From the World Climate Service-3 conference in Geneva, a big international meeting setting the stage for what will be a major climate change treaty to be ratified in Copenhagen in December. Judging by what we have seen here, one would suspect the nations of the world will have to make some serious compromises in the negotiations ahead.
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Television meteorologists who make school visits inevitably get the same question from youngsters: “How much money do you make?” When speaking to adult groups there is another, equally uncomfortable question that comes up: “What do you think about global warming?”
We do our best to answer, as we are members of the scientific community and expected to give guidance on such matters. But it is hard to find the upside of giving an answer that, according to statistics, puts any television meteorologist (on either side of the issue) at odds with approximately 50% of their viewers.
Take the case of two excellent TV meteorologists who work in adjoining markets in Alabama: Dan Satterfield from Huntsville, and James Spann from Birmingham. Both are among the very best at what they do. Each is considered the dean of weathercasters in their markets; both are very smart guys and fine gentlemen. They both study climate science and talk with experts in the field. But they have come to an honest, carefully considered difference of opinion. Dan Satterfield believes in manmade global warming. James Spann does not.
James has received the greater attention. He was interviewed on national television for criticizing former Weather Channel climatologist Dr. Heidi Cullen, after she suggested that weathercasters who deny manmade global warming should not be certified by the American Meteorological Society. (The AMS has issued public statements about climate change.) Dan has long written about climate issues, and two years ago proved his sincere interest by paying his own way to the Arctic to report on the effects of warmer climate there.
Both James and Dan have received substantial ridicule and abuse for taking their thoughtful positions. James was blamed for creating a “cyber storm.” Dan has been accused of joining “with other recent frustrated ‘believers’ in man-made climate fears.” An emailer said Dan seemed to “prefer the practices of the inquisition.”
Most of the angry rhetoric has come from outside of Alabama, from critics who don’t know either man or how seriously they do their jobs. Just as with national opinion polls, the feedback about climate change tends to break along party lines. In advising fellow broadcasters who might be tempted to take a stand on climate change, James Spann cautions:
I would warn anybody that dives into this issue (they) will pay the price with a pile of hate coming from one political party or another.
Three years ago, while attending a conference in eastern Europe, I was invited to an evening social gathering hosted by the local British ambassador. At one point, the ambassador asked if I thought it was possible to get the Kyoto treaty ratified in America.
Kyoto was an international agreement under which industrialized countries (as a whole) were to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gasses to 5.2 percent below what they were in 1990. It was legislation aimed at curbing manmade climate change identified by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Most of Europe and the rest of the world approved.
I replied to the Ambassador that I did not think it was possible to get the Kyoto treaty ratified in America. I did not see how my country would agree to self-cripple industries and transportation systems. Besides, as recently as 1997, the US Senate passed a resolution stating opposition to the Kyoto treaty – and passed it by a 95-0 vote.
Since then, climate change has become a hot issue, with substantial funds spent to burn the fires of discourse. But, cue the fire extinguisher – there is no point in debating any further.
The US House passed President Obama’s Cap and Trade Act. No one in Congress is sure about everything in it (it is 1500 pages long), but they do know it will strictly limit greenhouse gas emissions in America. The same principles opposed unanimously in the Senate twelve years ago have now been approved 219-212 in the House.
President Obama and his administration have been masterful in reversing a tide of opposition into a groundswell of support in the halls of Congress.
A small plane crashed into the side of a road on the northeast side of Sheldon, Iowa Tuesday morning. According to an Associated Press article carried in the Chicago Tribune, the FAA says the plane crash occurred about 11 a.m. when “thunderstorms with heavy rain were moving through the area.”
An examination of radar imagery suggests heavy rain was not occurring over the crash site. Assuming the plane went down at 11 a.m., the rainfall from a line of thunderstorms was still approximately ten miles west of Sheldon. But cold air surging out ahead of the thunderstorms was just reaching Sheldon in the form of a gust front at 11 a.m.
The “outflow boundary” is clearly visible on radar as a faint line of weak reflectivity. When this same north-south boundary passed over Sioux Falls airport an hour earlier, it produced a 43 mph wind gust at the surface. At 11:15 a.m., the automated sensor at Sheldon airport (KSHL) registered a short-lived, westerly wind gust of 39 knots, or 45 miles per hour.
A pilot clearly would have seen the line of thunderstorms approaching from the west, with dark clouds that lined the horizon. But the gust front, while visible on radar, might have been sudden and invisible to the eye. While it will be months before the FAA investigation is complete, my guess is that this unseen “wall of wind” played a role in the aviation accident.
A colleague of mine, Angela, insists that June is always starts cold in South Dakota. Clearly this June is extra cold, with daytime high temperatures averaging 6-7 degrees below normal in Sioux Falls, and the month is on pace to be the coldest-ever June in Rapid City.
My children concur with Angela’s hypothesis, based upon the lack of days spent at the neighborhood pool. So I decided to combine my kids’ observation and Angela’s hypothesis with the creation of a subjective barometer I will call the “Daytime Outdoor Pool Index”, or “DOPI” for short. It is not an unprecedented concept – farmers have an official index called growing degree days (GDD), and the energy people have indexes called heating degree days and cooling degree days (HDD and CDD), intended to reflect how much we operate our air conditioning and indoor furnaces.
In designing DOPI, I considered what parameters are essential for a good day at the pool. First and foremost, the public pools must be open. In the Northern Plains that generally means mid-May to mid-September. Secondly, it must be warm. Eighty degrees or better seems to be a nice round number, though the kids will agree to go to the pool if it as least 75 degrees early in the season. I will give half-credit for May days where the high temperature is between 75 and 79 degrees.
Sunshine is essential, since a healthy tan (a few shades short of a burn) seems to be desirable. I will decrease by one-quarter any pool day if the location receives less than half of its possible sunshine due to thick clouds. Another factor that will ruin an otherwise nice pool day is a strong wind. Even on a hot day, strong winds can make a body shivver when getting out of the water. So in DOPI, we will decrease by another one-quarter any pool day in which the average wind speed is over 15 miles per hour.
Putting together all of the numbers, here is how many acceptable pool days there have been in Sioux Falls, SD over the past few years:
So what does this prove? Absolutely nothing, except that this has been a lousy month to visit the local pool. And – perhaps – that there are too many meteorological indexes to keep track of.
Vortex2, the biggest tornado research project in history (as The Weather Channel reminds us every five minutes), is an armada on wheels that has been roaming the Central and Northern Plains in search of tornadoes this Spring. The amateur storm chase community is an armada on wheels that has been roaming the Central and Northern Plains in search of tornadoes this Spring.
It has been fascinating to watch both groups in their quests to spot tornadic supercells. While storm chasers claim to have scientific skill and predictive prowess, they seem to be more interested in stalking the scientists with Vortex2 than in using their own judgment in positioning. Whererever Vortex2 has deployed, a gaggle of storm chasers has been sure to follow – clogging the roads and byways in Tornado Alley.
One example occurred on Tuesday. Vortex2 was in the vicinity of Wichita, KS, in what the Storm Prediction Center identified as a 15% tornado risk area. Like flies attracted to meat, at least fifty amateur storm chasers converged on Vortex2′s location. Admittedly, everyone could see the east-west fine line on radar showing a boundary for potential storm initiation. But what was interesting was that while Vortex2 and the attendant chase community waited in frustration for the boundary to ignite, there were real tornado warnings posted right across the border in Missouri – with hardly any chasers paying attention to them.
I suppose it is okay for chase beginners to cling to Vortex2 in hopes of observing a tornado. Surely, with the cache of brain power involved in the project, they should be pretty good at finding twisters even in this “down year” for Plains tornadoes. But if I was a chaser, I would want to demonstrate my knowledge and skill by breaking away from the pack – to predict, identify, and chase a tornado that nobody else is on. That is the difference between a pro and a lookie loo.
These are difficult days in tornado alley – if you are a storm chaser seeking twisters for fun or profit. That was proven on Wednesday afternoon, when an army of chasers flooded into the panhandle of Nebraska from all directions after the Storm Prediction Center had rated this patch of prairie a paltry 2% risk for tornado production.
For a meteorologist spectating from afar, it was a curious situation. A cold front had passed through the area several hours before, and only some post-frontal thunderstorms were anticipated. A glance at the Rapid Update Cycle atmospheric profile showed the air in the lowest few thousand feet of the atmosphere was dry, the opposite of what is required to feed supercell-induced tornadoes. The wind field was weak, and the available potential energy was elevated above high cloud bases. The SPC’s mesoscale discussion promised only “a few damaging wind gusts especially if short bowling line segments can organize.” No watch – tornado or thunderstorm – would be issued this day.
Yet the chasers had seized upon the long-shot and raced to the panhandle. The Vortex2 tornado project was already in the area with an armada of equipment in search of a rare, 2009 High Plains tornado. When a garden-variety thunderstorm popped up south of Alliance, Nebraska, chasers swirled around its flanks hoping for the action that would never materialize. It was fascinating to watch the GPS locations of more than a dozen chasers converge on the center of radar reflectivity – on a storm that did not even warrant a severe thunderstorm warning.
The drought of tornadic weather has been unlucky for the world class scientists and researchers who have set aside five weeks of their lives hoping to study tornadoes in Vortex2. One would expect good odds for severe weather in tornado alley in late May. So far this year it has just been wishful thinking.
After Wednesday’s bust, the outlook for the rest of the month is no better. Vortex2 announced it is grounding its media chase vehicle due to poor expectations for severe weather.
Thursday the Storm Prediction Center’s Convective Outlooks were released with what is probably an unprecedented severe-free late May. The SPC forecast contained no high, moderate, or even slight risk areas for the entire nation going out eight days. That means no areas of organized severe weather are anticipated for the final week of May.
With that outlook, it appears most tornado chasers will have to find something else to chase for the Memorial Day Weekend and beyond.
We get a lot of questions from schoolchildren – especially when they are assigned to research a potential career by writing to people who work in that industry. Here is a list of typical questions about becoming a meteorologist, with my typical answers.
What does a meteorologist do?
Most meteorologists are involved in forecasting the weather. Broadcast meteorologists deliver forecasts on television. Government meteorologists (e.g. National Weather Service) prepare forecasts for the public and aviation sectors. Research meteorologists investigate the science behind the weather, contributing to better forecasts.
What does a person have to do to become a meteorologist?
An undergraduate college degree (B.A. or B.S.) is the bare minimum for any career in meteorology. Increasingly, employers are giving preference to job seekers with graduate degrees. Even in television, which used to require no degree at all, you will find some meteorologists with Master’s (M.A. or M.S.) degrees – and even a few Doctorate (Ph.D.) degrees.
What made you decide to become a meteorologist?
Almost everyone in meteorology can trace their career path back to an interest in weather during childhood. Many can point to a specific storm they can recall in vivid detail that pointed them toward a career as a meteorologist. There are exceptions, of course. I myself started in television as a sportscaster, became a newscaster, and turned to weather after taking university classes as a non-traditional (meaning older) student.
What is your favorite weather to forecast?
My specialty is severe thunderstorms, but I enjoy the challenge of winter weather as well. Snowstorms are probably the most challenging to forecast, because the “bust” potential is so high. A degree or two difference in temperature can turn a snowy forecast to rain, and sometimes snowfall comes in narrow, heavy bands in which one place can get 6” while 30 miles away people get nothing.
Do you love your job? If so, why?
Yes. Meteorology is one profession which is never the same from one day to the next. As a forecaster, you get an immediate report card on your skill by simply looking out the window. If a public forecast is wrong, everyone knows it. But there is a silent satisfaction that many people fail to appreciate – most of the time the forecast is correct.
How much money do you make?
I think it is fair to say that a beginning meteorologist will make about the same salary as a school teacher. The very best broadcast meteorologists in America make salaries exceeding a few hundred thousand dollars per year. No jokes about getting paid even when you’re wrong, please.
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