State of the Climate: It’s All Connected

Today’s publication of State of the Climate in 2019 marks the 30th annual release in this series of supplements to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The report is not just a service for immediate use as the latest status report on climate. It’s a resource that people worldwide will use throughout the year, and indeed as a reference through the coming years. The report, now online only, is meant to stand a test of time as a bedrock of other reports and decisions.

SOCcover2Despite the rapid pace of writing, editing, and reviewing, this is obviously not the first (or last) assessment of 2019’s climate. So we still often get asked—why now? Why release in August 2020 a comprehensive, validated check-up on the health of our planet’s climate in 2019 August, instead of in January, when it’s still hot news?

Co-editor Jessica Blunden of NOAA addressed the question a number of years ago, with a helpful look behind the scenes of State of the Climate. You can appreciate, first of all, the amazing job she and coeditor Deke Arndt (also of NOAA) do to pull this all together so fast—they’re coordinating the work of more than 500 authors and chapter editors from 61 different countries. So naturally, at first glance, churning out this report in only a matter of months is a managerial triumph–a testament to international cooperation:

The production of this document really does “take a village”; without the dedication and hard work of every single one of the people who contribute to this process, the quality and scope of the report would not be possible. Each year the number of authors tends to increase as we add new information to the report.

SOCauthormap2In just the past decade alone Blunden and Arndt have added 150 authors and 13 additional countries. Why so many authors?

The authors are asked to contribute based on their expertise in a specific field. For our Regional Climates chapter, which is comprised of annual summaries for countries around the world, the authors are often affiliated with a specific country’s official meteorological/hydrological agency and provide analysis based on data from that agency. it’s not just any process of coordination. State of the Climate is an elaborate scheme to make a scientifically worthwhile document:

The development of the report is quite rigorous, with writing, two major peer-review processes, technical editing, layout, and approval. After the calendar year has ended, authors are given about six weeks to develop their content and provide an initial draft that is reviewed by the chapter editors.

Then the chapter editor has the draft reviewed by two or three scientists with expert knowledge in that field. Generally, we allow one to two weeks for this review to be completed and another one to two weeks for the authors to make revisions, as needed, and for the chapter editors to prepare the new version for a formal, external review.

The external review process involves anonymous peer reviews, and BAMS allows three weeks for these reviews to be completed. The authors and chapter editors then have two weeks to make revisions based on these comments and submit the final draft for approval.

Then there’s editing and layout and so on . . . as Blunden summarizes:

This document takes the time to provide the most accurate information available on the state of the climate system.

But the time isn’t actually about writing and reviewing; it’s the comprehensiveness of 429 pages and a bazillion references (no, we didn’t count them). A report that started as a 30-pager gets bigger and more precise with each iteration, because the value increases:

The longer a data record is and the larger the area it covers, the more useful it is for putting a particular climate indicator into context, for example comparing one year to another, or detecting trends over time. Today we are fortunate to have technologies and capabilities that were not available to us decades ago, such as satellite observations, but to use all those observations for climate research means combining observations from multiple sources into a single, seamless climate data record, which is neither fast nor easy.

With both satellite and direct observations, it is important to reconcile data discrepancies and inaccuracies so that the climate records are correct, complete, and comparable, and this painstaking process can take years. For our report, a high-quality dataset is ready for inclusion only after its development processes and methodologies have been scrutinized through peer review with published results. That way readers of the State of the Climate reports can depend on detailed journal articles if they want to understand the details of a data record.

The process of creating a climate quality data set and then having it evaluated by other scientists through peer review is so challenging, no more than a few are added to the State of the Climate report each year.

So the State of Climate is a testament to a complex process, with complex, interrelated data sources that cry out for the reconciliation and comparison that makes the report unique. And of course, all about a climate that is nothing if not the paragon of complexity.

As Deke Arndt explains about Earth’s climate (in a webinar to watch before using State of the Climate): “If the Earth didn’t spin, and we didn’t have day and night, it would be very simple.”

That sums up the reason the State of the Climate is not simple . . . or small, or fast. It is all connected.

