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The decision to change school schedules due to inclement weather is based on the best information available when the decision is made; however, we can never be sure how the weather will affect our area. Even meteorologists disagree on weather predictions.

Such, um…(cough, cough)…nonsense… deserves a chuckle when brought to good-humored life by photographer Harry Lim in this doctored image of Orlando, Florida, broadcast meteorologists. See Lim’s blog for the full image and description of the photo shoot for an upcoming issue of a local homeowners’ association magazine, Baldwin Park Living.

The Super Bowl is, of course, more than just a game. In fact, some might argue that the game is secondary to all of the social activities that go on during Super Bowl week.  (And then there are the commercials, but let’s not go there…) There’s no doubt that many view the Super Bowl as an event where they can see and be seen, so the NFL’s decision on Tuesday to play Super Bowl XLVIII outdoors in New Jersey is sure to upset some of those who prefer partying to pigskins.
This will be the first Super Bowl to be played outdoors in a cold-weather city, and the NFL waived its weather rules to allow New York/New Jersey to apply for hosting the game. Previously, the league only allowed the Super Bowl to be played in a location where the external temperature normally exceeds 50°F during the time of the game or where the stadium has a closed roof. With New York’s Giants and Jets having built a $1.6-billion stadium in New Jersey that opens this year, the league felt the region had a selling point that would outshine any weather issues, and after four rounds of secret balloting, NFL owners agreed, awarding New York/New Jersey the 2014 event over Tampa and Miami, two cities that have hosted the game a total of 14 times.

A posting today on the Weather and Climate Discussion blog of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading tackles the burgeoning subject of communicating forecast uncertainty.  It ends with a well-chosen quote from Francis Bacon:

If a man will begin with certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

This resourceful use of literary heritage sends us hunting for other like-minded quotations.  A quick check of a quotations reference yields plenty of quips and admonishments. Most are too metaphysical for meteorological musing. For instance, from Kahlil Gibran:

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

Hmmmm. Maybe that’s not the best thought for portraying ensemble modeling results. Fortunately, there are more suitable candidates, as in this one from the English poet, Robert Browning

Who knows most, doubts most;…

(Unfortunately, Browning’s corollary is not so reassuring)

…entertaining hope means recognizing fear.

On this side of the Pond, communicating uncertainty becomes even more heavy-handed. From 20th Century American legal eagle, Clarence Darrow comes this motivation:

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.

Clearly, the thesaurus is a dangerous place to hang out: “doubt” is the downer scientists avoid with “uncertainty.”  Better to parse out Donald Rumsfeld’s oft unappreciated and surprisingly articulate case for ensemble modeling:

There are known knowns; these are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Meteorologist Paul Huttner’s writes on his Minnesota Public Radio blog, “Updraft” about the launch today of a new cable TV channel for weather, “The Weather Cast.”

From my perspective, this news may come as the equivalent of a nuclear bomb for national cable and satellite weather programming. This is the first time since The Weather Channel’s launch that a viable national alternative has appeared.

The distributor, and apparent instigator, of the new channel is the DISH Network, with 14 million subscribers. In its press release, the network explained it was responding to a proliferation of movies, features and other content on TWC that aren’t about the weather at hand:
“Our customers always tell us that the only thing they want in a weather channel is weather reporting,” said Dave Shull, senior vice president of Programming [for DISH].

But there’s more to the business side of this decision than just trying to cater to viewers: DISH had been negotiating with TWC over fees, with a deadline of midnight Thursday.  The plan was for DISH to dump TWC (channel 214) and substitute the The Weather Cast (initially channel 213) assuming no deal with TWC.
A visit to the DISH web site didn’t yield any further information, but Huttner reports that fellow Minnesota meteorology icon Paul Douglas is producing the network through his company, Weather Nation.
Dare we imagine a day when weather junkies will be able to surf national cable channels the way politicos and news junkies surf Fox, CNN, MSNBC and other outlets?

We … call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.

