by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director. Adapted from posts (here, here, here, and here) on the AMS Project,
Living on the Real World, discussing this week’s AMS workshop in Washington, D.C.
Our community suddenly finds the larger host society fiscally constrained and bitterly divided politically. And this seems to be true not just for America but for much of the world. The sources of funding that have fueled the progress in Earth observations, science and services in recent decades are not drying up – but they are looking to be intermittent, unreliable. And reductions – perhaps deep cuts – may well lie ahead. Historic bipartisan support for our work is fraying a bit; here and there we experience criticism, some of it harsh.
We face a twofold challenge. The work we do has never been more urgent…but the underpinnings for that work are in jeopardy. And – this is sobering – it seems this conjunction may not be accidental. Instead, these twin trials are related; they stem from the same cause. A population of seven billion people, on its way to nine, is straining both the Earth’s resources and its own intrinsic innovative capacity. And all of us are getting nervous and snippy with one another. If we’re not careful, worse lies ahead.
Discussions this past week at the AMS workshop on Earth Observations, Science, and Services for the 21st Century showed two divergent approaches to this challenging societal context. What was striking, without going into the details, was the contrast between work underway to (1) augment networks of surface meteorological sensors and (2) to deploy sensors in space. Both have had their recent successes. Shortly we’ll enjoy a substantial augmentation of surface carbon dioxide measurements – far sooner than most people had thought possible. And the successful NPP launch clears a huge hurdle for the world of aerospace and remote sensing of the Earth from space.
The distinction lies in what happens next. Those working on the surface networks see each sensor as seeding further sensors. They make comments like “…put this out in one state, and pretty soon other communities in that state will want their own sensor, and over time the network will build…” They’re looking to probing above the surface, characterizing not just conditions adjacent to the ground, but throughout the depth of the boundary layer (think the inversion layer that traps pollutants, or the layer just beneath cloud formation).
The folks at the satellite end find themselves by contrast on autopilot settings that don’t look as if they’ll change significantly until around 2025. The JPSS missions that will succeed NPP are scheduled to follow a script that’s relatively cut-and-dried. In the meantime, everything else in the host society that wants these space-based Earth observations will be morphing constantly, rapidly – if anything, at an accelerating rate. And this rigidity brings costs.
A big key? Being able to change direction…to recognize, acknowledge, and correct mistakes. How to accomplish this? Still up in the air.
Latest Readings
From our AMS bookmarks this week (for more, visit AMSFrontPage on Delicious, http://bit.ly/v7dMY2): Sun trackers gather to calibrate instruments…Feds make slow progress on levee inventory…WoW! FIU’s New Hurricane Simulator…Terra, Landsat Among US Satellites Hacked…Rivers Exhaling Surprising Amounts of Carbon Dioxide…Arkansas observers honored for 75 years of weather data…Obama Setting Records for Disaster Declarations…New NCAR supercomputer a boon for Wyoming wind energy studies
NASA Mission Monitors Birth of Antarctic Iceberg
Resuming a multi-year mission to map Antarctic ice in mid October, NASA researchers discovered a miles-long crack in a major glacier that marks the beginning of a new mammoth iceberg. Operation IceBridge scientists flying in a specially instrumented DC-8 jet returned soon after to make the first-ever detailed airborne measurements of giant iceberg calving in progress.
The crack in Pine Island Glacier, which extends at least 18 miles (29 km) and is 165 feet (50 meters) deep—enough to swallow up the Statue of Liberty— could break free a chunk of ice more than 340 square miles (880 square km) in size from the vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Pine Island Glacier’s ice shelf mostly floats, extending its unstable arm as many as 30 miles (48 km) away from the Antarctic landmass that grounds it some 500 meters (1,640 feet) below the surface. As the glacial ice inland flows slowly toward the sea and feeds the shelf, the arm eventually breaks, calving huge icebergs.
Pine Island Glacier last calved a significant iceberg in 2001, and some scientists have speculated recently that it was primed to calve again. But until an Oct. 14 IceBridge flight of NASA’s DC-8, no one had seen any evidence of the ice shelf beginning to break apart. Since then, a closer look back at satellite imagery seems to reveal the first signs of the crack beginning to cut across the ice shelf in early October.
