Dr Jimmyc

A note on "forcing"

2012-01-24T22:30:00.000-06:00

It is easy to take a hard look at the maps and determine easily what constitutes strong "forcing". Usually we see a highly dynamical setup (e.g. deepening surface low, intensifying short wave trough) and immediately point to strong "forcing" as a reason for an outbreak. So what did yesterdays outbreak look like in terms of forcing, where we can be specific and look at two metrics of forcing: 700 hPa Q-vector divergence (shaded) and thermal absolute vorticity advection (contour). The Q vector divergence is an approximation for the QG omega equation forcing function. Thermal vorticity advection is the Trenberth approximation for QG omega; though as noted by Sanders (1990) the divergence of Q vector method may be more reliable in frontogenetical forcing. So here is the map of these two forcing functions on the NAM 12 km grid:

The same convection as yesterdays post is used comparing the 36 (upper left),24 (upper right),12 (lower left) hr forecast to the model analysis (lower right). Although this plot is for 700 hPa the one at 500 hPa was similar. Clearly the front (e.g. cold front aloft) was present the forcing is not that strong according to the model analysis, though the forecasts suggest a much greater forcing than diagnosed through the data assimilation system. One could reach the same conclusion from yesterdays plot of the derived QG omega (through the harmonic method used in SUNYPak) at 500 hPa (shown again below). At most both of these plots suggest that forcing in the region of the outbreak in AR and later in MS and AL was more weak to moderate than strong. The forcing for ascent shown here is localized to the front aloft. Where there was strong forcing indicated by the direct retrieval of 500 hPa QG omega was located around Kansas City ahead of the upper low relative to its translation as a negatively tilted trough. Certainly we can say this was a strong upper low but by no means was the outbreak area under strong dynamic forcing.

23 Jan 2012 outbreak: Synoptic evolution

2012-01-23T20:04:00.000-06:00

The first moderate risk with tornado potential was forecast last night for portions of AR, MS, TN. A cold front aloft (CFA) associated with a short wave trough at 500 hPa came ripping across OK during the day and became negatively tilted across AR by 00 UTC. Cold advection at 700 hPa was well ahead of the low level front. QG diagnostics at 500 hPa from the 12 hr NAM forecast valid at 00 UTC show the relatively weak cross-front contribution to QG omega confined to AR while further North the along front component was dominant (courtesy of the legacy SUNYPak from UAlbany).

Soundings were taken at LZK at 21 and 00 UTC which illustrate minor warming (+0.8C at 700 hPa) but but stronger warming (+2.60 at 677 hPa) indicative of the strengthening inversion. Soundings taken at JAN for 00 and 03 UTC showed warming around 600 hPa (+1.3C). Looping the water vapor imagery it appears as though the warming was in advance of the CFA but this effective cap was insufficient to limit convection. All of the available soundings indicate that parcel paths had zero negative area yielding uncapped near surface parcels in the warm sector. With no cap storm coverage was large and relatively uninhibited. With little in the way to focus convection multiple messy lines and clusters formed.

SRH was extreme approaching 500 m2s-2 at JAN at 03 UTC. 1st tor warning south of JAN came out around 0530 UTC. It appears that this line of storms formed along an effective dryline (mostly moisture gradient).

12-14 hr HRRR forecasts valid from 00-02 UTC showed development very similar to observations albeit just about a or two far east and lacking the secondary more westward line of convection. Given the large 0-1km SRH from observed soundings and the lateness of model convection, it is no surprise why the HRRR failed to show any (and thus not significant) updraft helicity associated with the storms.

This point alone should highlight why it is so tough to forecast severe weather with models that may be only slight late in initiation and slow to develop. 1-2 hours late and 1-2 hours too slow to become significant (in a relative sense) means the models can be as much as 4 hours behind in convective evolution or even later if the environment is evolving and the convection doesn't follow the same evolution as observed.

As for the NAM, lets compare the 36,24,12 hour forecast of the CFA:

The 36 hr (upper left), 24 hr (upper right), 12 hour (lower left) forecast are compared to the analysis (lower right) for the frontal positions (magnitude of the potential temperature gradient) for the 700 hPa (shaded x10-5 K km-1 per 3 hrs), 500 hPa and 850 hPa (6 x10-5 K km per 3 hrs black and blue contours respectively). The difference between 36 and 24 hr is the difference in frontal position at 850 hPa into the cold front aloft. 700 hPa frontal positions were surprisingly stable, albeit with fluctuations in magnitude. So at least in theory this event had some measure of predictability associated specifically with the synoptic precursors, but the dynamical evolution of those precursors had little predictability beyond 36 (or maybe 30?) hours prior to convection initiation.

Tornado days

2012-01-13T21:44:00.001-06:00

Revisiting the tornado data set (1950-2010), I summed up the tornado's per day to take a look at the dependency of reports per day, daily path length, daily fatalities and daily injuries. The figure below shows these variables with respect to the daily maximum tornado magnitude. Given the magnitude of this years April, the April climatology is highlighted in Red.

10 of the 43 E-F5 days (23%) occur in April contrast that with 71 of the 317 E-F4 days (22%). The April E-F5 fatalities have a median of 22 while injuries have a median of 290. This all occurs with a median of 26 tornadoes and a minimum of 11. The 3 April 1974 outbreak is the largest outlier in the E-F5 category with 148 tornadoes, 2553 miles path length, 368 fatalities, and and 6149 injuries.This years April had roughly 200 tornadoes with an estimated path length of 1950 miles. Final official numbers probably won't be available until March. I will update the graphics then.

March has 7%, May has 35% and June has 20% of the E-F5 tornado days to make up the monthly distribution. The E-F4 tornado days are distributed as such: March has 10%, May has 23%, and June has 16%. These 4 months comprise the most deadly and numerous tornado days.

Always know your data: Note the outlier in the E-F0 category for Path Length. That is an error in the database associated with one tornado on 14 AUG 2006 in New Mexico. Apparently these types of errors appear now and again and are hard to officially remove.

Tornado reports year in review

2012-01-08T22:01:00.000-06:00

I queried the storm reports page from SPC, collecting the tornado reports for the last 7 years (2005-2011). I wanted to see what kind of year this was. I started by looking at (convective) days over the last 7 years (2557 days) where tornado reports were received (1186, or 46.4%).

When 30 or more tornado reports were received daily (sample size of 68), the yearly distribution was:
2011: 13
2010: 11
2009: 7
2008: 19
2007: 5
2006: 4
2005: 9

The top 6 report days over this period were:
27 APR 2011: 292
15 APR 2011: 146
12 MAR 2006: 140
16 APR 2011: 139
5 FEB 2008: 131
25 MAY 2011: 127

So 2011 stands out both in terms of the maximum tornado report day on 27 APR (twice the reports of the next closest day), and 4 out of the top 6 report days. Quite the year for regional outbreaks, but does not beat 2008.

Reflect

2011-12-11T09:40:00.001-06:00

I watched Sarah Kay's TEDX talk on "How many lives can you live?"

So I took her literally:
kid, student, friend, businessman, builder, athlete, teacher, lecturer, laborer, master, accountant, stormchaser, traveler, adult, mentor, ~~husband~~, stepdad, dad, scientist.

What do you consider your lives?

Killer tornado perspective

2011-12-09T21:55:00.001-06:00

Caption: Far upper left is a zoom-in of the Tornado histogram by year, middle is a spinogram (the vertical scale is 100 percent and the bin width is the histogram count) of the magnitude of tornadoes, and below that is the map of killer tornadoes (inset shows 1460 tornadoes highlighted in red, out of the sample population of 55 439). To the right are the log(fatalities) histogram, below that is the log(fatalities+injuries) spinogram, and below that is the log(length*width). The red shading (the 1460 or 2.63% tornadoes) reflects the conditional distribution (based on fatalities). The color brushing is based on the bins of the log(fatalities+injuries).

I was just playing with the tornado data to see where the killer tornadoes have occurred and their stats. You can see the peak in 1974 from the Super Outbreak. The killer tornadoes, statistically, are those that are long-track and wide. Clearly these are also a function of their strength.

I really like the color brushing feature where I highlighted the log(fatalities+injuries) or large impact tornadoes regardless of fatalities. It appears that the distribution is shifted to the left (attempting to filter out the yellower shade) in the log(length*width) plot or shorter path lengths and not as wide.

The software I used to generate these plots is called Mondrian. The software is really pretty cool that you can visually play with the data. Exploring the richness of your data set becomes pretty easy in this framework. And at least you don't need to write a bunch of code to discover any patterns or even make associations.

Earthquake 5.6

2011-11-06T07:32:00.002-06:00

Update:
The NWS at Norman made an awesome illustration from the radar of all the bugs and birds who took flight during/after the earthquake. With the new dual polarization upgrade to the radar, now we can "see" the echo and know they are non-meteorological scatterers.

I love having new experiences like this one. My perception of the world has changed, and that experience is now filed under "surreal".

******
Well, scratch 1 item off my bucket list. A record 5.6 magnitude earthquake struck about 40-50 miles away. Had some real good noise, shaking (P waves), and rolling action (S waves) for about 20 seconds. It seemed longer than that since really my concerns were focused on "will this apartment collapse" when the first rolling wave went by. It took me nearly half the quake to realize what was happening (when the first rolling motion hit), because really I was wondering why the train didn't blow his horn when it was going by. Then I realized there was no train. When it was over I filed my USGS shake report. Made for an interesting evening. I now am well versed in earthquake preparedness. Probably will print off a copy of the Red Cross earthquake preparedness plan for future reference. I did not expect to ever need earthquake knowledge in Oklahoma. Hoping this is not a precursor for Mondays potential severe weather event. But you have to pay attention to the signs after a crazy year like this one ... even if it is just superstition.

eductional ramblings

2011-11-04T23:07:00.000-05:00

I was reading the NYT article on STEM education and the attrition rates associated with them. I guess they got a hold of engineering students to discuss this. They said things like classes were hard, theory driven, not practical, and wasn't until senior year when things got made or designed. Good news, folks. Such is the state in most fields where math is applied. The problem for students is that they have to do the hard work before they can get to the fun stuff.

In a disappointing turn of education, some educators try to only have fun by teaching kids cool stuff, then afterwards explaining what it means and why it works. This type of education is what you do in high school. Its called the "make it fun" principle. It is a functional distraction. It serves a purpose but is not in and of itself a framework for education. It may be considered a tool.

But the goal of education is not to make learning fun. The goal is to enhance curiosity. By making it fun we hope to get kids passionate, a level of built in motivation, to learn about what they are interested in. The other goal is to help students teach themselves. When they are motivated and passionate they will be curious.

Benefit of practicality
The other issue is how "slow" professors in college are adapting to these quickly bored/discouraged students. I find it great that professors are incorporating more application into their classes. It is always important to stop and smell the roses, evaluate where you are, what you have learned, how it applies, and build.

