It’s always nice to hear good news: The ozone layer is recovering, and by around 2032 the amount of ozone in the atmosphere should return to 1980 levels, according to the 2010 Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion. At last fall’s symposium on Stratospheric Ozone and Climate Change, co-sponsored by AMS, Paul Newman gave a talk about this progress–and what the world would have looked like had the landmark Montreal Protocol not been implemented in 1987. Here’s his message, in a nutshell, courtesy of a NASA video:
(You can see Newman’s in-depth presentation on the Assessment from the Bjerknes Lecture at the AGU Fall Meeting as well).
Comprehensive data are available in the links, but a couple of highlights from Newman’s talk are that 1) amounts of chlorine and bromine in the lower atmosphere are in decline, and 2) if the Montreal Protocol had not been implemented in 1987, two-thirds of the ozone layer would be have disappeared by 2065, while the UV index would have tripled. Not only would this have led to a marked increase in occurrences of skin cancer and other health problems, but it also would have caused crop yields across the world to decline by up to 30%, potentially leading to food shortages.
The technology used in ozone research will be the topic of a number of presentations at the upcoming AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans. One device of particular interest is the Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite (OMPS), a state-of-the-art instrument onboard the recently launched NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite.
Angela Li of NASA and colleagues will discuss the collection and evolution of OMPS data in a presentation titled “End-to-End Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite (OMPS) Mission Data Modeling and Simulation” (Tuesday, 1:45 p.m., Room 343/344).
Glen Jaross of Science Systems and Applications, Inc. will lead an examination of the calibration of instruments like OMPS in the discussion, “Evolution of Calibration Requirements and Techniques for Total Ozone Mappers” (Tuesday, 8:30 a.m., Room 257).
Lawrence Flynn of NOAA/NESDIS will lead a talk (Monday, 5:00 p.m., Room 245) on recent advances in ozone sensors, with a focus on those that make solar Backscatter measurements in the Ultraviolet–a list that includes not only OMPS but also the EuMetSat Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME-2), the Chinese Meteorological Administration (CMA) Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet Sounders (SBUS) and Total Ozone Units (TOU), and the NOAA Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet instruments (SBUV/2).
Early results from OMPS and other instruments on NPP will be the subject of a panel discussion (Monday, 12:15 p.m., Room 343/344) of NPP science team members and designers.
Science for Oysters…and Oysters for Scientists
One of the highlights of New Orleans is its distinctive, world-renowned cuisine. And indulging in that famous cuisine more often than not means enjoying the bounty of the Gulf of Mexico. AMS members will descend on New Orleans right at the high season for oysters, according to food critic Brett Anderson writing in the local paper, the Times-Picayune, right before Christmas:
Meteorologically speaking, it is an inconvenience that Louisiana oysters are never more delicious than they are right about now, just as we’re growing accustomed to the daily threat of something resembling winter. Wouldn’t it be nice if oysters were at their crispest in August instead, when they could provide cool relief from the blood-hot sun? Yes, that would be nice, but our reality is pretty sweet as well: oysters at their peak, tasting like clean ocean water, firm-fleshed and sitting pert on their shell. They’re perfectly sized, large enough to announce their presence, small enough to swallow whole. Get another dozen. It’s gift-giving season.
According to the reports from the restaurants, the local crop is back to the quality seen before the big BP Horizon oil spill of 2010. Prices and supplies have normalized.
So while you’re hunting for some Gulf oysters on the half-shell later this month at the AMS Annual Meeting, keep in mind that this delicacy is not only featured on your plates but, also, featured on scientific program. In particular, two presentations might ease concerns you have about subjecting your stomach to the raw variety (of food, not science, of course!). Gina Ylitalo (NOAA) and colleagues will present on “Oil Spills and Seafood Safety” (8:45 p.m., Tuesday, Room 333). They write
Thousands of seafood samples collected during reopening and surveillance in the Gulf, as well as those obtained dockside and in the marketplace have been analyzed using [advanced] analytical methods. While chemical compounds associated with the oil spill have been detected in seafood samples using these various analytical methods, none were present in edible tissues at levels that approached levels of concern for human consumers of seafood products from the Gulf.
