Roadside Detraction

Broadcast meteorologist Kevin Selle posted this picture to his blog, Digital Meteorologist, with the spot-on comment: “Note to self. Switch energy providers.”

Consider these events from the upcoming AMS Annual Meeting:

  • What Do Meteorologists Need to Know about the Energy Sector–and Vice Versa–to Integrate Weather-Driven Renewables into the Electric Grid (Monday 24 January, 7 p.m., Town Hall meeting)
  • Dollars and Cents: Weather for Energy Markets and Weather Fundamentals for Energy Planning (Thursday 27 January sessions of the Conference on Weather Climate and the New Energy Economy).

Meanwhile the atmospheric science community moves on, working to make lives easier and more stable for utilities and their customers. For instance, Erica Zell will be presenting “NASA Products to Enhance Energy Utility Load Forecasting” (Wednesday, 26 January) in Seattle. She notes:

Existing load forecasting tools rely upon historical load and weather, and forecasted weather to predict load within energy utility service areas. Microclimates and weather events such as stalled fronts have proved particularly challenging for load forecasting. The shortcomings of load forecasts are often the result of weather data that is not at a fine enough spatial resolution to capture local-scale weather events.

Zell offers hope by integrating high resolution satellite-derived atmospheric information into load forecast tools.
We could go on, of course.
Energy provider driving down Texas highway mutters: “Note to self. Switch energy providers!”

Pioneering Space Weather Expert Dies

Paul Kintner, a Cornell University engineering professor  and head of the university’s Global Positioning Systems Laboratory, died Monday at age 64. He’d been battling pancreatic cancer.
Kintner was a major influence in the engineering world for recognizing the potential of global positioning technology, but to the AMS community he was a leader in the science of the effects of the Sun on the atmosphere, starting from his Ph.D. work at the University of Minnesota on the plasma physics of the northern lights high above the Earth. Later he studied the effects of the Sun on radio signals and in particular GPS. His observational studies made him the discoverer of  “electrostatic ion cyclotron waves, double layers and lower hybrid solitary” in space.
Says Rich Behnke of NSF, a member of the AMS Committee on Space Weather,

Paul was the quintessential professor – super bright, outspoken, a superb scientist and a deeply committed teacher.  He has been a real pioneer in developing GPS technology and advocating the importance of space weather on society.  He was also a personal friend, a running buddy, and a wonderfully warm human being with a great smile.

Kintner was scheduled to be one of the featured speakers at the upcoming Symposium on Space Weather at the AMS Annual Meeting in Seattle in January. His topic during the Tuesday, 25 January session was to be “GNSS, GPS, Modernized Signals and the Next Solar Maximum.” In his abstract he notes that GPS had just become open to widespread application during the previous solar max, which at one point in October 2000 resulted in a 26-hour outage of navigational services. Now many more applications are based on GPS and a solar max is approaching in 2013. While newer, more robust technology is being phased in, Kintner noted that

the overwhelming majority of operational GPS receivers will use the legacy GPS signals during the next solar maximum….[Precision applications based on GPS] have dramatically increased over the past solar minimum along with the assumption that the services will be truly uninterrupted and continuous. Providers of these services should be aware of three potential space weather impacts, density gradients as before, scintillation and especially phase scintillation which has only recently been resolved, and solar radio bursts about which we know little.

This presentation at the meeting will be replaced by a tribute to the Kintner and his pioneering contributions to our sciences.

You Weren't the Only One Who Mist This Game

Football is tough enough to play when the visibility is good; when you can’t see your own teammates, it’s a whole lot tougher.
In the infamous “Fog Bowl” on 31 December 1988, the Philadelphia Eagles somehow managed over 400 yards of passing. Then again, the game started out sunny and unseasonably warm, perfect for the Eagles’ flashy offense. But thick fog soon rolled in off the lake and onto Chicago’s Soldier Field until visibility was less than 20 yards, making passing a precarious proposition and helping the defensive minded Bears grind out a 20-12 victory with their strong ground-based attack.

