technology

Bill Hooke and Life on the Real World

A new NOAA oral history archive spotlights lessons from a life in science and policy

William H. “Bill” Hooke, PhD (AMS senior policy fellow emeritus), has both led and thought a great deal about developments in weather, water, climate (WWC) and society at large over more than half a century. He worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and antecedent agencies from 1967 to 2000, including tenures as Deputy Chief Scientist and Acting Chief Scientist of NOAA, as well as Senior Scientist in the Office of the Secretary of Commerce. An honorary AMS member, he has served as a senior AMS policy fellow, associate executive director, and director of the AMS Policy Program. He founded the AMS Summer Policy Colloquium, which he directed for 21 years. 

Over the course of many jobs, administrations, and scientific revolutions, Hooke developed a reputation for exceptional leadership and collaboration, for managing crucial initiatives in natural disaster reduction and national policy, and for deep and multidisciplinary insights across scientific and social fields. He has influenced the careers and lives of many people in the WWC enterprise, and won the AMS’s Joanne Simpson Mentorship Award (now the Robert H. and Joanne Simpson Mentorship Award) in 2014. Now, an oral history video series from NOAA captures some thoughts and observations from his long and vibrant career.

In a series of 30 candid conversations, Hooke talks to AMS Policy Colloquium alumna Mona Behl about his life in a family of scientists; his contributions to disaster reduction, the evolution of the WWC Enterprise, and technological innovations; and what it means to be a leader, a scientist, and a person of faith.

Watch the first video in the series

Here are a few excerpts from their rich conversations.

On luck:

“My dad was born in Chattanooga … in 1918. … The doctor told my grandmother afterwards, he said, “Mrs. Hooke, that’s the biggest baby I ever delivered whose mother lived.” And in fact [maybe] the reason I’m alive today, is that while the doctor was getting ready to tell my grandfather that he had to choose between my grandmother and my dad, my grandfather was nervously walking around outside the hospital, around the block. By the time he came back in for that consultation, my dad had been born. I’ve reflected a lot … that all of us represent just this accident of history. … We’re all lucky to be here.” 

On his childhood and his family’s academic legacy:

“When [my grandfather, who received his PhD from the Sorbonne] came back to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he and my grandmother used to have a salon. … People would smoke cigars, and faculty members from the university would come over, and there was just this great conversation and a lot of laughter and so on. As a kid, every time I visited, we’d get to see this scene and participate in it and actually come to like the smell of cigar smoke, although I never smoked. … It was just quite a scene. A spectacular thing to see growing up.”

“[My father, Robert Hooke,] was very interested in problems that were tough to solve. … He thought most of the interesting problems in the world didn’t have solutions. He used to say things like, “Linear problems are all the same. Nonlinear problems are always different.” … The one patent he ever got was for something called Direct Search, which was looking for optima when there was no formula for them.”

“[Getting a PhD in geophysical sciences] was a lack of imagination. Here I was in this tribe of scientists, and it never occurred to me to be anything else. … I woke up with a PhD and thought, ‘Now what?’”

On his early career:

“I never got the job I applied for, and I never turned down one that was offered. … So, I took this job at the Ionospheric Telecommunications Laboratory [in 1967]. … [But when Nixon created NOAA, my boss transferred me to] the Wave Propagation Lab. That was cutting-edge. … [Gordon Little, who ran the lab,] realized that remote sensing was the key to learning about … the atmosphere, the oceans, the solid Earth. … All of these technologies – acoustic sounding, weather radar, Doppler lidar, other techniques, radiometry – were in their infancy, and nothing worked. So, when things started to work, they’d start seeing atmospheric phenomena that nobody had ever seen before … If you had half a brain, you could wander around and you were seeing things that nobody had seen and applying simple ideas to them, and they worked.”

On learning how to manage and lead:

“[Gordon Little] didn’t care much about the Geoacoustics group [at the Wave Propagation Lab] so he put me in charge.] … Well, in our group, we always had a brown bag lunch every day. … The conversation would usually move on, oblivious to whatever I was trying to say. But that lunch [after Little announced the change] … I said something [and] there was this hush that fell over the group. Wow. I realized, from now on, I’m walking in a hall of mirrors. People are only going to show me the side that they think I’m going to like. It was a very important moment for me … One of the things that you learn is, the higher you go … you have to get gentler and gentler and gentler if you really want people to open up to you and for the group to be vibrant the way it should be.”

“If [a leader’s dream is] a small dream, if it’s like, “Hey, we’re going to do this, and a small number of us will get rich.” … It can’t be a shabby dream. People are put off by that. The second thing is it’s got to be a shared dream. … If you don’t share your ideas, they get smaller and smaller and less relevant and really kind of a grotesque version of what they were meant to be. But if you share your ideas, then other people riff on them, and … it actually generates ideas. … People want to be around you. You’re not a sink for thought; you’re a source of it.”

On advice for early career scientists:

“If you’re an early career scientist, you live in a world that encourages you to be anxious and stressed and to feel insecure, maybe even fearful. … [But] the world is hungry for talent. We just have unlimited needs for brain power right now. Brain power is in very short supply, and if you have … something to offer, people are standing in line to harness it and to work with you. It’s just a message that young people need to hear, and they can’t hear it enough.”

On legacy and achievements:

“I have a very dim view of my achievements. … I had the very good fortune to work with just brilliant people. … There’s so much you can do to stifle creativity and innovation, but trying to [instead] stay out of the way of people who are in that business; that means working up the ladder to make that [innovative work] possible for those people. … You need to just be saying thank you and encouraging people day in and day out, hour in and hour out, and you add it up after forty, fifty years, and it has an accumulated effect.”

