weather enterprise

What’s the Future of Weather Decision-Making?

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A 2024 AMS Summer Community Meeting highlight

Matt Corey

The AMS Summer Community Meeting drew exceptional attendance and engagement this year as people across sectors helped inform an upcoming report on the Weather Enterprise. The AMS Weather Enterprise Study will provide a comprehensive picture of the shifting landscape of weather-related fields to inform our joint future. At the 2024 SCM, working groups discussed what they’d found about key issues facing the enterprise, and asked for feedback from the community.

Here are a few takeaways from the Decision Support Services working group, as reported by Matt Corey (pictured at left) of Microsoft Weather. Decision support services (DSS) help stakeholders make weather-related decisions that are informed by the best available knowledge across fields. They are crucial for emergency managers and many other decision makers, as well as members of the public.

How has the decision support landscape shifted in the last decade or so?

Stakeholders for DSS range from an emergency manager making critical decisions about an entire community to an everyday citizen making a decision for themselves or their family. For decision support services, the last two decades have seen an abundance of technology changes which have allowed stakeholders easier access to information. However, this can be both a benefit and a challenge, as misinformation has also become more readily available.

What were the main themes that came out of your working group’s discussions?

The themes that emerged for us included:

  • The different sectors of the Weather Enterprise have become coupled, with less well-defined boundaries when it comes to providing decision support.
  • New players are entering the enterprise, with growing AI and novel ideas.
  • Developing and maintaining the necessary workforce is a concern.
  • There are increased opportunities for translating forecasts into easily understood language in order to support decisions.
  • There is a need for increased funding for quality observational datasets for many applications, especially in AI.
  • In a complex, misinformation-rich environment, there is still room for all sectors to tailor communications to stakeholders, but there is also concern about maintaining consistency in order to maintain trust.
  • Embracing user centric design to understand stakeholder concerns, technical levels, and understanding is important, including the use of probabilistic information.  Example:  “There is an 80% chance the flooding will happen this afternoon.”

What are the main challenges you have identified?

In our group, the discussion continues to be about who should be providing decision support services. As the NWS gets more involved in DSS, one concern is for increased friction from some private sector entities. Another key point is that DSS is not limited to a specific stakeholder type. DSS is important to all citizens who need to make decisions involving weather every day, thus there is a shared dimension and need for responsible and clear messaging to all stakeholders (including the tactical use of probabilistic information). 

A final recurring theme is around the workforce itself. Forecasters need to be taught communication skills, and social science is critical in helping to understand the needs and problems to be solved for the end users. With the focus shifting to newer tools including AI-infused capabilities, there is a concern that the new workforce will lose the necessary skills critical in conveying adequate decision support services.

What preliminary/tentative recommendations, solutions, or future directions have you discussed?

Some of the recommendations we’re working with right now focus on:

  • Integration of weather, water, and climate information with socioeconomic and biosphere information for earth system forecasts.
  • Cross-sector support of ecological forecasts and environmental early warning systems (for example, warnings of fishing industry impacts due to warmer water) to benefit society and facilitate impact-based action.
  • Improved communication about weather impacts, especially in a changing climate, using common terms and learnings based on stakeholder’s decision needs.
  • Embracing AI as a way to increase the velocity of forecasts, integrate probabilistic information into forecasts, and increase efficiency for both short-term services like nowcasting and long-term climate solutions for all.
  • Helping meteorologists to become the communicators that they should be. Leveraging AI solutions and tools to help make them more efficient at helping stakeholders with their decisions.
  • Expanding opportunities for smaller businesses/individuals to obtain specialized DSS.
  • Increased public awareness of changing weather patterns stimulating the need for better accuracy, earlier warnings, and long-range projections.
  • The need to smartly integrate probabilistic information to help stakeholders better understand forecasts and limitations.

Want to join a Weather Enterprise Study working group? Email [email protected].

About the Weather Enterprise Study

The AMS Policy Program, working closely with the volunteer leadership of the Commission on the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise, is conducting a two-year effort (2023-2025) to assess how well the weather enterprise is performing, and to potentially develop new recommendations for how it might serve the public even better. Learn more here, give us your input via Google Forms, or get involved by contacting [email protected].  

About the AMS Summer Community Meeting

The AMS Summer Community Meeting (SCM) is a special time for professionals from academia, industry, government, and NGOs to come together to discuss broader strategic priorities, identify challenges to be addressed and opportunities to collaborate, and share points of view on pressing topics. The SCM provides a unique, informal setting for constructive deliberation of current issues and development of a shared vision for the future. The 2024 Summer Community Meeting took place August 5-6 in Washington, DC, and focused special attention on the Weather Enterprise, with opportunities for the entire community to learn about, discuss, debate, and extend some of the preliminary findings coming from the AMS Weather Enterprise Study.

How is Weather Research Changing?