The rhetoric from this letter to the 7 May issue of Science magazine may seem unusually overheated, especially considering it is signed by some 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. But the topic is, of course, global warming, and the heat—political and social—has turned up several notches this year, as you know. (Indeed, the firestorm of commentary on the doctored picture of a polar bear on an ice floe that Science chose to accompany the letter is instructive of the tempers spilling out of the climate change discussion of late.) The rhetoric is a sure sign that climate change long ago outgrew the Ivory Tower and now hinges on the court of public opinion, where appearances are as critical as ideas. But that’s well understood; what’s new is that science seems to have moved on to yet another court of opinion where the appearance of fairness trumps all other familiar criteria.
The tipping point for the Science letter was a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) issued in April by the office of Virginia Attorney General Kevin Cuccinelli as part of a fraud investigation of climate change research conducted at the University of Virginia. Specifically, the CID would have the university turn over all documentation, correspondence, work—anything basically—related to five grants stretching back to as much as 11 years ago for climate change research by Michael Mann, a leading climatologist who has since moved on from Charlottesville to Penn State University. The CID gave the university just three months to complete the state’s massive, time-consuming document search.
The outrage from scientists was joined last week by AMS Executive Director Keith Seitter and UCAR President Rick Anthes, whose letter to the UVA president seeks protection of the scientific process, while it is still possible to challenge the CID.

We feel strongly that the actions of the Virginia Attorney General represent an inappropriate use of government authority, and urge you to do everything within your power to uphold the tenets of academic freedom.

The university’s faculty senate, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Association of University Professors, and others had also cautioned that compliance with the CID could compromise academic freedoms. Even one of Mann’s most persistent critics (aimed mostly at his “hockey stick” graph of rising temperatures that has gotten considerable exposure through the IPCC and other citations) has condemned Cuccinelli’s tactic.  On Friday, UVA administrators announced they would use private funds for legal representation in this matter, saying “Research universities must defend the privilege of academic freedom in the creation of new knowledge.”
At the same time, Nature magazine joined the chorus of protest from scientists with an equally strong editorial in their 13 May issue.

Cuccinelli’s actions against Mann hark back to an era when tobacco companies smeared researchers as part of a sophisticated public relations strategy to raise doubts over the science showing that tobacco caused cancer, and delayed the introduction of smoking curbs for decades. Researchers found themselves bogged down in responding to subpoenas and legal challenges, which deterred others from the field. Climate-change deniers have adopted similar strategies with alacrity and, unfortunately, considerable success.

It is easy to see why Nature considers the Virginia fraud investigation part of a trend. Climate science has gotten more entangled in the legal system since the hacking of emails at East Anglia. In February, three states—Texas, Alabama, and, yes…Virginia—said they would challenge EPA regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The suit is based on doubts about the validity of anthropogenic climate change fueled by the East Anglia e-mails that were hacked (or stolen or leaked) last fall.
And while the legal system is now a venue for challenging the scientific basis of climate change, scientists in turn are using the same system to respond to attacks on themselves and their work. In March, lawyers for Mann took action to stop internet distribution of a video lampooning one of his emails in the East Anglia servers. Similarly, late last month, Andrew Weaver of the University of British Columbia, one of the lead IPCC authors (and former chief editor of Journal of Climate) filed a libel suit against The National Post of Canada. Dr. Weaver said, “I asked The National Post to do the right thing – to retract a number of recent articles that attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held. To my absolute astonishment, the newspaper refused.”
Already, plenty of words have been spilled on the pitfalls of scientists becoming their own advocates in the policy arena. Now climate change science steps out further, to be evaluated in a system that not so much determines truth as upholds fairness through a competition of advocacy. The rules of the game are even more obscure than before. The ball is officially in someone else’s court, and it is difficult to imagine this is any better for science.

In the wake of the recent eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland and the inconvenience it caused air travelers, this might be a good time to remember another Icelandic volcano and the chain of events it set off, including widespread famine, thousands of deaths, and maybe even the overthrow of a European power.
In June 1783, the Laki volcano in Iceland began an eruption that would continue for eight months, launching huge amounts of poisonous gas into the atmosphere. In Iceland, this had disastrous effects: vast amounts of cropland were destroyed and remained useless for many years, and approximately 80% of the country’s livestock died, setting off a famine that combined with the polluted air to kill approximately 10,000 people–at least one-fifth of Iceland’s population–over two years. This period is known in the country as “The Mist Hardships” because of the hazy mix of hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide that settled over the land.
That haze inexorably made its way to other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. The famed British naturalist Gilbert White noted in his Naturalist’s Journal that, “The peculiar haze or smoky fog that prevailed in this island and even beyond its limits was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man.” Killing more than 20,000 British citizens, the toxic haze is considered to be the worst natural disaster in modern Britain’s history. But it didn’t stop there. As recounted in the book, A Cultural History of Climate, by Wolfgang Behringer,