“I’ve worked with a lot of people who made great contributions to improving weather and climate warnings, but I probably had nothing to do with that myself. … I led efforts where great progress was made. … In particular, a lot of work in small-scale weather, short-term weather, aviation weather, things of that sort. Those were, again, things [that] groups I managed worked on. Made a lot of progress on those things, but it was wonderfully sharp people who did it, and I just kind of went along.”

On civil service:

“The work we’re engaged in is a high calling. I got interested in science because I was good at it, and it was fun. It became serious business, particularly after I got into the hazards work, starting with that Academy panel I was on in 1986, the one that set up the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. … The people were just high-minded people. I saw a lot to admire in the people I was involved with.”

“One piece of advice that I’d give every NOAA employee. … You should take a lot of satisfaction from your role as a civil servant in NOAA and what you’re contributing to society. It’s very easy to see all the things and all the dysfunction and the budget problems … [and] interagency squabbles and the rest of it. … You should just be strong about the value of what you’re doing.”

On the philosophy of science, AI, and innovation:

“Scientists, we might be unique in our difficulty at understanding that we’re not pure. [laughter] We struggle so much to work on the objective part and the experiments in the lab … that we forget that science is a human construct … You have to think a lot more about the human purposes and the human goals and so on. … With artificial intelligence[,] I think we’re all seeing in a vague sort of way, “Wow, this has so much potential for both good and evil.” I don’t think there’s been a moment since the construction of nuclear weapons that people have been [so] apprehensive about the steps we’re now taking. These are steps that have nothing to do with science as we understand it; it has everything to do with humanity. We don’t trust ourselves … to control this science for the benefit and use of life versus those inferior things – fame and power, money and so on – that [Francis] Bacon spoke of.”

“When it comes to science that matters … you want multiple paths to it. You want redundancy. One of the things I fought all my career was this bureaucratic tendency to try to reduce duplication in science, and overlap, and I kept thinking, ‘No. On innovation, you want to be doing as much as you can afford.’”

“AI will probably exacerbate this [current breakdown of social trust] to some extent. … I think we’re in for … a Wild West kind of frontier-like period [in which] wonderful things and horrible things are going to happen at a higher rate of speed than usual. Human beings are going to have a period of trying to deal with that. I think that’s why, to me, it’s getting more and more important that we learn how to be forgiving.”

“Tom [Durham] had written just a stellar disaster preparedness strategy for the State of Tennessee. … Tom had a lot of expertise, and he brought it to bear on this very thoughtful strategy and worked with people to develop it and get started implementing different aspects of it. … That would be the kind of thing that more people could do if aided by artificial intelligence.”

“When I was still living out of Boulder … we had some huge thunderstorms moving rapidly through the Denver area. There was a small echo up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that didn’t seem worth paying much attention to. Well, it stayed put for six hours … [and] one or two people drowned when the flooding occurred. That’s the kind of thing that an artificial intelligence system might be better at capturing, that kind of alertness and just looking for a detail … that other people might miss. So, I think AI really changes the possibilities for good if we have good intentions and look for ways to harness it. … It’s going to be fun to sort it out. But I think it really changes things.”

On confronting environmental change:

“To get out of the pickle that we’re in with regard to climate change and broader environmental issues … we have to be good as much as we have to understand the science of things. … We’ve got eight billion people playing some version of [game theory] – lack of trust, lack of forgiveness, lack of tolerance. [And] there’s a lot of complacency about all the aggression that we’re visiting on others. … I’ve been very interested in the whole rise of the diversity, equity, inclusion kind [of thing] because it seems to me it’s getting at this … at the level that it really needs to get at it.”

“We are each responsible for fixing it, whatever the problem is. That doesn’t mean changing history; you can’t do that. It is what it is. It means a path forward. … We have to work on the problem all of us together, and that’s eight billion of us. Everybody has something to offer. Everybody has something to regret. It’s our job right now. It’s the 21st-century task. … Suppose you decide that your task in life is to be responsible for the renewal of the world versus your task in life is to document the collapse of the world. Choosing the second one over the first is a poor trade [laughter] in so many ways.”

On his work in natural disaster reduction/resilience:

“The Subcommittee for Natural Disaster Reduction was under this Committee on Environment and Natural Resources. … We felt that our goal was really to try to build US resilience. … It’s really people who were disadvantaged, to begin with, who are hurt most by natural disasters when they occur … I think I told you I’ve always been interested in political science … But it just got to be a much richer thing after that. … I went from feeling excited about what I was doing because it was just so interesting, to feeling each day that I could help make the world a better place.”

“A lot of interest in the government [at the time was on climate change] – this was the Clinton Administration … If you were working on natural hazards, you were struck by [the sense] that the planet really did much of its business through extreme events. These averages that were of so much concern were the averages of extremes of heat and cold, extremes of precipitation and drought. … [Today] we see people putting those two things together.”

“The President looks at a certain number of disaster declarations over the year … But for each of the local officials, it’s life-changing. … the incentives for thinking ahead locally for events like this are just so much stronger than the incentives for a President of the United States to look at these matters. I continue to feel that the best thing to do would be [to] give people at the local level more tools for dealing with this.”