This is actually my talking point in atmospheric sciences at least as far as it concerns forecasting (the practical application). if you will ever be involved in forecasting, you should probably be doing that activity on a rigorous schedule both in and out of class. Paging the 10,000 hours concept. If you want to get good, you need to have experience with the real weather to compare with theory. Without this background, then all of the conceptual models remain exactly that...idealized reconstructions that you will never observe in isolation. It is why meteorology textbooks have lots of maps and examples in them!

And yet the folks who write the great books with maps and examples, don't actually teach forecasting. They leave it for the students to learn on their own...a legacy of the boomer generation. It is how they learned. A educational generational divide. And it needs to be overcome.

More More More
Another aspect the article touched on was the production rate of scientists and engineers saying it would not meet some random number. better look around for all the scientists and engineers that are out there in other fields because when they graduated there were no jobs. Move on and adapt. Think its a mystery why they do that? Engineers get a hard lesson in economics (a necessary skill in engineering) in their senior year. After all, you can't make stuff that loses money. So is it any wonder that engineers go into finance where the math is essentially simpler and they can make more money instead of being unemployed?

Rejection

2011-09-25T10:28:00.001-05:00

I started this weather blog so I could train. I am training to write. Training to identify my poor writing habits, to find my voice, and eventually improve my technical writing. This is not a task, it is a process. I recognize my failings as a scientist and the one thing I have struggled with is my writing. So it was not a surprise to find my recent paper submission was rejected. It was rejected because I failed to communicate my points, create proper linkages, and explain what I had done.

What I have continued to struggle with is to treat my writing as a reviewer rather than the author. I have no trouble being a reviewer. I really put forth a sincere effort to do a lot of paper reviews in the hopes I could retrain my brain to take the self reviewer role. Being a reviewer has helped my ability to review, but not to self-review. I have been successful at times in this process, but not consistently so.

My own self analysis of my writing process revealed that I lack the ability to restart my writing. That is, I begin writing early to get into the flow, but then fail to improve that writing. I am a writing hoarder; keeping sentences that are poorly constructed and writing around them to make up for those deficiencies. I really need to start repairing my thoughts rather than working around sentences. I don't have a solution at the moment. I had hoped that outlining and expanding those outlines would help.

In a lot of ways I have not found my voice and find writing and communicating to be one of the hardest activities in science. I am an excellent support scientist but I really need to take the time to communicate better. So I am trying to reject my bad writing and find a way to becoming a much better communicator.

More on learning

2011-09-18T12:20:00.000-05:00

I added a new link to the right hand side: Dr Rick's blog from Sylvan Learning Center. The guy is a powerhouse of top ten lists. Give it a read, because why wouldn't you want to know why a book report is worth doing.

After reading that post I realized something. This next generation of students are task masters. They have to-do lists of everything: How to get into college, take tests, get good grades, activities that are fulfilling, etc. But a to do list is just a statement of the tasks. It goes no deeper than that. The realization was that not only do kids need explanation for why something is important they also need context to understand its importance. This is a step beyond the task.

This understanding is normally called Learning. But, alas, this one step thinking (task mastering) permeates everything we do as a society. It is propagated by our politicians and our news media. It only goes so deep because "people wont understand if we get too complicated". But complicated is what everything is. We have to have higher expectations of our citizenry.

The book report post was an excellent example of how teachers and parents can measure the propensity of independent thinking in their classroom. A check on who is a taskmaster and who is a thinker. You have the chance to know how to reach a student even by that crude assessment. To discuss and question the topic at hand is crucial to learning, even to forming educated opinions. Seeking out a bunch of dissenting opinions and knowing where to do so is even more crucial as one advances in their learning. Organizing your thoughts coherently, using logic to bring them a step or two further. Then communicating that information in a way that is readily accessible to your audience. This last step is called writing. Bring your new found knowledge to the masses (journalism).

The book report post though was filled with tasks! As good as it was, it was still a checklist (a well communicated and contextualized list). I am thankful it was directed at parents (and teachers in my opinion). [I don't have a solution to hypocrisy, as I recognize that my world is filled with it as well.]

I remember

2011-09-11T23:14:00.001-05:00

I remember very clearly where I was when Challenger exploded, when the Berlin wall fell, when Iran Contra dominated the news, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and we invaded Iraq, when the OKC bombing occurred, and when the towers fell. I remember because I immediately looked at the weather as a possible cause and quickly ruled it out. I hoped it was an accident. But I knew better. I was surprised when the second plane hit but by then it was just the surprise of actually being able to see the plane hit the WTC.

I was at school listening to the panic unfold locally as "threats" had heard about the nearby capitol and local students frantically tried to make sense of both a far away tragedy unfolding and the threat of a more personal tragedy. I recall having toured the WTC on a field trip for grade school, it having been the only skyscraper I knew of let alone having been inside. I remember wondering if I knew anyone who might work in or around the city having grown up not more than 50 minutes away in southern CT.

School was cancelled around 3, and a few of us stuck around the map room to talk. I can't recall what we specifically talked about but it probably had to do with terrorism. Of course this was before we really knew anything about 9/11. I rode my bike home and subsequently came down with the flu. I literally watched the 24 hour news cycle being born in those 2 days of being home sick. I keenly remember Elizabeth Cohen, a CNN reporter, showing the buildings containing missing people flyers and being overwhelmed by what she saw. It was a very moving, raw piece of reporting. I never did see her on the air after that. It was years before I realized she is now a Health reporter. I missed her reporting.

I also remember cancelling my class of 120 students on Wednesday and returning on Friday. I walked in, got ready, and realized I had the complete attention of that class. I said what I felt: "That was some fucked up shit. Pardon my French."

I remember the feeling of getting on an airplane not too long after that. Back then TLH tested our bags for explosives and drugs. Those tests had new meaning. I was extra alert for suspicious people, as probably most people were. I was extra cautious and that feeling took a few flights to settle down. I still look around but for what I have no idea.

There was a lot of talk about heroes today. The heroes that died. The heroes who made it back out alive. The heroes who worked on the pile. The heroes who are the family members who read names aloud, who have read those names for ten years, who have raised their children and have helped their friends, family, and neighbors cope with the loss of a loved one. They continue to sacrifice.

The sequel

2011-09-10T11:26:00.001-05:00

There are two things that blow: Wind and Politics. Just add some wildfires and see what happens. Texas is in the middle of a series of wildfires that are absolutely large in terms of fire sizes and number of fires. They have received very little rain statewide for the last year and this was a record breaking hot year. Almost off the charts hot. The drought will continue for the foreseeable future with another (expected weaker) projected La Nina.

What struck me about all of this is what has happened in the political mainstream as of late, with Ron Paul (representing the Galveston area) having stated that FEMA should be deconstructed (circa just last week) and Gov. Rick Perry stating outright that states can handle disasters better as long as FEMA still gives him money to handle them (circa early 2009). But then the wildfires took the mainstage and Perry backed off of criticizing FEMA, arguing on TV that the issue he was discussing was in the past and was more about efficiency and equipment and that discussion would left for another day.

But then factor in this: Texas had planned in their state budget to cut firefighting budgets from 30 to 7 million. All of these facts seem to be playing into the type of disaster that *could* go down as being a natural disaster turned into human accelerated disaster. This is exactly the type of disaster we will face more of in the future.

This same problem will crop up in Iowa ... in the 500 year flood plain where rebuilding will be the norm and those same people will be flooded out. I believe Iowa is actually trying to navigate that situation by doing actual work on developing a risk analysis and presenting it to the people through research and outreach.

The same problem is occurring in New Orleans, sitting below sea level, where new homes have to be built on stilts. Or in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi coastlines where hurricane strikes and storm surges will be the main threat. Lets add New Jersey and New York to that list.

The bottom line is that we as a society (the entire United States) are more vulnerable because of human decisions and risk-taking. Natural phenomenon have not changed all that much, but our level of risk-taking, and our exposure has. And for every decision we make there will be consequences.

Throw in a little bit of climate change (adding new potential weather threats) to communities unaccustomed to them, and you have the makings of a period in our history where there will be significant disasters every year ... accelerated in part by our poor decisions.

I am reminded of the Veggie Tales (kid substitute for the bible) story about the 7 year feast/famine episode. What would you do if you knew you had seven years of extreme prosperity and then seven years of extreme hardship? We should be in that mindset instead of coasting for seven years then scrambling for seven years complaining how we didn't do anything to plan for it. This is actually being discussed in some of our scientific disciplines (Space Shuttle program for one). But it needs to be in the general electorates mind as well.

And lets not forget that Presidential disaster declarations for 2011 are on a record pace. Remember La Nina? She took some blame for this years disasters. Are you ready for the sequel?

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0909/Politics-of-fighting-wildfires-Did-Rick-Perry-s-Texas-do-enough-on-its-own

cold frontal passage

2011-09-04T09:29:00.004-05:00

A much welcome cold front, complete with high dew point and high humidity passed through Oklahoma last night. If it ain't the heat its the humidity. It did bring 0.2" of precipitation with it, and yet another band of very light precipitation will hit us today. (update: no extra rain.)

It appears that the continental modified air mass made its way down as expected albeit shallow. It looked more like an outflow boundary passage than a cold front (see Norman mesonet time series below). The next shot of "cooler" air comes later this morning with the drop in humidity but as the sun comes out it won't actually be cool. The baroclinic zone associated with a reinforcing shot of actual cold air is still in KS. Lets look at the sequence of potential temperature gradient maps from the University at Albany (http://www.atmos.albany.edu/gopher-local/surface/theta/).

The sequence is from 1200 UTC 9/3/2011 through 1200 UTC 9/4/2011 (I left 0900 UTC on 9/4 for brevity). You can see all kinds of baroclinic (yellow to red shading implies stronger potential temperature gradient) zones from around tropical storm Lee, to the cold front in KS, to the dryline in TX, to the hints of the modified cold front approaching OK but already into CO and the TX panhandle, and the back door cold front into AZ.

From this perspective, the real cold air will actually arrive later today and tonight. Last nights 2" soil temperature under bare soil was 87F and this morning it was 74, while our 12" soil temperature under sod is still 82. It will be interesting to see what our actual versus forecasted high temperatures will be given this initial condition change. Currently our forecast high for today is around 83 and tomorrow it is 76.

Heatburst

2011-08-13T11:59:00.000-05:00

There have been quite a few heatbursts in Oklahoma this year, and one occurred last night here in Norman. What is so fascinating about these heatbursts are the variety of signatures they produce ranging from 10 to 180 minutes of strong temperature rises and dew point falls, to weak temperature rises and strong dew point falls, gusty winds, and strong pressure falls.

