The Front Page – Page 44 – Blog of the American Meteorological Society

Driving Home the Point about Listening

January 25, 2012

Crescent City Pedicabbie, the taxi-blogger service here in New Orleans, writes:

The American Meteorological Society is holding their annual conventionin New Orleans this week. Late this afternoon I picked up a convention-goer, and as he settled into the seat, he asked me: “Is it going to rain this evening?”
I started to give him my best guess when I remembered who he was. I whirled around in my seat to look at him in disbelief. “Seriously? You’re asking ME?”
Looking back on the incident, I’m wondering if he was collecting data for the forecast. Maybe they factor the intuition of pedicabbies into it or something.

Well….yes, actually (and we don’t just listen to cabbies with elaborate theories). Take, for example, the abstract for a presentation here at the AMS Annual Meeting on Tuesday, by Marcel Molendijk, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) In the Netherlands, the 35 official weather observation stations provide plenty of density for purely meteorological information, but equally significantly, the density of development in such a small country also means the need for ground truth of weather impacts is equally great. So KNMI has initiated a new weather alerts system that solicits feedback from citizens through an iOS app for mobile devices. The user of the app selects preset conditions and can attach a photo. The software applies GPS location and time stamp and sends the information to the weather forecasters.
So indeed, pedicabbies are now in the weather observation game and their intuition–at least their observations–are much appreciated by the professionals. Thanks for driving that point home, CrescentCityPedicabbie.

2012 Verner E. Suomi Award Recognizes Extensive Field Work to Understand Ozone Dynamics

January 25, 2012

Anne Thompson, professor of meteorology at Penn State, is the 2012 recipient of The Verner E. Suomi Award. She is being recognized with the Suomi Award, which is in the form of a medallion, for exceptional vision and leadership in deploying technologies that have significantly advanced the understanding of ozone dynamics in the atmosphere.
The Front Page sat down with Dr. Thompson to learn more about her research accomplishments and her passion for field programs, which produced huge amounts of data, allowing her to unlock the secrets of ozone dynamics. She also extends that passion to students who sometimes need prompting to participate in field work , willing them to “open your eyes and get involved.”
Click on the image below to view the interview.

Disaster Risk Management Meets Climate Change Adaptation

January 25, 2012

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director, from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
An increasingly popular and visible feature of AMS Annual Meetings is a suite of so-called Town Halls. Often scheduled for the lunch hour (and therefore attracting primarily that minority of attendees who prefer food for thought to the competing invitation of physical sustenance with friends), these sessions are supposed to model the iconic town halls that once were the heart of the new England political process. They’re more about community input than any erudition of the speakers.

AMS Town Halls are typically used to roll out federal agency initiatives, strategic plans, and/or explore the interface between our community’s science and major developments within the policy arena. A sampling: yesterday one provided researchers a look at emerging directions for DoE’s climate and earth system modeling. Another looked at threats to the continuity of Earth observing systems – a topic frequently discussed in this blog.
I was a last-minute substitute panelist, for the panel on Risk Mitigation for Climate Adaptation and Natural Hazards. The session took its cue from a recently-released Summary for Policymakers of an IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX).
For those in the field, this special report has been required reading. Thirty pages or so of thoughtful, well-reviewed and well-documented material. [We can look forward to publication of the full document next month.] Here’s the bit that to me looks salient today: “Closer integration of disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, along with the incorporation of both into local, subnational, national, and international development policies and practices, could provide benefits at all scales.” [page 9]
The idea, in a nutshell, is that disaster risk management and climate change adaptation share much in common. The Town Hall announcement highlights the difference this way: risk management draws from history, while climate change looks to the future. The idea is the incorporating this forward-looking perspective into more traditional hazard risk management will lead to more resilient communities.
This is a great thought…but also maybe a no-brainer.
On reflection, this session also provides opportunity to reflect anew on five ways (there are undoubtedly others) we might make hazard risk management itself (and by implication, climate adaptation) more effective.
Embrace No-Adverse-Impact policies. Environmental impact statements have been with us a long time. You know the idea. When you and I contemplate construction, land use, etc., we have to assess the environmental consequences of our actions. In a similar way, we could and should assess the benefits and/or risks our plans and actions imply for community resilience.
Learn from experience. When it comes with natural hazard rsik management, we should adopt the learn-from-experience habits of aviation, as embodied in the work of the National Transportations Safety Board.
Measure progress. Hazard loss figures are noisy year-to-year and uncertain. But the discipline of continually honing our ability to estimate losses will in itself contribute to the awareness needed to motivate loss reduction when averaged over years.
Foster public-private collaboration. Such collaborations are not optional in today’s free-market societies. However, there’s considerable room for improving the level of such collaborations. They should not be fragmented, haphazard, merely tactical. They should instead be truly collaborative, ongoing, strategic.
Revitalize a venerable institution. Much has been made recently about a notional move of NOAA from the Department of Commerce into the Department of Interior. Dr. Lubchenco was questioned on this in her talk of yesterday. With NOAA embedded in Commerce, a good case can be made that the Department of Commerce provides an excellent home for achieving these several goals of hazard risk reduction and climate adaptation. However, this potential has been recognized and ignored for decades. If it’s never to be realized, then a move to Interior makes more sense.

Suomi Now Smiles Down Upon Us

January 25, 2012

NASA and NOAA announced today at the AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans that they have renamed the recently launched polar orbiter, NPOESS preparatory project, the Suomi NPP, after the late Verner Suomi, who was one of the pioneers in creating instruments for satellite observations of the weather. AMS annually gives out a prestigious Verner Suomi Award for technological achievement–this year’s winner is Anne Thompson.
“Verner Suomi’s many scientific and engineering contributions were fundamental to our current ability to learn about Earth’s weather and climate from space,” says John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Suomi NPP not only will extend more than four decades of NASA satellite observations of our planet, it also will usher in a new era of climate-change discovery and weather forecasting.”
Suomi, who died in 1995 at the age of 79, spent nearly his entire career at Univ. of Wisconsin. He is legendary for developing the spin-scan camera, which allowed satellites in stationary orbit of one point on Earth to maintain continuous focus and enable, among other capabilities, the instant-replay-style weather images we watch on television.
In 1968 he won the AMS’s highest award, the Rossby Medal

for his imagination, ingenuity, and versatility in conceiving and designing diverse meteorological sensors which have helped to transform the satellite as a meteorological probe from a dream to a reality. His Spin-Scan camera has given us our most comprehensive views of the atmosphere as an entity, and has already led to revised ideas concerning the circulation in lower latitudes.

and in 1977, he received the National Medal of Science — one of many awards — though his son Eric Suomi expects his father would have been particularly appreciative of Suomi NPP’s mission and new name.
The University of Wisconsin gathered comments on the name change:

“I think this is an excellent match,” says Eric Suomi, an electrical engineer who lives in Madison. “Had my father still been around, he would have been pushing for more of the kind of instruments on this satellite and the observations they’ll be making of our planet.”
“Vern flew the first experiment to look at the Earth from space on Explorer 7,” says Hank Revercomb, a Suomi collaborator and director of UW-Madison’sSpace Science and Engineering Center, which Suomi helped establish in 1965. “That was a radiation budget experiment, and there is actually a similar experiment, an instrument called ‘CERES,’ on the spacecraft they’ve named for him.”
Suomi NPP will also add to long-term climate records, monitor the health of the ozone layer, measure global ice cover and air pollution levels, map vegetation and — with the help of a sounder, an instrument conceived by Suomi and refined by Revercomb — contribute to better weather forecasts with sharper data on cloud cover, wind, temperature and atmospheric moisture.
“This satellite is designed to study the atmosphere and improve our understanding of how and why changes make a difference in our weather and climate,” Univ of Wisconsin Professor Steve Ackerman says. “Those were Day One objectives of Verner’s from the 1950s.”

The Good Meteorologist: CCM Forum Wednesday

January 25, 2012

Are you good at what you do? Of course, you are…but are you good in what you do?
All professions ultimately uphold specific ethical standards–guidelines for being good in a moral sense. In some cases these are established by laws enacted in the interest of the public that relies on these professionals. Meteorology may not be as heavily regulated as some professions, but it still is subject to laws and government regulation, especially to the extent that researchers spend government dollars, or professionals engage in business or work for governmental agencies.
Oddly enough, however, obeying the standards of a profession are not always equivalent to simply behaving well in the usual sense of being good. Our lives in private or personal matters are governed by a different code of conduct than our lives as professionals. Or so insist ethics experts. According to Albert Flores, Philosophy Professor at California State Univ.–Fullerton,

to suppose that there must be absolute consistency between private and public actions does violence to the very point of drawing the distinction in the first place.

Flores cites, for example, the difference the lengths to which a lawyer must go, ethically, to defend a client and the way the same lawyer would behave in disputes in private life. And it is ok for a police officer to deceive a suspect under investigation but not ok to employ deception in dealing with friends. It’s also ok in private life to promise to do something that you don’t yet know how to do, but not ok as a scientific consultant to portray yourself as capable of things you aren’t yet competent in doing. As a result of contradictions like this, you can’t count on your well-ingrained sense of right and wrong to guide you through every ethical dilemma as a meteorologist, whether in private practice, in government, or in academia. And because laws and codes are involved, you may not even realize what sort of decision could get you in legal trouble as a professional. There’s a lot to know.
To help you navigate the rights and wrongs of meteorology, the CCM Forum at this Annual Meeting is devoting its Wednesday discussions to professional ethics. At 10:30 a.m. (Room 245) Bernard Meisner CCM “will review some of the most common situations faced by NWS consulting meteorologists” in his presentation, “Ethical Practice for National Weather Service Consulting Meteorologists”
At 1:30 p.m., Jerry Hill, CCM, will moderate a panel discussion of “Contemporary Ethics Problems Facing Meteorology Community.” Among the panelists will be Univ. of New Mexico Regents Professor Law, Marsha Baum, who is a scholar of the intersection of meteorology and the legal system, and is the featured speaker at the CCM Town Hall (12:15-1:15 p.m., Room 239). Prof. Baum teaches a course on “Weather in U.S. Law and Society” and has titled her keynote speech, “Is It Law or is it Ethics.”

Broadcast Meteorology Award Winner Says 'Be Yourself' On-Air

January 24, 2012

Bob Ryan, meteorologist for WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., is the 2012 recipient of The AMS Award for Broadcast Meteorology. Ryan is being honored with this annual award in recognition of a career based on personal integrity and dedication to advancing the science of meteorology through broadcasting, education, promotion of safety, and support of colleagues.
Established in 1975, the AMS Award for Broadcast Meteorology recognizes a broadcast meteorologist for sustained long-term contributions to the community through the broadcast media, or for outstanding work during a specific weather event. Ryan, who has been a fixture in Washington TV News for more than three decades, will receive the award at the 92nd AMS Awards Banquet Wednesday evening in New Orleans.
The Front Page caught up with him to learn about how he connects with viewers when on-air and with his colleagues within the AMS. His primary advice for future broadcast meteorologists: “Be yourself,” he says, “and again, you’re talking to one person.” You can view interview below.

Big Exhibits in the Big Easy

January 24, 2012

More photos up on Flickr.

Planets align at the Exhibit Hall opening.

Everybody Talks about the Weather–but Not All the Time

January 23, 2012

Installation of dual-polarization radar at the Sacramento, California, office of the National Weather Service prompted a local paper to publish a detailed profile of forecast operations there. The web version we linked includes a short video interview with meteorologist Kathy Hoxsie explaining the advantages of the new observing technology.
Dual-pol of course is a major topic here at the Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Many attendees are getting a chance to hear the latest updates on the installation of the technology, including tomorrow (Tuesday, 11 a.m., Room 357) when Timothy Crum of NOAA/NEXRAD operations gives a “30,000 foot view” of the upgrade process.
One thing that caught our eye in the article was a telling comment Hoxsie made about the public’s interest in weather, when a

storm – which was producing a light drizzle Friday morning – had moved in Thursday, ending what had been a spike in weather interest by the public.
Counter-intuitively, people are interested when weather isn’t doing what it is expected to do, Hoxsie said. So the arrival of rain – a normal occurrence throughout the winter – didn’t mean more questions from the public.
“We get almost as many calls when there is no weather,” Hoxsie said. “People want to know if there is a drought, when the next storm is coming, when will the sunny weather end? The interest actually lessens a bit because the weather is doing what everyone’s expecting it to do.”

(Even if the public takes an occasional break from talking about the weather, surely this week of all weeks we can go nonstop, so here goes:) Doesn’t this effect depend on how menacing a rain might be? One would think a heavy rain might prompt a spike of interest in flood risks, or simply questions about when the rain would end. But the counterintuitive effect Hoxsie mentioned is a reminder that our relationship with weather is more nuanced than we might think.
So, at the same time as the presentation on dual pol radar (but in Room 243), you’ll find clear evidence of that subtlety thanks to David Perkins IV, who cuts through preconceptions about how weather determines people’s zoo attendance.

Social forces are admittedly the strengths of attendance prediction; however, the subtle differences in a zoo’s weather vulnerability—whether it is related to city proximity, spatial layout, surrounding demography, or climate of the location—are factors that underlie the scholarship of how weather and weather perception both affect zoo attendance.

The next paper in that session is by Kevin Simmons and Daniel Sutter, two social science researchers who also refuse to take this relationship for granted. We’re particularly interested to know what their cold-eyed data show about the effect TV meteorologists actually have on saving lives during tornadoes.

WeatherFest and All That Jazz

January 23, 2012

More photos up on Flickr.