On the AMS Policy Program and Policy Colloquium:

“I was minding my own business. In the year 2000, I was thinking I had about ten or fifteen more years to go in government … I got invited downtown to the DC offices of the American Meteorological Society by Ron McPherson, who was the executive director at the time, and Dick Greenfield, who was standing up this new thing called the AMS Policy Program. … They asked me, ‘Well, when could you start?’ And I said, ‘Two weeks.’ [laughter]”

“I had basically a year to kind of get [the AMS Summer Policy Colloquium] ready and got it started in [2001]. … One of the things I found out pretty early was all the congressional staffers, policy officials in the government, and so on – they were looking for something like this, too, and they were skeptical that maybe the AMS could deliver … But after they came the first time and saw how bright the Colloquium participants were … the speakers just thought, “What a great group. What a great format. All this time for discussion” and so on. Sometimes, they’d come early and hear their colleagues’ lectures or stay late for another colleague’s lecture. That added kind of to the vibe. They’d ask questions as part of the discussion. It was, thanks to the participants, really lively.”

“The Colloquium was a way of showing people that the real world wasn’t operating on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations, or the rules of radiative transfer, or plasma physics, or whatever – it was working on heuristics, conjecture, power and courage, and trust and faith, and a whole bunch of things on which all those equations are silent. … [As scientists,] we’re not used to being as disciplined in our approach to the policy process as we are to science. This was an effort to overcome that. … I really think the whole thing was a tribute to, again, just the passion that the science leadership of this country, government agencies, and staffers on the Hill had for it and the quality of the participants that were coming in … The people made it all work. … It was just a privilege to be part of it for two decades and to just watch this sweep of intellect, energy, and talent go by.”

On retiring (or not): 

“My uncle “retired” in his fifties and moved back to North Carolina. But at the age of eighty-something, he was still getting research grants from DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] to do these non-fusion applications of plasmas. He was part owner of a drugstore on the main street in North Carolina. … He would do his physics there in the diner and kind of go over to the university … He was the inspiration to me. I kind of felt as long as my uncle was still working, who was thirteen years older than I was, I ought to be working, too. Only I did it in a more formal way and I’m just tremendously happy I did. These last twenty years or so of my career were the best by far.”

View the full video series and transcripts at the NOAA Voices Project

View a biography of Bill Hooke

Bill Hooke is the author of the book Living on the Real World: How Thinking and Acting Like Meteorologists Will Help Save the Planet. He runs the Living on the Real World blog, where you can read his continuing contributions about science, society, and this moment on the planet Earth.

About the NOAA Heritage Oral Histories Project

NOAA Heritage Oral History Project aims to document the history and legacy of NOAA through compelling interviews with its leaders. These firsthand accounts provide an invaluable resource that preserves NOAA’s significant contributions to environmental research and management, fostering a deeper understanding of NOAA’s vital role in shaping our understanding of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. Learn more here.

Website Tracks Public Understanding of Tornadoes

Imagine you live in a part of the country where few people have experienced tornadoes. It would make sense that your neighbors wouldn’t know the difference between a tornado watch or warning, or know how to seek safety.

A new, openly available online tool shows exactly that, by combining societal databases with survey results about people’s understanding of weather information. But there are some surprising wrinkles in the data. For example, the database drills down to county-level information and finds “noteworthy differences” within regions of similar tornado climatology.

How is it that Norman, Oklahoma, residents score higher in what people think they know of severe weather information than those in Fort Worth, Texas? And why is there a similar gap between what people actually do know, as tested in Peachtree City, Georgia, versus Birmingham, Alabama?

“Differences like this create important opportunities for research and learning within the weather enterprise,” say Joseph T. Ripberger and colleagues, who describe the weather demographics tool in a recently published Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society article. “The online tool—the Severe Weather and Society Dashboard (WxDash)—is meant to provide this opportunity.”

For example, in one key set of metrics, the WxDash website looks at survey data on how well people receive and pay attention to tornado warnings (reception), how well they understand that information (both “subjective” comprehension—what people think they know—and “objective” comprehension—what they actually know), and response to tornado warnings.

From the BAMS article, a figure showing knowledge and response to average person percentile (APP) estimates of tornado warning reception, subjective comprehension, objective comprehension, and response by county warning area (CWA). The inset plots indicate the frequency distribution of APP estimates across CWAs. These estimates compare the average percentile of all adults who live in a CWA to the distribution of all adults across the country. For example, an APP estimate of 62 indicates that, on average, adults in that CWA score higher than 62% of adults nationally. The range of APP scores is wide. CWAs range from 38 to 61 on the reception scale, 32 to 69 on the subjective comprehension scale, and 37 to 60 on the objective comprehension scale. Response scores vary less. Not surprisingly, all categories broadly reflect the higher frequency of tornadoes in middle and southeastern CWAs.
From the BAMS article, a figure showing knowledge and response to average person percentile (APP) estimates of tornado warning reception, subjective comprehension, objective comprehension, and response by county warning area (CWA). The inset plots indicate the frequency distribution of APP estimates across CWAs. These estimates compare the average percentile of all adults who live in a CWA to the distribution of all adults across the country. For example, an APP estimate of 62 indicates that, on average, adults in that CWA score higher than 62% of adults nationally. The range of APP scores is wide. CWAs range from 38 to 61 on the reception scale, 32 to 69 on the subjective comprehension scale, and 37 to 60 on the objective comprehension scale. Response scores vary less. Not surprisingly, all categories broadly reflect the higher frequency of tornadoes in middle and southeastern CWAs.

 

WxDash combines U.S. Census data with an annual Severe Weather and Society Survey (Wx Survey) by the University of Oklahoma Center for Risk and Crisis Management. The database then “downscales” the broader scale information to the local level, in a demographic equivalent to the way large scale climate models downscale to useful information on regional scales.