 

 

 

Wilder Weather: Data and Science in the Novel, The Long Winter

Even tall tales have their facts, but in historical fiction the myriad factual details often far outshine the story itself. In the ever popular books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the telling details turn out to be the truly epic—and real—weather of the past. Barbara Mayes Boustead (University of Nebraska—Lincoln) and her coauthors show us in a recent BAMS article that Wilder’s, The Long Winter, isn’t just good history wrapped into a great novel–it’s also valuable climate data.

The cold, snowy season of 1880-81 featured in The Long Winter was strikingly difficult across much of the Plains and Midwest. A number of accounts have referred to it as the “Hard Winter” or “Starvation Winter.” Wilder’s story, set in De Smet, Dakota Territory (present-day South Dakota; 60 km west of Brookings), is fiction, but it contains many verifiable facts about the weather.

Clearing snowBoustead and co-authors Martha D. Shulski and Steven D. Hilberg set out to determine which parts of Laura’s stories are based in fact, and in the process, filled in the gap left by the absence of analysis or documentation in scientific literature about the Hard Winter of 1880-81. In the process, Boustead et al. show that the Hard Winter places recent severe winters, such as 2013-14, into context.

The winter began early, with a blizzard in eastern South Dakota and surrounding areas in mid October. Following a respite thereafter, wintry conditions returned by mid-November, followed by a number of snow and potential blizzard events in December. After a cold but relatively snow-free period, storm frequency increased from early January through February, producing snow almost daily in eastern South Dakota. In March, most days remained below freezing, though snowfall frequency decreased. Cold conditions continued into the first half of April. The BAMS article goes into detail describing why the winter of 1880-81 was so severe.

pAWSSIBAMS asked a few questions of Boustead to gain insight into her research. A sampling of answers are below:

BAMS: What would you like readers to learn from your article?

Barbara Mayes Boustead: Literature and other creative work can provide windows into past weather events and climates – including everything from documentary evidence to the impacts of those events on individuals and communities. We can connect those works to other historical weather data sources, from observations to reanalysis data, to reconstruct what occurred during these noted events, and why. By researching weather and climate related to a popular-interest subject like Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House stories, I have been able to reach audiences that otherwise might not have been so engaged, sparking interest in weather and climate by presenting it through Laura’s perspective.

BAMS: How did you become interested in investigating the weather of Wilder’s book?

Boustead_PhotoBarbara Mayes Boustead: The Long Winter research began over a decade ago as I reread the book as a “comfort read” on the tail end of a winter, reminding myself that even the longest winters do eventually end. I’ve been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books since I was in elementary school, and I had always wondered if the winter was really as Wilder had described it. And then I got to thinking – I am a meteorologist, and I have the tools to look it up! The deeper I dug, the more that my questions led to more questions. I especially got excited as I found data that verified much of the weather that Wilder had described. And I knew I had found a resonant topic when I presented the work at a conference called LauraPalooza in 2010 (it’s real and it’s serious!) and was overwhelmed with questions and discussion following my presentation.

BAMS: What got you initially interested in weather and, more importantly, these novels?

Barbara Mayes Boustead: It seems that many meteorologists started with either a memorable event or a fear of a weather phenomenon. I was in the latter group, afraid of thunderstorms in my preschool years. My mother and sister took me to the library so that I could read books about weather, hoping that understanding would help me conquer fear. I had plowed through all of the books in the library in about a year, and I was hooked! As for my interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder, I can again thank my mom and books. She purchased Little House on the Prairie for me at a garage sale when I was in first grade and ready for chapter books. I turned my nose up at it, but she encouraged me to give it a chance. I did, and of course, Mom knows best – I was hooked and plowed through the rest of the book series, too.

BAMS: What surprised you the most in doing this research?

Barbara Mayes Boustead: Laura Ingalls Wilder was an excellent weather observer. Having researched the winter of 1880-81 extensively, as well as the rest of the identifiable weather and climate phenomena throughout the Little House books, I found that while many elements of the books were fictionalized, she recounted weather and climate events with great accuracy. Almost every weather or climate detail in her books really did occur and usually occurred just as she described it. She occasionally moved some timelines around, but the events themselves were spot-on.

