The understanding and forecasting of space weather could take great steps forward with the help of NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission, which recently captured the first-ever images taken simultaneously from opposite sides of the sun. NASA launched two STEREO probes in October of 2006, and on February 6 they finally reached their positions 180 degrees apart from each other, where they could each photograph half of the sun. The STEREO probes are tuned to wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet radiation that will allow them to monitor such solar activity as sunspots, flares, tsunamis, and magnetic filaments, and the probes’ positioning means that this activity will never be hidden, so storms originating from the far side of the sun will no longer be a surprise. The 360-degree views will also facilitate the study of other solar phenomenon, such as the possibility that solar eruptions on opposite sides of the sun can gain intensity by feeding off each other. The NASA clip below includes video of the historic 360-degree view.
Neutralizing Some of the Language in Global Warming Discussions
By Keith Seitter, Executive Director, AMS
The topic of anthropogenic global warming has become so polarized it is now hard to talk about it without what amounts to name-calling entering into the discussion. In blogs, e-mails, and published opinion pieces, terms like “deniers” and “contrarians” are leveled in one direction while “warmist” and “alarmist” are leveled in the other. Both the scientific community and broader society have much to gain from respectful dialog among those of opposing views on climate change, but a reasonable discussion on the science is unlikely if we cannot find non-offensive terminology for those who have taken positions different than our own.
As Peggy Lemone mentioned in a Front Page post last week, some months ago, the CMOS Bulletin reprinted a paper originally published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences by Anderegg et al. that simply used the terms “convinced” and “unconvinced” to describe those who had been convinced by the evidence that anthropogenic climate change was occurring and those who had not been convinced. This terminology helps in a number of ways. First and foremost, it does not carry with it the baggage of value judgment, since for any particular scientific argument there is no intrinsically positive or negative connotation associated with being either convinced or unconvinced. In addition, this terminology highlights that we are talking about a scientific, evidence-based, issue that should be resolved through logical reasoning and not something that should be decided by our inherent belief system. (And for that reason, I work very hard to avoid saying someone does or does not “believe” in global warming, or similar phrases.)
The sense I have gotten is that those who do not feel that human influence is causing the global temperatures to rise would prefer to be called “skeptics.” However, I have tried to avoid using this term as a label for those individuals. Skepticism is a cornerstone upon which science is built. All of us who have been trained as scientists should be skeptics with respect to all scientific issues — demanding solid evidence for a hypothesis or claim before accepting it, and rejecting any position if the evidence makes it clear that it cannot be correct (even if it had, in the past, been well-accepted by the broader community).
I have seen some pretty egregious cases of individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics accepting claims that support their position with little or no documented evidence while summarily dismissing the results of carefully replicated studies that do not. On the other side, I have seen cases of climate scientists who have swept aside reasonable counter hypotheses as irrelevant, or even silly, without giving them proper consideration. Neither situation represents the way a truly skeptical scientist should behave. All of us in the community should expect better.
We will not be able to have substantive discussions on the many facets of climate change if we spend so much time and energy in name-calling. And we really need to have substantive discussion if we are going to serve the public in a reasonable way as a community. Thus, it is imperative that we find some terminology that allows a person’s position on climate change to be expressed without implied, assumed, or imposed value judgments.
There may be other neutral terms that can be applied to those engaged in the climate change discussion, but “convinced” and “unconvinced” are the best I have seen so far. I have adopted this terminology in the hope of reducing some of the polarization in the discussion.
New from AMS: Joanne Simpson Mentorship Award
The AMS has introduced a new award in recognition of the career-long dedication and commitment to the advancement of women in the atmospheric sciences by legendary pioneering meteorologist Joanne Simpson.
The new Joanne Simpson Mentorship Award recognizes individuals in academia, government, or the private sector, who, over a substantial period of time, have provided outstanding and inspiring mentorship of professional colleagues or students. The award is separate from the honor bestowed upon exceptional teachers mentoring students, which is covered by the AMS Teaching Excellence Award.