The site also provides information on public trust in weather information sources, perceptions about the efficacy of protective action, vulnerability to beliefs about a variety of tornado myths, and other weather-related factors that can then be studied in light of regional and demographic factors.

Some of the key findings seen in the database:

  • Men and women demonstrate roughly comparable levels of reception, objective comprehension, and response, but men have more confidence in subjective warning comprehension than women.
  • Tornado climatology has a relatively strong effect on tornado warning reception and comprehension, but little effect on warning response.
  • The findings suggest that geography, and the community differences that overlap with geographic boundaries, likely exert more direct influence on warning reception and comprehension than on response.

Even the relatively expected relation of severe weather climatology to severe weather understanding is problematic, Ripberger and colleagues write.

Tornadoes are possible almost everywhere in the US and people who live on the coasts can move—both temporarily and permanently— throughout the country. These factors prompt some concern about the low levels of reception and comprehension in some communities, especially those in the west.

In addition to interacting with these data, you can download one of the calculated databases for community-scale information, the raw survey data, and the code necessary to reproduce the calculations.

The idea is social scientists can dig in and figure out why what we know about weather isn’t nearly as closely correlated with what we experience as we might think. The hope is an improvement in public education and risk communication strategies related to severe weather.

Observations without Fear: NOAA’s Drones for Hurricane Hunting

Nowhere is it more dangerous to fly in a hurricane than right near the roiling surface of the ocean. These days, hurricane hunting aircraft wisely steer clear of this boundary layer, but as a result observations at the bottom of the atmosphere where we experience storms are scarce. Enter the one kind of plane that’s fearless about filling this observation gap: the drone.

NOAA’s hurricane hunter aircraft in recent storms has been experimenting with launching small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) into raging storms–and these devices show promise for informing advisories as well as improving numerical modeling.

Lead author Joe Cione of NOAA's hurricane research division holds a Coyote sUAS. The drones are being launched into hurricanes from the P-3 hurricane hunter aircraft in the background.
Lead author of a new paper in BAMS, Joe Cione of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, holds a Coyote sUAS. The drones are being launched into hurricanes from the WP-3D Orion hurricane hunter aircraft in the background.

 

The observations were made by a new type of sUAS, described in a recently published paper in BAMS, called the Coyote that flew below 1 km in hurricanes. Sampling winds, temperature, and humidity in this so-called planetary boundary layer (PBL), the expendable Coyotes flew as low as 136 m in wind speeds as high as 87 m s-1 (196 mph) and for as long as 40 minutes before crashing (as intended) into the ocean.

In the BAMS article, Joe Cione at al. describe the value of and uses for the low-level hurricane observations:

Such high-resolution measurements of winds and thermodynamic properties in strong hurricanes are rare below 2-km altitude and can provide insight into processes that influence hurricane intensity and intensity change. For example, these observations—collected in real time—can be used to quantify air-sea fluxes of latent and sensible heat, and momentum, which have uncertain values but are a key to hurricane maximum intensity and intensification rate.

Highs-lows

Coyote was first deployed successfully in Hurricane Edouard (2014) from NOAA’s WP-3 Orion hurricane hunter aircraft. Recent Coyote sUAS deployments in Hurricanes Maria (2017) and Michael (2018) include the first direct measurements of turbulence properties at low levels (below 150 m) in a hurricane eyewall. In some instances the data, relayed in near real-time, were noted in National Hurricane Center advisories.

Turbulence processes in the PBL are also important for hurricane structure and intensification. Data collected by the Coyote can be used to evaluate hurricane forecasting tools, such as NOAA’s Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) system. sUAS platforms offer a unique opportunity to collect additional measurements within hurricanes that are needed to improve physical PBL parameterization.

Coyote launch sequence: (a) Release in a sonobuoy canister from a NOAA P-3. (b) A parachute slows descent. (c) The canister falls away and the Coyote wings and stabilizers deploy. The main wings and vertical stabilizers have no control surfaces; rather, elevons (i.e., combined elevator and aileron) are on the rear wings, controlled by the GPS-guided Piccolo autopilot system with internal accelerometers and gyros. (d) After the Coyote is in an operational configuration, the parachute releases. (e) The Coyote levels out after starting the electric pusher motor, which leaves minimally disturbed air for sampling at the nose. The cruising airspeed is 28 m s-1. (f) The Coyote attains level flight and begins operations. When deployed, the Coyote’s wingspan is 1.5 m and its length is 0.9 m. The 6-kg sUAS can carry up to 1.8 kg. Images were captured from a video courtesy of Raytheon Corporation.
Coyote launch sequence: (a) Release in a sonobuoy canister from a NOAA P-3. (b) A parachute slows descent. (c) The canister falls away and the Coyote wings and stabilizers deploy. The main wings and vertical stabilizers have no control surfaces; rather, elevons (i.e., combined elevator and aileron) are on the rear wings, controlled by the GPS-guided Piccolo autopilot system with internal accelerometers and gyros. (d) After the Coyote is in an operational configuration, the parachute releases. (e) The Coyote levels out after starting the electric pusher motor, which leaves minimally disturbed air for sampling at the nose. The cruising airspeed is 28 m s-1. (f) The Coyote attains level flight and begins operations. When deployed, the Coyote’s wingspan is 1.5 m and its length is 0.9 m. The 6-kg sUAS can carry up to 1.8 kg.
Images were captured from a video courtesy of Raytheon Corporation.

 

The authors write that during some flights instrument challenges occurred. For example:

thermodynamic data were unusable for roughly half of the missions. Because the aircraft are not recovered following each flight, the causes of these issues are unknown. New, improved instrument packages will include a multi-hole turbulence probe, improved thermodynamic and infrared sensors, and a laser or radar altimeter system to provide information on ocean waves and to more accurately measure the aircraft altitude.

Future uses of the sUAS could include targeting hurricane regions for observations where direct measurements are rare and models produce large uncertainty. Meanwhile, the article concludes, efforts are underway to increase sUAS payload capacity, battery life, and transmission range so that the NOAA P-3 need not loiter nearby.

Observations without Fear: NOAA's Drones for Hurricane Hunting

Nowhere is it more dangerous to fly in a hurricane than right near the roiling surface of the ocean. These days, hurricane hunting aircraft wisely steer clear of this boundary layer, but as a result observations at the bottom of the atmosphere where we experience storms are scarce. Enter the one kind of plane that’s fearless about filling this observation gap: the drone.
NOAA’s hurricane hunter aircraft in recent storms has been experimenting with launching small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) into raging storms–and these devices show promise for informing advisories as well as improving numerical modeling.

Lead author Joe Cione of NOAA's hurricane research division holds a Coyote sUAS. The drones are being launched into hurricanes from the P-3 hurricane hunter aircraft in the background.
Lead author of a new paper in BAMS, Joe Cione of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, holds a Coyote sUAS. The drones are being launched into hurricanes from the WP-3D Orion hurricane hunter aircraft in the background.

 
The observations were made by a new type of sUAS, described in a recently published paper in BAMS, called the Coyote that flew below 1 km in hurricanes. Sampling winds, temperature, and humidity in this so-called planetary boundary layer (PBL), the expendable Coyotes flew as low as 136 m in wind speeds as high as 87 m s-1 (196 mph) and for as long as 40 minutes before crashing (as intended) into the ocean.
In the BAMS article, Joe Cione at al. describe the value of and uses for the low-level hurricane observations:

Such high-resolution measurements of winds and thermodynamic properties in strong hurricanes are rare below 2-km altitude and can provide insight into processes that influence hurricane intensity and intensity change. For example, these observations—collected in real time—can be used to quantify air-sea fluxes of latent and sensible heat, and momentum, which have uncertain values but are a key to hurricane maximum intensity and intensification rate.

Highs-lows
Coyote was first deployed successfully in Hurricane Edouard (2014) from NOAA’s WP-3 Orion hurricane hunter aircraft. Recent Coyote sUAS deployments in Hurricanes Maria (2017) and Michael (2018) include the first direct measurements of turbulence properties at low levels (below 150 m) in a hurricane eyewall. In some instances the data, relayed in near real-time, were noted in National Hurricane Center advisories.
Turbulence processes in the PBL are also important for hurricane structure and intensification. Data collected by the Coyote can be used to evaluate hurricane forecasting tools, such as NOAA’s Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) system. sUAS platforms offer a unique opportunity to collect additional measurements within hurricanes that are needed to improve physical PBL parameterization.

Coyote launch sequence: (a) Release in a sonobuoy canister from a NOAA P-3. (b) A parachute slows descent. (c) The canister falls away and the Coyote wings and stabilizers deploy. The main wings and vertical stabilizers have no control surfaces; rather, elevons (i.e., combined elevator and aileron) are on the rear wings, controlled by the GPS-guided Piccolo autopilot system with internal accelerometers and gyros. (d) After the Coyote is in an operational configuration, the parachute releases. (e) The Coyote levels out after starting the electric pusher motor, which leaves minimally disturbed air for sampling at the nose. The cruising airspeed is 28 m s-1. (f) The Coyote attains level flight and begins operations. When deployed, the Coyote’s wingspan is 1.5 m and its length is 0.9 m. The 6-kg sUAS can carry up to 1.8 kg. Images were captured from a video courtesy of Raytheon Corporation.
Coyote launch sequence: (a) Release in a sonobuoy canister from a NOAA P-3. (b) A parachute slows descent. (c) The canister falls away and the Coyote wings and stabilizers deploy. The main wings and vertical stabilizers have no control surfaces; rather, elevons (i.e., combined elevator and aileron) are on the rear wings, controlled by the GPS-guided Piccolo autopilot system with internal accelerometers and gyros. (d) After the Coyote is in an operational configuration, the parachute releases. (e) The Coyote levels out after starting the electric pusher motor, which leaves minimally disturbed air for sampling at the nose. The cruising airspeed is 28 m s-1. (f) The Coyote attains level flight and begins operations. When deployed, the Coyote’s wingspan is 1.5 m and its length is 0.9 m. The 6-kg sUAS can carry up to 1.8 kg.
Images were captured from a video courtesy of Raytheon Corporation.

 
The authors write that during some flights instrument challenges occurred. For example:

thermodynamic data were unusable for roughly half of the missions. Because the aircraft are not recovered following each flight, the causes of these issues are unknown. New, improved instrument packages will include a multi-hole turbulence probe, improved thermodynamic and infrared sensors, and a laser or radar altimeter system to provide information on ocean waves and to more accurately measure the aircraft altitude.

Future uses of the sUAS could include targeting hurricane regions for observations where direct measurements are rare and models produce large uncertainty. Meanwhile, the article concludes, efforts are underway to increase sUAS payload capacity, battery life, and transmission range so that the NOAA P-3 need not loiter nearby.