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A 2024 AMS Summer Community Meeting highlight

The AMS Summer Community Meeting (SCM) drew exceptional attendance and engagement this year as people across sectors helped inform a major upcoming report on the Weather Enterprise. The AMS Weather Enterprise Study will provide a comprehensive picture of the shifting landscape of weather-related fields to inform our joint future. At the 2024 SCM, working groups discussed what they’d found about key issues facing the enterprise, and asked for feedback from the community. 

Here are a few takeaways from the Research Enterprise working group, as reported by Daniel Rothenberg of Brightband.

Photo courtesy of Daniel Rothenberg.

How has the weather research landscape shifted in the last decade or so?

Two of the most important shifts have been a movement of exploratory and applied research from the public to the private sector, and the rise in importance of “data science” and other hybrid roles blending a mixture of domain expertise and broader engineering and technical skills. 

Possibly the biggest example of these shifts coming together has been the advent of AI-based weather forecasting tools, although it also shows in trends such as the rise of private companies operating earth observation platforms.

What were the principal themes that came out of your working group’s discussions?

One major theme we discussed was the balance of responsibilities across the traditional weather enterprise. Initiatives such as building and launching satellite constellations or developing new weather models were at one point solely within the remit of the public sector (due to complexity and cost), but are now commonly undertaken by the private sector – sometimes even at start-up companies.

This re-balancing opens as many opportunities as it does challenges, and leads to another major theme: how we can best prepare for the workforce needs of today and tomorrow. Meteorologists will increasingly need to apply technical skills such as software development and data science alongside ones from the social sciences; preparing our current and future workforce for these demands will be a challenge in its own right.

A third major theme is that the weather enterprise is getting bigger. We’re not just a community of meteorologists anymore. Increasingly, critical work related to weather, water, climate, and their impacts on society is being undertaken beyond the traditional boundaries of our enterprise. There is a significant opportunity to improve society’s resilience if we as a community are able to build relationships with the new institutions working on these issues in a collaborative, interdisciplinary manner.

What are the main challenges you have identified?

Better accounting for how we ought to invest limited – and declining – federal resources will be a significant and contentious challenge, only complicated by the shifts in priorities and capabilities across the enterprise.

Those shifts motivate a second key challenge, which is clarifying who in the enterprise is accountable for, or has ownership over, certain areas. For example, NOAA makes available nearly all of the observations used in its operational forecast models, with some exceptions for proprietary data from commercial entities. But as more private companies try to sell data to NOAA, how will this balance hold? What if those private companies move towards selling actual weather modeling capabilities or services – perhaps a proprietary AI-based weather model – to the government? In the case of expanding commercial data purchases, who is responsible for maintaining and improving our data assimilation capabilities? 

Coordinating many actors across the enterprise, in a manner that most effectively serves our mission to society, will be a key challenge we must navigate in the coming years.

What preliminary recommendations or future directions have you discussed?

Our tentative recommendations revolve around building robustness. We encourage academic organizations who train our future meteorologists to consider how to prepare these students to work in a multidisciplinary capacity, and to embrace data science skills. Not everyone needs to be an interdisciplinary scientist, but it’s vital that our students learn how to apply their deep domain knowledge as part of a team of such individuals.

We also acknowledge that the rise of AI/ML techniques is changing the demands of our computing and data infrastructure. Not only must our workforce learn to adapt to these technologies, but we must consider how the enterprise will support enabling them: for example, by ensuring that in addition to large, traditional high-performance computing resources, we provide access to GPUs and similar tools. As part of this re-evaluation, we must evolve the ways in which we as a community define our priorities for federal research funding

What did you hear from the community at the SCM?

We thank the community for the warm reception to our assessments at the Summer Community Meeting. Many of the themes we touched on – the re-balancing of capabilities across the enterprise, the emergence of AI/ML and its implications, as well as core workforce development concerns – were echoed across many other working groups, underscoring their importance.

Within our group, we also discussed the growing importance of convergence science, which was echoed several times throughout the meeting. Convergence science, which involves coordinating diverse, interdisciplinary research teams with real stakeholders to solve societally relevant problems, is likely to be an important mechanism of translational research in the future, but we (and others at the meeting) identified a need for federal agencies to devote more resources earmarked for this sort of work in order to complement traditional, siloed funding programs.

Want to join a Weather Enterprise Study working group? Email [email protected].

About the Weather Enterprise Study

The AMS Policy Program, working closely with the volunteer leadership of the Commission on the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise, is conducting a two-year effort (2023-2025) to assess how well the weather enterprise is performing, and to potentially develop new recommendations for how it might serve the public even better. Learn more here, give us your input via Google Forms, or get involved by contacting [email protected].  