Last Friday two Michigan high school football teams topped that NFL classic with an even thicker fog-bound playoff game of their own. At least, it looks like they did…through practically no one actually saw what was happening on the field. Rub your eyes, clean your computer screen, and check out the video highlights here.
Host Bedford-Temperance High School built a two-touchdown edge over Grosse Pointe South High School under the Friday night lights, but gave the ball away four times and saw their lead evaporate in a series of miscues. Twice the Grosse Pointe defense scooped up fumbles and returned them for touchdowns when the Bedford-Temperance quarterback couldn’t find the teammate he was supposed to hand off to in the mists.
The game came down to a last-second Grosse Pointe kick that, according to the referees, split the uprights for a 44-42 victory over Bedford-Temperance. This was one game where the guys in the striped shirts really were the only people in the stadium in a position to know for sure.

A White House Moment

Dr. Washington goes to Washington. Photo courtesy Ryan K Morris Photography/National Science & Technology Medals Foundation

Yesterday at the East Room of the White House, President Obama honored the winners of the National Medal of Science, including AMS past president Warren Washington. President Obama noted:

It’s no exaggeration to say that the scientists and innovators in this room have saved lives, improved our health and well-being, helped unleash whole new industries and millions of jobs, transformed the way we work and learn and communicate. And this incredible contribution serves as proof not only of their incredible creativity and skill but of the promise of science itself.

For more on the award, see our post from October 16.

A Good Climate for Looking at Clouds

How much do we know about clouds and the effects they have on climate change? It’s a lingering source of uncertainty, with as many questions as answers. No wonder the National Science Foundation calls them “The Wild Card of Climate Change” on its new website about the effect of clouds in climate.
The site is good place to start thinking about this complicated issue. The NSF page features videos of cloud experts like David Randall of Colorado State University and AMS President Peggy LeMone of NCAR, as well as a slide show, animations, articles, and other educational material that address some of most salient cloud/climate questions, such as: Will clouds help speed or slow climate change? Why is cloud behavior so difficult to predict? And how are scientists learning to project the behavior of clouds?
The impression one gets from the website about the progress of the science in this area may vary depending on your point of view, but Randall, for one, sounds about as optimistic as you can get. In his video, he admits that optimism is a job requirement for climate modelers, but in his assessment, “We’re not in the infant stages of understanding [clouds] any more; we’re in first or second grade, and on the way to adolescence.” His hope for solving their role in climate and representing cloud effects in climate modeling rests in part on better computers and in part on the numerous bright people entering the field now, ready to overshadow the work of their mentors.
The AMS Annual Meeting in Seattle will be a good occasion to dig deeper at the roots of Randall’s optimism and sample some of the emerging solutions to the cloud/climate relationship. For example, Andrei Sokolov and Erwan Monier of MIT will discuss the influence that adjusting cloud feedback has on climate sensitivity  (Wednesday, 26 January, 11:30 a.m. in Climate Variability and Change). Basically, they’re using small adjustments to the cloud cover used to calculate surface radiation in a model to create a suite of results–an ensemble. The range of results better reflects the sensitivity of climate observed in the 20th century better than some other methods of creating ensembles, such as adjusting the model physics.
Randall says in his video that early predictions about climate change are already coming to pass and this leads to optimism that more predictions will verify well in the coming years as we scrutinize climate more and more closely. This of course presupposes sustained efforts to observe and verify. Laying the groundwork for this task–and for thus better climate models–are Stuart Evans (University of Washington) and colleagues in a study they are presenting in Seattle. According to their abstract, “Improving cloud parameterizations in large scale models hinges on understanding the statistical connection between large scale dynamics and the cloud fields they produce.” Their study focuses on the relationship between synoptic-scale dynamic patterns and cloud properties (Monday, 24 January, 11 a.m. in Climate Variability and Change). Evans et al. dig through 13 years of cloud vertical radar profiles from the US Southern Plains site of the DOE ARM program and relate it to atmospheric “states”, thus providing a metric for evaluating how well climate models relate cloudiness to radiation and other surface properties.
While Evans and colleagues use upward looking remote sensing, Joao Teixeira (JPL/Cal Tech) and coauthors look down at boundary layer cloudiness from above–using satellites. They expect to show how new methodologies with satellite data can improve the way low level clouds are parameterized in climate models (Thursday, 27 January, 9:30 a.m., in Climate Variability and Change). A recent workshop at Cal Tech on space-based studies of this problem stated:

Clouds in the boundary layer, the lowermost region of the atmosphere adjacent to the Earth’s surface, are known to play the key role in climate feedbacks that lead to these large uncertainties. Yet current climate models remain far from realistically representing the cloudy boundary layer, as they are limited by the inability to adequately represent the small-scale physical processes associated with turbulence, convection and clouds.

The lack of realism of the models at this low level is compounded by the lack of global observing of what goes on underneath the critical low-level cloud cover–hence the effort of Teixeira et al. (and others) to “leverage” satellite observing, with its global reach, to improve understanding of low level thermodynamics in the name of improving climate simulations.

From the new NSF web page on clouds and climate, this picture shows a series of mature thunderstorms in southern Brazil. Photo credit: Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center

On the Road Again!

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director. From the AMS project, Living on the Real World

Remember those road-weather folks who were meeting in Indianapolis around September 1st? They’re back. Many of those same players, and a few new ones, are picking up their conversation again today and tomorrow, here in DC. You can find the details at the road-weather policy forum website.
The meetings and discussions will be of interest in and of themselves. In some areas of our lives, weather is vital, but we can do little more than sigh. Give a
In the road weather community, stovepipes can make music, too.

farmer thirty minutes notice of a coming hailstorm? He’s going to lose his wheat crop anyway; he can just start the grieving process half an hour sooner. In other venues, we’ve got plenty of weather information, but we’ve made it less relevant. That’s why offices are housed in buildings… and why we have domed football stadiums.
But roadways are an intersection (forgive me…too tempting!) where (1) weather affects safety and the economy, and where (2) those affected – the drivers, the traffic managers, the roadway maintenance folks, the businesses dependent on supply lines fed by road – if given the right information in the right way, can actually do something about it. A hailstorm is coming? Traffic managers can put out the word; drivers in the hailstorm’s path can divert or stand down until the hazard passes. Snow is on the way? We can get out the trucks with the plows and salt. And people are using the roadways to get from home to the office, or to that football game, aren’t they? Even in this age of virtual connectivity, physical connection still matters, commercially and socially, and much of that connection is made by roadway.
So road weather is a very special topic, rich with potential for improving the human condition.
We also find road weather to be an interesting example – a microcosm, if you will – of policy issues that play across what appears at first blush to be a “stovepiped” landscape. But let’s probe a little deeper. In this instance, we find leaders who see their institutions as the organ pipes they are, and are jamming, playing a little music together (to build on yesterday’s metaphor from my post, “Stovepipes! The Musical“). They’re effectively working across boundaries – boundaries separating::
Federal agencies. The DoC/NOAA/National Weather Service and the DoT/Federal Highway Administration each have a piece of the puzzle, don’t they? To be valuable, weather information must be applied. As the FHWA tries to make road travel and commerce safer and more efficient, it must integrate weather with traffic conditions, road maintenance, and other elements of the mix. To be useful, the agencies need each other! At the policy forum, they’ll be signing an memorandum of understanding (MOU) – a policy document – committing to another five years’ collaboration on road weather research and services.
And by the way, there are policy interfaces within each of those two Cabinet-level Departments, aren’t there? FHWA is competing with its rather larger sister agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Maritime Administration (MARAD), and many more, for attention at the top. NWS is always trying to make sure