Later in the same session on Tuesday, Jay Grimes (Univ. of Southern Mississippi) will talk about monitoring disease potential from raw seafood with satellite monitoring of ocean temperatures and salinity, in “Can You Really See Bacteria from Space?”. Below is the latest bacteria estimate from their oceanographic monitoring website:
The Hazards of the Winter Roads
We all know winter is a tough time for drivers, not only with wet and icy roads but also with poor visibility due to more dark hours, low sun angles, valley fogs, or blowing snow.
Right there you have two different problems: adverse road conditions, and adverse atmospheric conditions.
Which hazard is more of a seasonal phenomenon, and which is the greater risk to drivers? And given regional variations in winter conditions, how do the risks change with your location and time of year? Do risks depend on whether you’re driving a big or small vehicle?
Recently, Allan Curtis of the University of Lincoln and his colleagues have been putting a quantitative edge to such questions by analyzing more than 100,000 fatal crashes, one-fifth of them with commercial trucking. Some results so far that they’ll present Wednesday, 25 January (10:30 a.m., Room 348/49) at the AMS Meeting in New Orleans include:
- 17% of all fatal accidents and 7,130 persons are killed in weather-related accidents each year.
- The Midwest has the greatest average intra-annual variability for both trucks and passenger vehicles. For large commercial trucks, the average monthly peak occurs in January with 38.29% of accidents occurring with adverse-weather, and a minimum in June of 8.27%. For passenger vehicles, accidents are less affected by adverse-weather with an average intra-annual peak of 30.28% in January and a minimum of 6.32% in June.
- The South has the least average intra-annual variability of accidents in adverse-weather.
- Adverse-road related accidents are greater in all regions than adverse-weather due to the fact that accidents can occur on wet or snow/ice covered roads in the absence of adverse-weather.
One can imagine taking Curtis et al.’s data and parsing out when the forecasts for road conditions are likely to be more meaningful to drivers than forecasts for the weather itself, among other applications. Stay tuned for the presentation in a few weeks.
New Study Now Quantifies the "Huge" Seafloor Movement in 2011 Japanese Earthquake
At a magnitude of 9.0, the earthquake off the Japanese coast last March was already known as one of the most powerful ever recorded, killing (in large part due to the ensuing tsunami) almost 16,000 people and damaging or destroying more than 125,000 buildings. A recent study (available here; subscription required) now quantifies just how monumental the event was: the seafloor in the Japan Trench northeast of the mainland, where the quake originated, was jolted 50 meters horizontally and 10 meters vertically–movement that was “abnormally, extraordinarily huge,” according to Toshiya Fujiwara of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.
Fujiwara led the research that used multibeam bathymetric surveys to measure the depth of the water and contouring of the seafloor. He noted that the research team did not expect to be able to use such equipment to detect the crust movement,which during most earthquakes occurs in scales of millimeters or centimeters. For example, the 2005 Miyagi earthquake, which had a magnitude of 7.2, registered a crustal shift of 10 centimeters at a geodetic station near the Japan Trench. The 2011 earthquake had a shift of 15 meters at the same station. The study also found another vertical shift of at least 4-6 meters of a slab of ocean crust between the Japan Trench and the Japanese coastline, which may have contributed to the pulsating pattern of the tsunami waves that eventually struck the country.
The researchers believe that the fault that caused the quake may extend as far as the axis of the Japan Trench.
“Previously, we thought the displacement stopped somewhere underground,” Fujiwara said, “but this earthquake destroyed the entire plate boundary.”