About the AMS Summer Community Meeting

The AMS Summer Community Meeting (SCM) is a special time for professionals from academia, industry, government, and NGOs to come together to discuss broader strategic priorities, identify challenges to be addressed and opportunities to collaborate, and share points of view on pressing topics. The SCM provides a unique, informal setting for constructive deliberation of current issues and development of a shared vision for the future. The 2024 Summer Community Meeting took place August 5-6 in Washington, DC, and focused special attention on the Weather Enterprise, with opportunities for the entire community to learn about, discuss, debate, and extend some of the preliminary findings coming from the AMS Weather Enterprise Study.

AMS 2024 Session Highlight: WRN Asks “What If…?”

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Graphic: WRN Asks "What If...?"

Since 2013, the AMS Symposium on Building a Weather-Ready Nation (WRN) has brought together meteorologists and other Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise partners to discuss efforts in advancing what it means to be “Weather-Ready.” At the 104th AMS Annual Meeting, for the second year in a row, the WRN Symposium will be opening their program Monday morning at 8:30 AM ET in Baltimore with a special, interactive session: “WRN Asks: What If…?” We spoke to one of the program chairs for this Symposium, Trevor Boucher from the National Weather Service, about why this session is unique and why AMS attendees might want to check it out.

What’s so special about this session, and how did it come about?

Trevor: The design and discussion are both very different from a traditional 12-minute presentation or panel session. Weather Ready Nation Symposium was created shortly after the National Weather Service introduced the WRN Initiative as a forum to share lessons learned, successes, and best practices. After a decade of this pursuit, several recurring themes arose: How do we, the Weather Enterprise, target underserved and vulnerable populations? How do we communicate our science effectively? How do we focus on our publics/partners while also maintaining our own well-being? These provocative questions are not easily addressed through the traditional paradigm of science conferences. Last year, the 11th WRN Symposium looked to an interactive, collaborative strategy to address big societal challenges, hosting a special session called, “WRN Asks: What if…?” which embraced the concept of “transformative learning.” We shifted the focus to collective, group discussion, and critically reflecting on what we’ve all learned since 2013.

This year’s “What if…?” session not only fits into the Annual Meeting’s “Living in a Changing Environment” theme but intentionally asks the provocative “elephant in the room” questions that are difficult to have in a traditional session. We designed this session as a “reverse panel,” where moderators provide a 3-minute “state of the science” with respect to their backgrounds and propose an open-ended, “What if…?” question to the audience. Then their role shifts to moderating audience discussion for the remainder of their 20-minute slot. So you might see notable names on the agenda, but they do the least amount of talking. The audience are the true panelists, sharing their opinions, their knowledge, and their concerns about these questions.

Where did this idea come from?

Trevor: To be honest, the design inspiration and name largely came from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). There is an animated series with the same name that explores how certain character storylines would progress in alternate scenarios or timelines. What would the implications be if certain details of these characters changed? Additionally, the show Black Mirror on Netflix is another inspiration, exploring how some seemingly inevitable technological advancements like AI or cybernetic implants may change our society. Similarly, we wanted to explore “What if…?” scenarios around how our science may look if things progress, change directions, or stay the same.

One of last year’s discussion moderators, Dr. Justin Sharpe, helped us also understand how this style of discussion fits very nicely into the concept of Transformative Learning (Mezirow, 1995, 2000) and engendering critical reflection of the audience. For the chairs, this also helps us reflect on how we craft our scientific discussions each year in our program. The single, double, and triple-loop deutero learning model (below) applies to both the audience and the chairs simultaneously.

Deutero Learning: Single, Double and Triple Loop Learning where single-loop learning is primarily related to considering one’s actions — such as improving efficiency; double-loop learning questions priority-setting, such as how solutions are determined (Argyris and Schön, 1978); and triple-loop learning questions underlying values and assumptions, asking, for example, what our goals may be (Sharpe, 2018, 2021, Sweiringa and Wierdsma, 1992).

The goal for this year’s session is to inspire the following year’s call for abstracts. We will be taking notes on everything discussed from the audience and planning follow-up sessions called “What’s Next?” based on the discussion. We hope people will be excited to contribute to these discussions for years to come.

How did the first “What if…” session go last year?

Trevor: Exceptionally well. Even though it was the first time we tried this and it was the opening Monday morning session of the Annual Meeting, with a LOT of competition for the membership to choose from, we had about 40-50 folks and had no problem with participation. In fact, we had to cut discussions off for all four questions proposed. I honestly think everyone who attended spoke up at some point through the 90-minute session.

My favorite part was an idea from Doug Hilderbrand, the creator of the WRN Symposium. He asked all the students in the audience to raise their hand, and promised they would be prioritized in the discussion, since these topics are likely what they will be grappling with throughout their upcoming careers.

What’s in store for attendees this year?