Note the two heat bursts from Norman between 4 and 5 am having increased the temperature by 10F from 70 to 80 over that 45 minute span. Notice how long the episode is but how sharp those peak temperatures are. I also found it interesting that the pressure drop was 4 hPa with wind gusts to 30 mph just preceding the first burst, but a lack of gusty winds on the higher temperature heatburst with a pressure rise.

I was curious if the NSSL-WRF had a similar feature but I could not zoom into the old forecast graphic to see anything so sharp in the temperature field, but there were strong dew point drops for a similar area. This suggests that this event had some predictability. Further analysis awaits.

Much credit is due to the Oklahoma Mesonet for collecting this data, and the citizens of Oklahoma for supporting such science activities.

Bores

2011-08-12T23:39:00.003-05:00

The last few days have seen what I hope to be the start of a drought buster ~~the drought get busted~~ here in Central OK and it started off with the transition to Northwesterly flow aloft. Convection developed up in Kansas and produced outflow which propagated south and resulted in the production of a bore which transitioned to a series of solitons. The latter are atmospheric gravity waves (amplitude ordered) which propagate on the interface of the inversion aloft. You can see the waves on radar (below).

What I find interesting is that these waves passed over the Oklahoma mesonet and were well resolved with the 5 minute interval data collection. As the waves approached Norman there were 3 or 4, and passing through Norman there were 5, and afterward possibly a sixth wave.

The following day we had two waves which may be another set of bores. These waves contributed to the development of convection in eastern OK which gave the area some much needed rainfall and kept temperatures down for the whole day.

On the 10th, the radar depiction above, the NSSL WRF model did a good job depicting the convection and outflow, but I doubt there was a bore as it might not be well resolved spatially on a 4km grid. One thing I know that will be beneficial in model development is to output time series so we can see what kind of waves (density currents, gravity waves, bores, solitons, etc) emanate from model generated convection. In this way we can test whether the models are capable of simulating these features. This will probably be more valuable at finer resolution as has been shown in research grade real-data simulations down into the sub 1km grid spacing range.

These waves can be implicated in all kinds of processes, from pre-conditioning the environment to being the cause of convection initiation, to doing nothing. Exploring these fine scale features and quantifying their impacts on the model simulations (through physics sensitivity) is just another way to help understand the fine resolution models (and maybe contribute to our understanding of the real world).

Skipping class

2011-08-09T23:50:00.002-05:00

There was an interesting blog entry over at Freakonomics concerning "how professors should incentivize classroom attendance". There is a good example which I won't repeat because it only fit economics classes. I do want to address the questions they posed.

1. Is the student a consumer?
Yes, the student is a consumer of knowledge. The basic assumption is that the professor serves as both a translator of the textbook from a set of facts into useable knowledge and someone who applies that knowledge. Now not all classes allow themselves to be taught like this. In almost all classes there is some foundation upon which all subsequent learning is built. An Intro class though probably has more foundation than students care to master.

The student is not a consumer of grades. Grades are not something to be mastered, the material is. Oftentimes the true meaning of what you have learned takes additional perspective, additional time, and application to find its use and/or value. At the time it may seem like a neat trick. Later it may become something you use often and becomes second nature. The pythagorean theorem comes to mind.

Making class about reaching some set number of points becomes more about the points than actually achieving learning. I have seen it before in a class I TA'ed. A student did all the extra credit. He did well on his tests. He did most of the homework. He filled in "A" for all 50 questions on the last exam, saying he needed only 20 points to get an A. It was difficult to know if this student had learned anything or just did the work he was supposed to do. It was at this point that extra credit was not on my good side as a reward system.

2. Does classroom attendance equate to learning?
I used to think that Yes was the correct answer. The number of learning styles in the classroom has increased dramatically. So to reach larger audiences with different learning styles with one professor is difficult. It is not impossible, unless the student views him/herself as a consumer. But lets assume (in my ideal fantasy) that this is not the case. The best professor's can bring the material to life if it is bland. They can also add perspective, nuance, and practicality that can make the material more interesting. They can also be lively, interesting, humorous, engaging, and approachable. In this way the classroom experience can be mined by each student for that which captures their imagination.

But nothing a professor can do will ever change the motivation, attitude, and expectations of the student. These are simply not in the professors agenda for lecture everyday. But they go a log way to make learning possible or at least make the knowledge accessible.

So I think that classroom attendance is a necessary first step in achieving motivation and allowing an interaction to develop between the professor and students. The interplay that develops is thus a function (nonlinear) of the student and professor relationship inside the classroom. If that relationship goes stagnant for whatever reason it is the students responsibility to improve it. There is time available for this type of activity: Office Hours.

I once begged my students that were struggling to show up. They did and we worked on learning. It may not be classroom time but it served the same purpose: face to face contact. Did it work for everyone? No of course not. See the student responsibilities I listed above.

3. Are students a fair market to judge professors?
Once the class is over and they have perspective on the material and the relevance to their life or career, then yes. Immediately after they took the class? Not so much. See student responsibilities. It isn't a one way process, this learning thing. It is two ways. If you go in expecting me to to feed your brain, and your brain simply remembers it, then you missed the point and need to click "Next Blog" at the top of the page. I even demonstrated this in class once.

I got a silver platter. I gave a student all my knowledge (which easily fit on this platter). I asked if the mere act of giving them knowledge worked at helping them learn. It was rhetorical. I can stand there and talk. for. ever. and. ever. Will they just suddenly get it by showing up?

I found out that students in that class didn't like to read the book.

4. Do bonus/penalty systems work?
No. See the extra credit assignment I discussed above. But when I started taking them to task on the book they at least opened it, flipped through it. Which I wanted. I incentivized the book and thus learning. I asked what the chapter was about. It wasn't a hard question, but how many missed it the first time? Quite a few. I kept them on their toes with simplicity. Note that I did not incentivize the grades. I got them to commit to act. Or not.

Really in the end a bonus or penalty system only works if they CARE. You cannot make a student care about learning if they walk in not CARING. The best professors care about learning. They don't care about grades, or points, or even exam scores. They use exams as a metric to monitor learning. If you cheat, the professor gets the sense that you are learning. How can we help you learn if we already think you are learning. That is the students penalty and the rationale for the honor system.

The only system that works for getting students to learn are the burden of responsibilities that students place on themselves. We talk alot about personal responsibility. But when you start buying stuff and want your money's worth, logic goes out the window, and it is about someone else's responsibility to fulfill a deal. Bonus and penalty systems make the system seem leveraged (in your favor ... a discount) when they are not. By that I mean bonus points are a plus for you in the absolute sense. Penalties are a bonus for you if you bet your classmates will be penalized more than you and thus are relative. Both can be advantages to your grade but not your learning.

twice the Scientific communication?

2011-07-07T23:19:00.000-05:00

I recently read two articles by Dr. Alan Betts pleading to the scientific community that more effort be devoted to communicating their science to non-scientists. This is indeed a potential benefit to the public but it does have serious implications.
The good:
1. The "public" has a translator for science reducing the sensationalism of every finding
2. The science could be beneficial
3. The "public" would become more aware of what their tax dollars pay for and why it is deemed important
4. Scientists could help educate the public through this type of outreach

The bad:
1. Scientists would spend time writing two papers for every paper they publish
2. Not all science needs to be communicated to everyone so who decides which papers are worthy of translating
3. The scientists would be doing the work of science journalists

In general it is a good idea IF we could figure out which science is deemed public consumable. Not every published paper necessarily needs to be communicated. Rather a body of work which presents specific findings on a public-relevant topic. Along these lines it would be nice to have a report, for lack of a better term, which describes what the funding accomplished. Usually this is described in a researchers CV or resume as what papers were published in relation to particular research efforts.

But again, it is time consuming. Time consuming though is code for not worth the extra effort since you already wrote up the paper to specifically communicate with those in your field.

This is why journalism was created: To report relevant information to a curious or demanding public.

So has journalism been doing a great job? In the words of Jon Stewart: "The bias of the mainstream media is towards sensationalism, conflict and laziness". Thus I believe it is time to wake up the true journalists.

Journalists were good when they sought to lead people toward knowledge (at least I hope there was a time when that happened). As of now most journalistic efforts focus on dumbing down science ... on purpose. Even the words. As we all know this strategy has been implemented for centuries. In politics. With remarkable results.

In fact all news organizations employ the latest greatest strategy for attracting viewers: opinion. But not just offering an opinion, but soliciting your opinion. Everyone can have an opinion, but are all opinions equally qualified? The mere act of offering an opinion is like placing a bet in a poker game. You now have something to lose by playing. This is what politicians do. They comment on anything. Sometimes with great care, other times off the cuff. Off the cuff usually gets them in trouble, because someone holds a more informed opinion, and will find fault with your opinion (sometimes based on facts).

This is where social media enters the picture, because social media is an opinion playground. This is where you voice your opinion and others can agree with you, making it feel like you are correct because others hold similar opinions. Does that make your opinion correct? Maybe. Maybe Not.

What is clear is that communication is needed in all realms especially as more information is available. This requires education and "smartening" up the science to be consumed by a more intelligent public. The public is clamoring for more knowledge. They are seeking ways to not struggle, ways to not get screwed, and ways to succeed. It is clear that knowledge in all aspects of our lives is to our benefit, whether its how care for yourself so you have fewer health problems, to how to protect yourself from weather. They are rediscovering they need this knowledge to survive.

In this case, I like the idea of better scientific communication but not at the expense of science. The system as a whole needs to serve the public better. I don't think that a one sided solution will work so I propose that we fix the system. We need better education, less sensationalistic journalists, less sensationalistic information consuming habits, and more communicative scientists.

Meeting an astronaut

2011-06-24T22:46:00.001-05:00

When any high-ranking official comes to the Weather Center, we all get to jump. I won't bore you with the topics of weather conversation. Meetings are called, visits are made, speeches are provided during meetings. This week it was Dr. Kathryn Sullivan from NOAA. First US woman to walk in Space. Was on the mission to put the Hubble Space telescope in orbit. Flew on the shuttle 3 times. Also served as NOAA chief Scientist in the 90's.

When I read her bio, I was excited to even be offered a chance to hear an astronaut speak. Yeah, I know I sound like a kid. But I really enjoyed her stories. Being stuck in the airlock when the hubble's solar cells did not deploy, then having a tech "fix" it, thus stopping a perfectly good EVA. Especially when she casually mentioned that training for fixing anything on Hubble took 5 years! Not to mention stating that she got the same look at Hubble as we did here on Earth, being stuck in the airlock after all just in case the solar cells did not open through commands. It was also interesting to hear about the risk of that mission, running models to make sure the density calculations were correct for Hubbles' drag, since the thrusters to maintain its orbit were weak, so initial placement was critical. And, as she said, "the astronauts wanted to make sure we had enough fuel to get back", since they were headed to an orbit twice as far as the space station.

She flew in April 1992, 3 missions before I saw my first Space Shuttle launch in August 1992. Back when the shuttle flew often. A silly personal stat, but one of significance for me. It was cool to meet her and hear her down-to-earth stories. I should have asked for an autograph.

Hazardous Weather Testbed

2011-06-24T12:48:00.000-05:00

I spent some time blogging about the activities of the HWT, specifically the Convection Initiation component. Here is the link:
http://springexperiment.blogspot.com/

A good chase Part 2

2011-06-15T06:48:00.002-05:00

It is always very instructive to go back and learn something about the storms you chase. This is really the only way to chase for me, and now that I have access to vast amounts of data with actual data visualization capabilities, like zoom, without writing massive amounts of code (downloading, storing, processing, picture making, looping, then zooming) I looked at our storm from Saturday.

Turns out there wasn't just one merger but at least 3, in different parts of the storm right about when we stopped just before Follet, TX to the west of Shattuck, OK. I had assumed that the one storm merger I saw coming was the culprit for the crazy behavior we thought was happening. The data present a different picture of what I might call a weak storm.

The storm really was weak in terms of rotation from the lowest elevation angle as seen from Amarillo. Visually we recognized this fact, but the slow moving storm, was really trying to generate rotation that may just have been small enough to avoid radar detection at relatively long distances from the radar.

So around 7:25pm a new storm went up to the west southwest of our storm (achieving 40 dBz) and merges to the north by 7:43pm. A new storm forms on the southern side of our storm at this time (hitting 35 dBz) and merges to the southeast by 8:01pm. Another storm initiates by 8:10pm and merges 9 minutes later.

All of these mergers had a constructive effect on the storm, helping it achieve a substantial size (even squareness) that made it resemble an HP supercell. The result was a decent vortex at 8:15pm (after we had already seen a few attempts at tornado-genesis) and while we were in the second RFD surge. As we continued after this surge, basically following close behind the demarcation between rain driven RFD and decent conditions, we re-entered the RFD and then after a brief "lull" another RFD hit us. This is, I think, the effect of the older circulation RFD hit us, the mesocyclone moved east and then southeast, and a new meso formed back to the north moving southeast. So our two RFD surges on 15 east of Follet were from different circulations, and it was the second circulation which jumped further southeast that produced a tornado which hit 6 miles north of Shattuck.

Just as a reference for the environment I saved the Amarillo and Norman soundings:

The bulk shear in the 0-6km layer is at or above 40 knots, the instability is marginal at AMA but if we account for a solid 10F increase in dew point where our storm was, then the instability was probably in the 3200 ballpark. Arnett, OK dew points just to the south of Shattuck maintained a 60 dew point well into 7pm. The other difference at Amarillo is the wind direction in the lowest layers, which was southerly in the sounding, and southeast at 15 knots, probably lengthening the hodograph.

A good chase

2011-06-12T09:04:00.000-05:00

Saturday, 11 June 2011 looked like a decent day to chase storms over in the panhandles. After spending 5 weeks in the Hazardous Weather Testbed we were eager to once again let mother nature show us how much we didn't know. En route we targeted Woodward but continued on west and wanted to be in Lipscomb county Texas where we intercepted our first storm of the day. It took a while to get going and looked a bit ragged at times, but slowly it matured into a rotating supercell. And man was it slow moving. We watched it for nearly an hour, and in the latter half of that time it kept on trying to spit hail and rain on us, with each pulse a little stronger, and then finally rear flank downdraft cuts emerged and multiple spin ups at cloud base resulted. It was wild to see the mesocyclone occlude and wander back to the NW, while the next spin up emerged a little further east and south. There was a small funnel we observed at this location, and also a possible brief tornado, though it was pretty far away to know for sure. I think it was reprted as a brief rain wrapped tornado, though. At one point it appeared to jump to the east, right over the road we were, but another of rotation developed over the car. The cloud motions were awesome, and the bases of the clouds that were higher were slowly, but step function wise, lowering.

I was also struck by the interesting fact that the storm was half heartedly splitting, with the left mover barely making it out before essentially evaporating at the base. There must have been at least 3-4 splits, marked only by the ragged low-mid level cloud (remnant updraft).

So we headed south to Darrouzette to reposition further east, essentially trying to get northeast of Follet. But, another storm blew up right in our storms flank. So we stopped on 15 just before Follet and got to watch a few tornado genesis attempts, which were pretty cool. As we were watching, the RFD came surging out, maybe 40 mph winds from the west. The circulation had jumped further south and was heading east. So after watching this for about 25 minutes we pushed on east and within 5-10 minutes we got slammed in some RFD rain. This was about 8:11pm and the hail started to get bigger (maybe at most a few golf balls) and the winds were around 50-55mph, and it was pretty amazing. After a 5-10 minute stoppage, we carried on and re-entered the RFD but this one was a little different. It pulsed in severity, maybe getting up to 70 mph, with a few larger hail stones. We got hit with at least two rfd surges at this location maybe 4 miles east of Follet, perhaps a few miles from the border of OK. That was as intense as I have seen an RFD surge with nothing but north winds. We turned the car out of the wind, and eventually turned around to head further south since we couldn't very well keep putting ourselves into the RFD.

We made it south, finally got cell coverage and realized that our storm was a giant high precipitation supercell. We couldn't make around Higgins and get back on the storm so we stayed back and watched the next supercell to the west which was attempting to form a wall cloud, so we watched that storm for a while. The group collected lightning still shots from this storm. We attempted to follow it as night set in. As we drove North to the nearest east option we took out a ginormous raccoon, injuring my chase partners vehicle. We fishtailed, but through some superior driving, we recovered. The raccoon lost the battle but won the war (aka. a bit of car damage to the front fender (fender is a poor word for shitty fiberglass front panel attached by plastic that breaks easily). But then again it was probably a serious 30lb raccoon.

There were quite a few animals roaming around last night, including coyotes. Glad none of them decided to run across the road.

We also drove through quite a few towns without power. Shattuck being one of them. This was because our original storm produced a tornado around 830pm, while we were back in the western RFD surges. I will have to look over the storm merger process to see what exactly happened (lost iPhone coverage for about 30 minutes). I doubt we could have seen the tornado unless we were really up in the rain which would not have been a safe position. Either we waited too long after the failed tornadogenesis attempts, or we were already too late as the storm merger took over the evolution.

First shitty cell phone picture is of the remnant left splits and the second, from the 2nd location (on 15 west of Follet but within ear shot of the sirens) is te first tornado genesis attempt.

An arrival home at 130am made for a fantastic, classic storm chase. It was easy going with all the long stoppages. But rather complete with all types of lurking danger. I had a ton of fun reconnecting with mom nature, something every storm observer likes doing I think. It was quite a show and we were lucky enough to have good seats to this one. I don't think anyone was hurt in this storm so that is also good news considering this years events.

Caring about teachers

2011-06-05T01:01:00.000-05:00

I was pointed to this opinion piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/opinion/04zimmerman.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

I was appalled by the first quote. Clearly that person was more than angry. She stopped caring. Whatever her reasons, she should cease being a teacher. Because after that quote she wasn't going to be saving anyone in the classroom either. The rest of the quotes from teachers were just free speech. Hardly can anyone say that privacy was violated by exposing names. I guess an argument can be made that if you know the teacher then you can figure out the students. But the statements are too general. And general statements like those were not made in haste. They were made after comparison to other classes. And if they weren't, then they were quick generalizations stated such that a teacher can realize the challenges that lay ahead for this class.*

The conclusion of the opinion piece was spot on. Watch what you say and to whom. Complain to the people who care about you the most, because those are the people who should know your specific frustration. But let the rest of us hear your general plight, the general concerns you have about the state of education, the state of our students, and what you think we need to hear to address your grievances. My hope is that the dialogue does not get lost internally and that the teachers are supported by their colleagues and principals and school boards. But the reality is that speaking your mind just gets you in trouble. And social media lets everyone know what you said, when you said it, and it never gets deleted. Once its out there ... its out there. Then you have to go on a PR tour to defend your comments.

The problem isn't people speaking their minds (most of the time). The problem is that a lot of people can not put themselves in your shoes (e.g. lack of empathy). Nor can they take criticism without getting offended. There is also an issue of "it's someone else's problem". Like Teachers. I give you my kid and you teach them. Its your job. The tendency to segregate the roles can lead to failure. Teachers assist learning. They expect active participation. It is not passive. It is not passive for parents either.

Forcing teachers to be passive and under strict control doesn't lead to successful outcomes. Teaching requires taking risks. It also means letting teachers have control so they can take those risks. Like telling parents they need to step up and stop making excuses, just as much as they need to tell their students the same. I just hope they allow themselves to hear that message.

I doubt I am being eloquent here. But we should always be on the side of our caring teachers while supporting the students. And we should be really concerned if our teachers stop caring.

*Yeah I know. Sounds like I am making excuses. Perhaps. But I know that frustration. I have complained too. But it needed to be said for my benefit and for my students. Not as an insult for those lazy, whiny students ... it was the truth. Some of them admitted as much. Some of them gave up, stopped doing required work and hoped that by persevering they would pass. They became passive. Some of them passed or excelled when I cited their passivity to their faces. They knew that passivity wouldn't work. They appreciated the honesty and that I cared.

Endeavor

2011-05-16T00:59:00.000-05:00

I napped too long today so now I am awake. While blogging about the Hazardous Weather Testbed, I had the computer tuned in to http://www.spaceflightnow.com where I was watching the NASA video of the new instrument going to the ISS. [mental note: I know so many acronyms that they are starting to repeat.] It is called the AMS and will look for really cool particles (dark matter hopefully) and figure out where they came from. Truly spectacular experimental platform. They do really cool science and I am always awestruck at how risk averse science can be. Especially at NASA. Risk averse probably isn't even in there vocabularly.

They probably use a word like redundancy. Take big risks but only if you can make a back up system for it. So I over-dramatize. Sh. This is my blog. Seriously though. They spend decades building equipment, that helps them design big experiments. The satellite that entered orbit around Mercury? They built a giant umbrella to protect it. They have fancier names like heat shields but whatever. The umbrella is made of stuff they had to dream up, before they could even consider flying to Mercury. And they had to prove it could withstand the heat and protect the satellite. They are so close to the sun, that the solar panels have to be at an angle to the sun or they would melt away. Talk about taking risks.

And that is yet another reason why watching shuttle flights is so powerful. It isn't just the 385,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and 143,000 gallons of liquid oxygen that are placed in two tanks in the external tank ... next to each other ... at -423 F and -298F respectively. It isn't just the fact that when mixed those volatile substances power the shuttle to orbit and oh by the way, makes water. Its all the stories of the astronauts, the science they do in space, the science produced to get to space, the engineering required to make it all work, and the payloads they carry that will produce more information which leads to robust and powerful understanding of the universe. And every now again we hear about the science that mission provides to us right here on this blue dot.