As we posted previously, a number of presentations at the AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans will cover the community response to the earthquake and tsunami, including Junichi Ishida of the Japan Meteorological Agency who will discuss the earthquake’s impact, the JMA’s response to it, and lessons learned from the disaster in the keynote address for the 28th Conference on Interactive Information Processing Systems (Monday, 11:00 a.m., Room 356).
Weather Alerts Get More (and More) Mobile
The use of social media as a forecast tool seems to develop as rapidly as the devices themselves. In December, the NWS revealed it will soon be providing customized location-specific alerts through a user’s wireless carrier.
“We’re getting this weather, disaster, and other emergency information into your hand,” says David Green of the NWS. “The new service will use geo-location to target alerts to a person’s whereabouts. The goal is to give people greater insight into what’s going on with the weather so they can make the best decisions about how to respond.”
At the AMS Meeting in New Orleans next month, you can get a look at two more ways mobile devices are being used to aid in forecasts. In “Using Mobile Devices to Display, Overlay, and Animate Meteorological Data and Imagery,” David Santek, CIMSS/University of Wisconsin, and colleagues, will show their custom interfaces for smartphones that offer near real-time weather alerts. For more on the details of their applications and the future plans for it, check out their presentation on Monday, 23 January, at 5:00 p.m. (Room 357).
Marcel Molendijk, of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, offers up a different use in “iWitness; Damage Assessment of Severe Weather by Mobile (phone) Observations.” Instead of sending weather alerts to cell phone users, Moldendijk and colleagues collected accident damage reports from an Apple iOS application they developed, with information including a description of the event, time and location (GPS-based), and an optional photo. To get more information on the KNMI system and the results collected to date, go to the talk on Tuesday, 24 January at 2:30 p.m. (Room 356).
After the Disasters, How to Be a Holiday-Ready Nation
Weather took hundreds of lives in a record 12 billion-dollar disasters in the United States in 2011. Internationally, the disaster toll is even more startling. Tragedies have been a commonplace. The record-breaking year is a wake up call to the weather and climate community and to the nation as a whole.
Yet, on a holiday eve, a veteran of some of the worst weather of the year shows us how to give thanks. It was at a meeting, “Weather Ready Nation: A Vital Conversation” this month in Norman, Oklahoma, in an emotional presentation by Keith Stammer. If anyone knows what it means to be Weather-Ready, now, it’s Stammer, the emergency manager of Jasper County, Missouri, where basically a third of the city of Joplin was ripped apart by an EF-5 tornado nearly a mile wide. (You can listen to Stammer’s description of the ordeal on-line.) Yet here’s how he started his talk:
The big thing you need to understand about Joplin is that at nighttime it is a city of 50,000 people; in the daytime it’s a city of a quarter of a million. A lot of people come in for shopping, medical, for work. The one thing that translates, into in terms of this particular disaster, was that we are most grateful that it happened on Sunday evening, and not Monday evening, or the totals would have been absolutely different.
That’s a remarkable perspective to take after 162 people died, over a thousand were injured, and nearly 17,000 dwellings were lost. It’s a way to live after a year like 2011.
The discussion about making this country more resilient to the battering and bruising of a violent atmosphere, begun in Norman, will continue at our meeting in New Orleans next month. A Monday lunchtime Town Hall by the same name, organized by the leaders of the Norman conference, will be a highlight (12:15 p.m., Room 238). After Christmas, we’ll report on some of the Weather Ready Nation ideas and comments in The Front Page as preparation for the week’s deliberations.
But before refueling our minds for the Annual Meeting, a holiday is a time to replenish the heart and to experience community, so listen again to Stammer, who ended his talk thanking the 114,677 different people who stepped forward, registered as volunteers, and put in some 697,817 hours of service so far to help Joplin recover (more than a million cubic yards of debris removed so far):
All disasters are local, they start locally; they end locally, they may in fact rise to national prominence somewhere in between as ours did, but in the end, with all due respect, all of you foreigners are going to go away and we’re still left to have to handle it. I think one of the things that helped us here is the fact that everybody was willing and able to look at this as a local effort. I can tell you that we did not have one organization or person that stood up and said, I’m in charge, you’re not, get over it. It was in fact a collaborative effort from the get-go and remains to be so today.