Simpson was the first women to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology, and her distinguished achievements include creating nearly singlehandedly the discipline of cloud studies, determining the source of heat energy that drives hurricanes, and leading a decade-long effort at NASA that culminated in establishment of the ground-breaking Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). Her career spanned more than 50 years, during which she challenged the male-dominated establishment in meteorology and fought for equal footing for women in the sciences. Although she passed away nearly a year ago, her enduring spirit continues to pave a pathway forward for other women pioneers in meteorology and the related sciences.
As with all AMS awards, nominations for the Joanne Simpson Mentorship Award are considered by the AMS Awards Oversight Committee.
Online submission of nominations for the new award will be accepted until May 1. The first Joanne Simpson Mentorship Award will be presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
The Weather Museum Names Its 2010 Heroes
The John C. Freeman Weather Museum at the Weather Research Center in Houston, Texas, recently honored three weather heroes for outstanding service in 2010.
The Weather Hero Award is given to individuals or groups who have demonstrated heroic qualities in science or math education, volunteer efforts in the meteorological community, or assistance to others during a weather crisis. The 2010 Weather Heroes honored were the American Meteorological Society, KHOU-TV in Houston, and Kenneth Graham, meteorologist-in-charge of the NWS New Orleans/Baton Rouge office.
The AMS was recognized for developing and hosting WeatherFest for the past ten years. WeatherFest is the interactive science and weather fair at the Annual Meeting each year. It is designed to instill a love of math and science in children of all ages, encouraging careers in these and other science and engineering fields. AMS Executive Director Keith Seitter accepted the award on behalf of the Society. “While we are thrilled to display this award at AMS Headquarters,” he comments, “the real recipients are the hundreds of volunteers who have given so generously of their time and have made WeatherFest such a success over the past decade.”
KHOU-TV was honored for hosting Weather Day at the Houston Astros baseball field in fall of 2010. Weather Day was a unique educational field trip and learning opportunity that featured an interactive program about severe weather specific to the region. Over the course of the day, participants learned about hurricanes, thunderstorms, flooding, and weather safety—highlighted by video, experiments, trivia, and more.
Graham received the award for his support of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill cleanup. As meteorologist-in-charge of the New Orleans/Baton Rouge forecast office in Slidell, Louisiana, Graham started providing weather forecasts related to the disaster immediately following the nighttime explosion. NWS forecasters played a major role protecting the safety of everyone working to mitigate and clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The awards were presented at the center’s third Annual Groundhog Day Gala and its fifth annual Weather Hero Awards on 2 February 2011.
The Weather Research Center opened The John C. Freeman Weather Museum in 2006. As well as housing nine permanent exhibits, the museum also offers many exciting programs including weather camps, boy/girl scout badge classes, teacher workshops, birthday parties and weather labs.
Commutageddon, Again and Again
Time and again this winter, blizzards and other snow and ice storms have trapped motorists on city streets and state highways, touching off firestorms of griping and finger pointing at local officials. Most recently, hundreds of motorists became stranded on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive as 70 mph gusts buried vehicles during Monday’s mammoth Midwest snowstorm. Last week, commuters in the nation’s capital became victims of icy gridlock as an epic thump of snow landed on the Mid Atlantic states. And two weeks before, residents and travelers in northern Georgia abandoned their snowbound vehicles on the interstate loops around Atlanta, securing their shutdown for days until the snow and ice melted.
Before each of these crippling events, and historically many others, meteorologists, local and state law enforcement, the media, and city and state officials routinely cautioned and then warned drivers, even pleading with them, to avoid travel. Yet people continue to miss, misunderstand, or simply ignore the message for potentially dangerous winter storms to stay off the roads.
Obviously such messages can be more effective. While one might envision an intelligent transportation system warning drivers in real time when weather might create unbearable traffic conditions, such services are in their infancy, despite the proliferation of mobile GPS devices that include traffic updates. Not surprisingly, the 2011 AMS Annual Meeting in January on “Communicating Weather and Climate” offered a lot of findings about generating effective warnings. One presentation in particular—”The essentials of a weather warning message: what, where, when, and intensity”—focused directly on the issues raised by the recent snow snafu’s. In it, author Joel Curtis of the NWS in Juneau, Alaska, explains that in addition to the basic what, where, and when information, a warning must convey intensity to guide the level of response from the receiver.
