The first USA Science & Engineering Festival kicks off this weekend in Washington DC. Running for two weeks, the festival wraps up with a two-day expo on 23-24 October, with 1,500 booths planned in the downtown area, numerous local festival events, as well as satellite events across the country. From Hawaii to New York, scientists plan to visit local schools, hold special events, and open their doors to the general public. The WeatherBug mascot will be at the DC Weather Coalition exhibit.
As part of expo, AMS will take part in the massive event on the National Mall, helping out with a double booth space run by the DC Weather Coalition, an educational partnership of government, scientific societies, enterprise, and institutions. The booth features an exhibit called “Become an Amateur Weather Forecaster,” in which visitors can experience firsthand what it takes to be a weather forecaster (Booth Numbers 1010, 1012, Section MA-C). “Using this approach to examine the wonders and mystery of weather, water, and climate certainly adds intrigue and excitement to the many hands-on exhibits sponsored by DC WeatherFest Coalition partners,” comments Elizabeth Mills, a Coalition representative and associate director of the AMS Education Program.
A WeatherBug weather station is planned to demonstrate the numerous ways to access the daily weather. Meteorologists from local television stations WJLA and TBD, including Joe Witte, and members of the AMS Education Department will be available for questions and to assist with the WeatherBug display and twice-daily Weather Jeopardy games at the booths.
Mills notes that this variety allows visitors to experience related topics from different perspectives. “Visitors in one area of our exhibits can be interviewed on camera, in another explore a weather station, and in others learn about the latest in weather research,” and in other exhibits, “they can see, first-hand, the instrumentation used in the ocean and understand the way climate is changing, or watch their kids being entertained by the WeatherBug mascot.”
To find exhibits that meet specific interests, the festival site is organized by age range, subject area, keyword, or organization name. A tracking system for various age groups also makes it easy to find events with a common theme. The exhibits will be open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on the weekend of the festival.
Processing the endless stream of weather data can be a little like drinking from a fire hose. So designer/artist Mitchell Whitelaw has found a new way to civilize information intake. "Measuring Cup," by Mitchell Whitelaw, showing at the Object Gallery in Sydney, Australia.
“Measuring Cup” is formed using 150 years of monthly average temperatures for Sydney, Australia. Says Whitelaw,
The structure of the form is pretty straightforward. Each horizontal layer of the form is a single year of data; these layers are stacked chronologically bottom to top – so 1859 is at the base, 2009 at the lip. The profile of each layer is basically a radial line graph of the monthly data for that year. Months are ordered clockwise around a full circle, and the data controls the radius of the form at each month. The result is a sort of squashed ovoid, with a flat spot where winter is (July, here in the South).
Whitelaw decided to smooth the data with a five-year moving average “because the raw year-to-year variations made the form angular and jittery.” The result is not only aesthetically pleasing but functional due to climate change:
The punchline really only works when you hold it in your hand. The cup has a lip – like any good cup, it expands slightly towards the rim. It fits nicely in the hand. But this lip is, of course, the product of the warming trend of recent decades. So there’s a moment of haptic tension there, between ergonomic (human centred) pleasure and the evidence of how our human-centredness is playing out for the planet as a whole.
In other words, don’t sip from your own data unless you can show a perceptible warming.
Tropical Storm Lisa became the 12th named storm in the Atlantic Basin this week in what has suddenly become the active 2010 hurricane season that forecasters months ago had predicted. Nine of those twelve storms formed since August 21, with five of them becoming hurricanes. Before that, only one of the first three named storms (Alex) even reached hurricane strength. By contrast, 2005 (9 out of 28) and 2008 (6 out of 16) both had numerous storms form before August 20. Why the delay this year? According to a story in Newscientist.com, a mass of hot, dry air over the oceans stunted the formation of tropical storms. Scientists traced this dry air to a massive ridge of high pressure that sat for months over Europe and Asia, causing an intense heatwave in Russia and severe monsoon rains in Pakistan this summer that killed thousands of people. But just as mid-August arrived, when the typical height of Atlantic hurricane activity is imminent, things changed. As the Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters wrote in his blog on August 17:
Vertical instability, which was unusually low since late July, has now returned to near normal levels over the tropical Atlantic, though it remains quite low over the rest of the North Atlantic. Instability is measured as the difference in temperature between the surface and the top of the troposphere (the highest altitude that thunderstorm tops can penetrate to). If the surface is very warm and the top of the troposphere is cold, an unstable atmosphere results, which helps to enhance thunderstorm updrafts and promotes hurricane development. Since SSTs in the Atlantic were at record highs and upper tropospheric temperatures were several degrees cooler than average in July, enhancing instability, something else must have been going on to reduce instability. Dry air can act to reduce instability, and it appears that an unusually dry atmosphere, due to large-scale sinking over the Atlantic, was responsible for the lack of instability.
