levels, changing tidal configurations)
- introduced extreme temperature warnings to account for reduced electricity capacity
- enhanced aviation support (in particular due to traffic for relief flights) because of flight dangers including radioactive clouds
At the same time (11 a.m. Monday, in Room 338) Yukio Masumoto of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology will kick off a session devoted to the March 2011 disaster as part of the Coastal Environment symposium. Masumoto will speak about ocean dispersion of radioactive Caesium-137 and Iodine-131 after the Fukushima releases, including relationships with tides, surface winds and, in one case study, atmospheric fallout. In his abstract, Masumoto reports, “In the near-shore region, the wind forcing is a dominant factor that controls the flow field, while large-scale currents and eddies advect the radionuclides in the off-shore region.”
Several other Monday morning presentations in the Coastal Environment session feature rapid American responses last spring to adapt and construct viable modeling systems to depict Japan’s waterborne radiation hazards–speakers include Ronald Meris of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, William Samuels of Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), and Matthew Ward of Applied Science Associates.
After lunch, in the same session (2 p.m., Room 338) Gayle Sugiyama of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will talk about how the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center provided analyses and predictions of the radioactive plume, estimating the exposure in both Japan and the United States. Guido Cervone of George Mason University (2:15 p.m., Room 338) will show how dispersion modeling helped reconstruct the otherwise unknown sequence of radioactive releases at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Masayuki Takigawa (1:45 p.m., Room 338) will discuss results from regional transport modeling of the radioactivity dispersion on land and ocean, while Teddy R. Holt of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory will show passive tracer modeling capabilities with the Fukushima events in a coupled ocean-atmosphere mesoscale modeling system (1:30 p.m., Room 338).
In a parallel session of the Coastal Environment Conference next door (1:45 p.m., Room 337) Nathan Becker of NOAA/NWS will discuss calculations of detection times for various configurations of the sensors for the Pacific tsunami warning system, concluding that, “for global tsunami hazard mitigation the installation of about 100 additional carefully-selected coastal sea-level gauges could greatly improve the speed of tsunami detection and characterization.”
Interestingly, Monday’s Space Weather posters (2:30 p.m.-4 p.m., Hall E) include a presentation by Tak Cheung of the ionospheric disruptions caused by the great Japanese earthquake last March. Forecasts of ionospheric disturbances affect yet another service in the wake of the disaster: the communications provided by shortwave radio operators. And that will be a topic for Kent Tobiska (Utah State Univ.) in the Space Weather session at 5 p.m. (Room 252/253
Gliders Do the Wave, in the Air and in the Ocean
One would think that the time when gliders were considered cutting-edge technology for science would have long passed. Yet this durable technology remains at the forefront of research, even today.
Where daredevil pilots once pushed the boundaries of engine-less flight into the upper reaches of the troposphere to study mountain waves, now the Perian Project looks to send its pilots into the stratosphere–30,000 meters up–in the extreme reaches of mountain-perturbed winds. With a special glider that has a pressurized cabin, organizers of the Perian Project hope to double the world’s sailplane altitude record that they set in 2006 with a different sailplane.
Elizabeth Austin of WeatherExtreme, Ltd. (of Fallbrook, California), the forecast provider for the Perian Project, will speak at the AMS Annual Meeting (Monday 23 January at 5 p.m.) about the high-altitude sailplane flights. Tests of the new, Phase 2 glider will begin in 2012 in California. Austin writes,
This two-seat sailplane is a one-of-a-kind, carbon fiber, pressurized sailplane that will utilize the polar night jet associated with the polar vortex to achieve an altitude of 90,000 feet (27.4 kilometers). The phase two glider has a wing span of 84 feet and will weigh 1,800 pounds loaded with two pilots and equipment. The windows are polycarbonate and do not get brittle at low temperatures. A special drogue chute is being designed that will not degrade rapidly with high levels of ozone exposure.
While piloted sailplanes are basically an extension of the daredevil mountain-wave research that’s been going on since before World War II, robotic devices have also recently been extending the art of research gliding far into the oceans.