Read more

Kermit Would Approve

It’s not easy being green, as Kermit the Frog famously lamented on the TV show, “Sesame Street,” but it might be getting easier thanks in part to the Tungara frog—a native of Central and South America. David Wendell of the University of Cincinnati recently led a study that developed a new type of foam that can absorb CO2 and convert it to sugar before it escapes into the atmosphere (a process that occurs naturally in plants during photosynthesis). A key ingredient in the foam, which could be placed into the exhaust systems of power plants, is a protein that is naturally created by the Tungara frog to form a foam nest that protects their eggs. (Here’s a brief video showing a frog weaving the nest.)  
“I read about a protein that the frog uses that allows bubbles to form in the nest, but doesn’t destroy the lipid membranes of the eggs that the females lay in the foam, and realized that it was perfect for our own foam,” says Wendell. The CO2-absorbing foam is an amalgam of numerous enzymes harvested from plants, fungi, bacteria, and frogs, and it converts all of the solar energy it captures into sugars, making it as much as five times more efficient than plants, and, according to Wendell, “the first technology that actually consumes more carbon than it generates.” The invention recently won the $50,000 grand prize at the 2010 Earth Awards, which were founded in 2007 to encourage innovative designs “to improve our quality of life and build a new economy.”

Successful Launch for Rocket City Weather Fest

In October, the University of Alabama in Huntsville student chapter of AMS (UAHuntsville AMS) hosted its first Rocket City Weather Fest (RCWF), a free weather festival for the North Alabama community.  For its debut year, the fest had close to 300 in attendance, as well as more than 50 exhibitors and presenters.
“Due to the variety of weather extremes experienced in the Tennessee Valley, one of the priorities of the UAHuntsville AMS is to educate the community about severe weather safety,” comments Sandy LaCorte, RCWF event coordinator and UAHuntsville AMS education outreach committee chair. “The event gave children and adults the opportunity to explore the atmospheric sciences through hands-on activities, demonstrations, and informative seminars, emphasizing safety and preparedness.”
At the Wacky World of Weather, kids learned about hurricanes, tornadoes, hail, and floods. Other activities included weather-themed movies in Sci-Quest’s Roaming Dome, a planetarium style inflatable theater, plus a weather miniature golf and beanbag toss. Attendees were also given the opportunity to see a weather balloon launched by the UAHuntsville atmospheric chemistry research group.
RCWF is the chapter’s newest endeavor in community outreach. Members, who are undergraduate and graduate students in pursuing careers in atmospheric and earth sciences, also speak at local schools, judge regional and state science fairs, administer tests for the Science Olympiad, and program weather radios at various events.

Science Policy: What Would the Founding Fathers Do?

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director. From the AMS project, Living on the Real World
“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”
– Mark Twain
When I was a graduate student in physics at The University of Chicago, the department had a weekly seminar. One year Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a faculty member, already a famous astrophysicist (he would go on to win the Nobel prize) and author of over 1000 publications, delivered a talk on his new theory of quasars. The next week’s speaker happened to be Tommy Gold, a Brit, a fellow of the Royal Society, and then on the faculty at Cornell. He laid out a competing theory. When Gold was done, Chandrasekhar was the first person to ask a question. Wearing his signature pinstripe suit and looking like he just stepped out of the pages of GQ, Chandrasekhar cut a dignified figure as he rose from his chair. “Surely you would agree…” he smoothly began…
Can’t remember exactly what he said next, but it was the equivalent of asking Gold whether he believed that 2+2=4. It was also the first step down a line of argument that would lead to Chandrasekhar’s theory. The room was packed, but you could have heard a pin drop. Gold looked at him for what seemed like forever; then finally said “No.”
Maybe for the more senior faculty this was just another day at the lab, but we students had never seen a scientist do that. Every person in the room knew the only right answer was “yes.” Most of us had also been present the week before. Chandrasekhar glowered, then silently took his seat. A serious chill set in the room. The Q&A went on for some time, but never fully recovered.
Tommy Gold knew that you couldn’t separate data and facts from considerations of the end. To defend his theory he was going to have to say “no” at some point, so he might as well do it early.
It was not science’s best day. But in that instant I took to heart – internalized in my gut, not just my head – that while science might be objective, the pursuit of science could be very political – and combative. As a result, the process of collecting and analyzing the data can’t really be separated from considerations of the end use.
I got to see this up close and personal from 1987-1993 . At that time I was the NOAA Deputy Chief Scientist. The National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) Program, an interagency group, was administratively housed in NOAA under the leadership of the Chief Scientist. The same argument was playing out, but now