The emissions caused sulphurous odours, eye irritation, breathing difficulties and headaches as far away as central Europe. In large parts of Europe and the Ottoman empire, there were reports of thick “dry fog” and darkening or unusual colouring of the sun. Members of the Societas Meteorologica Palatina reported that, in the summer of 1783, the dark sky meant that people were able to look at the sun with the naked eye. . . . Acid rain damaged the environment throughout Scandinavia. Vegetation directly suffered even in the Netherlands, where with some delay cold and drought led to harvest failures, outbreaks of fever and diarrhoea, and increased mortality.

The eruption resulted in two years of unusually cold winters in Europe, which in turn led to widespread crop damage and a deadly famine. (Even the United States felt the effects: Benjamin Franklin noted that the winter of 1784 was the coldest in memory.) Indeed, much of Europe in the 1780s was plagued by unusual and extreme weather–and subsequent hardships brought on by this weather–that has been attributed to Laki. In his book, Behringer notes that,

Grain prices rose threefold in the decade beginning in 1784. The cumulative periods of cold during these years led to heavy snowfall and deep frost, widespread failures of vine and bread cereal harvests, flooding and livestock epidemics–precisely the combination of disasters that hits traditional agrarian societies hardest. The severe winter of 1783-4 saw exceptionally heavy snowfall, and there was serious flooding when the thaw came in late February. In the Rhine-Main area, the highwater mark at that time has in many places never been exceeded; it caused devastation in the fields or meadows and outbreaks of livestock disease due to contamination of the land. Many bridges collapsed, and roads and paths became impassable. The winter of 1784-5 was also exceptionally long and cold. In Berne snow lay on the ground for 154 days. . .

Some historians even trace the French Revolution back to the volcano, as the difficult conditions created by its eruption (e.g., long, cold winters, crop failures, food shortages) bred widespread disillusionment among the country’s peasantry.

In a region already dealing with the potentially devastating effects of the offshore oil drilling disaster, the southern United States has been dealt more blows by recent severe weather. Storms over the weekend brought rain, thunderstorms, tornadoes, and severe flooding to much of the South, killing more than 30 people.

Springtime sandstorms are common in China, but the spate of widespread blowing dust and sand and yellow skies in March (with five dust storms in 12 days) has many Asians worried that conditions are worsening.
The storms originate when an atmospheric low pressure feature referred to as “the Mongolian Cyclone” kicks up winds that sweep through Mongolia and across the Gobi desert, creating clouds of sand, dust, and dirt that inundate much of China. The Mongolian cyclone has been particularly intense this spring, with recent storms affecting about one-fifth of China’s 1.3 billion people, according to the state-run Xinhua News Service. And the clouds don’t stay within China’s borders; studies have shown that they can travel as far as North America, and the Korean peninsula has been hit particularly hard by this storms this year. The Korean Meteorological Administration (KMA) posted a rare yellow dust warning recently, and soon thereafter it recorded the greatest amount of the dust since it began taking measurements in 2005: 2,684 micrograms per cubic meter in Daegu (a warning is issued when the concentration exceeds 800 micrograms per cubic meter).

In one of the classic understatements of aviation history, Eric Moody turned on the flight intercom of his British Airways 747 and reported to his 248 passengers:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

The date was 24 June 1982, and Moody’s 747 was south of Java, en route from Heathrow to Auckland, amidst an ash cloud from Mount Galunggung in Indonesia. At first it looked as if the only hope was to ditch the plane in the ocean. However, the crew was able to glide the plane (let’s all nod now  to engineers who managed to create a jumbo jet that descends only one meter for every 15 flown without power) until successfully restarting three of the four engines, but the damage from the cloud made for a harrowing landing over the mountainous terrain around Jakarta. In 1989, another 747 temporarily lost use of all four engines due to a volcanic plume (from Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt).
Not surprisingly, since the British Airways incident, volcanic plumes—previously studied more closely for their climatic effects—have become a preoccupation of weather forecasters. The world meteorological and aviation communities have collaborated on the International Airways Volcano Watch, whose advisories Thursday led to the cancellation of flights across northern Europe due to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjalla volcano. It will be hard to overstate the  consequence of this eruption for travelers around the world; it is already being compared to the no-fly days after 9/11.