It was a risk to start with and it will always be risky to go beyond what we think we are capable of. Yet, this year NASA will launch or has launched a number of truly remarkable satellites. More space discovery awaits even though the shuttles will retire. Instead of mourning the loss of the shuttle fleet we should take the time to appreciate our accomplishments via the shuttle program. The next time we launch our astronauts into space, it could be aboard a commercial rocket. And that will be another milestone in space exploration. I hope I get to at least wait in line for my ticket into space.

Don't dumb it down

2011-05-01T10:48:00.000-05:00

The Outbreak of 27-28 April 2011 was incredible. Incredible loss of life in a relatively high population density area, amazing damage to what we believe are sturdy structures, amazing long track tornadoes, some incredible supercell storms, incredible LIVE coverage of the tornadoes, and an incredible number of warnings, and a pretty good warning lead time performance for the weather service.

What I also find incredible is the disconnect between the linkage of science and society as it pertains uniquely to journalism. I will not pretend I am a journalism expert. I am not. So take the following with a grain of salt.

What makes a great story are personal details. Something the reader can relate to and understand. As if they were there, reliving the story with themselves as the subject of the story. There is implied intelligence here. This human story does not require anything more than what happened and how did you feel and what was going through your mind. This gives that sense of being there only without the mystery of what happens next. The spoiler was probably the title, and the fact that a person was interviewed means they survived.

To add to the story writers like to add facts for perspective. They look for all kinds of facts. They ask the experts and then they modify the words for effect sometimes losing all coherence. They like to add words like rare and extreme.

Then they add their own perspective. They cite their experience of why they are qualified to offer an opinion. Read that sentence carefully. There is only one. Assess if they are truly qualified to make a statement. It is usually obvious. If you ask a wrongologist, they would remind you that the writer is like the coyote chasing the road runner off the cliff (not having fallen yet). They keep writing because they are on a roll and havent taken stock of where they are. Then they realize. They look down and fall.

I have read a number of articles where the writer just hasn't realized. Then they make statements which seem plausible but wouldnt stand up to a thorough review by a subject matter expert. Remember the experts? They are interviewed first. The editor has the last say. Think he/she is a scientist?

The disconnect is in the presentation of "dumb-downed" science. The public may not understand everything about the science, but surely they are capable of learning. We need a more educated public. A more educated public is quicker to adapt. They are harder to confuse. They are privy to the "inside" information ("inside" will fade away when everyone knows the information). They are more likely to prepare because the risk is that much more understandable, that much more real, and that much more on their radar (~~pun unintended~~).

I like when people on TV say things like: "We are not used to this like people on the Great Plains." Thanks. I accept your accolades. You just insulted all your listeners. You told me that other people are more prepared, more accepting of the risk, more in tune with the violent weather risk. You also admitted publicly that you haven't done enough to prepare your listeners for that dreadful day.

Ask any survivor if they are used to being in a tornado that is ravaging their lives. The people are used to warnings and watches. They believe they are at risk, rightfully so, but usually are not directly at risk. Tornadoes tend to be small. That is one aspect of the problem. Big mile wide tornadoes are somewhat rare and also somewhat weaker on average, a fact I still find surprising. (I await that data being published in a peer reviewed journal.)

Not all stories or opinion pieces are bad though. I have read quite a few amazing stories, seen even more on TV. The father and son who left their mobile home to seek shelter face down in a ditch. The apparent life saving act was a tree falling on them to keep them anchored to the ground before it was lifted off of them by the tornado trying to suck them up. I guess the word is getting out to the mobile home folks, even if it is a relative few. This was the 2nd such story I read where people left their mobile home and sought refuge in a ditch. Others who stayed in theirs, were not so lucky.

****
Was this event rare? Rare in the once every generation rare. In terms of the meteorology it was certainly unique to have so many supercells producing long lived, long track tornadoes. The violence of those tornadoes was certainly not rare, but the number of them that were violent in a high population density area could perhaps be described as rare.

The EF5 in MS received the following description from the NWS Storm Survey: "appliances and plumbing fixtures in the most heavily damaged area were shredded". That to me is rare, having not been a storm surveyor, but only because I too think that the safest place to be in a house without a shelter or basement is the bathroom. Where all the pipes essentially reinforce the walls at least in a small area.

I should also refer you to this blog: http://stormeyes.org/wp/ for more perspective on this outbreak. It was well worth the time.

Impressive rain totals

2011-04-25T19:53:00.000-05:00

A ton of rain has fallen in the last few days but the image above shows the last 7 days. Is it any wonder that a levee in MO is about to burst? From Central AR through TN, and across MS and AL will also fill in as more severe storms and rain affect the region tomorrow and Wednesday. Tonight it appears OK will add to its catchup rainfall. Below is the 5 day precip forecast from HPC:

Certainly the human impact will be a bit more wild as all the rain floods some areas and puts them at risk for the severe weather outbreak. Today was the first time that the Storm Prediction Center issued Moderate Risk areas for Day 1, 2, and 3. Regardless of the tornado impacts, it is going to pour down rain on already wet ground tomorrow. Add some tornadoes and wind, and trees are going down. Add more rain and certain locales will experience flash floods and your regular run-of-the-mill flooding.

And if that isn't enough, a nasty bow echo with tornado warnings is currently going through Little Rock. A quick glimpse at the storm total rainfall product from Little Rock shows 15"+ rainfall in the last few days over a non-trivial area. The bow echo should add even more to those totals.

NSSL WRF performance

2011-04-10T14:09:00.000-05:00

The more I looked at the NSSL WRF forecast from yesterday the more interesting it was.

While the model initiated storms off the warm advection cloud band in Iowa after 0100 UTC, which did turn out to be correct, it was not severe nor was it the major player. Observations indicate this was part of an alto-cumulus castellanus area.

The area in NE where storms initiated in the real world along the warm front sharpened until 23-00 UTC where in model land it weakened considerably. There was an indication in the model that reflectivity was small but non-zero when the convergence was strong. This is a good albeit weak signal.

Another area under consideration for convection initiation was along the dryline in KS and northern Oklahoma where one storm formed around 23 UTC. The model had little in the way in convection here until 2 hours later, along the dryline.

Another area was in SW OK, where observations indicated a small, weak storm developed around 01 UTC and quickly died off. The closest model storm was at 05 UTC. Of course, the whole forecast goes awry in these latter two isolated storms as the model initiates convection all along the dryline from KS through Southern Oklahoma. The last 6 hours of the forecast looks little like what happened in terms of storms. I would caution that the model is not entirely wrong, just very aggressive. The cloud fields in the model develop into convection but closely resemble the cloud fields observed.

We are just beginning to harvest the wealth of information contained within such forecasts. I believe we will learn a lot more about these types of forecasts when we get down to looking at cloud fields (not at the grid scale but over substantive areas) and use these to compare the model with observations. This perspective should give forecasters more confidence in the overall appearance, and solidify what to look for when examining fine resolution forecasts. I think information extraction will be much more successful than reflectivity alone.

http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/wrf/110409/

Supercell buffet

2011-04-09T20:21:00.001-05:00

It appears that parts of Iowa, near Mapleton and points east and southeast were hit hard by 3/4 mile wide tornado (according to the storm reports). The storms took a while to develop and mature but sure enough once that cell crossed into Iowa it was going nuts. Here's why:

1. The instability was high, up around 3600 J/kg and moisture was 13.6 g/kg through a deep layer.
2. The low level shear was 27 knots and the bulk deep layer shear was 62 knots.
3. The hodograph is a classic quarter circle up to 6 km.

Of course the other storms in Nebraska were prolific splitting supercells, with the left mover racing north. A very impressive supercell buffet. This area was highlighted well by SPC, despite the NSSL WRF having nothing in this area today. This was also despite a relatively good forecast by the same model for events last night in the Ohio River Valley. The cloud simulation looked good too, but perhaps the resolution was just too coarse to really capture the boundary layer processes responsible for convective initiation of relatively small thunderstorms.

UPDATE: Sounding image obtained from SPC, and radar image from College of DuPage (http://cod.weather.edu)

Chasing supercells

2011-04-08T23:08:00.000-05:00

Pretty good chase day today. Any chase day is a great day, but this was good because it ended my absence on the Plains after roughly 4 years. It culminated in a splitting supercell with near tennis ball size hail in a marginal low level shear environment, but favorable bulk shear environment.

Hard to say what the issue with convection initiation was, but most of the updrafts that initiated at least marginal vertical cumulus growth seemed to tilt and then result in small turrets on the top. The clusters of clouds that did manage to grow finally did so after 2200 UTC, and by 2300 UTC we had a nice storm to chase at least from its radar presentation. The base was elevated a bit but a clear updraft bell had formed, and when we drove north on I35 to stay ahead of it, noticed pretty good size hail on the ground. Maybe 2-3 inches in diameter, low-density. I even found some that had split in half so you could see the rings. Most of the hail in the grass was unbroken, but the stuff that had hit the pavement was easily smashed.

The model scenario played out fairly well. A moisture pool was left over from the late afternoon mixing of the dryline further south. Last nights NSSL WRF simulation had 1 storm form west of Tulsa and I took this to be a positive sign that CI was probable. Of course the model had some pretty high moisture values so that was a concern. However, afternoon observations indicated that dew points would hold near 64 F. Of course the low level shear was weak as was the SRH, but the bulk shear was up around 20 m/s. Plenty good for supercells, but not so good for tornados.

The focus for initiation was along a convergence zone in Northern Oklahoma that would eventually redevelop rapidly north, at least in model land. I will have to investigate if this actually occurred. I think its worth investigating from the modeling standpoint, especially the structure of the boundary layer that led to the mixing out event further south but kept enough moisture further north.

The storm we were on is to the east-northeast of WDG on the image below at the time tennis ball hail was falling while we were on I-35.

Glad to be back chasing storms...

Old Weather

2011-03-30T23:02:00.000-05:00

http://www.oldweather.org/

Pretty neat project to go through old Royal Navy logbooks and record weather observations from the scanned images and read the reports offered by the officer at the helm. It is tedious but pretty interesting, especially when you read about them taking prisoners, sighting a ship and pursuing it, or firing on ships. Check it out...

Khan part 2

2011-03-18T20:19:00.000-05:00

I have an obvious criticism of my previous post about the guy who made lectures available on line as part of this new "revolution" in education:
Does he think that every kid will watch 6 hours of lecture video at home and go to school?

The other issue regards what the role of a teacher actually is. A teacher is there to provide guidance and help and knowledge. The teacher has not only subject matter knowledge, but experience in teaching to a wide array of students. They know what works, how it works, and they have time to perfect their craft. Often times the delivery is just as important as the messenger. So by using a different teachers' videos, you are adding a challenge for the student to learn the same material from two different people. This could be an advantage in some instances, providing perspective on problem solving skills.