BAMS: What was the biggest challenge you encountered in the research?

Barbara Mayes Boustead: There were times during my research that I would have gone to great lengths to obtain true snowfall measurements from one of the observing sites near the area of interest, or to fill in the spatial gaps. Snowfall data just don’t exist for the central U.S. in the early 1880s.

BAMS: What’s next?

Barbara Mayes Boustead: Research into the weather and climate of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books and life continues as I work to document other weather and climate events from her other books and stories. Given the popular interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder, some of the research is and will be written for broader audiences, providing a window into the world of science (meteorology and climatology) for non-specialists by standing on the shoulders of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s storytelling and characters. What began as a side project has transitioned into decades worth of research and storytelling! Her books include everything from tornadoes and hail storms to blizzards, droughts to floods, extreme cold to extreme heat. There is fodder for research for years to come!

The Forecast for Huge Numbers of Hurricanes in 2020: Not a "New Normal"

Thursday NOAA updated its forecast to an “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season. That has some news outlets linking the  19-25 predicted named storms to Earth’s future—even warmer—global climate. The future looks like it will indeed bring high levels of overall “activity” due to the intense, damaging hurricanes of a warming world (regardless of whether the frequency of storms overall changes). And, of course, settling into a new “norm” isn’t going to happen while warming is ongoing. But the huge number of storms forming? That’s a lot of what the public takes away from the forecast, and that profusion of named storms is not projected to be characteristic of seasons to come.
As we blogged here in May, recent research published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society finds there’s no evidence to support an increasing trend in tropical cyclone frequency.
NOAA-2020-outlook-update2In that assessment of the current literature, Tom Knutson (NOAA) and other top tropical experts reviewed a number of peer-reviewed studies and determined that a majority found the numbers of named storms actually decrease in climate projections as we move deeper into this century. But there was no consensus among the authors to either support or refute those studies since their research also showed that “there is no clear observational evidence for a detectable human influence on historical global TC frequency.”
Their assessment did find that we can expect stronger and wetter hurricanes in our warming world and, notably, a possible uptick in the number of intense (Category 4 and 5) hurricanes. It’s these storms that have Knutson and his colleagues most concerned since a majority of hurricane damage is done by the big ones. Their increase is alarming even if the number of storms goes down.
Notable with this week’s forecast update is a prediction close to record territory. “We’ve never forecast up to 25 named storms” before—more than twice a season’s typical 12—noted Jerry Bell, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. He went on to say there will be “more, stronger, and longer-lived storms than average” in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and Gulf 0f Mexico. In an average season there are six hurricanes,  and three of those grow into major hurricanes.

The Forecast for Huge Numbers of Hurricanes in 2020: Not a “New Normal”

Thursday NOAA updated its forecast to an “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season. That has some news outlets linking the  19-25 predicted named storms to Earth’s future—even warmer—global climate. The future looks like it will indeed bring high levels of overall “activity” due to the intense, damaging hurricanes of a warming world (regardless of whether the frequency of storms overall changes). And, of course, settling into a new “norm” isn’t going to happen while warming is ongoing. But the huge number of storms forming? That’s a lot of what the public takes away from the forecast, and that profusion of named storms is not projected to be characteristic of seasons to come.

As we blogged here in May, recent research published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society finds there’s no evidence to support an increasing trend in tropical cyclone frequency.

NOAA-2020-outlook-update2In that assessment of the current literature, Tom Knutson (NOAA) and other top tropical experts reviewed a number of peer-reviewed studies and determined that a majority found the numbers of named storms actually decrease in climate projections as we move deeper into this century. But there was no consensus among the authors to either support or refute those studies since their research also showed that “there is no clear observational evidence for a detectable human influence on historical global TC frequency.”

Their assessment did find that we can expect stronger and wetter hurricanes in our warming world and, notably, a possible uptick in the number of intense (Category 4 and 5) hurricanes. It’s these storms that have Knutson and his colleagues most concerned since a majority of hurricane damage is done by the big ones. Their increase is alarming even if the number of storms goes down.