You may remember that the cover of the August issue of BAMS featured an underwater glider as part of the article on the Alaska Ocean Observing System. At the upcoming Annual Meeting will be several oceanographic presentations involving the use of ocean gliders–for example here for P. Chu and C.W. Fan on thermocline measurements (Monday, 11:30 a.m.) and here for Phelps et al. on conditions for Arctic ice concentrations (Tuesday, 9:45 a.m. poster session).
Thanks to an open-source contest by Liquid Robotics, Inc., you don’t have to wait for the Annual Meeting to find out what it’s like to use the latest robotic gliders in oceanographic and meteorological observing. As a demonstration of robotic gliders powered by wave action, the Sunnyvale, California, company is launching four of its remote controlled craft in San Francisco on 17 November. Their goal: to cross the Pacific Ocean while collecting a variety of oceanic and atmospheric parameters.
The company is calling this record-breaking robotic the PacX Challenge and it involves a prize for the scientist–that could be you!–who comes up with the best use of the data streaming back from the robots as they make their way westward and, hopefully, avoid sharkbite (which has happened to one of the company’s gliders in the past).
The gliders (featured in today’s New York Times), only move at about one knot or so, and will split into pairs in Hawaii. In about 300 days, one pair is expected to reach Japan; the other pair, Australia.
While at sea, the Wave Gliders will be routed across regions never before remotely surveyed and will continuously transmit valuable data on salinity and water temperature, waves, weather, fluorescence, and dissolved oxygen. This data will be made available in near real-time to all registered individuals.
Oceanographic organizations already planning to use the data gathered during the Pacific crossing include Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Monterey Naval Post Graduate School.
If you submit an abstract by 23 April 2012, you can design a scientific mission for the gliders and hope for this:
The grand prize winner will receive six months of free Wave Glider data services and will work with Liquid Robotics to chart the course and mission for the six month deployment, including configuration of onboard sensors.
Not a bad way to let robots do the work for you.
About That New Satellite
With the the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite launched successfully yesterday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, satellite users will want to begin thinking about getting up to date on NPP at the AMS Annual Meeting. Here’s a quick link to the dozens of upcoming AMS Annual Meeting presentations related to the satellite and JPSS in general.
In particular consider attending the Tuesday (24 January,; 8:30 am) panel on “Expected Improvements from Satellite Technology on Operational Capabilities at the NWS, Navy, and Air Force.” The participants are the heads of those respective forecasting agencies–Jack Hayes, Fred Lewis, and James Pettigrew. AMS’s William Hooke moderates.
Also, on Monday (23 January at 11:45 am) Mitchell Goldberg et al. of the JPSS program will describe NPP and its place in the overall JPSS mission (the Joint Polar Orbiting Satellite System, is the civilian-side successor to NPOESS, which was the National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System). NPOESS was canceled in 2010.
Meanwhile, until we meet in New Orleans, here’s context about how the mission has evolved with the cancellation of the NPOESS. And here’s a NASA video describing NPP’s mission and capabilities:
Further, you’ll find a wealth of information about the NPP satellite and its genesis in the overall architecture of NPOESS, described in BAMS last year. The meeting program has more specifically about the five major instruments aboard, VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite; described here in BAMS), CriS (Cross-track infrared Sounder), ATMS (Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder), OMPS (Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite), and CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System; description in BAMS here).
We’ll undoubtedly post more about specific satellite-related sessions at the 2012 Annual Meeting in New Orleans as we approach January.
Never Too Early To Complement Your Meteorology Skills
Dan Dowling, The Broadcast Meteorologist blogger, posted some useful advice yesterday for aspiring weathercasters about how to deal with inevitable on-camera jitters as they start their careers. The advice is worthwhile for all students or professional meteorologists looking to advance their careers–not just those who want to be on television.
Dowling points out that a lot weathercasters knew from an early age that they wanted to be meteorologists, but not many of them knew until much later that they were going into broadcasting. As a result, they developed their scientific skills from the start but not the confidence and polish that they’ll needed to communicate to an audience.