Key to learning how to create and disseminate clear and concise warnings is understanding why useful information sometimes seems to fall on deaf ears. Studies such as the Hayden and Morss presentation “Storm surge and “certain death”: Interviews with Texas coastal residents following Hurricane Ike” and Renee Lertzman’s “Uncertain futures, anxious futures: psychological dimensions of how we talk about the weather” are moving the science of meteorological communication forward by figuring out how and why people are using the information they receive.
Post-event evaluation remains critical to improving not only dissemination but also the effectiveness of warnings and statements. In a blog post last week following D.C.’s drubbing of snow, Jason Samenow of the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang (CWG) wondered whether his team of forecasters, and its round-the-clock trumpeting of the epic event, along with the bevy of weather voices across the capital region could have done more to better warn people of the quick-hitting nightmare snowstorm now known as “Commutageddon.” He concluded that, other than smoothing over the sometimes uneven voice of local media even when there’s a clear signal for a disruptive storm, there needs to be a wider effort to get the word out about potential “weather emergencies, or emergencies of any type.” He sees technology advances that promote such social networking sites as Twitter and Facebook as new ways to “blast the message.”
Even with rapidly expanding technology, however, it’s important to recognize that simply offering information comes with the huge responsibility of making sure it’s available when the demand is greatest. As CWG reported recently in its blog post “Weather Service website falters at critical time,” the NWS learned the hard way this week the pitfalls of offering too much information. As the Midwest snowstorm was ramping up, the “unprecedented demand” of 15-20 million hits an hour on NWS websites led to pages loading sluggishly or not at all. According to NWS spokesman Curtis Carey: “The traffic was beyond the capacity we have in place. [It even] exceeded the week of Snowmageddon,” when there were two billion page views on a network that typically sees just 70 million page views a day.
So virtual gridlock now accompanies road gridlock? The communications challenges of a deep snow continue to accumulate…
Some Take-Home Messages from Seattle
by Peggy Lemone, AMS Past-President
Unpacking from my trip to Seattle, I mulled over the many ideas about communicating weather and climate gleaned from planning, the formal program, smaller meetings, and hallway and dinner conversations. Below is but a partial list: I would be interested in hearing what others think.
The first idea originated well before the meeting, when Raj Pandya, Steve Ackerman, and I were brainstorming about the Presidential Forum. After we settled on a panel discussion on communicating with the public, we decided that we needed to include weather as well as climate to provide synergy between the two, to provide a fresh twist, and to transcend the negativity sometimes associated with communicating about climate.
What I saw at the meeting suggested that was the right thing to do. Talking about “climate” alone has too often divided Americans, while talking about weather sets us at ease, and experiencing a severe storm or blizzard unites us. Besides, it is not clear to me at least where one draws the line between weather and climate. I suspect, as we learn more, we will be talking more and more about the changes that are taking place from year to year using terms that we didn’t even know thirty years ago – like El Nino and La Nina, Arctic Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and so on. “Climate change” discussion will be richer with the inclusion of these phenomena.
Communication about polarizing subjects requires trust, which can emerge from long-term engagement. As we learned from the Presidential Forum, people in the media not only bring us weather forecasts but also educate us about these new weather phenomena and new types of data like Doppler radar reflectivity. People turn to their weather broadcaster for information not only about weather but also science. Many weather broadcasters, like Tom Skilling, solicit questions from the public. We feel more comfortable hearing difficult messages from these people, because we have a long relationship with them. (However, as one of the panelists, Claire Martin noted, the media could do a much better job).
The importance of trust was reinforced in a small meeting on data-stewardship issues. A colleague looked at us and said – “I see you all have wedding rings. Anyone who has been married a long time realizes there will be disagreements, but you can handle them if you remember what you have in common.” One of the newspaper advice columns said exactly the same thing. If you have something difficult to talk about, start by reminding yourself about shared values before diving in. If it gets too hard, then go back to those shared values before trying again. A similar approach might work with other relatives and friends: allowing a dialog that includes common values rather than giving a lecture on the science.
Ralph Cicerone’s talk on Thursday reminded us of two more important points related to developing trust. First, we should work to the best of our ability to earn our trust as a scientific profession. This means working hard to keep the peer review process robust, not only by selecting good editors and reviewers, but also by ensuring that data used in publications are available to check conclusions.
