Another Way to Work the Night Shift in Meteorology

Meteorologist A.J. Jain dispenses a lot of good advice for young professionals on his blog, Fresh AJ. But in a post last week he aimed his thoughts to employers, giving them a tip on how to keep their forecasting talent from drifting away from the rigors of shift work.
Turns out that Jain finds the demands of job, family, and health wearing him down when he’s working through the night four days and then trying to reset his body clock for the other three.

I know there are many meteorologists out there that currently feel the same way I did.  Tired, groggy, and just wish there was another solution.    Well I want to introduce you to a new model that is being successfully run at a top aviation weather company on the west coast (I won’t name names…but I am a huge fan!).
The company allows their meteorologists to work from home.  Yes…home.   Yes you can sit in your pajamas all day or night and work from the goodness of your laptop.   How awesome is that!
And you know what is amazing…the turnover of the meteorology department at the aviation company has dropped considerably.  The employees are much happier…and the product they put out is just as great…if not better. And they’re still doing shift work!

Read the rest of his points about how telecommuting can be a successful strategy for meteorological shift work.

IPCC's New Special Report: Adapt to Extremes, but Prepare for the Presentation

For a first reaction to the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report, Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, read William Hooke’s full post here, but keep in mind his take away message for now:

The world need not just this and the other IPCC reports themselves but also the body of diverse analysis and reaction the reports trigger. IPCC reports should and do stimulate thought and action. They don’t prescribe it.
What should you and I keep in mind as we read?
1. We should remember that the Earth does its business through extreme events and always has. Extremes are not suspensions of the normal order; they are its fulfillment.
2. Extremes leave no sphere of the natural or social or technological world unaffected and the disruptions in all those normally distinct spheres intereact with each other, compounding the challenge.
3. Social change matters more to what extreme events and disasters portend for our future than does climate change. .
4. We’ve got to get past reacting to the crisis of the moment

This will be good preparation not only for reading the full report when it’s available online in February 2012 (the summary is now available here) but also for discussions with Roger Pulwarty and colleagues when the present the reports findings on the first day of the upcoming AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans (23 January, 11:30 a.m., Room 243). If you’re interested in hearing from the report authors now, check out the video from Friday’s press conference:

Weather and Climate Services Protecting Public Health: Get Your Questions Answered

by Viviane Silva, Co-Chair, Third Conference on Environment and Health
To address the needs related to reducing climate-weather-water related public health risks, we’ve organized a panel session entitled “Integration of Climate-Weather-Water and Health Information: Strengthening Partnerships and Enhancing Services” during the Third Conference on Environment and Health at the AMS 2012 in New Orleans (Monday 23 January, 4 p.m., Room 333).  Taking part in the discussion will be a distinguished group of experts, including: Dr. Jack Hayes, director of the National Weather Service; Dr. Christopher Portier, director of the National Center for Environmental and Health for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry – CDC; Dr. John Balbus, senior advisor for Public Health, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences – NIH; and Dr. John Haynes, NASA, Health  and Air Quality Applications Program Manager.  This is your chance to participate as well.
The topics will include research and data needs, opportunities for shared efforts, and emerging services to support decision makers in the health community. The presenters plan to focus on

  • the changing landscape of society’s need for integrated information to enhance decision making and each agency contribution to this regarding climate, weather, and water information to predict, prevent, or manage public health risks;
  • how CDC, NIH, NOAA, and NASA will work collaboratively with other agencies to  address national, state, local, and tribal needs;
  • how these agencies will support open exchange of data and delivery of information and decision tools; and
  • current efforts to facilitate research and development of services.

The presentations are designed to foster a conversation with the audience. Some of the questions the presenters plan to ask are: What integrated weather/water/climate/health information do you need? What challenges do you face when trying to access data that you need? What would you envision being included in a related Decision Support System or Health Early Warning System? Considering the current fiscal environment, what integrated information would you consider to be the highest priority?
We’re looking for more questions from you.  Post your questions as comments to this entry on The Front Page and we’ll make sure
they will be answered during the panel discussion.

A Summer Spent Studying Disagreements

Washington State University just published a profile of Rodrigo Gonzalez, a graduate student in the Laboratory for Atmospheric Research (LAR) who spent his summer interning for the AMS Policy Program:
“It’s not in my character to be in a lab doing research and publishing articles that are only useful for other scientists,” Gonzalez said. “I want to see the broader impacts. I like to see that what I do has an impact on the development of society.”…
Gonzalez has been long interested in politics. He studied environmental engineering in Mexico City as an undergraduate and participated in modeling studies of air pollution in that city.
During his summer in D.C., Gonzalez worked for the American Meteorological Society’s policy program, which helps congressional staffers develop science-based policy. It also connects scientists and policy makers. The idea is to help each other and give each other information, Gonzalez said.
There often has been a gap between scientists and policy makers, he said: “It’s very hard to communicate science to make effective policy.” The AMS policy program tries to cover that gap.
In 2009, the program made policy recommendations based on the professional and scientific expertise and perspectives of the AMS about a climate change legislative proposal. The legislation passed in the House of Representatives but never made it through the Senate to become law.
Part of Gonzalez’s work was interviewing the different actors on this legislation as well as experts and advocates surrounding the proposal. What were the electoral implications of the proposal? Why did it pass the House and not the Senate? Who and what gives momentum to the legislation?
“It is not necessarily the science or engineering that gives legislation its momentum,” he said….
Trying to get science into the public policy discussion can be frustrating, Gonzalez said. But it was more frustrating before he became involved.
“Now I understand how it works and what is involved,” he said. “It’s natural and necessary for humans to disagree. The source of policy making is disagreement. As frustrating as that can be, there is no better way.”
Gonzalez is working to complete a Ph.D. in air quality modeling. Since returning from his summer internship, he is pursuing his final year in the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in engineering sciences.
He would like to travel and eventually return to Mexico to help his country with its air pollution problems. Spending the summer in D.C….helped [Gonzalez] learn how to better communicate the science that he studies.
“It’s a different world away from the lab,” he said. “This has really made me a better professional.”
For the full article, by Tina Hilding, click here.