But the reasons that Khan cited for why this system worked were somewhat enlightening:
1. They could pause and rewind at will wasting less of my time.
2. They could go slowly through the material taking time for mastery.
3. They could work around exploring the material.

Well, I am not sure I want students to forge their own path through the material not should I expect younger learners to do this on their own. As for the other two, we are to blame for that. The standardized testing contributes, and so does the need to finish school in a year, so to speak.

Perhaps this is just evidence that we are caving to the social norms of this generation. Immediate gratification. Or it means that we recognize that we have too many different types of learners mixed into our classrooms. Does this mean we should segregate them? Smart kids go to advanced school, while slower kids go to slower schools? But really we already do this by separating the kids within the school into what I knew as "tracks". I was in the college track and even the name was daunting for kids not in it. They immediately knew what it meant to NOT be in that track.

I will bet other kids feel that same way with regard to funding, especially in the inner city and probably in the rural areas too where the smartest kids stick out like a sore thumb.

I believe Europe has a very interesting approach to education. I have only heard about the process around pre-college level: At some point in high school you are deemed worthy to attend college. Others are sent to develop a trade or craft I presume through some sort of apprenticeship. College though is just the first step. After 2 years you are selected into a major based on your math and science skills. But the principle in college is simple. You have 1 year. Show up to class or don't. Your choice. There is 1 test at the end. Pass and you advance.

The demonizing of teachers and the lack of funds mentality we pass on to our kids is showing up in the classroom. The American dream is no longer attainable for the masses. It is for the smart, or the big risk takers, or the already wealthy. This too is entering the classroom. The process of education is suffering from societal apathy. It is also suffering from "it is their job to teach you" or outsourcing of responsibility mentality. It is the students' job to learn.

I know this country has an outsource mentality, but we can not outsource education to be delivered outside the classroom. The outsource mentality is that someone else will do the grunt work ... the jobs no one wants to do. We don't have that problem in the classroom. Teachers like teaching. Ask them. They will tell you and in the process will invariably mention: "well, its not for the money". And they are correct. They enjoy the process as much as the material. They want their students to be successful.

At the least Khan is identifying issues in the classroom and pointing out that teachers are overworked. At best he is providing some help for teachers. Whether this works for the student, I think, depends on parents.

I am surprised that no one has investigated how well tutor businesses are doing. Their business was booming in my former "affluent" educational community. We could really learn a lot by looking at the whole picture (public, private schools, tutor companies, individual tutors) instead of only addressing portions of the problem; and only then by applying band aids to stop the hemorrhage.

Khan

2011-03-13T00:08:00.000-06:00

A change in perspective. Or, If you don't like the rules change the game.

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

Education for thought

2011-03-10T21:56:00.000-06:00

I stumbled across a working paper talking about incentives in Education through the freakonomics blog. The article basically states that incentives for teachers don't improve student performance. It was an outlier among other studies in other countries.

The article, while a difficult read, referenced some data from the digest of education statistics which stated that student to teacher ratios were DECREASING from 17.3 in 1989 to 15.5 in 2007. It also stated that average class size was around 23 in secondary schools and 20 in elementary schools.

I find this hard to swallow, but data is data. There are obviously some things taken into account which I have no idea about. All I know is anecdotal evidence suggests that in SOME schools class sizes are increasing.

I feel out of my league here with all these stats. I am stubborn so I haven't changed my mind on what I think is wrong. But perhaps other components of education have been harmed such as student motivation and enthusiasm, poor student-teacher interactions, or overworked teachers (incentives can't solve time problems). Lets just remind ourselves that learning is up to students. Teaching is up to teachers. I wonder what teachers would say is going awry in student achievement?

Privatizing education

2011-03-09T23:39:00.000-06:00

I have been thinking about privatizing education, mostly because I believe this is what is behind the attack on unions. It isn't an attack on education per se, but with how education is delivered. It is not an assault on teachers per se, it is a full scale offensive on acquiring the right to fire ALL teachers.

Getting costs on labor under control, to borrow that phrase, is an excuse to lower education costs such that states can issue vouchers. Vouchers which can be used so that students can pick the "best" schools and go to them. As if this is even a solution. Can you imagine if everyone wanted to go to the "best" school? Shouldn't they all be good? The only real option is specialization. But even the high school level is too early for specialization.

After careful consideration, I think we would end up with the same problems. Labor costs are not going to go away. More kids require more teachers. More kids require more buildings. More buildings and more teachers require more money. Its not a labor problem. Its a population problem.

Idaho has taken some bold steps. This includes stripping tenure, increasing pay and increasing classroom size to compensate. They are also going to offer bonuses for performance. How exactly do you increase student performance while adding more students?

To borrow some of the economic terms, have these people really assessed the indirect cost? Teachers who love to teach will HAVE to work harder to maintain performance with larger class sizes. More brains in the room demand more teaching time since the old methods don't have an efficiency rating of 100 percent. May be something in the forties. Which forces an innovation component to teacher prep. This alone is time consuming because it relies more on the delivery than the long term plan. The more focus on delivery the less time you have to advance through the material you wish to teach. And the more methods you use to deliver to reach a wider audience, the more short term a teacher is forced to consider. Diminishing returns springs to mind.

The other indirect cost is the loss of older more experienced teachers. What if you have a bad year as an older teacher? Will they even consider your body of work or just label you as ineffective? Experience is difficult to quantify. There is a collective classroom management skill to consider, not to mention the skill of dealing with individual problems from student issues to teacher issues.

So without tenure or job security, what will teachers resort to? They will be virtually forced to teach testing skills to keep their job. Skills that have absolutely nothing to do with LEARNING. Education hinges on class size and quality of teachers. But sometimes you have to have bad teachers to know what good teachers do so well. There needs to be perspective. I could not possibly imagine a school where every teacher was rated as "A" level. There are just too many different learning styles and personality types and preferences for how students learn and who they learn it from.

The public model is not failing. Just our ability to cope with the actual problems of an increasing populous and rising costs.

The legislation looks more like self sabotage.

5100 critics

2011-03-06T21:15:00.001-06:00

UPDATE: Controversy abounds because of the journal in which it was submitted; the fact that the work did not undergo internal review; the fact that it did not pass a "more prestigious" journals' peer review.

Here is an example of unprecedented peer review work involving Dr. Richard B. Hoover, a NASA scientist, who claims to have found life in meteorites that have landed on Earth.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/05/exclusive-nasa-scientists-claims-evidence-alien-life-meteorite/?test=latestnews

I find it awesome that before the paper is published, the work will be distributed for comment to 100 scientists, while another 5000 have been invited to review the work. Dr Hoover is clearly outnumbered! But he welcomes the challenge, precisely because this is about science, and scientific discovery. He is simply looking to explain what he has found and make some sense of it. Science is a remarkable process and whatever the outcome of the peer review and comments process we are sure to learn something new.

Uncertainty and skill

2011-03-04T23:22:00.000-06:00

I was reading about what the National Hurricane Center will be doing this year. It was quite interesting:
1. Watch lead time to 48 hours; warning lead time to 36 hours
2. The size of the cones will be based on 5 year running mean of 2/3 of track error. The cone size radius varies in the Atlantic basin from 36 to 59 miles from 12 to 24 hours and grows about 35-40 miles per 24 hours thereafter.*

This means they have skill out to 48 hours in advance. They will be communicating actively their uncertainty via the graphical product (cones).

My foolish expectation would be to shy away from any sort of climatological cone of uncertainty and use ensemble guidance. This may not be the best option since it could provoke the so-called meteorological cancer i.e. over-dependence on models which have little value, not necessarily little skill. On the plus side it allows forecasts to be naturally consistent ... fairly certain in their ability to track where storms are, where they are going in the immediate future. To be fair the cone widens for a reason: tropical storms and hurricanes can encounter harsh or favorable environments quickly and these types of environments are hard to recognize over the ocean at longer lead times. Of course these environments can bring about changes to the inner workings of tropical storms in which case certain status quo forecasting rules may not work so well, and of course models also tend to not be spot on with hurricane intensity changes.

If nothing else, just seeing the products and how they are discussed should be interesting. It will be worth paying attention to see how the "public" reacts to be under "threat" for longer periods of time.

* I have not seen what this will look like but it will certainly be interesting!

budget impacts to schools

2011-03-04T20:31:00.000-06:00

I have more questions than answers.
Has anyone in charge of the budget crisis given any thought to their actions from the perspective of young students or teenage students?

Villifying teachers by saying their benefits and salary are too large is just plain non-sense. Does anyone realize that teachers are on a 9 month pay schedule? Or that they work from home at least 2-3 hours per evening? And they do these things because they believe that education makes a difference in the relative success of our young people.

Do your children think about Teachers after school? Do they wonder where homework is graded, or how many classes are taught, or how many students are in their classes? Can they fathom the willing sacrifices that are made to achieve success as a teacher? Do parents teach their kids to "Walk a mile in someone elses shoes"?

If we say education matters but cut funding from schools, what does that say to kids?

Kids are listening to what we say about education and are watching we do about education and it does not compute. They know education is important but they act like it isn't. I hope you aren't wondering where they get that from.

Uncertainty cont.

2011-02-27T09:23:00.000-06:00

I have been able to examine the NSSL-WRF, 00 UTC and 12 UTC NAM this morning.
With regard to the trough that is forecast to be the major player, it is likely that significant severe will break out colocated with the strong forcing along the triple point, in the dry punch into MO, and then another round even later in AR.

The main uncertainty lies in OK, where my hopecast suggests storms could try to break out along the dryline. The problem is that it occurs just around 22-23 UTC when the wind profile might be considered terrible for tornadoes. The wind profiles in general become more favorable further east and later on putting the tornado threat into AR but the window for discrete supercells appears to be small. Rather a squall line of some type will form with probably the chance for embedded supercell structures.

Further south however, there are better wind profiles, but the cap is somewhat stronger. The 00 UTC NSSL-WRF forms a squall line there as indicated by the synthetic satellite imagery.

I don't have a good intuitive feel for what may occur given some of the wind profiles I have seen. I do think the overnight models will struggle as they are typically too far east with any convection. They also struggle to produce individual storms ... will only produce storms in stronger forcing. The resolution of the models, the tendency to produce weaker lapse rates, etc all contribute to the storm bias. That said, the main threat appears to Normans east (Tulsa area and north), northwest (along the triple point), and southeast (secondary dry punch). There is still a chance for central OK. It all depends on if any storms attempt to go up along the dryline, which ultimately depends on the relative balance between the depth of moisture in the warm sector and the cap strength.

I am hoping that LMN and OUN will launch 21 UTC soundings, and maybe 18 UTC soundings so we can really examine the wind profile evolution as well as the cap. This will be a good case for analysis either way as it is a strong forcing case that is highly dependent on mesoscale details that our models may not get correct.

Uncertainty foci

2011-02-26T11:14:00.000-06:00

1. The trough in question is still only half over the upper air network, thus there is uncertainty in its exact structure. It appears to be currently moving more south than east but that trend may be shifting to more east.

2. I found a website to scrutinize the 3 hourly soundings from the NAM. It turns out the cold air advection over OK around 00 UTC may actually be a reflection of a boundary layer deepening up to 550 hPa at KGAG! Thus while it is getting cooler aloft, it does not necessarily imply a forcing mechanism for ascent. Note that 3 hours later, descent is implied from the inversion yielding net warming in the same layer while the boundary layer significantly cools. The exact role this feature plays remains uncertain.

3. Soundings from central OK show a very shallow moist layer and cap aloft which although weakens some remains strong until after 03 UTC. This is saying a lot since the previously mentioned odd double low level jet is clearly playing a big role in the development of deep moisture. Its even difficult to get moisture into KLZK under this scenario.

Severe weather potential

2011-02-26T09:33:00.000-06:00

Interesting forecast shaping up for tomorrow evening. Somewhat strong trough will move into OK tomorrow bringing with i the chance for significant severe weather to central and eastern OK and continuing eastward overnight.

The more certain portion of the forecast is the later period late Sunday night when it appears probable that a severe MCS/squall line will tear up parts MO, AR, LA again. I think its likely as more time will allow for more moisture to advect northward in what amounts to me to be an odd linkage between a pre-existing low level jet well east of the effects of the trough and the trough. The apparent phasing of the two will occur later sunday evening. These highly dynamic environments lead to some interesting MCSs.

The early part of the threat in central OK is less certain. To me, at the moment, the most interesting part of the forecast is that the features of interest appear to slow down before entering it the Plains, then speed up once they do. This makes for a confusing scenario. The prominent features I see this morning are the dryline in western OK, the dryline warm front intersection in NW OK, and the rather strong 700 hPa cold advection over the dryline all at 00 UTC. Now, I have no idea what to expect in this type of slow then fast large scale regime. This fact alone adds uncertainty for my limited experience of significant severe weather in OK during Feb.

What is not clear is if the cold advection aloft will be enough to remove the cap, and if the instability will be large enough to be realized. We just had some rain followed by cold temperatures, and soil water fractions are high apparently. The last 10 and 30 day rainfall maps show that western OK is dry and eastern OK has seen around 2+ inches. So it is possible that strong sensible heating will take place on Sunday in areas that are drier ahead of the dryline. Will this actually matter? I will tell you on Monday.

The other major issue is how the dryline and shear align. At the moment the mean wind for sunday evening appears to be from the SW and the dryline is oriented more north-south. This angle difference will allow storms to move off the dryline. The shear vector should also orient itself across the dryline but the magnitude of that angle will be very important to storm mode.

I guess my inclination at this moment are that all the necessary ingredients can be found, it will be a matter of how they come together and when that will occur and for how long. For now, at least, it is important to get that moisture screaming northward. I could use a good storm chase.

A lot will change. But I think there is a chance for supercells. I am uncertain where convective initiation will occur, and where severe storms will get going, and what that initial mode will be. I will evaluate the Short range ensemble Forecast (SREF) when the 15z run becomes available later this afternoon. Really this is just me getting my thoughts ramped up ... otherwise known as situational awareness.

Trying not to lose

2011-02-10T21:49:00.000-06:00

http://www.spacenews.com/policy/110208-house-earth-science-funds-manned-spaceflight.html

The point of the article is a bunch of lawmakers who want to reorient NASA back to human spaceflight. They will do this by taking climate monitoring funding, referred to in the article as global warming funding, away.

I believe a policy like this does 3 things: gives lawmakers the power to control research directions (even if only on this one particular goal), it hurts the climate monitoring via satellite initiatives that we sorely need, and it presumes to send humans back to the moon via, I assume, the constellation program.

I don't think the moon is a good goal and I really like that commercial space transport and delivery is making significant accomplishments via SpaceX and Orbital Technologies. This is good but not great news, since I doubt these companies will profit much. I think we need to think big like Mars. The challenges Mars poses are grand. Materials science, engineering, biochemistry, chemistry, biology, psychology, psychiatry, nanotechnology, etc will all need to be utilized in a major way. It could be the sputnik moment. Of course, the obvious problem is that a Mars trip is one way, right now. And that is why the moon is the next "best" thing.

The satellite issue is important since both weather and climate rely on satellite monitoring. Satellite development is long and expensive but it pays in science even though it costs a ton. The most exciting in my mind is soil moisture which the US has not been able to do, but the Europeans have. Why does NASA do satellites and climate monitoring? Because its a natural fit. They build them, launch them, and monitor them. No other agency is qualified to do that.

The controlling of research dollars and directions by lawmakers ...well...I don't care to comment on that at the moment. These are people trying to save jobs at home to guarantee continued employment for their constituents. But really it aligns with their re-election priorities and that's why it makes more sense to them. The status quo is desirable for jobs and who can blame them. Keep what you have so you don't have to risk asking for money for new job development in your region. especially in a floundering economy.

I don't really have a good sense that this budget stuff will help without a reorganization of our goals ... both public and private. I like slogans like "win the future" because really what we have been doing is trying not to lose. We need high risk high reward activities and they cost money. It will take money and the will to take big risks. But trying not to lose is not working.

Meteorological data

2011-02-08T02:43:00.001-06:00

UPDATE: Remember when I said there are some missing data? Yeah. Only for the case I want to analyze. The exact 16 hours I most wanted. Funny that the operational data that is saved all over the place has more observations than the archived ASOS data at NCDC. Redundancy is an important part of data archival.

I am analyzing a particular case and have been looking at the unique observations that the Oklahoma mesonet collects. I want to add to this huge data source. Therein lies the issue. Merging data sets is quite a task. Of course the fancier one gets, the more trouble there is.

Recently the NWS added many stations to its list of archived, 1 and 5 minute ASOS data. It is a decent dataset even if it is spatially sparse. The issue is the format. Now regular hourly and special observations get transmitted in METAR format. There is a nice decoder written for GEMPAK which processes this data. I would say it is awesome but it is suitable. What makes it better is that it retains the whole METAR data string for subsequent data mining. This ensures that some of the metadata (+TSGRFC, PRSFR, etc) are not lost.

However, the potential research quality dataset currently being archived at NCDC undergoes no quality control and the files can have transmission problems. It also suffers because if the data are not relayed in time, the data is lost. Thus one must process the data and visually inspect for issues. I did this many years ago as part of my PhD training for the BAMEX field project and it was a nightmare to write code to process the 1 minute data. I ended up having multiple Fortran codes to deal with some of the transmission problems, formatting problems or missing data.

The five minute data are stored in METAR format, but not exactly METAR form. I would think someone could process the minute data into a quality 5 minute data set with a decent, readable format and provide some measure of quality control. (I will share my code which reads the data. ) This could be an interesting data set. As it is now it is difficult to work with, but not impossible. I heard that the community was trying to organize a network of networks for surface data. I hope they succeed and I hope they model whatever they do with the successful components of the Oklahoma Mesonet, MesoWest, and the Iowa Environmental Mesonet.

Brief Comment on Climate Change

2011-02-07T17:40:00.000-06:00

I read this today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

I think Krugman makes a good point. It is one I have written about before.

Let me say that I don't know if "crisis" is the correct word to use. Higher prices, sure, but not relative to 2007. Economies are more sensitive to weather, absolutely. And as I blogged a few days ago, under the type of climate change I believe we are in, the variability increases with respect to extremes (floods and droughts, heat waves and cold spells, etc). Whether this increased variability would occur under different climate states or different rates of change of climate states, I don't know.

The point is that this type of global weather impact can not only be disruptive and expensive, it points out how vulnerable we are to climate change. This problem will only get worse as more people require more food. Human expansion has also resulted in the fading away of the family farm, and as the current global economic crisis continues more farm subsidies will be on the chopping block as budgets get reigned in. Thus it is the human-earth system that we need to understand. I know first hand that many groups are working on these challenges both academically and through the government.

It will be a while before we know if this is the "first taste" of our vulnerability but I strongly doubt it was. Debate will rage as economic, agricultural, and climate and weather related issues all conspire in various degrees. What is clear is that we remain vulnerable. Technology may have helped in the last 90 years, but it won't save us.

NSSL WRF performance over OK

2011-02-06T00:56:00.000-06:00

I grabbed some 2 meter temperature forecasts from NSSL's WRF 4 km model simulation from 00 UTC 5 February 24 hour forecast to compare with what happened on Saturday.

The model did not do terribly well but it highlighted the issue with snowpack. Lets go to the pictures:

The images depict the 2m temperature in 2 hour increments from 18 to 22 UTC; with the 22 UTC image being the warmest time of this day. What stands out is the warm air over the TX panhandle which does not expand rapidly into OK. Just east of the OK panhandle it warms rapidly, but it does not expand and penetrate eastward. Over OK, the cold patch, which aligns perfectly with the storm total snowfall and thus snow pack, does not appreciably change shape but it does warm a bit. Clearly the model had a poor representation of the snow cover, both in areal extent and depth.

From the previous post, the high temperatures even over the deep snow pack near Tulsa in the core of the model cold patch, got to near 40F ... a difference of 20 F!

The situation eases later as night arrives by 00 UTC. Below are the 24 hour forecast from the model and the initialization from the next cycle.

The differences between these 2 images is difficult to discern but they are still large, because of the eastward shift of the OK cold patch and the eastward extent of warmer air. This is an interesting case where I would expect this type of model to perform better. Diagnosing the evolution of the snow pack and the low level temperature tendencies both aloft and from within the model physics (boundary layer scheme) should shed some light on why the model performed poorly.

Temperature forecasting over the snow cover

2011-02-05T21:47:00.000-06:00

How high will the temperature get across OK over the snow pack?

The sounding above at OUN was taken at the morning low according to the Norman mesonet site. Now it snowed another inch or two yesterday to make the compacted snow depth anywhere from 3 to 5 inches. The snow we had was an icy consistency. I walked on it and only in the drifts was it actually loose snow.

The forecast high for today was 36 (as of this writing was upped to 38) from the NWS, and I thought that was pretty good. But it is always difficult to predict the high temperature when the ground is snow covered. The high for the day in these situations depends how far from the bare ground you are relative to the low level air mass that is moving in. The 1845 UTC visible satellite image shows where the snow is. The whiter the ground the deeper the snow:

I can't mark where Norman is but trust that we are not very far from the edge of the snowpack and points to the west of us didn't get that much snow in the first storm and barely received any in yesterdays.