Trevor: Four new moderators with four new questions! And we have become a bit more emboldened to ask even more provocative questions this year. Some of them are excellent examples of #HowtoStartaMetFight (a popular Twitter hashtag from years ago). I personally can’t wait to see where the discussion takes us. The questions include…

“What if all weather information was probabilistic?”
Dr. Sean Ernst (OU’s Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis)

“What if there wasn’t a stigma when talking about climate change?”
Jared Rennie (Research Meteorologist – NCEI)

“What if we didn’t change anything?”
Dr. Tanya Brown-Giammanco (Director – NIST Disaster and Failure Studies)

“What if there was no ego in the weather enterprise?”
Matt Lanza (Managing Editor – Space City Weather)

I’ve been on all our coordination calls and dry runs with these folks and we have had to cut short our 90-minute meetings each time because we just can’t help but discuss these important questions — and that’s just 6-7 of us. I really think AMS attendees will find it to be an invigorating way to begin their week in Baltimore.

Read more about the session.

About the AMS 104th Annual Meeting

The American Meteorological Society’s Annual Meeting brings together thousands of weather, water, and climate scientists, professionals, and students from across the United States and the world. Taking place 28 January to 1 February, 2024, the AMS 104th Annual Meeting will explore the latest scientific and professional advances in areas from renewable energy to space weather, weather and climate extremes, environmental health, and more. In addition, cross-cutting interdisciplinary sessions will explore the theme of Living in a Changing Environment, especially the role of the weather, water, and climate enterprise in helping improve society’s response to climate and environmental change. The Annual Meeting will be held at the Baltimore Convention Center, with online/hybrid participation options. Learn more at annual.ametsoc.org. 

COVID-19 and the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise

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by Mary Glackin, AMS President

In normal times, our thousands of AMS professionals and colleagues are completely dedicated to helping people make the best possible weather-, water-, and climate-related decisions. In this COVID-19 period, were not just providing critical information; we are also receiving it. We are each of us following guidance from public health experts and local officials so that we can keep ourselves, our families, and our friends safe and well. We’re joining in the national and global efforts to “flatten the curve.”

amsseal-blueWe all continue to work, but these duties are now competing with new ones: caring for children who would normally be in school, searching for basic necessities that would routinely be in stock on supermarket shelves, protecting elderly friends and family members. With campuses and laboratories shut down, professors and students have scrambled to adjust to online teaching and reimagining plans for field experiments. Nonetheless, critical weather and hydrologic services are provided with sharp eyes for spring floods and convective weather. Preparations for the coming hurricane season are moving forward.

COVID-19 doesn’t “slightly tweak” the task of building a Weather-Ready Nation; it completely rearranges the landscape. Goals of shelter-in-place and evacuation have to be reconfigured for a world where we are advised by health experts to maintain physical separation from others—more than a challenge in a communal evacuation center.

COVID-19 provides a unique learning opportunity for all of us in the Enterprise. We can experience firsthand how even the best-intended top-down risk communication can sound to someone in harm’s way—and step up our own communications accordingly.

Finally, it’s worth noting as AMS embarks on its second century that our founding coincided with the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. The link between weather, water, climate, and public health (enshrined in the AMS seal) has been integral to building a sustainable and resilient world, and it will likely play a larger role in the future.

Thank you for maintaining essential services and supporting research and education during such a critical, difficult time. Stay well, and stay safe—and at the same time, stay focused, on our contributions to a safer, healthier world.

In Celebration: American Weather Enterprise Collaborating to Protect Lives and Property

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By Mary M. Glackin, AMS President-Elect, and Dr. Joel N. Myers, Founder and CEO, AccuWeather

In his acclaimed book, The Signal and the Noise, noted statistician Nate Silver examines forecasts of many categories and finds that most forecast types demonstrate little or no skill, and most predictive fields have made insignificant progress in accuracy over the past several decades.  The one exception, Silver concludes, is weather forecasting, which he singles out as a “success story.” We quite agree.

The benefit of improved weather forecasting on human activity over the last 60 years cannot be overstated. As we approach in January the 100th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, the nation’s premier scientific organization dedicated to the advancement of meteorological science, it seems a fitting time to celebrate all that we have accomplished for the protection of life and property and the substantial benefits to people and business and contemplate the challenges ahead and the path forward to conquer them.

With technology and human knowledge increasingly transforming both weather forecasting and our relationship with it, our success will rest squarely on our ability to embrace transformational change and to recognize and welcome opportunities for collaboration between key facets of the weather enterprise – academic, government and the private weather industry.

The publicly funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plays a critical role in supporting the entire infrastructure of weather forecasting, which government organizations, such as the National Weather Service, the U.S. military, and privately held organizations rely on. This infrastructure includes observational systems, maintenance and support of numerical weather prediction models, and providing life-saving weather warnings.  Warnings, arguably, are the biggest payoff of weather forecasting with lives and property on the line.