Cruising the Ocean’s Surface Microlayer

Oceans are deep, and they are integral to the climate system. But the exchanges between ocean and atmosphere that preoccupy many scientists are not in the depths but instead in the shallowest of shallow layers.
A lot happens in the topmost millimeter of the ocean, a film of liquid called the “sea-surface microlayer that is, in many ways, a distinct realm. At this scale, exchanges with the atmosphere are more about diffusion, conduction, and viscosity than turbulence. But the layer is small and difficult to observe undisturbed and over sufficient areas. As a result, “it has been widely ignored in the past,” according to a new paper by Mariana Ribas-Ribas and colleagues in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology.
Nonetheless, Ribas-Ribas and her team, based in Germany, looked for a new way to skim across and sample the critical top 100 micrometers (one tenth of a millimeter) of the ocean. This surface microlayer (SML) “plays a central role in a range of global biogeochemical and climate-related processes.” However, Ribas-Ribas et al. add,

The SML often has remained in a distinct research niche, primarily because it was thought that it did not exist in typical oceanic conditions; furthermore, it is challenging to collect representative SML samples under natural conditions.

In their paper (now in early online release), the authors report on their solution to observing is a newly outfitted remote-controlled catamaran. A set of rotating glass discs with holes scoops up water samples. Pictured below are the catamaran and (at left, top) the glass discs mounted between the hulls and (bottom left) the flow-through system.
catamaran
Catamarans are not new to this research, but they were generally towed behind other vessels and subject to wake effects or were specialized. The new Sea Surface Scanner (S3) takes advantage of better remote control and power supply technology and can pack multiple sampling and sensors and controls onto one platform. Tests in the Baltic Sea last year showed the ability of S3 to track responses of organisms in the surface microlayer to ocean fronts, upwelling areas, and rainfall. The biological processes in turn affect critical geochemical processes like exchanges of gases and production of aerosols for the atmosphere.
The technology may be a fresh start for research looking in depth at the shallowest of layers. See the journal article for more details on the S3 and its performance in field tests.
 

The Paths to Observing Are Paved with Innovation

Every journey begins somewhere—sometimes all you need to do is start heading down a path.
blog_logo_final_all_caps_updateThis year AMS Past-President Fed Carr has given our Annual Meeting a destination: a comprehensive consideration of our observing needs. He’s also given us a place to embark on our journey: the Presidential Forum this morning (9 AM, Ballroom 6ABC) in which moderator Vanda Grubišić and her distinguished panel take us on a guided tour of our community’s capabilities and a glimpse of the multidisciplinary realms just beyond our reach.
He’s given us everything but the actual path. That choice is yours.
One option that beckons right from the Forum is the path of innovative platforms and systems that continually expand the ways we observe. It’s a path that travels across land, through air and water. It requires vehicles of all kinds and sizes, and takes your quest through every byway of modeling, theory, services, products, and yes, even observations, in search of our observational needs for the future .
Let’s look at a few of the milestones along the path of alternative observing, if you choose to take it.
Roadways themselves are paths, of course, and the Annual Meeting will showcase the new ways roads are a vital part of observing. On Tuesday (9:15 AM), Jeremy Paul Duensing of Schneider Electric will examine the success of Alberta Transportation’s road weather sensor network. One of the largest intelligent road observing systems in North America, this network features sensors taking 100 readings per second directly on vehicles.
Also on Tuesday, at 9:30 AM, Amanda Anderson of NCAR will review the Wyoming Department of Transportation’s project to collect weather (and other) data from internet-connected vehicles traveling on the state’s portion of I-80, which is prone to all sorts of hazardous conditions from blizzards to wildfires.
Meanwhile, the Oklahoma DOT combines a roadside weather information system with modeling and GIS visualization software to monitor road icing hazards. Benjamin Toms of the University of Oklahoma will discuss this system on Tuesday at 11:15 AM.
Our emerging technologies pathway extends skyward, too. On Wednesday at 9:45 AM, learn more from Djamal Khelif of the University of California, Irvine, about the Controlled Towed Vehicle (CTV), which utilizes improved towed-drone technology to measure spatial and temporal variability of sea surface temperatures, wind, temperature, and humidity, as well as turbulent air-sea fluxes from observations made as low as eight meters.
Range into space as well—you no longer need big, complicated satellites to get there. On Wednesday at 8:45 AM, as William Blackwell of MIT Lincoln Laboratory explores the capabilities of CubeSats in microwave high-resolution atmospheric remote sensing. James Clemmons of The Aerospace Corporation will investigate the potential uses of CubeSats in space weather research on Monday at 4:30 PM .
The path even extends onto and into the water. On Monday at 4 PM, Maricarmen Guerra Paris of the University of Washington will review a project that utilizes ferries equipped with Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers to provide full-depth profiles of currents and distinguish tidal currents adjacent to Puget Sound.
The Annual Meeting is full of such unconventional paths—paths of invention paving the way to observation. It’s time to make the choice and your journey.

How does it feel?

Sunday was supposed to be National Weatherperson’s Day. Did you receive flowers? Did distant relatives call to congratulate you? Did adoring fans of your forecasts voice their support?
Or did the much anticipated holiday pass uneventfully while everybody was preoccupied by lesser events…oh, like the Super Bowl, for instance? Just a case of bad scheduling conflicts, or a conscious attempt to diss you?
If you’re a meteorologist, especially a forecaster, you know how it feels to be underappreciated, to be told you’re not right often enough, that your job is going to be taken by a computer. Not only might you get ignored on the very day meant for you, now you get replaced…by a cube:

No substitute for the real thing.