It takes time to develop effective on-camera manner, Dowling says, just like it takes time to learn how to write reports or to analyze weather observations properly, because all of these skills stem from maturation of deeper qualities, whether an ear for language and logic to write well, or mathematical understanding to use models and observations, or, in the case of presentation, solid belief in your own abilities:
You can work on talking slower, or stop fidgeting with your hands, or trying to smile more, but it likely all stems from a lack of being comfortable and confident. It’s also a challenge to teach out of a student because it’s usually something that just takes time. Just like jumping in a pool of cold water, it just takes time to get used to, and there is not a lot else you can do to speed up the process. If you are in high school, now is the time to start building your confidence. The students who get started sooner end up coming to college better equipped for the opportunities they will find there.
The blog relates a couple examples of successful Lyndon State College meteorology grads who got involved in broadcasting in high school, but specific experience of this kind not the only way to work on communication and confidence:
It all starts by pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. If it’s a little scary, you are probably headed in the right direction. Try acting or singing in a play, or being in a band or chorus. Get out in front of people. Play a sport. Get involved with a speaking or debate club. Whatever you do, make it fun.
The interesting thing about this advice is that it applies in many meteorological jobs, not just broadcasting. Dowling’s points echo what experienced meteorologists have been telling attendees year after year at the AMS Student Conference: don’t neglect your communications skills. Employers are looking for the ability to write and speak well if you’re going into business or consulting, not to mention any sort of job interacting with the public.
It’s difficult to develop such versatility during student years, when you’re packing in the math and science (here’s an example of a teacher who tries to make it possible by integrating communication practice into the science curriculum). But it’s a lot harder to catch up quickly on fundamental skills like writing and public speaking later in life.
Latest Readings
The Front Page keeps an eye on the web for you, bookmarking interesting ideas, profiles, developments, and media related to the atmospheric sciences community that you might have missed in the daily flood of urgent news. Recent links from our Delicious bookmarks page:
Unusual Road to Atmospheric Science: A profile of Richard Anyah, UConn assistant professor who started out teaching high school math in his native Kenya.
Videos from 2011 Stephen H. Schneider Symposium are now online: talks and follow-up discussion in which the climate science community reflects on scientific progress and the challenges of communicating with policymakers and the public.
John Tyndall, Discoverer of the Greenhouse Effect: Podcast of Irish radio interview with Richard Somerville, author of “The Forgiving Air,” about the history of “greenhouse effect” science, IPCC, and climate change topics.
WeatherBill morphs into The Climate Corporation. With funding from tech industry giants, the company has rebranded itself to tailor information to agribusiness and others looking to adapt to climate variability and change.
Moon’s shadow creates a atmospheric wake. Researchers use GPS signals to detect high-altitude gravity waves moving through the atmosphere during the total solar eclipse of 2009.
Forecast Bright for Student Meteorologists. Profile of Howard University’s graduate student association for atmospheric science.
You can get these links automatically updated in your favorite reader via an RSS feed by visiting our links archive page on Delicious. Or keep watching the “Latest Readings” sidebar on The Front Page.
Python in New Orleans: Once Bitten, Quickly Smitten
The upcoming 2012 AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans is only the second with a whole symposium devoted to the use of Python programming language in the atmospheric sciences. The first was last year’s meeting in Seattle.
The quick return of Python to the conference program–including beginning and advanced short courses over the weekend (21-22 January)–suggests what a growing community of modelers and programmers already knows. Once they’ve encountered the Python language, people tend to become devotees.
“Python is an elegant and robust programming language that combines the power and flexibility of traditional compiled languages with the ease-of-use of simpler scripting and interpreted languages,” according to Filipe Pires Fernandes of the School of Marine Science and Technology in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who presents Monday (23 January, 2 p.m.).