The NWS analyzes and predicts severe weather events and issues advisories and warnings to the general public for their safety and protection. Warning services provided by NWS have improved over the decades. By design, NWS weather warnings cover a broad territory, intended for the widest possible public audience in a region.

While all government weather warnings reaching the public are produced by the NWS, increasingly in today’s digital age they are tailored and delivered almost entirely by private weather providers through news broadcasts and free, advertising-supported mobile phone apps and other digital sources of convenience.  The greatest challenge the weather enterprise faces is ensuring these life-saving weather warnings reach the greatest number of people potentially impacted by hazardous weather with enough advance notice to take proactive steps to remain safe and out of harm’s way. When seconds count in a weather-related emergency, this partnership example significantly extends the reach of the government for greater public safety.

What some may not realize is that when severe weather threatens, companies, such as AccuWeather, pair a deep understanding of client operations with their team of meteorologists to provide vital services, such as custom site and operation specific weather warnings, to clients tailored to their risk thresholds.

A recent Washington Post article mistakenly conflated warning services provided by NOAA with custom warning services provided to private clients.

In fact, with example after example, there is no doubt private companies, such as AccuWeather, which has received many AMS accolades for its warnings and expertise, can and do provide valuable warnings and services to private clients. It was unfortunate that a comment said on the fly was taken out of context. Both AccuWeather and AMS view the incident in this light and are continuing to build on their shared history of partnership. AccuWeather works closely with NOAA and NWS to make sure communities and businesses have the best information and warnings they need to stay safe. This partnership has never been stronger.

In fact, there has been a long history of cooperation between the public and private weather sectors.  National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS), including the NWS, readily source data and intellectual property from private companies to support their mission of saving lives, protecting property, and enhancing the national economy.  This trend is likely to continue in the world of shrinking government budgets and resource allocation.  In turn, private companies leverage technologies, such as the many forecast models provided by NMHS, as the foundation to their own products and services.

As we look ahead to the next 100 years, many challenges impacting the future of the weather enterprise loom large, such as cost and financial pressures, the hyperbolic increasing rate of the capture, storing, processing and analyzing of data, emerging challenges of health and climate change and new accelerating technologies and platforms in the digital age, some of which we cannot yet even conceive.

These sectors of the weather enterprise have their own advantages and efficiencies and together we can most certainly succeed in furthering meteorological advancement if we capitalize on each other’s strengths and work cooperatively and decisively to achieve our larger mission of safety and protection.

All partners in the weather enterprise –government, commercial and academia —  in addition to the support and stewardship of important professional organizations, such as the AMS, the National Weather Association and the American Weather and Climate Industry Association – are essential to meteorological progress, and the sum of our value to the public and business can be far greater than the individual parts.

In the last six decades, each component of the weather enterprise has learned to better understand and appreciate one another and to communicate more effectively and to respect the important contributions of each in the true spirt of cooperation. The greatest example of this is the AMS-championed Fair Weather Report, a study funded by the federal government to generate more harmony across the entire weather enterprise.

Since we began our careers, we have had the privilege of seeing amazing progress in our ability to provide more specific, more accurate, and more useful weather forecasts and warnings, which extend further ahead and have saved tens of thousands of lives and prevented hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage.

With even more and better collaborations between the various facets of the weather enterprise, there is no question the public and our nation stand to benefit from greater safety and better planning. We look forward to continuing our work together to bring about more exciting innovations and enhancements to advance public safety.

Editor’s note: Mary M. Glackin is President-elect, American Meteorological Society. She was formerly the Deputy Under Secretary for Oceans and Atmosphere at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a Senior Vice President of Science and Forecast Operations at The Weather Company (IBM). Dr. Joel N. Myers is Founder and CEO of AccuWeather

Thanksgiving in March

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by Keith Seitter, AMS Executive Director
The past few months have been a period of increased anxiety for many of us in the weather, water, and climate community as we contemplate how changes in the nation’s administration will impact agencies and programs, and, ultimately, how well our science and the services based on it can move forward. Despite the fact that we work in disciplines that routinely deal with uncertainty, it is not easy for us to deal with the particular flavor of uncertainty we have been facing, or to keep it from being deeply unsettling.
At AMS, we have focused on being even more vigilant in working to defend the integrity of the scientific process and in trying to ensure that the best peer-reviewed science is brought to bear on issues facing our country and the world. Recognizing the importance of those efforts—and even with occasional successes in them—does not keep one from becoming disheartened in dealing with our “post-fact world.”
I was feeling particularly discouraged recently as all this weighed on me, and then I realized that what I should be doing is creating the kind of list many of us do on Thanksgiving. Here it is:

  • I’m thankful to be part of a community whose work really matters. And that people become part of this community because they know how much this work matters and they bring dedication and passion to it every day.
  • I’m thankful that the general public appreciates and depends on the work of our community. They look to us every day to help them make decisions both big and small, and put their trust in us to keep them out of harm’s way (even though they may, at times, complain about our efforts).
  • I’m thankful that we can—and do—rely on a scientific process to discern how our environment works so that we can speak with confidence. It is not what we believe, but what we can observe, measure, and objectively model based on known physics that guides us.
  • I’m thankful I work at an organization guided by a Council made up of gifted and dedicated volunteer leaders, and that I can spend my time working with an incredible professional staff.