Notable with this week’s forecast update is a prediction close to record territory. “We’ve never forecast up to 25 named storms” before—more than twice a season’s typical 12—noted Jerry Bell, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. He went on to say there will be “more, stronger, and longer-lived storms than average” in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and Gulf 0f Mexico. In an average season there are six hurricanes,  and three of those grow into major hurricanes.

Isaias' Forecast Rains, Evaluated Through the New ERM Perspective

Tropical Storm Isaias is soaking the Mid-Atlantic states with what is expected to be three times as much rain as is typical for the area. Today’s heaviest tropical showers could trigger potentially deadly flash floods.
The projection is the finding of a new Intuitive Metric for Deadly Tropical Cyclone Rains, which we blogged about on The Front Page in June. The extreme rainfall multiplier (ERM) used the quantitative precipitation forecast (QPF) from the Storm Prediction Center last night to generate an ERM forecast for Isaias.
Isaias
“Since Isaias is a fast-moving storm (currently moving NNE at 23 mph), the heaviest rain is forecast to fall with[in] a 24-hour period today (Aug 4)”, wrote the study’s lead author, Christopher Bosma, a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a-pre-dawn e-mail. “Peak rainfall totals are projected to be just over 6 inches (approx. 150 mm), mostly in a narrow region just south of the DC Metro [area].”
In contrast, the region’s heaviest single-day, 2-year rainfall event is a bit more than 50 mm. Bosma uses that comparison in generating an ERM around 2.86 (152 mm / 53 mm). Rainfall may exceed the projections, but that gives a rough idea of how the storm compares to others in residents’ recent memory.
According to the study, which was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in May, the average value of an ERM in U.S. landfalling hurricanes and tropical storms is 2.0. ERMs can hindcast the severity of precipitation for such storms, like 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. Harvey deluged Texas with as much as 60 inches of rain and reached an ERM of 6.4—the highest calculated.
Those having lived in the D.C. area in the early 2000s might recall a tropical storm that Bosma says is comparable to Isaias: Isabel. After landfall in eastern North Carolina as a Cat. 2 hurricane the morning of September 18, 2003, it barreled north-northwest through the Mid-Atlantic delivering flooding rains and damaging winds that night.
“Isabel was also a fast mover at landfall, and was responsible for similar one-day rain totals of just over 6 inches, based on CPC-Unified gauge-based gridded data,” Bosma wrote.” The peak ERM for Isabel was 2.8. One thing to note from Isabel is that localized rainfall totals were higher in some spots, particularly in the mountains of Virginia, highlighting the threat of localized flash flooding that might also be present today with Isaias.”
Isabel
Indeed, flash flood warnings were issued all across the interior Mid-Atlantic this morning. This was despite drought conditions in parts of the area.
Bosma and colleagues Daniel Wright (UW-Madison), J. Marshall Shepherd (University of Georgia), et al., created the ERM metric to focus on the deadly hazard of extreme tropical cyclone rainfall. Getting word out about the threat using only the wind-based Saffir-Simpson Scale “was a problem brought to light with Hurricanes Harvey and Florence,” Shepherd says.
Wright also in an e-mail last night stated that for Isaias in and around Washington, D.C., it’s “a fairly large amount of rain, though certainly not unprecedented for the region.”
Recurrence

Isaias’ Forecast Rains, Evaluated Through the New ERM Perspective

Tropical Storm Isaias is soaking the Mid-Atlantic states with what is expected to be three times as much rain as is typical for the area. Today’s heaviest tropical showers could trigger potentially deadly flash floods.

The projection is the finding of a new Intuitive Metric for Deadly Tropical Cyclone Rains, which we blogged about on The Front Page in June. The extreme rainfall multiplier (ERM) used the quantitative precipitation forecast (QPF) from the Storm Prediction Center last night to generate an ERM forecast for Isaias.

Isaias

“Since Isaias is a fast-moving storm (currently moving NNE at 23 mph), the heaviest rain is forecast to fall with[in] a 24-hour period today (Aug 4)”, wrote the study’s lead author, Christopher Bosma, a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a-pre-dawn e-mail. “Peak rainfall totals are projected to be just over 6 inches (approx. 150 mm), mostly in a narrow region just south of the DC Metro [area].”