“It’s part of a natural process, but it’s pretty exciting to be here and actually observe it while it happens,” says Operation IceBridge project scientist Michael Studinger of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
The IceBridge team thinks that once the iceberg breaks free, it will leave behind the shortest extending arm of the Pine Island Glacier since recordkeeping began in the 1940s.
Pine Island Glacier is of particular interest to scientists because it is big and unstable, which makes it one of the largest sources of uncertainty in global sea level-rise projections. A collapse of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is one of the nightmare scenarios climate forecasters envision in a warming world. If the WAIS were to melt, it could raise sea levels worldwide 20 feet.
NASA’s Operation IceBridge, the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown, is in the midst of its third field campaign from Punta Arenas, Chile. The six-year mission will yield an unprecedented three-dimensional view of Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves, and sea ice.
Gliders Do the Wave, in the Air and in the Ocean
One would think that the time when gliders were considered cutting-edge technology for science would have long passed. Yet this durable technology remains at the forefront of research, even today.
Where daredevil pilots once pushed the boundaries of engine-less flight into the upper reaches of the troposphere to study mountain waves, now the Perian Project looks to send its pilots into the stratosphere–30,000 meters up–in the extreme reaches of mountain-perturbed winds. With a special glider that has a pressurized cabin, organizers of the Perian Project hope to double the world’s sailplane altitude record that they set in 2006 with a different sailplane.
Elizabeth Austin of WeatherExtreme, Ltd. (of Fallbrook, California), the forecast provider for the Perian Project, will speak at the AMS Annual Meeting (Monday 23 January at 5 p.m.) about the high-altitude sailplane flights. Tests of the new, Phase 2 glider will begin in 2012 in California. Austin writes,
This two-seat sailplane is a one-of-a-kind, carbon fiber, pressurized sailplane that will utilize the polar night jet associated with the polar vortex to achieve an altitude of 90,000 feet (27.4 kilometers). The phase two glider has a wing span of 84 feet and will weigh 1,800 pounds loaded with two pilots and equipment. The windows are polycarbonate and do not get brittle at low temperatures. A special drogue chute is being designed that will not degrade rapidly with high levels of ozone exposure.
While piloted sailplanes are basically an extension of the daredevil mountain-wave research that’s been going on since before World War II, robotic devices have also recently been extending the art of research gliding far into the oceans.
You may remember that the cover of the August issue of BAMS featured an underwater glider as part of the article on the Alaska Ocean Observing System. At the upcoming Annual Meeting will be several oceanographic presentations involving the use of ocean gliders–for example here for P. Chu and C.W. Fan on thermocline measurements (Monday, 11:30 a.m.) and here for Phelps et al. on conditions for Arctic ice concentrations (Tuesday, 9:45 a.m. poster session).
Thanks to an open-source contest by Liquid Robotics, Inc., you don’t have to wait for the Annual Meeting to find out what it’s like to use the latest robotic gliders in oceanographic and meteorological observing. As a demonstration of robotic gliders powered by wave action, the Sunnyvale, California, company is launching four of its remote controlled craft in San Francisco on 17 November. Their goal: to cross the Pacific Ocean while collecting a variety of oceanic and atmospheric parameters.
The company is calling this record-breaking robotic the PacX Challenge and it involves a prize for the scientist–that could be you!–who comes up with the best use of the data streaming back from the robots as they make their way westward and, hopefully, avoid sharkbite (which has happened to one of the company’s gliders in the past).
The gliders (featured in today’s New York Times), only move at about one knot or so, and will split into pairs in Hawaii. In about 300 days, one pair is expected to reach Japan; the other pair, Australia.
While at sea, the Wave Gliders will be routed across regions never before remotely surveyed and will continuously transmit valuable data on salinity and water temperature, waves, weather, fluorescence, and dissolved oxygen. This data will be made available in near real-time to all registered individuals.
Oceanographic organizations already planning to use the data gathered during the Pacific crossing include Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Monterey Naval Post Graduate School.
If you submit an abstract by 23 April 2012, you can design a scientific mission for the gliders and hope for this:
The grand prize winner will receive six months of free Wave Glider data services and will work with Liquid Robotics to chart the course and mission for the six month deployment, including configuration of onboard sensors.
