The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 3, 2009
Field Report: Meteorology
By Peter Monaghan
Who has not muttered, exasperated by another weather forecast that turned out wrong, "It's not rocket science!"
But, of course, predicting the weather is rocket science – at least, it's satellite science, and remote-sensing science, and algorithmic numeromancy of a high order.
Once a matter of recognizing patterns – "If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, go winter and come not again" (but keep close thy wellies) – meteorology has greatly refined its predictive powers in the past decade or two. Thank meteorologists' radiosondes, surface observation stations, ice-sheet bore holes, and fleets of buoys beaming back information as they roam the oceans. Thank numerical models crunched out in terabytes by computers as powerful as Zeus, Thor, and Thunderbird roiling the heavens as one.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
Weather systems are chaotic, but because of advances in the many fields that huddle under the broad umbrella of meteorology, forecasts are now reliable for smaller and smaller patches of earth, four or five days out. Coming soon: far more reliable predictions of where a tornado or hurricane will strike, your town or the next.
"When I was growing up, you were pretty lucky to know what would happen tomorrow," says a grateful Andrew G. Detwiler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
Sure, there are exceptions. Your part of the world may be mountainous like Rapid City, S.D., or like Seattle – "a bear of a place," says Detwiler, "with mountains all around and weather coming off the Pacific." But even there, say he and fellow weather-watchers, help is coming from mountain meteorologists and ocean meteorologists, as well as from specialists in how agriculture, forests, and the interactions of sea and sky affect weather and climate.
Urban meteorology is booming. All those billions more people, churning out greenhouse gases, in denser and larger conurbations: City dwellers, as little as 3 percent of the earth's population in 1800, will likely account for 60 percent by 2030. That creates "heat islands" where water cycles are disrupted and heat rises, as do the modeling challenges.
Most population growth is along coasts, and it is set to continue that way, at least until rising seas wash away millions, if more-frequent heat waves don't get them first.
Or terrorists. Post-September 11, urban meteorologists enjoyed a brief financing frenzy as they offered to divine which way the toxic winds would blow: around the northeast corner of the sports stadium or left of city hall.
Now climate change, studied every which way, is sucking up the research dollars. A huge, varied field, it has coalesced behind the most authoritative statement on the problem. The 2007 fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presents a thoroughly peer-reviewed consensus of more than 600 climate scientists from 40 countries that the earth's climate is warming beyond the range of natural variability.
And that we humans are to blame. We have burned vast amounts of fossil fuels, defoliated and paved a large percentage of the earth's surface, and produced such vast quantities of greenhouse gases that the earth can no longer dissipate them.
Ready to figure out the resultant climate nastiness are scientists who increasingly understand how to collect data and deploy it within numerical models. They are having more success, too, at testing whether those models can withstand buffeting by real-world conditions – a difficult task that involves representing processes as elusive as the physics of droplets within clouds.
Into models go such variables as how many dimensions to accord wind speeds and what degree of freedom or chaos. "It's amazing that the results are coherent, sensible, and even accurate," says Robert G. Fovell, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Solid results increasingly rely on the method known as "ensemble forecasting" – "the most important development in the last 10 years or so," according to William A. Gallus Jr., a professor of geological and atmospheric sciences at Iowa State University. By marshaling modern-day computer power, researchers can simultaneously run ensembles of dozens of models with slight differences in starting points and formulas. They then can average results from the many models to generate more-accurate forecasts with a more sophisticated likelihood rating.
For decades, much input to forecast models has come from high-power, long-range radar. But because the earth is curved, radar's power and range actually impede its view of the lower atmosphere. It's a matter of vector geometry. In place of long-range radar, meteorologists would like to install networks of small-range Doppler radar that are able to peer closer to the earth's surface, from cellphone towers and rooftops.
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is leading the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, a consortium of universities and industry and government bodies whose ambitious project of networked Doppler radar is delving into complex "mesoscale" phenomena like cloud systems and front formation.
Mesoscale refers to midrange weather systems, between large "synoptic" weather systems and microclimate phenomena such as storms. In one mesoscale project, researchers are figuring out how a type of radar used on naval ships for protection from missiles, the phased-array radar, can help them to detect such events as sharp wind shifts that predict storms.
In another, Vortex2, in Oklahoma, participants are deploying armadas of cutting-edge detectors to surround tornadoes and the supercell thunderstorms that form them, to gain a far more complete picture of the phenomena than is currently available.
These mesoscale projects all feature collaborations among academe, government, and industry. That kind of give-and-take typifies meteorology. So, increasingly, do collaborations with engineers, computer scientists, and earth scientists. Some of the hybrids may daunt the casual observer who just wants to know whether to leave the house with a raincoat.
As with any technical field, the research literature is not for the fainthearted. It is certainly voluminous. The largest publisher is the American Meteorological Society, a body of 14,000 members and numerous specialty areas that publishes 11 journals. Also active are the American Geophysical Union, the European Geosciences Union, the Royal Meteorological Society, in Britain, and Elsevier.
One newcomer, the quarterly Weather, Climate, and Society (American Meteorological Society), coming this fall, marks the increasing inclusion of the social sciences in weather and climate planning. Researchers and policy makers are embracing economic, political, social, and behavioral perspectives to better communicate information to affected parties—people in the way of storms, for example. Says Eve Gruntfest, an emeritus professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, a 30-year veteran of such approaches: "I used to always be the geographer, invited to the party, and never taken seriously as a person with a pedigree in meteorology, but now that is changing."
What's Next?
One field that is emerging in new form is weather mitigation. Humans have long tried to influence the weather, and sometimes have succeeded, inadvertently. The science is far from mastered, though research has sputtered along since the 1960s, when Project Stormfury famously tested the effect of seeding hurricanes to damp and direct them.
In recent decades, for example, commercial operations have sprung up all around the western United States, as throughout China. Says Detwiler, of South Dakota: "Some people take a moral stance that it's not a good idea to mess with Mother Nature. But some quite good scientists are opposed to weather manipulation because it's so complex that you really can't know what you're doing."
What must doubters think, then, of more-ambitious "geoengineering" schemes: large-scale efforts to alter atmospheric processes? Even dispersing aerosols in the stratosphere to reverse global warming—one of the milder interventions being considered – has not yet been attempted. Nor has shading the overheating earth with trillions of ceramic discs flung from huge electromagnetic guns, a million miles above earth, an idea the University of Arizona's J. Roger P. Angel and his colleagues have suggested.
At least meteorology has enough scientists to tackle its tasks, thanks to rising public interest in the field, fueled in good part by the availability and broadcasting of more and more weather-related data. "We've never before had so many people interested in getting into the field to make a difference," says Andrew J. Weaver, a professor of earth and ocean sciences at the University of Victoria, in Canada.
Some large, federally supported projects beckon. Two highly touted ones are efforts at broad collaboration. One is the National Unified Operational Prediction Capability project, or NUOPC. Another is the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, whose name tells only part of its tale. Its aims include overcoming a longstanding hitch in hurricane forecasting: Scientists have fared well in improving predictions of when hurricanes will occur, and from where, but they have progressed little in predicting the intensity of the events, which climate change appears to be making wilder, and more frequent and unpredictable.
Gifted meteorology graduates do not have to remain within academe to find research positions. Since Reagan-administration budgets emphasized research that the government did not pay for, private enterprise has stepped in.
Take Norman, Okla. It is home to a National Weather Service forecast office and other federal weather centers, as well as a large university meteorology department. But it also boasts an office park where dozens of firms of up to 60 employees package and sell weather information. One, landlocked or not, provides meteorological information to far-off Japanese shipping lines.
These days even big-box retailers employ meteorologists: They want to know not only how many winter coats and shovels to order for the next big freeze, but also what the risk is that snow will accumulate to the point of collapsing their giant flat roofs.