In contrast, the region’s heaviest single-day, 2-year rainfall event is a bit more than 50 mm. Bosma uses that comparison in generating an ERM around 2.86 (152 mm / 53 mm). Rainfall may exceed the projections, but that gives a rough idea of how the storm compares to others in residents’ recent memory.

According to the study, which was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in May, the average value of an ERM in U.S. landfalling hurricanes and tropical storms is 2.0. ERMs can hindcast the severity of precipitation for such storms, like 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. Harvey deluged Texas with as much as 60 inches of rain and reached an ERM of 6.4—the highest calculated.

Those having lived in the D.C. area in the early 2000s might recall a tropical storm that Bosma says is comparable to Isaias: Isabel. After landfall in eastern North Carolina as a Cat. 2 hurricane the morning of September 18, 2003, it barreled north-northwest through the Mid-Atlantic delivering flooding rains and damaging winds that night.

“Isabel was also a fast mover at landfall, and was responsible for similar one-day rain totals of just over 6 inches, based on CPC-Unified gauge-based gridded data,” Bosma wrote.” The peak ERM for Isabel was 2.8. One thing to note from Isabel is that localized rainfall totals were higher in some spots, particularly in the mountains of Virginia, highlighting the threat of localized flash flooding that might also be present today with Isaias.”

Isabel

Indeed, flash flood warnings were issued all across the interior Mid-Atlantic this morning. This was despite drought conditions in parts of the area.

Bosma and colleagues Daniel Wright (UW-Madison), J. Marshall Shepherd (University of Georgia), et al., created the ERM metric to focus on the deadly hazard of extreme tropical cyclone rainfall. Getting word out about the threat using only the wind-based Saffir-Simpson Scale “was a problem brought to light with Hurricanes Harvey and Florence,” Shepherd says.

Wright also in an e-mail last night stated that for Isaias in and around Washington, D.C., it’s “a fairly large amount of rain, though certainly not unprecedented for the region.”

Recurrence

When UAS Flock Together

All the research ships and aircraft of atmospheric science may never be able to gather in one place for testing. But small, portable unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are another matter. An international vanguard of scientists developing these atmospheric observing capabilities is finding that it is really helpful to get together to pool their insights—and devices—to accelerate each other’s progress. Together, their technology is taking off.

In the May 2020 BAMS, Gijs de Boer (CIRES and NOAA) and colleagues overview one of these coordinate-and-compare campaigns: when 10 teams from around the world brought 34 UAS to Colorado’s San Luis Valley for a week of tests, laying groundwork for new collaborations and future field programs. The July 2018 flight-fest conducted 1,300 research flights totaling more than 250 flight hours focused on observing the intricacies of the lower atmosphere.

Dubbed the LAPSE-RATE campaign—Lower Atmospheric Profiling Studies at Elevation–A Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Team Experiment—it was one of the fruits of a new community of scientists, the International Society for Atmospheric Research Using Remotely-Piloted Aircraft (ISARRA).

UAV_launch_ready2At a “Community Day,” the scientists shared their aircraft and interests with the public as well. Working together all in one place has huge benefits. The teams get to see how they compare with each other, work out the kinks with their UAS, and move faster toward their research goals. It’s one reason they are getting so good so fast.

Below, de Boer answers some questions about the campaign and how he got started with UAS.

BAMS: What are some of the shared problems revealed by working together—as in LAPSE-RATE—with other UAS teams?
Gijs de Boer: There are common problems at a variety of levels.  For example, accurate wind sensing has proven challenging, and we’ve definitely worked together to improve wind estimation. Additionally, different modes of operation, understanding which sensors are good and which are not, and sensor placement are all examples of how the community has worked together to lift up the quality of measurements from all platforms.

BAMS: What are the most surprising lessons from LAPSE-RATE?
GdB: I think that the continued rapid progression of the technology and the innovation in UAS-based atmospheric research is impressive.  Some of the tools deployed during LAPSE-RATE in 2018 have already been significantly improved upon.

BAMS: What are some examples of this more recent UAS improvement?
GdB: Everything continues to get smaller and lighter.  Aircraft have become even more reliable, and instrumentation has continued to be scrutinized to improve data quality.  Battery technology has also continued to improve, allowing for longer flight times and more complex missions.