Hook the device to your smart phone weather app and it adjusts its temperature to match the forecast temperature. So that’s how the weather feels! And how does it feel to be replaced by an aluminum box with a heating element and simple sink inside it?
Bob Dylan stuck the knife in with “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” but he twisted it cruelly with:

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone.

A forecaster’s fate? We think not.
Clearly this invention leaves much to be desired. In addition to being unable to prognosticate without a web app, after a decade or more of good minds trying to develop better ways of conveying uncertainty information in weather forecasts in a few words or pictures, here comes a giant deterministic step backward for communicating tomorrow’s conditions. And of course, although inventor Robb Godshaw of Rochester Institute of Technology insists that the Cryoscope compensates for the difference between conducting heat with aluminum versus air (and also effects of wind chill), it is difficult to imagine equating the touch of the hand to how it feels to move and breathe in the atmosphere. No, this box is not how it feels at all.
In fact, there’s a lesson here. Much as it is difficult to teach any scientific concept to a wide audience, let’s keep in mind that over the years people have developed an uncanny sense of how they feel, personally, when it’s 40, or 50, or 60 degrees Fahrenheit and so on (not to mention wiser folks who’ve learned all this in terms of Celsius). In fact, people probably have a much more acute ability to imagine what a 10 degree rise in temperature will feel like than what carrying a 10 pound increase in load will feel like.
The depth to which the temperature scale is ingrained with exquisite sensitivity into our consciousness is summed up by a viewer’s comment on the Cryoscope promo video page:

The step after that would be to hook up a water hose to it to tell you when it is rainy.

A Taste of (and for) Things to Come

We’re all in New Orleans for science, but for the sake of technology, let’s indulge in a brief philosophy break.
We all know that the present is shaped by the past. Part of the reason is psychology: people easily recall experiences–indeed, emotions–from the past. We can even empathize with other people’s past experiences through their stories.
But philosophers note a peculiar aspect of this ability to make mental time trips. For all of our empathy for the people of the past, our anticipation of the future is much less “real” to us. Often, even the near-certain knowledge of future difficulties, or outright pain, especially if it involves other people (like our progeny!), is not enough to change our current behavior. Our minds don’t travel well to the future.
Of course, economists can tell you something similar about discounting the future–rationality about future benefits is beyond many of us. Even in our own community, climate scientists are finding that it’s a lot easier explaining to most people what’s happened than talking about what might happen. The future is just not as real as the past.
And yet, dreaming about the future is big business: it sells technology, it sells movies, magazines, books, gadgets, and world expos. Futurism is here to stay. In fact, it will be here all week, starting with Monday’s AMS Presidential Forum, which will give us all a chance to talk and dream about what the future will look like for the atmospheric and related sciences. To help start a dialogue that clearly is fascinating but more difficult to do than one might expect, AMS President Jon Malay and his forum co-chair George Komar have given this year’s plenary session a whole new, interactive style. Here they are to explain:

A Theme for the Week–And Beyond

Seat back in the upright position, tray table latched, seatbelt tightened, cell phone off. Time to relax and think about something unrelated to work? Nope. In fact it’s time for proof that AMS President Jon Malay picked a great theme for this year’s Annual Meeting .
If you’re flying to New Orleans on United Airlines (yeah, carbon offsets and all), reach into that seat pocket in front of you and pull out Hemispheres magazine and start flipping pages.
You notice right away that there are the usual references to weather: Airline CEO Jeff Smisek greets readers by expressing special kudos to his team (and that means weather forecasters, too) for “overcoming challenges like snowstorms, hailstorms, hurricanes, and the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan.” There’s also an article on what to wear in New York winters and an eye-catching full-page ad from Embry Riddle University (find them at the Career Fair Sunday and Monday) touting their research into wind and underwater turbines for generating electricity.
In particular, check out the “Next Big Things,” a profile feature on six people making a difference in technology. A bunch are directly related to atmospheric science:

  • Ren Ng, of Lytro Camera, who engineered a way for better, efficient computing and focusing based on a “powerful miniaturized” light sensor—eliminating blur in hand held pocket cameras.
  • Paul Mascarenas of Ford Motor Company, who’s pushing his technology team to develop wi-fi networks amongst nearby cars in traffic so that they can pass along up-to-the-second observations about road conditions and process better driving strategies.
  • Jennifer Pahlka, of the nonprofit Code for America, which pays its fellows a stipend for a year to develop software in the public interest, including, for example, “an app for Bostonians to identify snow-covered manholes that need to be shoveled out [that] was later adapted by Honolulu to make sure its tsunami sirens were in working order.” Another app is a web-based solar energy potential calculator.

Remote sensing, road weather networks, mobile apps–these are all familiar themes this week as we look back, and ahead, to how technology shapes our community’s work. For more on the theme and how personally Jon takes it, watch his video on the Ametsoc YouTube Channel:

Seize the Janus Moment

by Mark S. Brooks, State Climate Office of North Carolina
Ancient Romans worshiped and studied many gods. One such god was Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions. Janus is often depicted with two heads facing opposite directions. They simultaneously peer into the past and the future. He looked over pathways, causing all actions and presiding over all beginnings. Our first month, January, was named after Janus. The symbolic icon of Janus is a great metaphor for the 92nd AMS Annual Meeting’s theme – “how we got here and where we’re going”. Asking that question can lead one to think about the transition from past to future and put into motion a plan to bridge the gap between research and operations. I call that a Janus moment.
Where We’ve Been. Technological innovations enabled quick advancement of weather and climate services. Radar, satellites, numerical weather prediction–each helped revolutionize meteorology and its related disciplines. But to get here, the development and understanding of these technologies had to transition from research to operations. Each had a Janus moment.
Today, as our sensitivities to climate variability become more pronounced and the demand for climate data and forecasts steadily increases, it is time for another major push of innovation – a new Janus moment. I believe that weather and climate services can help society adapt to climate change by helping people mitigate its negative impacts and capitalize on its favorable impacts.
The Role of Innovation in Weather and Climate Services. My favorite category of innovation is the disruptive or discontinuous kind, which addresses existing market needs or creates new markets by enabling customers to solve problems in new ways. Such innovations change the world. We can all think of many examples. In the early days of the Internet, I tried to be disruptively innovative by creating weatherimages.org. Although now woefully outdated, the website changed the way people consumed radar imagery, surface maps, satellite imagery, forecast images, and the like. The site was ranked in the top 3% of the entire Internet in 1999 by Alexa Internet.
A new era of Weather and Climate Services is now possible — a discontinuous, disruptive, and transformative innovation helping weather and climate sensitive clients solve problems in new ways with new data products.
Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Weather and climate services should not be making faster horses.
Steps to Accelerate Innovation in Weather and Climate Services: 3E’s. So how do we answer the demands of society without simply producing faster horses?
1. Be engaged. At the end of many episodes of Star Trek TNG, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard sets course for a new destination and embarks on his next mission with his favorite word:

It was a metaphor for the entire story: to learn, teach, and improve humanity. Engagement, in the context of weather and climate services, is about increasing society’s climate literacy, learning about society’s weather and climate sensitivities, and building a mutually beneficial relationship so that data and science can be made useful. Engagement also includes increased collaboration with one another. Transdisciplinary engagement, that which transfers knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, is also needed to create a new generation of weather and climate services.
2. Be entrepreneurial. This may be peculiar and even uncomfortable to many of us, especially in government. However, Rosabeth Kanter writes in her book, On the Frontiers of Management, “Innovative accomplishments are strikingly entrepreneurial.” Entrepreneurship is about creating something new with value by demonstrating initiative, creative thinking, and by organizing social and economic mechanisms to turn resources and situations into practical outcomes. Saras Sarasvathy crisply summarizes the entrepreneurial way of thinking as

believing in a yet-to-be-made future that can be shaped by human action and realizing that, to the extent that such action can control the future, one need not expend energy trying to predict it. It is much more useful to understand and work with the people who are engaged in the decisions and actions that bring it into existence.

Entrepreneurial characteristics for weather and climate service providers include: communications excellence, focus, transparency, adaptive ability, cohesive partnerships, hands on management, and effective incentives. Entrepreneurial behavior is also tolerant of ambiguity and failure. Blogger Max Pucher, a long-time IBM engineer said as much recently:

Tom Watson had called a VP to his office to discuss a failed development project that lost IBM in the range of $10 million. Expecting to be fired, the VP presented his letter of resignation. Tom Watson Jr. just shook his head: “You are certainly not leaving after we just gave you a $10 million education.” In those days, failure was not a problem at IBM as long as it was turned into a learning experience….During my tenure in IBM’s Havant plant I had learned that I needed to turn my thinking upside down: Not failure is the outlier, but success is! Trying to understand why we couldn’t fully control and predict how a complex system would work led me to learn about evolutionary concepts and complex adaptive systems.

Most weather and climate service providers cannot afford such mistakes, yet the ability to tolerate failure and learn from it is critical because it will happen and enables failure to occur at earlier and cheaper stages of investment.
3. Evaluate progress. Success is a moving target. To make continuous improvements, all weather and climate service providers should employ a balanced suite of metrics and performance tools to evaluate performance. And of course we need to continue efforts to quantify the value of weather and climate services.
I am excited about the 2012 Annual Meeting because several sessions and papers strike me as embracing at least one of the above components. For example, the session about Risk, Vulnerability, and Decision Support for Weather and Climate Hazards on Tuesday (11 a.m., Room 335/336);  a papers by Awdesh Sharma et al. (11:15 a.m., Thursday, Room 242) on NOAA/NESDIS’s reasearch-to operations process, and the Town Hall (Monday, 12:15 p.m., Room 244) following up on themes from the AMS Summer Community Meeting on building a stronger weather and climate enterprise. I look forward to these talks and many others.
Where We’re Going
Back in the heyday of weatherimages.org, I was interviewed by a radio station about my prediction for the future of weather and climate information delivery. My answer: “One day, we will be able to simply push a button and get timely, relevant information for where ever you are and whatever you’re doing.” I stand by this prediction. Timely, relevant, actionable, translated weather and climate information for the farmer in the field, the truck driver on the highway, the airline diverting planes, the insurance company underwriting policies, the engineer constructing a building, the energy company trading watts, the municipality planning for future water demand, and yes, even the newly engaged couple picking a wedding date.
We see a growing, $1+ billion weather services industry. The same level of economic development is possible with climate services. Government, academia, and private sector each have a major role to play in growing this industry and making our world a better place.
That is where we’re going.
Make a Janus Moment
Janus moments are not exclusive to technology, science, or innovation. Janus moments may also be found within each of us. Ancient Romans viewed Janus as a representation of new beginnings and transitions. As you experience this week, think about how you got here and where you’re going. Meet people outside your area of expertise. Sit with someone new at each meal. If you’re following this conference from home, connect with your colleagues who are here and join the online discussions, on Facebook, Twitter, and in this blog. Where ever you are, consider how to bridge the gap between research and operations. Perhaps you will have a Janus moment.