Read more

A Vote for Weatherproof Elections

Predicting–as opposed to actually voting in–elections has become a national past-time, if one is to judge the media’s obsession with who’s going to win what in today’s midterm contests in the United States. And what better way to make predictions than to ponder the weather map?
Tony Wood of the Philadelphia Inquirer, however, disputes the oft-cited connection between weather and election results. In a post last week on “Weather, Democracy, and Mythology“, he looked into the old theory that rain dampens voter turnout and concluded that it doesn’t hold water:

Consider the 2004 presidential election. Recall that it all came down to Ohio in a close race between President Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry.
That Election Day was a nasty one all over the state. It rained almost everywhere. The result? The voter turnout in Ohio was believed to be highest in at least 40 years. Some folks were said to be waiting up to nine hours to vote.
We did our own analysis of 30 years of election returns and weather in Philadelphia found no evidence of a link between the two. It rained on half of the Election Days with the 10 highest turnouts, while seven of the 10 lowest-turnout days were rain-free.

What about the oft-told story of the 1960 election? In his classic, The Weather Factor, meteorological historian David M. Ludlum claimed that rain in Illinois (on an otherwise mostly fair day across the country) hindered Nixonian rural voters more than Kennedy liberals in Chicago? Wood counters with political analyst Terry Madonna of Franklin & Marshall University, who says weather took a back seat to the behind-the-scenes intervention of Mayor Richard Daley:

“It [the rain] didn’t matter,” said Madonna, “because Daley had those votes already counted.”

We’re not sure how that explanation is logical (given that Ludlum’s theory is more about the lack of rural voters than about any surge in urban voters), but more specifically it would be great to see more of Wood’s 30-year study. In the meantime, the one recent study, by political scientist Brad Gomez and colleagues, quantifies a correlation between weather and voter turnout. The paper, published in 2007 by the Journal of Politics, was discussed at the 2008 AMS Broadcast Meteorology conference (audiovisual version here) by Allan Eustis.
Gomez et al. found that every inch of rain above normal correlates significantly 1% reduction in voter turnout. Similarly, every inch of snow correlates significantly to a 0.5% drop in voter turnout.
Eustis pointed out some limitations in this seemingly exhaustive study involving 22,000 weather observations (to resolve weather effects locally) across 14 national presidential elections. For instance, there’s no mention of extreme temperatures or windy weather. Eustis believes extreme weather, not deviations from norms, are more significant in turnout (therefore a linear relationship between precipitation and voting might not be valid).
Cliff Mass of the University of Washington discusses the Gomez paper in his blog and quickly throws a bucket of cold water on the the relevance of those numbers for today’s election, anyway:

Now an inch of rain is quite a bit of precipitation, only occurring during major storms (like Monday in the NW) or in thunderstorm areas.
Furthermore, these results were for presidential elections where people are generally highly engaged and motivated. What about midterm elections like Tuesday’s? If we assume that people would be less excited than for presidential runs would one expect the influence of precipitation to be greater for this election?
And what about the influence of the greater proportion of absentee ballots and of extended balloting times (some places in the U.S. allow voting in the weeks before the election)?

Playing along with the Gomez et al. paper for the moment, however, Mass  predicted (on Sunday) that if Republicans are indeed favored by lower turnout and thus precipitation, the relatively small areas of rain today will have little impact because it will fall areas that are already leaning heavily toward Republicans.
Eustis, however, notes that other studies of weather and elections, unlike Gomez et al., don’t support the adage that Republicans pray for rain (for instance this 1994 paper by Steve Knack of American University).
What Eustis has learned while working for the National Institutes of Standard and Technology, however, is that the weather effects the voting systems, not the voting people: apparently optical scanners can incorrectly process paper ballots, which expand in excessive humidity causing misalignment (see the 2005 SAT scoring controversy).
Ah, for the simple days when gentleman farmers slogged through the mud and rain, got further sloshed with liquor, shouted their preferences to the poll takers, and went home waiting weeks for the results with nary a prognosticating pundit to second-guess them.