Yet, we have so much more to do with respect to integrating our measurements into mainstream atmospheric research.

BAMS: What are some challenges to doing more to integrate UAS into research?
GdB: Primarily, our UAV research community is working to demonstrate the reliability and accuracy of our measurements and platforms.  This is critical to having them accepted in the community.  There are also some other challenges associated with airspace access and development of infrastructure to interface these observations in both mainstream research and operations.

BAMS: It seems like there’s been success in this mainstreamed usage of UAS.
GdB: Campaigns like LAPSE-RATE have paved the way for UAS to be more thoroughly included in larger field campaigns.  A nice example is the recent ATOMIC (Atlantic Tradewind Ocean–Atmosphere Mesoscale Interaction Campaign) and EUREC4A (Elucidating the role of clouds-circulation coupling in climate) field campaigns, where three different UAS teams were involved and UAS were operated alongside manned research aircraft and in support of a much larger effort.

BAMS: How did you become interested in unmanned aviation?
GdB: In 2011, I worked with a small group on a review article about our knowledge of mixed-phase clouds in Arctic environments.  We took a good look at critical observational deficiencies, and I began to realize that many of the gaps involved a lack of in situ information, quantities that I thought could be measured by small platforms. This sent me down the road of investigating whether UAS could offer the necessary insight.

Saildrone's Science at the Air–Sea Interface

The Saildrone vehicle returning to San Francisco on 11 Jun 2018. The wind anemometer is visible at the top of the wing and solar panels are on both the wing and the vehicle hull. Image credit: Saildrone/Gentemann.
The Saildrone vehicle returning to San Francisco on June 11, 2018. The wind anemometer is visible at the top of the wing and solar panels are on both the wing and the vehicle hull. Image credit: Saildrone/Gentemann.

 
You’ve heard of drones in the air, but how about on the ocean’s surface? Enter Saildrone: A new wind and solar powered ocean-observing platform that carries a sophisticated suite of scientific sensors to observe air–sea fluxes. Looking like a large windsurfer without the surfer, the sailing drone glides autonomously at 2–8 kts. along the surface of uninhabited oceans on missions as long as 12 months, sampling key variables in the marine environment.
In a recent paper published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, author Chelle Gentemann and her colleagues explain that from April 11 to June 11, 2018, Saildrone cruised on a 60-day round trip from San Francisco down the coast to Mexico’s Guadelupe Island to establish the accuracy of its new measurements. These were made to validate air–sea fluxes, sea surface temperatures, and wind vectors derived by satellites. The automated surface vehicle also studied upwelling dynamics, river plumes, and the air–sea interactions of both frontal and diurnal warming regions on this deployment—meaning Saildrone’s versatile array of instruments got a workout not only above surface but just below it as well, in the water along the hull.

BAMS asked a few questions of the authors to gain insight into their research as well as their backgrounds. A sampling of answers are below:

Chelle Gentemann
Chelle Gentemann

BAMS: What would you like readers to learn from your article?