We are honored to celebrate a holiday with folks like that. We will be proud to make a Weather Ready Nation with them, too.
A Siren Song for Top-Down Emergency-Preparedness Thinking?
Those of us of a certain age and place in the American experience talk a lot about the meaning of tornado sirens–how it defined our awakening to the omnipresent threat of severe weather. Such sounds stick with those of us who have made weather our business–Tim Coleman et al. admit this is part of the inspiration for their history of tornado warning dissemination published in the May 2011 BAMS. The role of community sirens is surging again in research following the horrible tornado disasters of 2011, as witnessed by presentations coming up at the AMS Meeting in New Orleans by Stephanie Mullins (Univ. of Alabama-Huntsville) in the Wednesday 25 January afternoon poster session (2:30-4 p.m., Room 252/53), Kimberley Klockow (Univ. of Oklahoma; same room and day, 11:30 a.m. oral presentation), Cedar League (Univ. of Colorado/Colorado Springs) on Tuesday 24 January (2 p.m., Room 243), and others.
But what we forget is that it’s not just weather experts and the weather-obsessed who respond deeply to the sounds of emergency sirens. Witness the public outcry to a suggestion by emergency managers to standardize times of regular siren tests across a county in northern Michigan recently, reported today in the Petoskey News. Officials were intent on cutting back from twice daily soundings that had become a community ritual. The Charlevoix fire chief told his city council
that many people report that “they don’t even hear the noon or 9:30 sirens anymore” — the exact condition the change in procedure is intended to avoid.
Quite probably true. But people hear even when they’re not listening. Thanks to Dr. Klockow for pointing us particularly to this passage in the article:
Many of those favoring leaving the siren soundings in place pointed to the soundings as a hallmark of a small town. Many said they have fond memories of their kids or themselves being called home for the evening by the siren’s sound. Others said if the siren was discontinued they’d feel like they were losing yet another part of what make Charlevoix unique.
New Release: Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology
The newest title from AMS Books is now available: Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology: Dynamics, Analysis & Forecasting, by Gary Lackmann of North Carolina State University, 
links theoretical concepts to modern technology and facilitates the meaningful application of concepts, theories, and techniques using real data. It is aimed at those planning careers in meteorological research and weather prediction, and it provides a template for the application of modern technology in the classroom. Among the topics it covers in depth are extratropical cyclones and fronts, topographically trapped flows, weather forecasting, and numerical weather prediction. The book is generously illustrated and contains study questions and problems at the end of each chapter.
Midlatitude Synoptic Meteorology–as well as other AMS publications and merchandise–can be purchased from the AMS bookstore.
Plane Has Combative Attitude toward Storms
Technological advancements don’t always involve brand-new applications; sometimes, progress can be made when older technology is utilized in new ways. Such is the case with aircraft used for scientific research. “Experienced” military aircraft have proven to be effective for many types of atmospheric studies, and with the news (subscription required) that a powerful combat plane used by the military for many years is to be reconfigured and given a new assignment, many are looking forward to even greater research capabilities. Originally developed in the 1970s, the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, better known as the “Warthog” or just “Hog,” is a twin-engine jet designed for close air support of ground forces. Now it’s being prepared to take on powerful storms.