Not a bad way to let robots do the work for you.
About That New Satellite
With the the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite launched successfully yesterday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, satellite users will want to begin thinking about getting up to date on NPP at the AMS Annual Meeting. Here’s a quick link to the dozens of upcoming AMS Annual Meeting presentations related to the satellite and JPSS in general.
In particular consider attending the Tuesday (24 January,; 8:30 am) panel on “Expected Improvements from Satellite Technology on Operational Capabilities at the NWS, Navy, and Air Force.” The participants are the heads of those respective forecasting agencies–Jack Hayes, Fred Lewis, and James Pettigrew. AMS’s William Hooke moderates.
Also, on Monday (23 January at 11:45 am) Mitchell Goldberg et al. of the JPSS program will describe NPP and its place in the overall JPSS mission (the Joint Polar Orbiting Satellite System, is the civilian-side successor to NPOESS, which was the National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System). NPOESS was canceled in 2010.
Meanwhile, until we meet in New Orleans, here’s context about how the mission has evolved with the cancellation of the NPOESS. And here’s a NASA video describing NPP’s mission and capabilities:
Further, you’ll find a wealth of information about the NPP satellite and its genesis in the overall architecture of NPOESS, described in BAMS last year. The meeting program has more specifically about the five major instruments aboard, VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite; described here in BAMS), CriS (Cross-track infrared Sounder), ATMS (Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder), OMPS (Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite), and CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System; description in BAMS here).
We’ll undoubtedly post more about specific satellite-related sessions at the 2012 Annual Meeting in New Orleans as we approach January.
A Pastime That Can't Be Postponed Due to Weather
by William Hooke, Director, AMS Policy Program. Excerpted from a post on the AMS project, Living on the Real World.
Google the expression “Weather-Ready Nation” and you’ll see a rich set of offerings. That’s because the National Weather Service is using this label to describe a comprehensive initiative to make America safer in the face of weather hazards. Recall that America has what is arguably the most hazardous weather on the planet – as many winter storms as Canada, China, or Russia; as many hurricanes as southeast Asia, Japan, etc.; and a virtual lock on the world’s store of tornadoes. Nine separate weather disasters each totaling over a billion dollars in losses this year alone. So a Weather-Ready Nation? No trivial ambition.
But weather doesn’t have to be severe to be high-stakes.
The latest example? Yesterday’s decision by Major League Baseball to postpone the sixth (and possibly deciding) game of the World Series, originally scheduled for last night in St. Louis, until tonight.
Baseball games – even World Series games – have been called on account of rain before. What makes last night’s call unusual was that it was made several hours before game time, while the field was still dry – based on a forecast, rather than an unplayable fieldper se.
The sports press has been full of this story. Want a sample? You can find St. Louis coverage here and national coverage here. Discussion of the possible consequences, and the range of implications, has been extensive. Here’s a sample.
Some saw the decision to postpone this way: as diverting a potential disaster for Fox, the network carrying the game. A rain delay, and a game which might possibly decide the Series (the Texas Rangers are ahead of the Cardinals 3-2 in games) being concluded late, with trophies awarded only in the wee hours of the morning, after viewers had gone to bed, would not be Fox’s preferred outcome. Others noted that the one day delay expands the pitching options available to both managers; their starters have all gotten an additional day’s rest. Cardinals have had one more day to brood about the mis-communication between dugout and bullpen that hurt their chances in Game 5. The Texas Rangers, undoubtedly eager to wrap things up, have had to pace their hotel rooms an extra day.
It’ll be difficult to assess the impact of the decision; the World Series is not part of a controlled experiment. [We didn’t get to clone the teams and explore alternative universes, one in which they tried to play the game last night, and another when they played this evening.] But this Series has been so close that a one-day delay may well be seen to matter in hindsight.
And the funds at stake are substantial. The difference to individual players on the winning and losing teams amounts to something like $100,000 apiece. Team revenues for the Series also vary. But the real stakes become apparent the following year. The winners can look forward to increased season ticket sales, higher advertising revenues, a larger fan base and other economic plus-ups.