By the time I got to the end of this list, I was no longer feeling discouraged but, instead, was energized and ready to keep working toward making sure that the best available scientific knowledge and understanding was getting into the hands of policymakers at all levels. We may be in the midst of particularly challenging times, but AMS, as a very highly respected “honest broker” covering the science and services of the weather, water, and climate community, is in a position to be particularly effective in working through those challenges.
(A version of this post appeared in AMS Executive Director Keith Seitter’s “Letter from Headquarters” column in the February 2017 BAMS.)

Space-Based Environmental Intelligence Community Celebrates

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bridenstine
by Ron Birk, Northrop Grumman
Over 150 stakeholders in our Space-based Environmental Intelligence community came together December 1 at the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C., for a special event co-hosted by the American Astronautical Society and the American Meteorological Society. Key stakeholders from NOAA, NASA, USGS, Congress, the Administration, the European Union, the private sector and academia celebrated accomplishments including the successful launch and deployment of the NOAA GOES R geostationary weather satellite.
There was a buzz throughout the networking event about advancing societal benefits into the future. Dr. Bill Hooke, Associate Executive Director of AMS and author of Living on the Real World, brought his compelling perspective on the value of science for society. Dr. Piers Sellers, acclaimed astronaut and Earth scientist, shared his findings from over 30 years of research and space travel on the value of monitoring our Earth from space in an excerpt from the recently released National Geographic Before the Flood movie.
The audience enjoyed an impressive video prepared by the space-based environmental community (watch for the video to be posted here soon). Major aerospace players, including Ball Aerospace, Harris Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies, provided impressive accomplishments linked together to form the value chain from environmental sensors processed into information products to inform emergency responders in saving lives and protecting property for a Weather Ready Nation. The Society of Satellite Professionals International and the European Commission Copernicus program enhanced the video highlighting benefits and capabilities that span the environmental intelligence value chain. The Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Sustainable earth Observation Systems (SeOS), and the Aerospace Corporation joined in sponsoring the event.
The Honorable Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), House Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee, arrived just as Tom Fahy announced the Senate passed the Weather Research and Forecasting Act S.1561. Congressman Bridenstine enthusiastically called for the space-based environmental community video to be shared with congressional committees. He emphasized the value of environmental information for severe weather warnings, especially tornados and floods, key to people of Oklahoma and across the nation. He described steadfast support for NOAA operational polar and geostationary weather missions, Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) and Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES R), and heralded the value of Earth science to monitor the vital signs of our planet with benefits for our economy, protection of life and property, and national security. The Congressman also emphasized progress and plans an increasingly robust Earth observations system, including benefits of being augmented by commercial weather data. A key area identified as a challenge for the community is space situational awareness, recognizing that low Earth orbit is increasingly congested and contested.
Tremendous recognition is due to everyone in the community coming together to make this important enterprise successful and vibrant as we continue into the future. Thanks to all for bringing so much talent and energy to the event.  Our challenge and opportunity is to continue to reach out and expand our community, recognizing that everyone across the U.S. and around the world benefits from quality space-based environmental intelligence.

AMS Community Priorities for the New Administration

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By Fred Carr, AMS President
Now that the election is over, a furious amount of activity has ensued on who will be in the new administration and what policies they will pursue. AMS members are particularly concerned about future science funding levels, environmental policies, observational and research infrastructure, STEM education, and who the new leaders will be in agencies that oversee aspects of the weather, water, and climate (WWC) enterprise. To provide guidance to those involved in the transition period, the AMS created a policy statement titled “Weather, Water, and Climate Priorities” that is located here.
I would like to summarize a few vital aspects of this document here. The fundamental premise is that “Economic and social prosperity belong to a society that understands and effectively responds to Earth’s changing weather, water, and climate conditions.” There is no doubt that many changes are occurring in the Earth’s physical and biological ecosystems (atmospheric and oceanic warming, Arctic and glacial ice losses, sea level rise, land use, drought and flooding intensities, etc.), most of them resulting from human activities. They are affecting our quality of life and large portions of our economy, and will worsen with time. These changes cannot be ignored, and national investment and leadership are needed.
The AMS policy statement provides recommendations on how to address these challenges, which require holistic, bipartisan, and coordinated strategies to accomplish. Some of them are:

  • The nation must invest in educating the next generation of scientists.
  • Both basic and applied research in the geophysical and environmental sciences must increase.
  • Observational infrastructure should increase across the WWC enterprise.
  • The U.S. should lead the world in high-performance computing.
  • Effective outreach to the public and decision-makers is needed to develop a scientifically literate citizenry and data-driven, science-based policies.
  • Partnerships among the academic, public, and private sectors are needed to develop successful policies and actions.
  • Outstanding individuals are needed to provide effective leadership of WWC-related agencies, advisory groups, and industries; they must be well-qualified, visionary, and diverse.