And secondly, we need to make ourselves available to help the public understand our science (and science in general) better. Part of this is by making ourselves available to the local TV weather broadcasters, as suggested in Monday’s presidential Forum, and making ourselves available in other ways, such as giving talks to schools , civic groups, museums, and participating in scouting groups, etc. Cicerone quoted statistics that suggested that people respected scientists, but few actually knew any scientist, save perhaps their physician. Building familiarity will allow better communication.
A third idea comes from a comment heard in the meeting of the Committee on Climate-Change Communication. Amidst our struggling to figure out how to do this, someone said that we shouldn’t think of people as being only in two camps – to use polite terms1 – the “convinced” and the “unconvinced,” but rather we should allow people to have a spectrum of positions. To illustrate the “either-you’re-with-us-or-against-us” attitude, a colleague at lunch complained that the “convinced” group pigeonholed him in the “denier” slot (o.k., this is a polarizing term, but this is a quote reflecting his feelings), simply because he wasn’t convinced about claims of a relationship of stronger tropical cyclones to a warmer climate. About a year ago, I exchanged emails with a well-known colleague who in the press was described as an ally by those who deny climate change simply because of some rather benign – and useful – comments on a blog. Upon being contacted, this person told me she was fully convinced of the importance of greenhouse gases in warming the planet.
Other conversations reinforced what we already know: that there are those out there who don’t want to have a conversation, but simply want to attack. This rarely happens with weather, but it certainly happens with climate. To reflect on Cicerone’s comments again, we needn’t “pander” to them but we do need to maintain our scientific integrity and to be approachable to those desiring a conversation rather than an argument.
Looking back on this essay, I realize that all the points are closely related: that we will do better about communicating about difficult topics if we develop familiarity and trust. We can perhaps do this by having a conversation that allows common ideas and values to emerge. But the chances for such a conversation increases when – either through common experience or shared values – we obtain a degree of familiarity and trust.
[1These terms were proposed by Anderegg, W. R. L., J. W. Prall, J. Harold, S. H. Schneider, 2010: Expert credibility in climate change. CMOS Bulletin SCMO, 38, 179–183. Thanks to Keith Seitter for pointing this out.]
2011 Meisinger Award Winner Working to Solve Hurricane Intensity Problem
NCAR researcher George Bryan received the 2011 Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award at the 91st AMS Annual Meeting in Seattle for innovative research into the explicit modeling, theory, and observations of convective-scale motions. With this award, the AMS honors promising young or early-career scientists who have demonstrated outstanding ability. “Early career” refers to scientists who are within 10 years of having earned their highest degree or are under 40 years of age when nominated.
The Front Page sought out Dr. Bryan to learn more about the specific problems he is working to solve with his colleagues at NCAR. “We’ve been doing numerical simulations of hurricanes in idealized environments trying to understand what regulates hurricane intensity,” he says. “One of the things we found was that small-scale turbulence is very important, small-scale being less than a kilometer scale—boundary layer eddies in the eyewall, and things like that. And so we’re hoping to take what we learned from that and apply it towards real-time forecasts and real-time numerical model simulations to better improve intensity.” In the interview, available below, Bryan says knowing this will give forecasters a better idea how strong a hurricane is likely to be when one does make landfall.
A Sustainable Investment in Sustainability
by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director, from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
Early in the AMS annual meeting this past week, I happened to run into Tim Killeen, the NSF Assistant Director for Geosciences. He barely said hello before asking me, “Bill, have you heard about SEES?”
I hesitated, and we both agreed I’d flunked his test. “SEES,” he went on, “stands for Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability.” He added, “This investment area spans all the NSF directorates, and will amount to about ten percent of our budget. It ought to be the topic of conversation here at the Annual Meeting, and yet there’s virtually nothing about it anywhere in the conferences and the sessions.”
!!!! Ten percent of NSF’s annual budget – some $7B/year – is real money.
Thankfully, Tim graciously went on to let AMS and me off the hook. “We could have done more to publicize this at the NSF,” he said. “But please let people know about the dear colleague letter which is still on our NSF website.”