Chelle Gentemann, Farallon Institute: New measurement approaches are always being developed, allowing for new approaches to science. Understanding a dataset’s characteristics and uncertainties is important to have confidence in derived results.
BAMS: How did you become interested in working with Saildrone?
Gentemann: The ocean is a challenging environment to work in: it can be beautiful but dangerous, and gathering ship observations can require long absences from your family.  I learned about Saildrones in 2016 and wanted to see how an autonomous vehicle might be able to gather data at the air–sea interface and adapt sampling to changing conditions.  There are some questions that are hard to get at from existing remote sensing and in situ datasets; I thought that if these vehicles are able to collect high-quality data, they could be useful for science.
BAMS: How have you followed up on this experiment? 
Gentemann: We sent two more [Saildrones] to the Arctic last Summer (2019) and are planning for two more in 2021.  There are few in situ observations in the Arctic Ocean because of the seasonal ice cover, so sending Saildrones up there for the summer has allowed us to sample temperature and salinity fronts during a record heat wave.
Sebastien de Halleux, Saildrone, Inc.: I believe we are on the cusp of a new golden age in oceanography, as a wave of new enabling technologies is making planetary-scale in situ observations technically and economically feasible. The fact that Saildrones are zero-emission is a big bonus as we try to reduce our carbon footprint. I am excited to engage further with the science community to explore new ways of using this technology and developing tools to further the value of the data collected for the benefit of humanity.
BAMS: What got you initially interested in oceanography?
de Halleux: Having had the opportunity to sail across the Pacific several times, I developed a strong interest in learning more about the 70% of the planet covered by water—only to realize that the challenge of collecting data is formidable over such a vast domain. Being exposed to  the amazing power of satellites to produce large-scale remote sensing datasets was only tempered by the realization of their challenges with fine features, land proximity, and of course the need to connect them to subsurface phenomena. This is how we began to explore the intersection of science, robotics, and big data with the goal to help enable new insights. Yet we are only at the beginning of an amazing journey.
BAMS: What surprises/surprised you the most about Saildrone’s capabilities?
Peter Minnett, Univ. of Miami, Florida: The ability to reprogram the vehicles in real time to focus on sampling and resampling interesting surface features. The quality of the measurements is impressive.
Saildrones are currently deployed around the world. In June 2019 , there were three circumnavigating Antarctica, six in the U.S. Arctic, seven surveying fish stock off the U.S. West Coast and two in Norway, four surveying the tropical Pacific, and one conducting a multibeam bathymetry survey in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2020, Saildrone, Inc. has deployed fleets in Europe, the Arctic, the tropical Pacific, along the West Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and Antarctica. NOAA and NASA-funded Saildrone data are distributed openly and publicly.

Saildrone’s Science at the Air–Sea Interface

The Saildrone vehicle returning to San Francisco on 11 Jun 2018. The wind anemometer is visible at the top of the wing and solar panels are on both the wing and the vehicle hull. Image credit: Saildrone/Gentemann.
The Saildrone vehicle returning to San Francisco on June 11, 2018. The wind anemometer is visible at the top of the wing and solar panels are on both the wing and the vehicle hull. Image credit: Saildrone/Gentemann.

 

You’ve heard of drones in the air, but how about on the ocean’s surface? Enter Saildrone: A new wind and solar powered ocean-observing platform that carries a sophisticated suite of scientific sensors to observe air–sea fluxes. Looking like a large windsurfer without the surfer, the sailing drone glides autonomously at 2–8 kts. along the surface of uninhabited oceans on missions as long as 12 months, sampling key variables in the marine environment.

In a recent paper published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, author Chelle Gentemann and her colleagues explain that from April 11 to June 11, 2018, Saildrone cruised on a 60-day round trip from San Francisco down the coast to Mexico’s Guadelupe Island to establish the accuracy of its new measurements. These were made to validate air–sea fluxes, sea surface temperatures, and wind vectors derived by satellites. The automated surface vehicle also studied upwelling dynamics, river plumes, and the air–sea interactions of both frontal and diurnal warming regions on this deployment—meaning Saildrone’s versatile array of instruments got a workout not only above surface but just below it as well, in the water along the hull.

BAMS asked a few questions of the authors to gain insight into their research as well as their backgrounds. A sampling of answers are below:

Chelle Gentemann
Chelle Gentemann

BAMS: What would you like readers to learn from your article?

Chelle Gentemann, Farallon Institute: New measurement approaches are always being developed, allowing for new approaches to science. Understanding a dataset’s characteristics and uncertainties is important to have confidence in derived results.

BAMS: How did you become interested in working with Saildrone?

Gentemann: The ocean is a challenging environment to work in: it can be beautiful but dangerous, and gathering ship observations can require long absences from your family.  I learned about Saildrones in 2016 and wanted to see how an autonomous vehicle might be able to gather data at the air–sea interface and adapt sampling to changing conditions.  There are some questions that are hard to get at from existing remote sensing and in situ datasets; I thought that if these vehicles are able to collect high-quality data, they could be useful for science.

BAMS: How have you followed up on this experiment? 