Python, for example, is at the heart of the National Weather Service’s graphical forecast editor (GFE) tool and thus at the basis of the usage of the whole gridded forecast product suite in effect over the last decade. “Python’s introspective capabilities permitted developers to build a tool framework in which forecasters could write simple expressions and apply them directly to the forecast process without the burden of needing to know details about data structures or user interfaces,” writes Thomas LeFebvre of NOAA, who will discuss (Tuesday, 24 January, 8:30 am) how “a large part of GFE’s success is the result of the rich set of features that Python offers.”
Symposium Chair Johnny Lin of North Park University produced a short video to explain the attraction of Python, now the “eighth most popular programming language in the world” and preview the upcoming symposium:
The symposium program features numerous new software packages, with many of the presentations demonstrating how Python is a solution to software quirks and limitations that have become more bothersome as technology advances. One presenter is using Python to display data and model output on Google Earth. Another developed a new Skew-T diagram and Hodograph visualization and research tool (SHARPY), recasting a standard program, SHARP, in Python. Explains Patrick Marsh of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory: “Unfortunately, SHARP utilizes several GEMPAK routines which makes compiling, let alone installing and using, a non-trivial task.”
Andrew Charles of the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia used Python to create a web-based tool to integrate contour plotting with GIS applications. “With ever increasing amounts of data being made available, the related increase in required storage means static plots are not a viable solution for the delivery of all maps to end users,” writes Charles about his (11:30 a.m. Tuesday) presentation. “Contour plots are one of the most used data visualisation techniques in meteorology and oceanography and yet, surprisingly, there are few available solutions for the generation of contour plots to be used as map overlays from live data sources.”
UCAR's Next President, Thomas Bogdan
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) announced today that Thomas Bogdan will succeed Richard Anthes as its next president, beginning in January 2012.
Bogdan has been director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colorado, since 2006. A Fellow of the AMS and current member of our Council, Bogdan moved to NOAA after a long stint at UCAR’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, beginning as a post-doc, moving up through the Scientist and administrative ranks, and eventually serving as Acting Director of NCAR’s Advanced Studies Program. From 2001-2003 Bogdan was Program Director for the National Science Foundation’s Solar-Terrestrial Research Section. He received his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1984.
You can hear a recent interview with Bogdan about space weather on Colorado Public Radio.
Or watch his presentation about space weather from 2007 at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference:
AMS Climate Course To Reach 100 More Minority-Serving Institutions
The AMS Education Program has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to implement the AMS Climate Studies course at 100 minority-serving institutions (MSIs) over a five-year period. The project will focus on introducing and enhancing geoscience coursework at MSIs nationwide, especially those that are signatories to the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) and/or members of the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation. AMS is partnering with Second Nature, the non-profit organization administering the ACUPCC.
“This national network involves more than 670 colleges and universities who are committed to eliminating net greenhouse gas emissions from campus operations by promoting the education and research needed for the rest of society to do the same,” explains Jim Brey, director of the AMS Education Program. “AMS and Second Nature will work together to demonstrate to current and potential MSI signatories how AMS Climate Studies introduces or enhances sustainability-focused curricula.”
In the first four years of the project, AMS will hold a weeklong AMS Climate Studies course implementation workshops for about 25 MSI faculty members. The annual workshops will feature scientists from NOAA, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Maryland, Howard University, George Mason University, and other Washington, DC area institutions. Faculty will initially offer AMS Climate Studies in the year following workshop attendance and colleges that successfully implement AMS Climate Studies will be encouraged to build a focused geoscience curricula area by also offering AMS Weather Studies and AMS Ocean Studies.
“The major outcomes of this project will be a large network of faculty trained as change agents in their institutions, sustained offering of AMS undergraduate courses within MSIs, and the introduction of thousands of MSI students to the geosciences,” comments Brey. He notes that this project builds on the success of similar NSF-supported programs for MSI faculty implementing the AMS Weather Studies and AMS Ocean Studies courses, which together have reached 200 MSIs and over 18,000 MSI students. “We’re looking forward to working with Second Nature to continue to expand the climate course and the education that it represents.”