Not until the heat wave broke near the end of August did the tropical storms really begin to form in earnest, with four storms (Danielle, Earl, Fiona, and Gaston) arising just between August 21 and September 1. And spurred by those record-high SSTs mentioned by Masters, the 2010 season has not only produced 12 named storms and 6 hurricanes, but 5 major hurricanes–four of them Category 4–making that slow start seem like a distant memory. To put this season in historical perspective, there have been yearly averages of 14 named storms, 8 hurricanes, and 4 major hurricanes since the current active Atlantic hurricane period began in 1995. This season is just one major hurricane away from moving into a 7-way tie for 3rd-most major hurricanes in a season, topped only by the 7 major hurricanes in 1961 and 2005 and 8 in 1950 (lists of most active seasons in various categories can be found here). This photo, taken from the International Space Station, shows the eye of Category-4 Hurricane Igor at 10:56 Atlantic Daylight Time on September 14, 2010, as it advanced over the Atlantic Ocean. (Photo credit: NASA Earth Observatory.)
In his new book, Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt, Edward P. Kohn tells how New York City’s government generally dithered while casualties mounted. During the heat wave in 1896, an estimated 1,300 people died as 10 straight days of 90-degree-plus heat, high humidity, and no wind baked the crowded working class tenements. Unfortunately, City Hall wasn’t keeping close track of what was happening until too late.
Roosevelt, then president of the city’s Board of Police Commissioners, was an exception. He ordered vendors to supply ice–normally too expensive for ordinary workers–for free.
Roosevelt personally supervised the ice distribution from the police precinct houses, not only “busting” this particular trust, but also having intimate contact with the city’s working poor. Writing his memoirs years later he would remember the “gasping misery of the little children and of the worn-out mothers.” Such scenes must have helped shape the man who was about to become the dominant figure of the Progressive era.
Kohn makes a perceptive point that general unawareness compounded the deadliness of the 1896 heat wave and can still exacerbate heat waves today. Even while some of us have begun waking up to the dangers of heat–especially since Chicago in 1995 and the European Summer of 2003– when complete, reliable, and immediate statistics are not available, heat is an underrated, quiet killer, more lethal than most people realize, and usually more lethal than necessary:
Images of forest fires and smoke-choked Moscow filled American televisions, yet the tremendous death toll from the heat wave attracted little attention. Only in mid-August did the Moscow city government report that the death rate in the city had doubled during the heat wave, resulting in three hundred extra deaths every day. The Russian heat wave, then, was a historic and catastrophic natural disaster. But it was underreported and will soon fade from our collective memory.
Now we’re galloping onward with fall, circulation patterns have changed and the summer’s heat has been replaced by other concerns. Reading Kohn’s book is a good way to reflect on the value of keeping good weather impacts statistics.
What if you are asked to be part of a scientific expedition aboard a non-luxurious research vessel, surrounded by complete strangers, forced to face rough seas – and sea sickness, 16 hours’ work shifts, no weekends or recreational activities, no days off, lots of hours under the sun working with scientific equipment, poor internet connectivity and no interaction whatsoever with the outer world? While many people would say: “no thank you”, I was euphoric when I received an email which first line read: “Congratulations, you have been selected as a participant of the Sixth Aerosols and Oceans Science Expedition”.
So begins Mayra Oyola’s engaging story of work aboard the NOAA research vessel Ronald H. Brown for the AEROSE campaign Beside The Ronald H. Brown.
under the auspices of Howard University, NOAA, and other institutions. It was apparently a love affair not just with the science and the sea, but with a lidar, too:
[E]very scientist is …assigned at least one particular instrument and is expected to become the one and only expert on that matter. In a sense, every scientist establishes a sort of “bond” with his/her assigned instrument that is very similar romantic affair. You can grow such a strong love and hate relationship with it. There are days when you two can get along just fine. But other days you have to fight against temptations (like throwing it overboard or smashing it with a sledge hammer). There are days when your appointed instrument gets seduced by Murphy (in other words, goes haywire) and you have to make him/her understand that s/he is in a monogamous relationship with you. As some partners, these instruments can be gold diggers (they cost hundreds/thousands of dollars) and are high maintenance as well.
And, this enticing view of the ocean:
When people say I must be crazy to have loved so much sailing on this expedition, I just ask them a couple of questions: Have you seen bioluminescence or done some fishing in the middle of the Atlantic basin? Or have you ever had the chance to catch a movie under the stars in the middle of the Sea? Well, I had. There are some great perks about sailing on the Brown. There is nothing as beautiful as lying on deck at night for the most spectacular stargazing sessions you will experience in this world. There are unusual things that you will never see in your everyday life: like watching a double rainbow or the most impressive towering cumulonimbus cloud EVER at the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITZC). I also loved watching different marine life forms like the flying fishes, dolphins and squids (oh yeah, we saw squids!). Oh and the sunsets… sunsets that will take your breath away!….But the highest reward is this: we get to do REAL science to solve REAL problems, such as improving the quality of satellite operations, understanding the effects of aerosols in hurricane formation and intensification and learning how tropospheric ozone can be linked to global warming, among many other things. There is nothing that can top that!
Check out the full story, and picture gallery, here, and kudos to Oyola for such drawing a compelling portrait of science at sea. We talk about the need to communicate science, and we’ll talk more about it as the Annual Meeting approaches, but she’s set a strong example already.
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.
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:
