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In one of the classic understatements of aviation history, Eric Moody turned on the flight intercom of his British Airways 747 and reported to his 248 passengers:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

The date was 24 June 1982, and Moody’s 747 was south of Java, en route from Heathrow to Auckland, amidst an ash cloud from Mount Galunggung in Indonesia. At first it looked as if the only hope was to ditch the plane in the ocean. However, the crew was able to glide the plane (let’s all nod now  to engineers who managed to create a jumbo jet that descends only one meter for every 15 flown without power) until successfully restarting three of the four engines, but the damage from the cloud made for a harrowing landing over the mountainous terrain around Jakarta. In 1989, another 747 temporarily lost use of all four engines due to a volcanic plume (from Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt).
Not surprisingly, since the British Airways incident, volcanic plumes—previously studied more closely for their climatic effects—have become a preoccupation of weather forecasters. The world meteorological and aviation communities have collaborated on the International Airways Volcano Watch, whose advisories Thursday led to the cancellation of flights across northern Europe due to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjalla volcano. It will be hard to overstate the  consequence of this eruption for travelers around the world; it is already being compared to the no-fly days after 9/11.

The UK Met office shows the anticipated spread of the ash cloud.
Readers interested in how meteorologists detect and analyze volcanic plumes (mostly with satellite ) will want to check out the article on IAVW in the February 2007 issue of Weather and Forecasting by Tupper et al. Also in 2007, BAMS published a cover article by Mesikalski et al. previewing some potential improvements in the use of satellite technology for aviation safety, including avoidance of volcanic ash. A quick search of AMS journal articles shows other contributions on weather forecasting and climate topics related to volcano eruptions.
Most commentators meanwhile seem to be heading off the inevitable rampant speculation about the climatic effects of the Iceland eruption. Cliff Mass of the University of Washington discusses the relatively small size of the eruption so far (the length of the eruption being a key unknown factor). However, Jeff Masters in his Wunderground blog  gives an explanation for why high-latitude volcanoes don’t tend to cool the climate as well as tropical volcanoes.
To sum up the Masters’ logic: the atmospheric circulation won’t encourage lofting and spreading of the plume as it would over the tropics, where volcanic gases are pumped high into the stratosphere, causing formation of sulfates in addition to the original volcanic ash(which is heavier and eventually settles out) and then spreading toward midlatitudes.  Various conflicting reports about the height of the Icelandic plume can be found–here’s another meteorologist supporting Masters’ contention that the height of the Iceland plume is so far not enough to be a major climatic factor.

Known as “the father of satellite meteorology,” Verner Suomi was a man of unique vision, with an influence on the field of meteorology that extended far beyond satellite research. One of his lasting legacies is the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC), which he cofounded with Robert Parent in 1965, and now the SSEC’s library has established a Web site devoted to the life and accomplishments of Suomi.

The site includes articles published about Suomi, obituaries and memorials written following his death in 1995, audio of an interview with Suomi conducted for the AMS and UCAR, and video of a discussion of Suomi’s life by some of his closest colleagues that was filmed during the 50th Anniversary of Meteorological Satellites in November 2009.
The panel discussion reveals Suomi as a man equally dedicated to–and skilled at–teaching and researching. CIRA’s Tom Vonder Haar recalled that Suomi’s graduate classes were

more like idea shops, where he would tell us a month before that we were going to do this, then he’d go on a trip and get some new ideas and come in and it would be a totally different agenda. We were working on projects like measuring the energy from the sun with a balloon launch from an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic . . . putting an air horn on a balloon to get the temperature profile with acoustic propagation information. Vern had a lot of ideas. . . I would say he was a dedicated teacher, and I think another example of that was his interest in the students and faculty in other departments here at UW; he worked a lot with electrical engineering–not just the faculty, but with the students–he worked with the physics group, the astronomy group, and soils. . . He was a very collegiate–maybe an eclectic–person. He didn’t have boundaries, he saw no boundaries in education and things of that kind.

On the research side, the University of Wisconsin’s Larry Sromovsky remembered Suomi’s unique method of persuasion while developing a net flux radiometer for NASA’s Pioneer Venus probe mission in 1978.

. . . One of the more remarkable things that he did was when we had a review, we had the sensor design pretty much set to go and there was this final design review that would allow us to go forward and actually build the flight instruments. And the NASA team came to Space Science and they looked at all our results and at one point in the discussion they expressed a great deal of skepticism about the strength of what looked like this delicate little sensor . . . surviving this 200-G deceleration. And Suomi–he was great for bold strokes, I must say, and simple bold statements. And he grabbed the sensor head and stood up and flung it against the wall as hard as he could and the sensor was picked up off the floor and it looked perfectly fine. And he said, “Now do you think it will survive?”

Opening a successful business is all about location, they say. And so it is with wind energy.
Though the United Kingdom, with 250 wind farms, has vigorously embraced wind generation of electricity, a new study paints a discouraging picture of the overall productivity because of siting problems.
The study, released by the energy regulator Ofgem, found that at least 20 wind farms in the U.K. are operating at less than 20% of their capacity, with some even dipping below 10%. This is well below a typical  farm, which generates around 30% of its maximum potential energy. According to the study, the least productive farm (Blyth Harbour in Northumberland) operates at just 7.9% of its maximum capacity; the Chelker reservoir in North Yorkshire isn’t much better, at only 8.7% of capacity.
Critics claim that government subsidies are leading developers to choose less-than-ideal locations (with at least 14 m.p.h. average wind), leading to the disappointing productivity.
“Too many developments are underperforming,” says Michael Jefferson, a professor at London Metropolitan Business School and environmental consultant. “The subsidies make it viable for developers to put turbines on sites they would not touch if the money was not available.”
British electricity consumers help subsidize the country’s renewable energy policy through the “Renewables Obligation” plan, which requires the country’s energy companies to establish renewable sources. The UK energy plan calls for 20% of all its electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020 (that figure was downgraded to 10-15% by the country’s energy minister); currently, the country gets about 4% of its energy from such sources.
Meanwhile a new article by Willett Kempton and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences affirms the message that location, determined by meteorological and climatological analysis, is the key to producing energy effectively from wind power. However, the authors radically rethink the typical meteorological considerations for wind farm locations:

Whereas today’s developers prospect for the windiest single site, we would advocate a broader analysis—to optimize grid power output by coordinated meteorological and load analysis of an entire region.

The authors (from the University of Delaware and SUNY-Stony Brook) used wind data from 11 meteorological stations, representing 2,500 km of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, to show that a network of  turbines could be configured to overcome the typical intermittency that bedevils wind generated electricity.
The trick to making steady electrical power at high output is meteorological: use wide spacing of turbines to take advantage of the typical synoptic circulation of extratropical systems moving up the coast and then connect with high capacity transmission lines. The net result smooths out operations even during very low wind situations.  The authors suggest that further meteorological pattern analysis could refine the siting of turbines beyond the even spacing explored in the article
The implications for design also include rethinking the scale on which power generation is governed and coordinated, however, requiring a new Independent Service Operator to manage offshore generation and transmissions.
Alas, for the United Kingdom, the article is a bit more sanguine about the possibilities for such synoptic wind farm optimization:

[T]he lack of benefit seen by aggregating stations in the United Kingdom may be due in part to the roughly north–south orientation of the island, thus experiencing
their east–west passage of frontal systems nearly simultaneously.

Guest post by Sergey Matrosov, Valery Melnikov, Alexander Ryzhkov, and David Atlas
Vladimir Danilovich Stepanenko, one of the leading Russian scientists in the fields of radar meteorology and cloud physics died 17 March 2010 in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was born in October 1922 in a small Ukrainian village. After graduating from a high school in 1939 he decided to dedicate his career to meteorology and entered the Moscow Hydrometeorological Institute. After World War II broke out, Vladimir was transferred to the Army Hydrometeorological Institute from which he graduated with honors in 1944. A decorated World War II veteran, he served as a meteorologist in the Soviet Black and Azov Sea Navy in 1944 during the military campaign in the Crimean peninsula.
After WWII, Vladimir moved to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and worked at the Leningrad Hydrometeorological Institute where he earned his Ph.D. degree. From 1950 to 1973, he was teaching at the Hydrometeorological Department of the Army Corps of Engineers Academy in Leningrad. He became a professor in 1967. During this time, Stepanenko became one of the leading Soviet scientists in radar meteorology and published his book Radar in Meteorology, which soon became the main fundamental textbook in the USSR in this discipline of science. 
In 1974, Stepanenko retired from his teaching position, and joined the Main Geophysical Observatory (MGO) as a deputy director of science. At this position, he continued his research work and advised many Ph.D. students. Stepanenko’s contributions to various areas of meteorology and cloud physics are significant. He was particularly interested in applied research. Some of his scientific studies include pioneering research in severe weather phenomena, aircraft icing, weather modification, lidar and microwave remote sensing of clouds and precipitation, and observations of air pollution. For his work in these areas, Stepanenko was awarded a USSR state prize in 1986.  He led the meteorological support activities for the Soviet Space Shuttle Program. He continually worked on improving instruments and methods for observations of clouds and precipitation, which resulted in 14 patents in addition to more than 270 scientific publications and 11 books. Although he was heavily engaged in the latter activities, Vladimir loved tennis and often came out first in his age group.
Stepanenko was also active in international scientific collaboration. For many years, he chaired the Center for Radar Meteorology, which coordinated operational weather radar observations in the former USSR and several countries of Eastern Europe. He served as a coleader of several international research projects including the Soviet–American Microwave Experiment (SAMEX), which was conducted over the North Pacific in 1978.  In the midst of the Cold War, joint experiments like this contributed to a better understanding between Soviet and Western scientists. On his trips to the United States he made a point to visit with his American friends. His friendship with David Atlas blossomed over the years through exchanges of scientific papers and annual greetings.
Besides being a brilliant scientist, Stepanenko was a great teacher. He was an adviser to more than 20 Ph.D. students. Many of his former students are now working in various Russian scientific institutions and also in other countries including the United States. He also was a man of fairness and good heart. We are privileged to have worked with him during important periods of our scientific careers.

The AMS recently presented outgoing Journal of Climate Chief Editor Andrew Weaver with a plaque to thank him for his volunteer service to the Society. This is the beginning of a new tradition to honor every chief editor when they step down from their position, and it is appropriate that Weaver is the first to be recognized in this way, as during his term (2005-2009) the Journal of Climate grew significantly and earned consistently high ratings for its impact in the field of climatology. 
“It just so happens that our recognition of chief editors ending their tenure begins with one of the most successful of all the CE’s,” notes AMS Director of Publications Ken Heideman. “Andrew built on the foundation that others established before him and took it to a new level.”
As Heideman describes it, Weaver’s predecessors as Journal of Climate chief editor–NOAA’s Alan Hecht (1988), the University of Oklahoma’s Peter Lamb (1989-1995), and Colorado State University’s David Randall (1996-2004)–helped to establish the fledgling journal as a leader in climate research. By the time Randall handed the reins to Weaver, it was, according to Heideman, a “hot journal.  And then Andrew helped make it one of the hottest journals.”
During Weaver’s tenure, the Journal of Climate page count increased by almost 25%–from 5,400 to 7,000. More importantly, its ISI impact factor reached #1 in the category of meteorology and atmospheric sciences and was never lower than #4. The Journal of Climate has the most submissions and the most published papers of any AMS journal, as well as the most editors and editorial assistants. Weaver’s work sets a high standard for other chief editors.
“It’s amazing how much time Andrew put into the job,” says Heideman. “He routinely handled 100 papers a year by himself, and sometimes more. That was far above what we at AMS expected.”
For his part, Weaver found his time working with AMS “incredibly rewarding” and was especially pleased that he was able to keep up with what was happening in the field of climatology during a such a fertile period. His philosophy for the journal was simple and effective: do a good job in the editorial process, and the authors will come back.
“I’m most proud that the journal’s growth happened in the most tumultuous time in terms of climate politics, and we had no issues with that whatsoever,” he remembers. “Everything we did was just about the peer-reviewed science.”
As an organization led by its members, AMS relies on the volunteer spirit of people like Weaver not only to edit its journals but also to run nearly 100 boards, committees, and commissions.

According to a survey last spring, almost seven out of ten Americans expressed little to no concern regarding possible emergency weather situations, and nearly half (43%) said they were unprepared for situations resulting from severe weather, such as power outages. According to the International Association of Fire Chief (IAFC), many people make the mistake of using candles instead of an emergency battery-powered kit in the event of a power outage, resulting in approximately 15,000 home fires annually.
To get this information about weather safety out to the public, AMS has joined the IAFC and Energizer in their weather preparedness initiative as part of the Change Your Clock Change Your Battery campaign. The public education program, Energizer Keep Safe. Keep Going®, which officially kicks off on the first day of spring, provides tips for building a power kit to keep critical lines of communication open.
AMS is encouraging on-air broadcasters to utilize the kits as informative props or possibly as giveaways to viewers. “Energizer sees the broadcast community as the perfect platform to spread this important message because they have the most direct conduit into homes,” says Keith Seitter, Executive Director of AMS. “Everyone turns to them when severe weather is threatening.”
Energizer will also be providing support for the Broadcast Conference in Miami this June, sponsoring travel for some of the severe weather experts and invited speakers and co-sponsoring the short course to enable more broadcasters to participate.  “Their sponsorship of the Broadcast Conference is allowing the conference to offer an increased level of professional development for attendees,” comments Seitter.  “This in turn benefits the meteorological community and our service to the general public. We’re expecting to have Energizer call on the AMS community for scientific expertise on storm safety and preparedness as this program continues to unfold.”

For many travelers, lounging on the deck of a cruise liner with a fruity drink in hand is the ultimate in luxurious relaxation. According to the industry Web site cruisemarketwatch.com, more than 18 million people will vacation on a cruise ship this year. And while those idyllic visions of leisure are usually accurate, two recent disasters have spotlighted the potential hazards that unexpected severe weather can bring to cruise ships.
In early March, the Louis Majesty was cruising the Mediterranean off the coast of Marseille, France, with more than 1,900 people aboard when it was battered by three 30-foot waves. Two people were killed and 14 were injured after the waves broke glass, ripped out furniture, scattered debris, and flooded cabins. Marta de Alfonso, an oceanographer with the Spanish government, told the Associated Press that a powerful storm was influencing Mediterranean at that time, with reports of winds in excess of 100 km/h (60 mph).
Significant wave heights of around 20 feet were recorded by buoys in the area. “Rogue waves” are at least double the significant wave height, so the waves that struck the Louis Majesty are not considered rogue. As CNN’s Brandon Miller explains here, wind and current direction and sea floor topography can all cause abnormally large waves. Nevertheless, De Alfonso said that waves of the size that struck the ship generally appear in the Mediterranean only one or two times a year.
The previous week, the Costa Europa, a cruise liner in the Red Sea carrying almost 1,500 passengers, was docking at the Egyptian port of Sharm el-Sheik when it violently struck a pier, ripping open a six-foot-wide hole in the hull. Three crew members were killed and three passengers and one crew member went to a local hospital with injuries. The cruise line’s CEO blamed “exceptional bad weather conditions and an unexpected gust of wind” for the accident, although a marine official later said the cause was “100 percent human error.”
While it is clear that vacation cruises are generally safe, it isn’t entirely clear how common rogue waves are.  Several papers in recent AMS journals have addressed the statistics of waves that stick out from the general sea state around them (for example, Gibson et al. and Janssen and Herbers in Journal of Physical Oceanography), mostly trying to show how it might be possible to for waves to combine and interact to produce exceptional heights only very rarely.

In another paper in the same journal, Johannes Gemmrich and Chris Garrett of the University of British Columbia, make an interesting point about what makes these waves so potentially deadly:

What is clear from many cited examples of what observers describe as “freak” waves is that they tend to be much larger than the waves in the surrounding sea state, often appearing either singly or in small groups, without warning. In many situations, this unexpectedness is more dangerous than the wave height itself, for example, if mariners interpret an interval of several minutes of relatively small waves as an indication of a decreasing sea state.

However they go on to show, in at least one interpretation of their evidence, that the unexpectedness of rogue waves may be in the eye of the beholder.

The frequency with which unexpected waves occur even without the extra possible physics of resonant nonlinear interactions is remarkable and of scientific interest. It suggests that many reported freak waves may not be so freakish after all, but merely the simple consequence of linear superposition. Our predictions could be incorporated into maritime safety manuals or coastal warnings. To be sure, we have based our simulations on deep water scenarios and further analysis is required for nearshore situations, but it seems likely that similar results will emerge. Thus, mariners and tourists can be warned that even a few minutes of waves can be followed by a wave at least twice as high, with such an event likely every few days.

Rarely fatal, the statistics of surprise are nonetheless consistently…well… surprising.

AMS President Peggy LeMone wrote a guest editorial in the UCAR Staff Notes in January, telling stories from the front lines of the struggle to give women equal footing in the sciences. Interestingly, several times during LeMone’s career at NCAR, women had to formally organize themselves to fight a particularly galling decision or simply to understand and improve their working conditions. None of these episodes, however, quite encapsulates the lonely, embattled situation of women meteorologists during the 1960s and ’70s more than LeMone’s observation that,

When I met Joanne Simpson, she greeted me like a long-lost sister—it was so exciting to meet another woman in the field!”

This little cameo just confirms that no history of women in science (this being, after all, National Women’s History Month) could be adequate without at least some mention of Joanne Simpson, the first woman Ph.D. meteorologist, whose distinguished research career brought her in contact with her female peers all over the country. She was the pioneer who made all the other pioneers possible.
While one would scarcely know it upon meeting and talking to Joanne, the weight of this responsibility blazing a path for her female colleagues took a toll. She said

I have always felt that I’ve been carrying a big burden for other women, because if I mess up then the chances for other women to get the same kind of job are going to be diminished.

Of course Joanne Simpson, who died early Thursday less than three weeks before her 87^th birthday, did not mess up.  She has long been a legendary pioneer of meteorology. Winner of the AMS Rossby Award (and our president, in 1989) as well as the IMO Prize, she turned meteorology on its head with the discovery that energetic processes in clouds don’t just signify the atmospheric circulation, they help drive it. She went on to extend her concept of “hot tower” clouds to explain the inner workings of the heat engine of hurricanes, then fought for the satellite observing systems that would later show such clouds in action.
Simpson basically created from scratch the discipline of cloud studies as we know it today, then mentored the people and fostered the technology to make sure it would thrive. (For more of Simpson’s inspiring story, be sure to read John Weier’s biographical article at NASA’s Web site, or the AMS monograph, Cloud Systems, Hurricanes, and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, A Tribute to Dr. Joanne Simpson.)
It was quite obvious to the multitudes who knew Simpson that she was in this science for the love of the science itself; consider what she told LeMone in a 1989 interview:

My greatest wish would be to be like Grady Norton, who died of a heart attack while forecasting a hurricane, or like my early hero, Rossby, who keeled over and died in the middle of giving a seminar. I don’t like the idea of when I won’t be a Meteorologist anymore. It’s just inconceivable to me.

Inconceivable indeed, with thousands of people following her path, studying the observations she made possible, using the ideas she formulated. Nothing could ever stop Joanne Simpson from being a meteorologist. Not then, not now.
No real story of meteorology could be written without telling hers. We invite you to do exactly that and share your own part of her story in the comments section.

Guest Post by Bob Henson, UCAR
I consider myself forever lucky to have met Don Kent.  On a bright, mild afternoon last September, I drove to New Hampshire with AMS archivist Jinny Nathans and NCAR archivist Kate Legg to interview Don for the AMS-UCAR oral history project.  Knowing that I was at work on a history of television weathercasting (Weather on the Air, to be published this June by AMS), Jinny suggested the time was ripe to get the full interview that Don and his illustrious career so richly deserved.

We spent a delightful afternoon as Don recounted the saga of his involvement in weather and broadcasting.  It began during his 1920s boyhood, listening on the radio to Boston’s original weathercaster, E.B. Rideout.  There were obstacles along the way, including the ones Don hurdled as a volunteer weatherman for WMEX in the late 1930s, not long after high school.  As was the case until the 1950s, radio stations couldn’t even get teletype reports, much less Internet feeds, so Don had to traipse back and forth each day:
“I went to the weather bureau at Boston at 11 a.m., got the first map off the press at 11:30, and got up to the radio station for the 12:55 broadcast.”
Don told us about experiencing and covering the great hurricanes of 1938 and the 1950s.  He recounted his adventures and achievements during World War II and his serendipitous return to weathercasting years later.  His eyes brightened as he recalled his defense of on-air meteorology during the 1960s, when a WBZ news director told him either Kent or the isobars on his maps would have to go.  (In the end, of course, they both stayed.)
Interestingly, this legendary weathercaster and self-proclaimed “weather nut” told us that, of late, he’d been turning to the Internet rather than television for his atmospheric fix.  Who needed TV, he said, “when you’ve got your own computer showing the satellite and all the other stuff.”
What mattered most to Don, it seemed, wasn’t the medium but the meteorology. His legacy is safe among the thousands of Bostonians who counted on his dependable, no-nonsense reports, as well as the many weather communicators he mentored and inspired. If he’d had a youth serum handy, I have no doubt that Don would be podcasting, blogging, and YouTube-ing for decades to come.  Guest Post by Bob Henson, UCAR Communications Office.

The Portuguese archipelago of Madeira, nestled in the Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of Portugal and northern Africa, is normally a subtropical island paradise. But severe flooding on the island last weekend created a disaster that killed dozens and has local environmental leaders blaming the urban planning in the region as much as recent heavy rainfall. They believe that extensive development on the island of about 250,000 people over the last few decades created conditions that exacerbated the severe weather that struck over the weekend, when more than 11 cm of rain per fell in 5 hours in the town of Funchal–more than 15% of what it normally receives in an entire year.

“The situation has gradually been aggravated due to land-use zoning problems and errors committed on the island,” said Hélder Spínola of Quercus, a Portuguese environmental organization. These “errors” include the development and paving of land along the coast and near waterways and disruption of the flow of Madeira’s three largest rivers. During the recent storm, the rivers overflowed, storm runoff did not effectively drain into the ground, and much of the water was forced into drainage channels that were unable to hold the tremendous amounts of rain. As a result, raging rivers of mud and debris stormed down the hillsides, plowing through roads, buildings, bridges, and anything else in their path. Adding to the problem was the absence of a weather radar in Madeira, which prevented an accurate forecast of the unusually strong storm.
While local government officials denied that faulty planning and overdevelopment were to blame for the catastrophe, research has long shown that urbanization increases frequency of flooding. For example, an upcoming article by Yang et al. in the Journal of Hydrometeorology finds that when the impervious surfaces cover more than a mere 3-5% of the total area in a watershed, there is a statistically significant effect on streamflow.