The letter merits careful reading in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt:
“The SEES Portfolio will support research and education projects that span all eleven NSF Directorates and Offices, including:
- research at the energy-environment-society nexus
- novel energy production, harvesting, storage, transmission, and distribution technologies, and their intelligent control that minimizes environmental impact and corresponding adoption, socioeconomic, and policy issues
- innovative computational science and engineering methods and systems for monitoring, understanding and optimizing life-cycle energy costs and carbon footprints of natural, social and built systems (including IT systems themselves)
- data analysis, modeling, simulation, visualization, and intelligent decision-making facilitated by advanced computation to understand impacts of climate change and to analyze mitigation strategies
- study of societal factors such as vulnerability and resilience, and sensitivity to regional change
- short and long term research enabled by a new generation of experimental and observational networks
- support for interdisciplinary education/learning science research, development, and professional capacity-building related to sustainability science and engineering
- creation of research and education partnerships around forefront developments in sustainability science and engineering, both nationally and internationally
- development of the workforce required to understand the complexities of environmental, energy, and societal sustainability
- engaging the public to understand issues in sustainability and energy
- development of the cyberinfrastructure and research instrumentation needed to enable sustainability science and engineering
- support of the physical, cyber, and human infrastructure necessary to achieve SEES goals”
Probably you’d agree that it would be harder to prove that your work, whatever it is, doesn’t fit under this umbrella, than that it does. And that said, it’s quite probable that many of you have already responded to requests-for-proposals under these auspices. [In fact, that may well be true of the American Meteorological Society also; in my conversation with Tim, I just wasn’t quite quick enough to connect the dots.…]
We can make a forecast. This articulation of a sustainability investment area won’t prove to be a one-off. More likely, it signals the start, or next step, in a series, doesn’t it? Increasingly, as society grows more concerned about the Earth as resource, victim, and threat, we’re going to see further calls for research proposals in these areas and along these lines. We can and should thank Tim and other NSF leadership for their vision here.
At Least It's a Start: Coordinating Federal Climate and Health Programs
by Skyler Goldman, Florida Institute of Technology, Student Correspondent
The Interagency Crosscutting Group on Climate Change and Human Health (CCHHG) is the US Global Change Research Program’s effort to focus and coordinate wide-ranging, climate-relevant federal efforts in environmental health. As I learned during the Town Hall Meeting on Monday, 24 January, CCHHG is trying to prepare the public for climate change by aiming “to build communities that are healthy and resilient to climate change impacts.” The purpose of the meeting, however, was to determine what AMS Annual Meeting attendees thought were important topics for CCHHG to address.
Interestingly enough, the first suggestion came from a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who said that “funding does not allow for [this kind of] interdisciplinary work.” The rest of the audience seemed to agree. It seems that there is either money available for climatology work, or money available for health work. Put the two together, however, and little funding is available.
John Balbus of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was quick to say that interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the first goals of the CCHHG, and hopefully funding will come soon as a result of the group’s work.
Another attendee wondered if the CCHHG can achieve its goals. “Existence of this group is reason to be hopeful,” Juli Trtanj, the coordinator of NOAA’s Oceans and Human Health Initiative, said. “We now have an opportunity to be forward-looking, [but there’s] a lot of work to be done to make it happen.”
The simple creation of the CCHHG doesn’t seem like a lot of reason to be hopeful in bridging the gap between climate changes and the public, yet it is a start—maybe even a start along a path to potentially making a big difference. Perhaps the larger goal of creating those healthy and resilient communities can one day be realized.
“If we don’t do a better job of bringing the topic to the public,” Trtanj added, “we’re never going to get there. We’ll be here ten years from now going through the same thing.”
Raj: "I think we learned something, Steve!"
Raj Pandya and Steve Ackerman, co-chairs of the AMS Annual Meeting this week in Seattle, wrapped up their show with Episodes 4 and 5, now up on YouTube. Raj and Steve took their production team and throngs of groupies into the Exhibit Hall in search of tips on communicating from those master communicators, the people who represent the products meteorologists invent and use:
The next day our intrepid co-chairs finally had a moment to themselves and opportunity to get to know a little bit about each other’s day jobs via the standard professional communique-in-a-nutshell…the elevator talk: