Thanks to George Taylor (Applied Climate LLC) for pointing out excellent photos of snow rollers taken in 2009 by Tim Tevebaugh in Lewiston, Idaho, Here’s just one of several that can be found at the NWS-Spokane website:
. Taylor’s blog provides a good description of the phenomenon.
When it comes to playing fantasy sports, every advantage counts. For fantasy baseball player Andy Rice– an avid storm chaser and a software product manager for Weather Central, a weather services company (and AMS corporate member) based in Madison, Wisconsin–familiarity with weather data allows him to create statistical analyses of player performance in various weather conditions. For example, as he explains in this interview, major league hitters perform better in hot conditions than in cold, with a league-wide 2009 batting average of .271 when temperatures were in the 80s and .274 when they were in the 90s, compared with just .250 when temps were in the 30s.
He also noted that rainouts–the nuisance of players, fans, and fantasy participants alike–are not nearly as common as they seem to be, although rain delays occur more frequently, which can be valuable information for fantasy players setting their daily lineups:
There are usually somewhere between 25-45 games postponed due to weather out of 2,700 games played per year. That’s 1-2%, so it’s kind of funny when I see people getting so concerned about it in the chat room. Rain Delays are a different story and happen more frequently. Their impact is mainly on the starting pitcher, since they tend to get pulled after a lengthy delay.
Similar to forecasting the weather, putting together a fantasy team largely depends on determining probabilities based on an evaluation of conditions–and also having realistic expectations:
In these daily leagues you know that not all of your players are going to have an amazing day, but if your pitcher wins and you get 3 or 4 hitters that have a good day, you have a really good chance of winning. So you need to give yourself a team of batters with an increased probability of having a big day and hope a few hit. If I have two players that I view equally, and one has a chance of steady rain for a few hours during the game, the probability of having a good day goes down and I’ll probably pick the guy playing in the dome.
Nice Q and A in the Battle Creek Enquirer with National Weather Service meteorologist Brad Temeyer, of Sioux Falls, Iowa, who was in Michigan last month as the weather officer for the Balloon Federation of America national championships.
Photo by Trace Christensen/Battle Creek Enquirer
How did you go from meteorology to ballooning? Or did ballooning come first?
Ballooning came first, actually. I started by going out and just watching the balloons as a spectator back when I was three years old.
I wondered why the balloons were able to steer as they go up in altitude. As they change their altitude, a lot of times winds are different and that made me really curious. I started to look into that and one thing led to another. I ended up with a career in meteorology. Is it easy to find time in your life for both ballooning and your work in weather?
In some respects, I have an advantage because I know the weather ahead of time and I try to line up crew and get a flight lined up. The drawback to it is that Mother Nature never takes a break, so I’m working rotating shifts around the clock. Sometimes when it’s flyable, I’m stuck at work. That’s kind of unfortunate.
NASA’s GRIP mission (Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes) is sending aircraft into Hurricane Earl, coming up with some wonderful imagery from almost 20,000 meters above the ocean surface. Here’s how the eye looked from the Global Hawk unmanned aircraft at 9:05 a.m. Eastern, Thursday:
For more on GRIP, Earl, the Global Hawk, and the importance of having drones that can fly up to 26 hours in a single mission, this video interview with Jeff Halverson gives some answers with nice imagery:
They got too close. Way too close. But thanks to Mike Smith for pointing out this close encounter with a waterspout, which was fun until it was no longer so fun…Which led us to find this even more slick, calculated approach:
So is waterspout hunting the latest crazy extreme sport? Let’s hope not, though sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time:
That’s far cry from what this waterspout does to a ship off Singapore :
Camerman to child: “You want to go up in an airplane? I don’t think it’s a good idea!”
Hmmm, maybe airplanes are how all this got started in the first place: Meteorologists' observation of a waterspout, Matecumbe Key, Florida, from the November 1967 Monthly Weather Review. Photo by Joe Golden.
by Peggy Lemone, AMS president (with thanks to Bob Chervin)
On 19 July, our community lost both a great scientist and a great communicator, Stephen H. Schneider. Dedicating his life to quantitative analysis of the physics of climate and climate change while still a graduate student, he soon became a leader in and major spokesman for the field. He spent most of his professional life at NCAR and then at Stanford.
My first real encounter with Steve Schneider was at an NCAR retreat in the 1970s. He was presenting a “back-of-the –envelope” calculation (on a hand-drawn envelope on the transparency) on climate change at a retreat in the Colorado mountains. He was energetic and enthusiastic, and able to distil his arguments into simple, easy-to-understand language. In the coming years, we all began to recognize that here was not only a gifted scientist, but a gifted communicator. It was not long before people in the media recognized that Steve had the ability to distil a complex problem into a short sound bite that was a lot more than “ear candy.”
Steve at the time was focusing on the cooling effects of aerosols, while his colleague Will Kellogg was investigating the warming effects of carbon dioxide. This inspired a display on our group bulletin board, with two newspaper articles, one about Steve and cooling, and one about Will and warming, beneath a copy of Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice.” In his aerosol research, Steve rapidly moved on from “nuclear winter” to “nuclear autumn” and the impact of carbon dioxide. Like a good detective, he refined his opinions as the evidence came in, and he drew in colleagues from multiple disciplines to track the causes and impacts of climate change. He quickly became NCAR’s ambassador for climate change, writing several books, and continuing to explain the rapidly-evolving science to the public through the news media.
Sadly, he ended up having to do far more than simply explain the science to the public and policy-makers: increasing resistance to the findings of climate-change science put him and other climate scientists on the defensive – not so much against other atmospheric scientists as to private citizens. Indeed, in recent years, he, like other climate scientists, have received multiple threatening emails. As in the title of his last book, climate science has in some sense become a “contact sport,”with confrontation rather than reasoned discussion. In Steve’s words (from an interview in Stanford’s alumni magazine)
…in the old days when we had a Fourth Estate that did get the other side [of debates]—yes, they framed it in whether it was more or less likely to be true, the better ones did—at least everybody was hearing more than just their own opinion. What scares me about the blogosphere is if you only read your own folks, you have no way to understand where those bad guys are coming from. How are you going to negotiate with them when you’re in the same society? They’re not 100 percent wrong, you know? There’s something you have to learn from them and they have to learn from you. If you never read each other and you never have a civil discourse, then I get scared.
Only time will quiet the vigorous and sometimes unpleasant debate. But, in the meantime, I hope that we in the community can also find times and opportunities to share this important science with the public in non-confrontational and user-friendly ways. We owe that to Steve, the public, and ourselves.
For more details on Steve’s rich and productive life, see the Stanford University web site, and also the 13 August 2010 issue of Science, and the 19 August 2010 issue of Nature
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.
This summer, the Catlin Arctic Survey team became the first explorers to ever take ocean water samples at the North Pole. The three-person team covered 500 miles over 2 1/2 months in their expedition across sea ice off the coast of Greenland. On the way they were met with numerous obstacles: a persistent southerly drift that regularly pushed them backward, strong headwinds, ice cracks opening under their tent, dangerously thin ice, and areas of open water they had to swim across. The Catlin camp
They persisted through it all, measuring ice thickness, drilling ice cores, and collecting water samples (see the video below) and plankton data. They hope their research will provide insight into the effects of carbon dioxide on local marine life and Arctic Ocean acidification.
The heartiness of the Catlin team reminds us of the rich history of polar exploration in the name of meteorology. Historian Roger Turner of the University of Pennsylvania gave a fascinating presentation at the AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta about the origins of the tradition, spotlighting the group of young Scandinavian meteorologists who studied under Vilhelm Bjerknes in Bergen, Norway. They were vital contributors to numerous Arctic expeditions in the 1920s.
This first wave of Bergen School meteorologists was well-suited to polar exploration, where they contributed their familiarity with the Far North conditions as well as their new understanding of upper-air dynamics. But Turner argues that their affinity for outdoors activities–particularly in the harsh conditions of the Arctic–also set them apart from others in their generation and, by implication, from the desk-bound meteorologists today.
We think those hardy meteorological pioneers of yesteryear would appreciate the intrepid scientific spirit of the Catlin team.