These recommendations make sense across the political spectrum, and I encourage readers to do what they can to bring them to the attention of the new administration.

Naming Winter Storms: Time for Community Cooperation

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by Mary M. Glackin, Senior Vice President, Public-Private Partnerships, The Weather Company
Forecasts of hazardous weather have continually improved, particularly over the past few decades. It is oft-cited fact that 5-day forecasts are now as good as 3-day forecasts were 20 years ago. At the same time, the public has more choices than ever in how it accesses weather information. In particular, we are seeing explosive growth in the web, apps, and social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter. Yet in the aftermath of a severe event, it is common to hear, “I didn’t know” either from public officials or the public at large.
It is this latter issue that the United Kingdom’s Met Office and the Irish Meteorological Service (Met Éireann) were seeking to address when they recently announced their plans to name storms this fall and winter. And to kick the campaign off, they are soliciting the public’s help in picking the names. After watching other country’s experiences, they believe naming significant storms will increase public awareness of severe weather and thus improve appropriate responses to warnings.
Several European countries name winter storms. For example, the Free University of Berlin’s meteorological institute has been naming them since the 1950s, and these names are adopted and used by the media and the German Met Service, Deutscher Wetterdienst. In the U.S. and elsewhere, very impactful storms become named by the media; think Snowmageddon in the Northeast (2010) and St. Jude Storm in the U.K. (2013). In the U.S., The Weather Company (TWC) began naming winter storms in 2012-13, citing the importance of communicating in social media–especially Twitter, which requires a hashtag. Rightly or wrongly, this effort was roundly criticized as having suspect science and for being a marketing ploy.
After three years experience at TWC, here is what we can report: Twitter alone provides an incredible reach where we routinely see more than one billion people receiving tweets using the storm name. Millions of tweets are sent using the hashtag from government agencies, school districts, utilities, businesses, and the general public. These hashtags also allow the NWS and others to find real-time weather data tweeted by citizens that can be used in nowcasts and other storm reports.
The criteria to name a storm are pretty simple: it must meet the National Weather Service winter-storm warning criteria, and it must be expected to impact at least two million people and/or 400,000 sq. km. We use a formal process and a committee of three meteorologists to review these criteria for each possible storm, and while we consider the criteria strict, the storm-naming committee still reserves the right to override the quantitative decision in certain circumstances. Some of the factors that may influence decisions to override the naming rules include the degree of historical significance of the event (e.g., accumulating snow in South Florida, a summer-season snowstorm, etc.); see more details here.  The U.K. is planning a similar system using their two highest warning levels, so names are only applied to the storms that present a significant threat.
What’s in a name? Well in this case, the name is the headline to attract attention to the threat. It is the beginning. It needs to be backed up with easy-to-understand information that details the threat to a specific locale and appropriate call-to-action statements. But, in this information-saturated world, this headline/hashtag is key. We need to recognize the importance of serving people in the way they find easiest to consume information vs. how we are most comfortable in delivering it.
Could we take this U.K./Ireland announcement as a call to the U.S. weather enterprise to come together to see how we could maximize the use of social media to improve the public response to severe weather events?  Twitter is here to stay, and it requires hashtags to separate the relevant information from an avalanche of incoming data. Hashtags are spilling over into other social media as well. It is easy to create a hashtag from a tropical storm name. If we could come together as a community to address this for winter storms, we’d no doubt learn a lot that could then be applied to significant weather at the local scale. The nomenclature could be something much different than what’s used in tropical storms or what we have been using.
What’s important is to lead as a community in this social media era. For our part, we are willing to share our experiences, transition our system, and/or help set up an enterprise-wide naming system. During major snow events, the reach on Twitter has been over a billion. What would our reach be with all of us working together feeding into the same system to keep people informed during these hazardous events? Are we ready to re-engage on this topic as a community?
 