For many years, the military plane of choice for research inside thunderstorms was the T-28. But as early as 1985, scientists recognized that this aircraft lacked the altitude reach, endurance, and payload capacity to adequately address many of their questions. After a number of workshops to study other options, the A-10 Thunderbolt was identified as a prime candidate to become the Next Generation Storm-Penetrating Aircraft. A subsequent engineering evaluation confirmed the scientists’ view of the A-10 Thunderbolt, but the U.S. Air Force was resistant to authorizing the jet for civilian use. With the advent of the Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS), a research center at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, an opportunity opened to put an A-10 Thunderbolt into service of the civilian science community. In 2010, the U.S. Air Force agreed to transfer an A-10 Thunderbolt out of mothballs to the U.S. Navy and, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and let CIRPAS (on behalf of the Naval Postgraduate School) operate it as it has operated a Twin Otter and other aircraft for the last 15 years. CIRPAS aircraft are equipped with basic meteorological, cloud, and aerosol sensors, and have ample capacity for additional instrumentation that collaborators from other universities or national laboratories may wish to use.
The A-10 Thunderbolt must be completely reassembled to be prepared for atmospheric research. A main part of this effort is wing replacement, but other activity includes evaluation of reinforcement and engine protection needs. The jet will also have its nose-mounted, 30-millimeter cannon removed, opening up more space for scientific instruments. The aircraft is scheduled to be ready for flight in the fall of 2012 and for flying actual scientific missions by mid-2013.
So other than its name, what makes the A-10 Thunderbolt so qualified to fly into storms? Perhaps most importantly, its heavy armor, designed and built to withstand machine-gun and cannon fire. Most planes avoid cumulonimbus clouds and thunderstorms because the hazards that may be encountered inside such clouds–such as severe turbulence, severe icing, lightning, and hail–can be fatal. Encountering hail is particularly dangerous, as striking golf-ball-size hail at 200 mph can smash windshields and damage the airframe and engines. But the A-10 Thunderbolt is rugged enough to deal with such conditions. As Brad Smull of the NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences noted, “It turns out that being able to survive wartime flak has a lot in common with being able to handle a strong storm.”
Also valuable are the A-10 Thunderbolt’s flight capabilities. Much is still unknown about cumulonimbus and thunderstorms, and the A-10 Thunderbolt has the potential to reach parts of storms that were previously off-limits. While the T-28’s maximum flying altitude is about 4.5 miles (7 kilometers), the A-10 Thunderbolt can fly at altitudes of up to almost 7 miles (11 kilometers)–high enough to reach the icy heights of thunderheads and gather data on hail formation. It also has the ability to stay in storms for up to 3 hours, compared to about 1 hour for the T-28, and because the A-10 Thunderbolt flies relatively slowly–about 342 mph (550 kilometers per hour)–the data it collects should be of particularly high quality. It can also fly lower than the T-28, making it ideal for air-sea interaction studies, and its heavy payload will support lidar, radar, and other imaging systems.
Ultimately, the versatility of the A-10 Thunderbolt may prove to be its most attractive trait. For example, it might help meteorologists understand what governs the evolution of a storm and its eventual severity; atmospheric chemists study how storms generate chemical species, transport material through the depth of the troposphere, and modify them in the process; atmospheric physicists investigate how clouds become electrified and how electrification may feed back to influence the microphysics and dynamics of storms; and scientists who observe storms using remote sensors (radars, lidars, satellite radiometers) and who try to predict storm evolution by use of models gather in-situ measurements to validate their observations.
[Portions of this post contributed by Haf Jonsson of the Naval Postgraduate School]
A Slam-Dunk Choice for a Gift This Season
Admit it, you want them for the Holidays. Mike Smith already confessed as much on his blog, Meteorological Musings.
They’re NBA star Kevin Durant’s line of Nike basketball shoes, called the “Weatherman”, replete with temperature shadings, isobars, and, on the tread…radar scans of precipitation. We’ll count the number of pairs we see when we’re together in New Orleans.
Durant of course plays for the Oklahoma City Thunder. But 
an even better–indeed a slam-dunk–choice for a holiday gift is recommended by Cliff Mass: the Washington Weather Calendar, co-produced by Q-13 Fox News in Seattle and the AMS Student Chapter at the Univ. of Washington. For $13.99 plus shipping you can soothe your meteorological soul, if not your sole.