What’s striking in all this press coverage? No negativity about the NWS role. In fact, here’s a quote attributed to MLB executive vice president Joe Torre: “It really wasn’t difficult because every single weather report that we’ve had for about three days has predicted rain during the game,” he said on MLB Network, adding that a good forecast for the next two days helped influence the move. “If we’re not right (with the early postponement), we wanted to make sure we were doing it on the safety side,” he said. “That’s why we called it so early.”
This takes us back to all that discussion over the summer about the importance of NOAA’s polar orbiting satellites to the day-to-day consistency in forecasts of approaching weather for decision-making. [You can find material from this blog here.] Note that baseball executives made the call based not just on the forecast for last night’s weather, but the outlook for St. Louis tonight and tomorrow night, in case a Game 7 is required.
This particular forecast was relatively visible nationally, but the fact is that our country uses National Weather Service forecasts to place multi-million-dollar bets every day. The smart money doesn’t wait for the weather to change. They’re acting on the forecasts of that change. Utilities forecast energy demand, not just for the country as a whole but region by region and metropolis by metropolis. Airlines are cancelling and rerouting flights based on weather predictions. Water resource managers are looking ahead to demands and stresses on their watersheds. Agribusiness is constantly adjusting its decisions on when, what and where to plant, the application of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, and how to hedge against sudden changes in international market supply and demand. The lists and the stakes are growing. The Nation grows more weather-ready by the day.
Play ball!
Never Too Early To Complement Your Meteorology Skills
Dan Dowling, The Broadcast Meteorologist blogger, posted some useful advice yesterday for aspiring weathercasters about how to deal with inevitable on-camera jitters as they start their careers. The advice is worthwhile for all students or professional meteorologists looking to advance their careers–not just those who want to be on television.
Dowling points out that a lot weathercasters knew from an early age that they wanted to be meteorologists, but not many of them knew until much later that they were going into broadcasting. As a result, they developed their scientific skills from the start but not the confidence and polish that they’ll needed to communicate to an audience.
It takes time to develop effective on-camera manner, Dowling says, just like it takes time to learn how to write reports or to analyze weather observations properly, because all of these skills stem from maturation of deeper qualities, whether an ear for language and logic to write well, or mathematical understanding to use models and observations, or, in the case of presentation, solid belief in your own abilities:
You can work on talking slower, or stop fidgeting with your hands, or trying to smile more, but it likely all stems from a lack of being comfortable and confident. It’s also a challenge to teach out of a student because it’s usually something that just takes time. Just like jumping in a pool of cold water, it just takes time to get used to, and there is not a lot else you can do to speed up the process. If you are in high school, now is the time to start building your confidence. The students who get started sooner end up coming to college better equipped for the opportunities they will find there.
The blog relates a couple examples of successful Lyndon State College meteorology grads who got involved in broadcasting in high school, but specific experience of this kind not the only way to work on communication and confidence:
It all starts by pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. If it’s a little scary, you are probably headed in the right direction. Try acting or singing in a play, or being in a band or chorus. Get out in front of people. Play a sport. Get involved with a speaking or debate club. Whatever you do, make it fun.
The interesting thing about this advice is that it applies in many meteorological jobs, not just broadcasting. Dowling’s points echo what experienced meteorologists have been telling attendees year after year at the AMS Student Conference: don’t neglect your communications skills. Employers are looking for the ability to write and speak well if you’re going into business or consulting, not to mention any sort of job interacting with the public.
It’s difficult to develop such versatility during student years, when you’re packing in the math and science (here’s an example of a teacher who tries to make it possible by integrating communication practice into the science curriculum). But it’s a lot harder to catch up quickly on fundamental skills like writing and public speaking later in life.
Science Run Amuck
Let no one claim that student hydrologists do not gain a deep understanding of their subject. The University of Wisconsin-Parkside press release explains:
Students continue to use the campus environment as a natural laboratory. The latest case of this is the recent installation of a water level gauge in Greenquist Pond by researchers from Geosciences Professor John Skalbeck’s Environmental Sampling, Monitoring, and Assessment (GEOS 445) course.
Students Jacob Jazefowski, left in the above photo, and John Rasch pulled on hip waders and immersed themselves in their research work. Greenquist Pond will soon be filled and the gauge they installed will monitor future pond water levels.
