Finally… incontrovertible proof that precip distribution is a step function.
From Regina Regis, in Italy. 69 Euros.
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Putting Out Fires with Meteorology
San Diego Gas and Electric has embarked on an ambitious weather-monitoring effort that should warm the hearts of meteorologists–whose help the utility may still need to solve a larger wildfire safety controversy.
SDG&E recently installed 94 solar-powered weather monitoring systems on utility poles scattered in rugged rural San Diego County, where few weather observations are currently available. The purpose is to help prevent and control forest fires during Santa Ana winds. The plan has won plaudits from local fire chiefs and meteorologists alike, since the data will be available to National Weather Service forecasters and models as well as the utility’s own decision makers.
“That makes San Diego the most heavily weather instrumented place on Planet Earth,” says broadcast meteorologist John Coleman in his report on the story for KUSI News.
SDG&E’s intensified interest in meteorological monitoring is precipitated by the hot water the company got into due to its role in forest fires in 2007: Electricity arcing from power lines is blamed for three fires that year that killed two people and destroyed 1,300 homes in rural areas around San Diego. While not acknowledging fault, the company has compensated insurance companies to the tune of over $700 million.
To improve safety the company came up with plans last year to shut off the grid for up to 120,000 people in rural areas if dry weather turns windy–classic Santa Ana conditions. The shut off would initiate in 56 m.p.h. winds, the design standard for much of the power system, and then power would be restored when sustained winds remained below 40 m.p.h. assuming the lines prove reliable. Southern California Edison used a similar cut-off tactic in 2003 with relatively positive reaction from customers, but the company later aggressively cleared areas around power lines and has not utilized the plan since.
SDG&E, by contrast, had been in federal mediation for months with customers angry about the shut-off plan. One of the main gripes about the plan has been that the power company didn”t expect to warn customers about the outages. The company said it couldn’t predict the winds on a sufficiently localized basis.
Clearly the controversy could be alleviated by enhanced meteorology with the newly established weather stations. Brian D’Agostino, the local meteorologist who helped SDG&E design the weather monitoring strategy told KGTV Channel 10 News:
We’re taking a lot of areas where we always just figured the winds were at a certain speed and now we’re going to know for sure….Right now, the National Weather Service gets its information once every hour. Now, we’re able to provide it with data every 10 minutes.
Sit Tight: You Might Be (Over)-Warned
On his blog this week, Mike Smith, CCM (and an AMS Fellow) discusses the common air passenger’s frustration 
with seat belt warning signs that stay on for hours even when the weather is clear and turbulence-free. But Smith’s post is interesting reading also because it is a uniquely meteorologist‘s frustration with this form of over-warning. He argues that we know enough about clear-air turbulence (and thunderstorm avoidance) that it makes little sense to tie people down to their seats for so long.
As we know from experience, most recently the United Airlines flight on July 20th in which two dozen people were injured, the seat belt signs are indeed important. More than 90 percent of all injuries on turbulent flights happen when people don’t buckle up appropriately. But Smith observes,
I fear pilots are — too often — training their passengers not to observe the sign. Fly enough miles with the seat belt sign on but no turbulence and you’re tempted to get up, sign or no sign.
Overuse of the warning sign is well known in aviation circles. From the pilot’s point of view, there’s a lot more to this situation than just meteorology. Some pilots apparently forget the light is on (one critic here says, “I think pilots pay about as much attention to the seatbelt sign as the passengers do”) and in any case airline policies and pilot predilections vary. In the United States, in particular, airlines must deal with liability: passengers frequently sue them when injuries are caused by turbulence. (One wag dubs the seat-belt sign the “anti-litigation switch.”)
Can science overcome this situation? Clear air turbulence has been a topic of research since bomber pilots encountered the jet stream in World War II—the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics’ Project AROWA in the 1950s researched the problem of forecasting clear air turbulence (for example: this paper in the AMS archives). Research on radar techniques for detecting CAT started to take off in the 1970s, and much progress is being made even now (here’s a good example of recent developments in CAT forecasting); it remains an area of intense research and product development.
Ultimately, improved CAT warnings are at the mercy of the confidence that customers (in this case, the pilots) have. Even if pilots do know the latest science or know how to use the latest gadgets, low confidence in new tools can mean excessive warning, which means careless passengers, which in turn means frustrated meteorologists, and an ongoing challenge for the aviation weather community.
A Community Living Up to Its Name
by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director
Last-day thoughts from the AMS Summer Community Meeting this week. From a post in the AMS project, Living On the Real World
The term “community” shouldn’t be applied to any enterprise cheaply; there should be a high bar. Dictionary.com gives several definitions for “community.” The third of these is most pertinent here:
“a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the ): the business community; the community of scholars.” [italics in the original]
Coming across that last phrase was a pleasant surprise; it’s been with me since ninth grade. Then I was a student at Wilkins Township Junior High, just outside Pittsburgh. (The school was kind of tough and my ambition was to graduate with all my teeth, but that’s another story.) Our science course that year focused on the weather. The course made an impression on me that lasted over half a century. In part this was because the Earth sciences became my career, but in addition there were two other reasons. First, our teacher, though she was nominally the science teacher, was uncomfortable with science. (This was before the AMS started its Education Program; today’s science teachers have no excuse!). So, our textbook notwithstanding, we spent the entire semester (!!!) on weather superstitions/folklore…”mares’ tails make lofty ships carry low sails,” etc. The semester seemed to me to drag on forever; I’m sure she felt the same way. Second, the opening page of that textbook stated, and I quote, from memory, “Scientists are a community of scholars engaged in a common search for knowledge.” As the son of a scientist, even then the thought inspired me. I wanted to be part of such a community.
In college I majored in physics, and then entered graduate studies at the University of Chicago. I started out at the Institute for the Study of Metals. But there, and then, competition, not cooperation, was the word. It was dog eat dog. The field seemed over-populated. A lot of people were working on the same problem (the de Haas-van Alphen effect, which had been around about 35 years), not sharing progress but keeping results to themselves, etc. After one year, I transferred to the Department of Geophysical Sciences after a year. What a breath of fresh air! There were more than enough problems to go around. Nobody was going to win a Nobel Prize. Growing rich was not in prospect; the geophysical scientists had all taken vows of poverty. As a result, or maybe because the field attracted cooperative types, we all got along! The contrast with physics was palpable.
Today we can all feel more privileged than ever to be part of this community.
Public and Private: More Thoughts from the AMS Summer Community Meeting
by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director
A post from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
Back in the 1990s, while still working at NOAA, I was once part of a two-day U.S.-Japan bilateral discussion in Tokyo on science and technology issues. Bill Clinton was President. Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s former Vice President, was then ambassador to Japan. Tim Wirth, who at that time was Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, was leading this particular delegation. Wirth, Mondale and the rest of us from the U.S. side were in a big meeting room with the Japanese. Leaders from Japanese government and industry filled the room, under auspices of MITI, the Japanese Ministry for International Trade and Industry. The Japanese couldn’t comprehend why the United States was moving so haltingly on a range of environmental and hazards matters.
“You have to understand,” Tim Wirth was saying, “that if government and industry worked with each other in the U.S. the way you do in Japan, people would go to jail.”
Tim Wirth’s remark has everything to do with this week’s discussions at the AMS Summer Community Meeting in State College. Two points: First, and foremost, this is our history and our policy in America. Our nation decided long ago that we wanted a free-market society, with minimal government. We wanted government to focus primarily on regulations that would foster capitalism and business competition, and at the same time curb corruption, restraint of trade, monopolistic practices, and other abuses. Second, this approach is a policy, a choice, or framework of choices, not an inescapable reality. Other governments are free to adopt other approaches, and have, as the Japanese example illustrates.
Well, as is so often the case, you pick your poison. The Japanese approach spurred
Civil War Sleuthing
Historians have long known—thanks to diaries and other first-person accounts—that weather played a small but possibly significant role in the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, August 10, 1861. This was the first important engagement of Union and Confederate forces west of the Mississippi River and was pivotal in determining the political alignment of Missouri early in the Civil War.
On the evening of August 9th the Confederate leader, General McCulloch, had decided to march on the nearby Union force, but rainfall starting around 9 p.m. convinced him to abandon the plan until morning, and to stay at camp to keep munitions dry. The rain delay enabled the smaller Union force, under Brigadier Nathaniel Lyon to creep up on Confederate encampment at dawn the next morning for a surprise attack.
All in all, the Confederates were able to rally themselves and ultimately force Union troops to back away—both sides suffering over a thousand casualties in the process. The Confederates parlayed their victory at Wilson’s Creek into control of a substantial portion of Missouri in the initial part of the war.
What historians lacked, however, was a good explanation of the weather situation that affected strategy in 1861. No weather stations were reporting from the area. Now, thanks to the enterprising research into analog synoptic maps, Mike Madden and Tony Lupo of the University of Missouri may have given students of the Civil War a credible meteorologist’s look at that fateful day in August 1861. For more on how Madden and Lupo did it, see the article by Randy Mertens in the Ozarks nature and science website, Freshare.net.
From Parallel Play to True Collaboration
by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director
A post from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
A few years ago, my daughter, who is a social worker, introduced me to a new term (at least new to me). We were watching my grandchildren (her children and their two cousins) sitting on a floor ankle deep in toys. There was occasional noise. I said something about how they were all doing together, and she laughed and said, “Oh, Dad, that’s only parallel play. Just give them a couple more years.” What she meant was, they were occupying the same space, but they were really engaged in toddler’s solitaire, focused on a few toys and oblivious to the others around them, except when possession of a toy would come into dispute.
Her forecast verified. Today, the oldest is only eight, but already when those same kids are together, the engagement is on an entirely different plane. There’s talk, there’s laughter. There’s common purpose and shared energy. They’re cooking up projects. It’s amazing. I can hardly wait until we hit the next level.
Something like that is happening in meteorology. Back in the postwar world of the late 1940’s (see Billionaires follow lead of former private-sector meteorologist), Lewis Cullman and his fellow private-sector meteorologists were sharing the same space with the Weather Bureau, and frustrated by what they saw as unfair competition in the service delivery. It was only this one aspect that concerned them. Everyone conceded that the government would be responsible for the observations, for the communication and compiling of all that information. Numerical modeling still lay a few years in the future. The issue was who would deliver the paltry weather information of the time that last mile to the public, and to specialized users.
Fast forward sixty years. Today public and private sector are partnering up across every link in the chain from weather observations to use of that information to save lives, grow the economy, protect the environment, and foster national security. The government still owns many of the observing instruments and platforms. But the radars, the satellite sensors, the satellite platforms themselves, the data links, and the big computing facilities are all built by the private sector. And when it comes to surface sensor networks, federal government agencies today own only a small fraction of the sensors. The rest are in multiple hands. Go into any government computing centers, where the big numerical weather predictions models are being run, and it won’t be uncommon to find contractors working side by side with government employees, in operations and maintenance, doing model development, etc. Virtually all of the service delivery is in private hands – and a wide range of those to boot. What once was the purview of the daily newspapers, radio stations, is now everywhere – on the internet, on laptops, handhelds, in cars – you name it. And at every step, it’s hard, and in some sense, rather pointless, for users to separate out the respective roles of public- and private-sector players in bringing this information to them.
And this collaboration is facing complex new challenges. Let’s look at just one – wind energy. Every evening, when you and I are watching television, we see advertisements touting green energy, and more likely than not, showing a farm of wind turbines, majestically towering above the terrain, and turning slowly in the background. But there’s a complicated reality behind all this.
The towers are now 100 meters high (think of a football field turned upwards on its end). Wind speeds are variable from top to bottom of the turbine blades. In fact the blades are now so big that wind direction can be substantially different between top and bottom of the blades. The resulting stresses increase the need for maintenance, and reduce the turbine lifetimes. Don’t believe me? Go to Google Images, and type in “wind turbine damage.” You’ll see pictures of turbines missing blades, of blades so warped they look like something from a Salvador Dali painting, of turbines on fire, of burnt-out turbine hulks. At the same time, the complexities of temporally-variable low-level winds over the irregular terrain where we find many of these wind farms mean power output is less than what may have been hoped.
One of the keys to reducing the need for turbine maintenance, and increasing the power output from wind farms is better numerical weather prediction, not on global scales, but on the scale of the wind farms themselves, and for just a few hours. Turns out that such forecast capabilities have other uses as well – for solar power, or for agriculture, or to support ground transportation. So what should we do? And who should do it? And how will we pay for it? To tackle these issues requires that government, corporations, and academic researchers all pull together. The conversations here at State College are partly about sorting all that out, on strategic as well as tactical levels.
Today, here in State College, as the private sector, the public sector, and academic researchers convene, we’re only eight years old in weather,-water,-and-climate-services-and-sciences years. Our field is still young. But there’s talk, there’s laughter. There’s common purpose and shared energy. We’re cooking up projects. It’s amazing. I can hardly wait until we hit the next level.
For more posts by William Hooke, visit his AMS blog, Living on the Real World.
Weathercasters in Multiple Exposures
A recent blog post by Bob Henson, author of the new AMS book, Weather on the Air, serves as a good summary of the growing news coverage of broadcast meteorologists’ take on global warming. Much of this coverage stems from a recent survey of weathercasters released by George Mason University, in which, as Henson notes:
…the most incendiary finding was that 26% of the 500-plus weathercasters surveyed agreed with the claim that “global warming is a scam,” a meme supported by Senator James Inhofe and San Diego weathercaster John Coleman. On the other hand, only about 15% of TV news directors agreed with the “scam” claim in another recent survey by Maibach and colleagues. And Maibach himself stresses the glass-half-full finding that most weathercasters are interested in climate change and want to learn more.
Henson cites The New York Times, National Public Radio, ABC’s Nightline, and Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report as some of those that have examined the issue recently. The most recent “exposé” was a 10-minute segment entitled “Weather Wars,” on Australian “Dateline”; it features a number of AMS members.
Cool Roofs Seen in Black, White, and Green
Science teaches us not to answer questions in black and white terms—the meaning of data usually has many shades of gray. So it is with figuring out the micro and macro effects that different roof coverings might have on global warming or energy efficiency. The answers are starting to look more complex, and more promising, than ever.
For example, it would seem natural when studying rooftops and their effects on climate large and small to focus on extremes of albedo—in other words, black and white surfaces. This is sometimes the case in simplified modeling studies. But at this week’s AMS 9th Symposium on Urban Environment, in Keystone, Colorado, Adam Scherba of Portland State University submitted findings that moved beyond simple comparisons of white (“cool”) roofs versus black roof coverings. He and his colleagues mixed roof coverings, notably photovoltaic panels and greenery (which has the advantage of staying cooler during the day but not, like white roofs, getting much colder at night). The mix makes sense when you consider that roofs are also prime territory for harvesting solar energy. Scherba et al. write that
While addition of photovoltaic panels above a roof provides an obvious energy generation benefit, it is important to note that such systems – whether integrated into the building envelope, or mounted above the roof – can also result in an increase of convective heat flux into the urban environment. Our analysis shows that integration of green roofs with photovoltaic panels can partially offset this undesirable side effect, while producing additional benefits.
This neither-black-nor-white-nor-all-green approach to dealing with surface radiation makes sense from both energy and climate warming perspectives, especially given the low sun angles, cold nights, and snow cover in some climates. For instance, a recent paper, in Environmental Research Letters, uses global atmospheric modeling to estimate that boosting albedo by only 0.25 on roofs worldwide—in other words, not a fully “cool” scenario of all white (albedo: 1.0) roofs—can offset about a year’s worth of global carbon emissions.
And the authors of a recent modeling study (combining global and urban canyon simulation) published in Geophysical Research Letters simulated a world with all-white roofs but showed that:
Global space heating increased more than air conditioning decreased, suggesting that end-use energy costs must be considered in evaluating the benefits of white roofs.
Delving directly into such costs this week at the AMS meeting is a paper from a team led by Anthony Dominguez of the University of California-San Diego. They looked at the effects of photovoltaic panels on the energy needs in the structure below the roof, not the atmosphere above it.
Did they find that a building is easier to keep comfortable when covered by solar panels? Well, if you need to air-condition during the day, yes. If, however, like many people on the East Coast this summer, you need to keep cooling at night, then no. This is science—don’t expect a black-and-white answer.
Remaking Stable Boundary Layer Research, From the Ground Up
A recently accepted essay for the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Joe Fernando and Jeff Weil is good background reading for this week’s AMS 19th Symposium on Boundary Layers and Turbulence in Keystone, Colorado.
Fernando and Weil point out that research into the lowest layer of the atmosphere where we all live and breathe will need to evolve to meet needs in numerical weather prediction. While progress is apparent in the modeling of the boundary layer when it is stirred into convection, those models have obvious shortcomings when the low-level air is not buoyant—the stable boundary layer typically encountered at nighttime. The stable boundary layer controls transport of pollution, formation of fog and nocturnal jets in the critical time before the atmosphere “wakes up” in daytime heating. Weil, in his presentation this Thursday at Keystone calls the still-flawed modeling of the stable situation “one of the more outstanding challenges of planetary boundary layer research.”
Fernando and Weil write in BAMS that study of the stable boundary needs to be retooled to embrace interactions of relevant processes from a variety of scales of motion. The weakness and multiplicity of relevant stable boundary processes means that investigations of individual factors will not be fruitful enough to improve numerical prediction. Scientists need to temper their natural tendencies to try to isolate phenomena in their field studies and modeling and instead seek
simultaneous observations over a range of scales, quantifying heat, momentum, and mass flux contributions of myriad processes to augment the typical study of a single scale or phenomenon (or a few) in isolation. Existing practices, which involves painstakingly identifying dominant processes from data, need to be shifted toward aggregating the effects of multiple phenomena. We anticipate development of high fidelity predictive models that largely rely on accurate specification of fluxes (in terms of eddy diffusivities) through computational grid boxes, whereas extant practice is to use phenomenological models that draw upon simplified analytical theories and observations and largely ignore cumulative effects/errors of some processes.
This new perspective, the authors argue, will be a “paradigm shift” in research and modeling.