The Great Blue Norther of 11/11/11

For the 100th Anniversary of one of most noteworthy storms in the history of the Midwest, University of Missouri atmospheric science students Brian Crow, Evan Kutta, and Jennifer Power spent hours digging through historical records. They were trying to document the progress of the Great Blue Norther of 11 November 1911, tracking the situation through old newspaper articles and other documents. What they found showed how devastating weather can be when people have no warning, as a beautiful, sunny and warm fall day quickly turned into a deadly winter blast including tornadoes and derechoes.
Using the information about the impact of the storm, along weather data and reanalyses, UM Associate Professor Patrick Market reconstructed the storm and found a relatively close modern analog–29 January 2008. That storm had a slower but similar temperature drop (from 70°F to 15°F) and a similarly intense cold front.
Check out the  interactive map the students created that tracks the events of that fateful day 100 years ago

View 11/11/1911 in a larger map
 

Jack Townsend, Shepherd of Weather Satellite Technology

The passing of AMS Fellow John W. (“Jack”) Townsend on October 29 serves as a fitting moment to register the evolving national relationship with space technology over six decades.

“Jack Townsend was truly one of the seminal figures in the history of NASA, and certainly, in the history of Goddard,” said current Goddard Spaceflight Institute Director Rob Strain. “The story of the space program simply could not be written without a chapter devoted to him. He dedicated his life to the exploration of space and the study of our planet, and humankind is richer for the knowledge he helped generate.”

Townsend was one of the first employees at Goddard in 1959, where he directed the satellite applications efforts, at a time when the nation was racing to enter the Space Age. He had already cut his teeth on space technology, first in radar countermeasures aboard B-29 bombers in World War II and, by 1949, working with V-2 rockets. Townsend helped bring satellite meteorology to fruition in the 1960s as Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Science Services Administrator (predecessor to today’s NOAA). After a decade at Fairchild Industries, he returned to NASA after the Challenger disaster, and then for three years as Director of Goddard.

Townsend retold the story of the origins of weather satellites just a year ago in an interview with archivist/historian Doria Grimes:

[E]verything started with sounding rockets just after World War II. I went to work for the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) following my graduate degree in physics. The sounding rocket program had just started at NRL and it involved the Army, Navy, and Air Force…. Interestingly enough, at White Sands, New Mexico, we flew rockets out over the desert in the late 1940’s. We put cameras on them called gun sight aiming point cameras, “GSAPs”. The idea of the camera was that as the rocket went up and rotated, it took pictures of the earth in swaths. You would use those pictures to reconstruct the attitude of the rocket.

One day we had a shot in New Mexico in which we caught what looked like a storm in pictures off to the southeast. One of the guys who worked for me, Otto Berg, made a composite picture of nearly 1,000 tiny GSAP pictures, a total mosaic of a storm. It looked exactly like a hurricane, and attracted the Weather Bureau’s attention. It was in the early 50’s – all before Sputnik.

The pictures stirred interest from Harry Wexler at the Weather Bureau, and eventually a classified Army satellite project was moved into the new NASA, gradually became declassified, leading to the first weather satellite, TIROS. It was during this period that Townsend and other American science administrators were involved with negotiating peaceful uses of space technology with their Soviet counterparts.

The subject came up of transferring data. We, at that time, expected to launch the research meteorological satellites. They promised they were going to launch meteorological rockets and satellites. Incidentally, they never did. But they wanted the transferred data because Russian ground data was very sparse, and these data meant a lot to them as a country. With the free transfer of meteorological data and satellite pictures, we had an issue, a big issue. Who pays for the communication expenses between Washington and Moscow? We got into a big fight about that, and the agreement had been to share. The Russians said that since the U.S. owns all these communications facilities, the U.S. should pay for 90% of it. Then the Russians said that the ruble was not worth as much money as the dollar. Finally, I came up with one of the only brilliant ideas I ever came up with. I said sharing means 50/50. We’ll pay the bill for three months, and you pay it for three months….So I cut this deal with the Russians on how to pay for it. [His Russian negotiating counterpart] Blagonravov thought it was funny. He laughed, and said to me, “I am glad I am too old to send to Siberia.” He was a lieutenant general which is a five star rank in those days, and he also was a communist and believed in the system. He was a neat guy and I got to like him.

The whole interview (transcript here) has more on the origins of the space program, NOAA, and operationsl satellites. You’ll get the sense that the field was guided then by strong personalities and a country committed to technology. [For more on the early development of weather satellites, specifically TIROS, check out James Rodger Fleming’s presentation on “Transformative Technologies and International Cooperation in the Career of Harry Wexler” at the 2012 AMS Annual Meeting (11 a.m., Tuesday 24 January)].

Dealing With a Challenging Science Policy Environment

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

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.

This major rift cuts 18 miles (29 km) across in the Pine Island Glacier in western Antarctica. (Credit: NASA)

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.
A close-up view of the crack spreading across the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf reveals the boulder-like blocks of ice that fell into the rift when it split. For most of its 18 miles (29 km), the crack was determined to be about 240 feet (72 meters) wide. The deepest points ranged from 165-190 feet (50-60 meters). (Credit: NASA)

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.