Students in this course are assessing groundwater levels from campus monitoring wells and measuring water quality in the pond and in the Pike River. They are investigating wetland soils, vegetation, and hydrology characteristics near the Pike River and in the Willow Swamp near the campus’ Wood Road entrance and are evaluating the potential for additional rain gardens to capture storm water from Ranger Hall.
“The different types of soils, water lands, and bodies of water on our campus provide an ideal outdoor laboratory for this course, which is highly experiential-based,” Skalbeck said.
Latest Readings
The Front Page keeps an eye on the web for you, bookmarking interesting ideas, profiles, developments, and media related to the atmospheric sciences community that you might have missed in the daily flood of urgent news. Recent links from our Delicious bookmarks page:
Unusual Road to Atmospheric Science: A profile of Richard Anyah, UConn assistant professor who started out teaching high school math in his native Kenya.
Videos from 2011 Stephen H. Schneider Symposium are now online: talks and follow-up discussion in which the climate science community reflects on scientific progress and the challenges of communicating with policymakers and the public.
John Tyndall, Discoverer of the Greenhouse Effect: Podcast of Irish radio interview with Richard Somerville, author of “The Forgiving Air,” about the history of “greenhouse effect” science, IPCC, and climate change topics.
WeatherBill morphs into The Climate Corporation. With funding from tech industry giants, the company has rebranded itself to tailor information to agribusiness and others looking to adapt to climate variability and change.
Moon’s shadow creates a atmospheric wake. Researchers use GPS signals to detect high-altitude gravity waves moving through the atmosphere during the total solar eclipse of 2009.
Forecast Bright for Student Meteorologists. Profile of Howard University’s graduate student association for atmospheric science.
You can get these links automatically updated in your favorite reader via an RSS feed by visiting our links archive page on Delicious. Or keep watching the “Latest Readings” sidebar on The Front Page.
Python in New Orleans: Once Bitten, Quickly Smitten
The upcoming 2012 AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans is only the second with a whole symposium devoted to the use of Python programming language in the atmospheric sciences. The first was last year’s meeting in Seattle.
The quick return of Python to the conference program–including beginning and advanced short courses over the weekend (21-22 January)–suggests what a growing community of modelers and programmers already knows. Once they’ve encountered the Python language, people tend to become devotees.
“Python is an elegant and robust programming language that combines the power and flexibility of traditional compiled languages with the ease-of-use of simpler scripting and interpreted languages,” according to Filipe Pires Fernandes of the School of Marine Science and Technology in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who presents Monday (23 January, 2 p.m.).
Python, for example, is at the heart of the National Weather Service’s graphical forecast editor (GFE) tool and thus at the basis of the usage of the whole gridded forecast product suite in effect over the last decade. “Python’s introspective capabilities permitted developers to build a tool framework in which forecasters could write simple expressions and apply them directly to the forecast process without the burden of needing to know details about data structures or user interfaces,” writes Thomas LeFebvre of NOAA, who will discuss (Tuesday, 24 January, 8:30 am) how “a large part of GFE’s success is the result of the rich set of features that Python offers.”
Symposium Chair Johnny Lin of North Park University produced a short video to explain the attraction of Python, now the “eighth most popular programming language in the world” and preview the upcoming symposium:
The symposium program features numerous new software packages, with many of the presentations demonstrating how Python is a solution to software quirks and limitations that have become more bothersome as technology advances. One presenter is using Python to display data and model output on Google Earth. Another developed a new Skew-T diagram and Hodograph visualization and research tool (SHARPY), recasting a standard program, SHARP, in Python. Explains Patrick Marsh of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory: “Unfortunately, SHARP utilizes several GEMPAK routines which makes compiling, let alone installing and using, a non-trivial task.”
Andrew Charles of the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia used Python to create a web-based tool to integrate contour plotting with GIS applications. “With ever increasing amounts of data being made available, the related increase in required storage means static plots are not a viable solution for the delivery of all maps to end users,” writes Charles about his (11:30 a.m. Tuesday) presentation. “Contour plots are one of the most used data visualisation techniques in meteorology and oceanography and yet, surprisingly, there are few available solutions for the generation of contour plots to be used as map overlays from live data sources.”