Gentemann: We sent two more [Saildrones] to the Arctic last Summer (2019) and are planning for two more in 2021.  There are few in situ observations in the Arctic Ocean because of the seasonal ice cover, so sending Saildrones up there for the summer has allowed us to sample temperature and salinity fronts during a record heat wave.

Sebastien de Halleux, Saildrone, Inc.: I believe we are on the cusp of a new golden age in oceanography, as a wave of new enabling technologies is making planetary-scale in situ observations technically and economically feasible. The fact that Saildrones are zero-emission is a big bonus as we try to reduce our carbon footprint. I am excited to engage further with the science community to explore new ways of using this technology and developing tools to further the value of the data collected for the benefit of humanity.

BAMS: What got you initially interested in oceanography?

de Halleux: Having had the opportunity to sail across the Pacific several times, I developed a strong interest in learning more about the 70% of the planet covered by water—only to realize that the challenge of collecting data is formidable over such a vast domain. Being exposed to  the amazing power of satellites to produce large-scale remote sensing datasets was only tempered by the realization of their challenges with fine features, land proximity, and of course the need to connect them to subsurface phenomena. This is how we began to explore the intersection of science, robotics, and big data with the goal to help enable new insights. Yet we are only at the beginning of an amazing journey.

BAMS: What surprises/surprised you the most about Saildrone’s capabilities?

Peter Minnett, Univ. of Miami, Florida: The ability to reprogram the vehicles in real time to focus on sampling and resampling interesting surface features. The quality of the measurements is impressive.

Saildrones are currently deployed around the world. In June 2019 , there were three circumnavigating Antarctica, six in the U.S. Arctic, seven surveying fish stock off the U.S. West Coast and two in Norway, four surveying the tropical Pacific, and one conducting a multibeam bathymetry survey in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2020, Saildrone, Inc. has deployed fleets in Europe, the Arctic, the tropical Pacific, along the West Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and Antarctica. NOAA and NASA-funded Saildrone data are distributed openly and publicly.

With Climate Change, the Interior West's Ski Season is on a Downhill Run

The Thanksgiving holiday weekend has long been heralded as the start of the Western United States winter ski season. But new research using regional climate models sees Thanksgiving skiing going cold turkey.
As climate change ramps up into the mid twenty-first century, we can expect shorter ski seasons from the Southwest to the northern Rockies. This includes projections for less snow as well as poorer conditions for artificial snowmaking in the mountain states of the interior West. These are the findings from new research presented by Christian Lackner (Univ. of Wyoming and Johannes Gutenberg-Univ. of Mainz) this week at the American Meteorological Society’s 19th Conference on Mountain Meteorology. Despite being entirely on-line, the meeting achieved record attendance.

Large decreases in the percentage of years with at least snow days during the Thanksgiving period, Nov. 22 - Dec. 1.
Large decreases in the percentage of years with at least 8 snow days at Rocky Mountain ski resorts during the Thanksgiving period, Nov. 22 – Dec. 1.

 
Lackner’s presentation, co-authored with Bart Geerts and Yonggang Wang, showed that the downturn in the ski season is projected to impact lower-elevation ski areas such as those in Arizona and New Mexico the most. Ski seasons by 2050 will start about two weeks later and end two-to-three weeks earlier than in the baseline period of 1981-2010. For many resorts that means the season length is seen to fall below the 100-day threshold long viewed as the make-it-or-break point for staying viable in the ski industry.
Higher-elevation ski resorts in Colorado, Utah, and western Wyoming, as well as higher latitude ski areas in Montana and Idaho, will fair better, although they’ll see their seasons shrink by 10-20 days. That will drop them below 120 days—the high-elevation, high-latitude resorts’ economic threshold—by 2050.
Lackner et al.’s study looked at climate change impacts at 71 ski resorts in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming from November 15-April 15, the key cold-season months.
The good news is the Christmas holiday week still looks good for shooshing down Western slopes, despite the climate projections.
Large decreases in the percentage of years with at least snow days during the Thanksgiving period, Nov. 22 – Dec. 1
Almost no change in the percentage of years with at least 8 snow days at Rocky Mountain ski resorts during the Christmas period, Dec. 23 – Jan. 1.