 

Boosting the Vitality of the U.S. Weather and Climate Enterprise

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by James Stalker, President and CEO, RESPR, Inc.
Editor’s note: Because this column has triggered much discussion in the community already, it is important to emphasize that all posts on this blog–guest columns or otherwise–present the opinions of the authors only. These blog posts do not represent official policy or views of the AMS or of its membership. What follows are an individual’s thoughts, and we hope that others in the community recognize, as does Mr. Stalker, the value of open discussion.
The U.S. weather and climate enterprise is exemplary to many nations of the world. And yet, it appears to struggle to maintain its edge—especially in economic development, job creation, and producing constant weather-readiness throughout the nation. While dwindling public funding may be partially to blame, the problem is deeper.
What systemic issues might be holding the enterprise back? Is there unhealthy competition between sectors?  Can we avoid a slowing rate of growth within the weather and climate enterprise? How can we make the enterprise more vibrant and help it stay vibrant? It is important to consider such questions, especially now as we prepare for the AMS Community Meeting this week in Boulder, Colorado.
Sectors and their objectives
Government, academia, and the private sectors all provide products and services to a fourth sector—the users. This user sector is the most important of all, and its members must far outnumber those of the other sectors in a healthy enterprise.
Each sector has a different mission. For example, government mainly provides timely weather and climate information to citizens in order to save lives and minimize property damage. The government sector, secondarily, provides weather and climate information to the academic and private sectors to indirectly support education, research, and economic development. Additionally, the government engages in research and educational efforts itself.
It is fair to ask whether or not the government sector adequately fulfills its primary objective. Huge gaps exist in the weather and climate information available in the public domain today, and there are inabilities to adequately customize data to meet the disparate needs of the citizens. However, the government sector does provide information critical to the academic and private sectors. The fact that the government sector seems to do better in achieving its secondary objective, relatively speaking, than its primary objective suggests that something does not work well.
The primary objective of the academic sector is to educate our future scientists and technicians. Secondarily, it offers products and services to the other sectors. Strengthened weather and climate datasets from a refocused government sector would improve the academic sector’s success in its primary and secondary objectives. A refocused government sector would similarly benefit the private sector in developing better value-added products/services for users. The beneficiary shareholders come from all walks of life, of course, but primarily it is the satisfied customers—the users—who keep the private sector alive and well.
Pathways for Products
Curiously, the “free” weather and climate data model of the government sector can potentially lead to the unsustainable situation in which product and service providers outnumber users. We see this by looking at the various pathways by which weather and climate data product and service providers interact with one another and reach out to the user sector.

Schematic showing various pathways amongst four sectors.
Schematic showing various pathways amongst four sectors.

 
All the pathways shown above are currently utilized in one way or another. In the current weather and enterprise structure, Pathway 1, by which the private sector reaches out to the user sector, is competing against Pathways 2 and 3, where the government sector and the academic sector, to a lesser degree, offer “free” data products to the user sector. Even though the private sector provides value-added products, the user sector is made to believe that they can get similar weather and climate products from the government and academic sectors for free. Secondly, since the government sector is focusing on Pathway 2, its production of a strong foundational data for Pathway 1A receives minimal attention.
Even though Pathways 1 and 3 don’t necessarily compete with one another, at least not as apparently as Pathways 1 and 2, the academic sector could increase its effectiveness by focusing its scarce financial resources on education and academic research.
The status quo enterprise structure results in unnecessary road blocks for the enterprise as a whole.
The vitality of the enterprise would get a boost if the government sector reversed its priority of objectives and emphasized, instead, on providing critical weather and climate information to the private (Pathway 1A) and academic (indirectly to Pathway 1B) sectors. At the same time, the academic sector would make a positive contribution to the vitality of the enterprise by shifting focus on improving and providing weather and climate information through academic research to the private sector (Pathway 1B). Both Pathways 2 and 3 would become secondary objectives in the new sectoral coexistence illustrated here.
This suggests that a business model aimed at providing “free” weather and climate information, while appealing, is not sustainable and will lead to inferior products. This model puts the private sector at a severe disadvantage.
The whole weather and climate enterprise will have to realize this fatal flaw. The government sector should ask itself: “Would it be better to invest more of the taxpayer dollars in what the government sector does better than in what it does not do so well?”
With this adjustment, the private sector will become the chief provider of end-user products and services to the user sector directly. This would not necessarily mean the end of Pathway 2, however. For example, the government might wonder if some users would be unable to afford the value-added products/services provided by the private sector. In this case, instead of trying to produce end-user products/services itself, the government sector would be better off purchasing them from the private sector and making them available to those users who are in need of the value-added products/services. In other words, certain segments of users may receive value-added products indirectly from the private sector.
A Path to Consider
Leaders engaged in weather and climate products and services from the three sectors should get together and evaluate the merit of this adjustment of priorities. The government sector would share with the other sectors; its effort would be appropriately split between strengthening the foundational weather and climate information and directly reaching out to the user sector. An oversight committee, sponsored by AMS, could ensure continued implementation of this new adjustment within the weather and climate enterprise. This committee would come up with further adjustments to the enterprise structure.
It is necessary practice in business, government, and academia alike to continually reexamine priorities to ensure economic vitality in a changing society and changing markets. The weather and climate enterprise should be no exception.