However, a forecasting technique I learned at UAlbany was the 850 hPa method. This method assumes that air from above the surface will serve as the upper limit as the boundary layer grows upward. Of course the atmosphere aloft is not usually stagnant so you need to account for that. This mornings OUN sounding had an 850 T of 1.6 C with even warmer temperatures of 6.4C at 911 hPa. This suggests a temperature of 14.3 C from 850, or a temperature of 13.6 C from 911 hPa ... again assuming these temperatures change very little during the day. So the mid to upper 50's!

So the forecast problem is the battle between surface effects: how the incoming radiation can heat the ground and help that mixing process along versus how the mixing occurring elsewhere (in this case to the northwest and west) brings in warmer air over the snowpack. The latter is usually referred to as an internal boundary layer.

Now, the temperature is obviously controlled by the snow depth and snow cover and there should be an obvious temperature contrastor gradient across the plains:

Note, the yellow shading which tells us the potential temperature gradient pretty much aligned along the edge of the snow pack from this morning.
I will add the 18UTC and 21UTC maps when available below:

The potential temperature gradient shifted somewhat east as the snow below has melted and temperatures have warmed.

So far at 4pm local time the temperatures in western OK have risen to 62+F and Norman is currently around 45F! This is pretty much going to be the high for the day.
I will add the mesonets max T plot when it is available:

Now where did this warm air layer aloft come from? Downslope off the mountains as the large scale trough passed through our region. Temperatures at 850 hPa warmed from -15C to 2C in 24 hours at Dodge City, and from -18C to 2C at Amarillo.

A comparison of soundings from Lamont indicated a slow warmup primarily in the boundary layer with just a minor change in the height of warm layer. However by 00 UTC it was clear that the entire column was warming significantly downstream from the mountains. LMN and OUN were clearly situated in a warm advection regime at 00 UTC. Given the sounding structures, you could have used the 850 method with forecast soundings, not upstream soundings given how much the entire temperature profile changed.

Of course, it is very interesting that the sounding at AMA can not be used to show the large surface warming over western OK. AMA only reached 12 C which is around 50F, while western OK reached 62F. The implication is that the warm pocket over Oklahoma this morning was bigger (or may have even developed aloft) than could be revealed by the sounding network. Either way these mesoscale details (snow cover or lack thereof, warm pockets of air aloft from downsloping) made it difficult for forecasters to utilize observations for short term forecasts of temperature. This is a much more complex scenario for what seems like a straightforward case of temperature forecasting over snowpack.

As a side note, the temperature warmed above freezing and so all the snow in the rain gauge is melting. Now a ton of it was blown around but what was secured to the gauge from the last two snowfalls should tell us something about the sleet that fell, then the snow, and then yesterdays heavier snow. The liquid total from the melt is: as of 9:40pm is 0.32".

I take exception

2011-02-03T20:47:00.000-06:00

A recent article appeared on Foxnews.com that I found noteworthy.

I wish to challenge the notion that anyone, with any certainty, can use any recent weather event no matter how large as a sign of or lack of global climate change. Climate as we all should know is about statistics. It will take a decade or longer to know how epic this latest blizzard was.

What Al Gore got correct was the scientific evidence. He correctly stated that under global warming scenarios it has been shown that variability increases. And even during a warming trend, globally, there can be dips, significant dips (even negative anomalies) regionally. This evidence suggests that this CAN be part of global warming scenarios. Of course we don't know the reverse because I am not sure that anyone has done a global cooling experiment. Please enlighten me if such a study has been done.

The second issue I wish to be picky about is the notion of predictions associated with climate. We are assuming a CO2 increase in what can only be described as complex models, but models that do not represent the full coupled climate system. This is necessary because building complex models requires a solid foundation upon which to add complexity. And unfortunately by building complex models we can not say that a model error at this point is actually wrong because all the processes we observe in the real world are not present in the model. It is an interesting problem to say the least. One that is being tackled on the weather side as well.

What we do know is that as model resolution improves we get better, but not perfect solutions. That is good news for weather and climate. But long term climate prediction is still not an initial value problem. Though some argue this point feverishly. It is a true scientific issue and debate will continue in the scientific arena, not in the media.

Speaking of media:

"If it all seems confusing and contradictory, other experts say, the real blame lies not with the climate, or with science, or even scientists or former politicians, but with the incompetent media for failing to provide critical context for readers. "

Indeed. In this very article! Examine it closely. The first half of the article presents one side and then trails off into the other side and only by the late middle does context begin to appear. And then just as context settles in, they bring in the 1970's cooling argument. This argument was created and propagated by press reports which misrepresented the science. Which makes it irrelevant in the current discussion.

And then they close by stating that science changes! Of course science changes. It does so because we update our theories based on new evidence, new data, new analysis. And yes even scientists can be wrong. They go where the science leads them and not every avenue leads somewhere or even leads to the correct somewhere. Thats why we attempt to make results reproducible.

We call it climate change because we know way more about the weather and climate and can state with confidence that change is the best way to describe it. Some regions will warm, others may cool. Some will get more precipitation, others less. It is an important scientific distinction. It is not changing the message, however.

Climate change is not contentious because the science is weak. It is contentious because the science is young. It is further complicated because of the economic impact any action on carbon emissions might have. Scientists still have the duty to warn about impending climate fluctuations or even climate change. And the climate scientists have spoken, in consensus, to warn us about the effects of increasing CO2. They do so with uncertainty; the range of possible warming scenarios. They do so with caution. What our policymakers should be doing is deciding how to act responsibly not deciding which science is correct. The science updates all on its own.

What is not easily updated is how well scientific communication occurs between scientists and policymakers, scientists and the public, and policymakers and the public.

Education on Snow

2011-02-03T01:37:00.000-06:00

It is late. I am on a snow day. And I feel like teaching.

Real snow days are not for play dates, driving around, or going to the movies. No offense Freakonmics blogger. But snow days in my mind are dedicated to physics, science, engineering, and daredevil stunts. That is, when you have finished getting paid for shoveling driveways and sidewalks around the neighborhood. Lets not forget some good family time where you build a snowman family.*

Designing, building, and organizing an awesome sledding hill complete with jumps is an effort in fun, design, creativity, and organization. Furthermore constructing snow walls or barriers in order to have epic snowball fights is also a must. And lets not forget finding a wall so that you can pile up 3-6 feet and jump into it from above. Going super fast down a hill (engineering, physics, design), jumping off a wall (testing gravity and snow compression), and snowball fights (principles of compression, strengths of materials, chemistry) are all awesome feats of awesomeness (copyright jimmyc, because its late and I said so)!

Kids don't go outside nearly as often as when I was a kid, but they should, and snow is the perfect excuse. "Its cold" is not a reason to stay inside. Your kids have ~~abercrombie and fitch~~ Eddie Bauer (I am old) gloves, hats, scarves, underarmour, goretex coats, etc. Use them dammit! I might be strange, but I would walk miles in the snow just to do it. And I know I am not alone. I saw it in a movie once, "O Captain, My Captain".

The blog post had the air of "old" people having a snow day. Snow days are about kids (movie: Snow Day). And if kids have snow days they should be out being kids learning about the awesomeness of snow. And, yes sometimes that means doing hard work to achieve your goals. Maybe it is shoveling the sidewalk or digging out the family car, or snow removal from the roof. And then its sledding but not before gathering all the snow on your block to make the awesome luge run you saw on the Olympics ... getting water to make it nice and icy (Chemistry, engineering, physics, science!). Just to go faster.**

So stop being "old". You will have plenty of time to make your kids old. Give them the tools to be young, creative, and inventive ... away from the computer (unless autocad can do design work on snow). I guess I am saying we should always be thinking about investments not immediate, gratifying incentives.

* Not to be confused with collegiate activities which involve constructing *other things* with snow.

**Someone in OK was killed when she tied her sled to a truck and stood in it as they crossed a bridge. Not the kind of activity I endorse.

more storm communication

2011-02-01T21:26:00.000-06:00

Did the forecast scenario's and/or forecaster methods work tonight? On one hand, the uncertainty on the depth of snow was well communicated. But both the TV and NWS focused in on a time frame when the precip would start ... 3 hours later and they missed on the precipitation type. Midnight was in numerous forecasts until the radar indicated otherwise. Pesky thunderstorms again. The precipitation type in Norman was rain for like 5 minutes before massive amounts of sleet were being dumped on us.

I don't think this was a failure at all. Just an example of how difficult it is to convey uncertainty information. In the public eye you have to convey a time. But when you do, it needs to be accurate and precise. And it just isn't possible to be precise and accurate in situations like this. I can let the sleet go because it was amazingly awesome that so much sleet fell ... better than freezing rain!

We live in very uncertain times and we simply lack the communication skills, that practical knowledge of how to convey uncertainty, without falling back to hard and precise numbers. Humans have had to live with but not necessarily convey uncertainty information. We say things are uncertain then make assumptions and decisions based on that uncertainty probably without thinking too hard about conveying it. We acknowledge it, decide, and move on. Whats in the past may be reflected upon, but the situations are always unique such that it is hard to know what, if any, information may have changed your mind one way or another. Sometimes we make decisions based on gut instinct or informed decisions about "likely outcomes". At least we think we know what the outcome will be. More often than not we stumble upon the outcome while trying to make our way towards our anticipated outcome.

I find it interesting and also compelling that weather information, specifically concerning uncertainty, finds itself in the same situation as personal medical data and also the terror alert system. There was a good TED talk about the personal medical data; how it is displayed, what information to convey; giving the statistics of where you fit in. They are tailoring the information to the end user. In a similar way the terror alert system promises specific information, how to act on it, and who and where need to be alerted. It sounds like they are issuing a weather service style advisory,watch, warning type of system. I am eager to see what they bring to the table and how.

To wrap up, our society is dealing with uncertainty communication, and it is working its way down into all aspects of life. Clearly we have lots of work ahead and the lessons we learn now might help with regional climate change. A more educated society is required in these uncertain times to utilize this uncertainty information.

More storm discussion

2011-02-01T00:41:00.000-06:00

The plot thickens. Not only are subsequent model forecasts increasing the snow for central OK, but the global model has backed way off. The SREF was going crazy with anywhere from 1inch to 22 inches of snow for Norman as of 2100 UTC. The operational NAM was going for 24 inches, and the GFS was going for 1 inch. Talk about uncertainty. The funny thing is that the NAM gets its boundary conditions from the previous GFS model run.

I speculate that the width and depth of the cold air helped get the GFS a good initialization and as a result a good depiction for the NAM. But maybe that cold air depiction was projected onto too large scale such that the ingredients for this event were misaligned. Also, the NAM ingredients may be too well aligned such that convective feedback may have been playing a role in creating a lot of precipitation but was able to simulate the banded features well.

As of 9:25pm there is the lovely, heart pumping sound of thunder, big lightning streaking across the sky, and ice pellets! Some of which could count as hail. I had to take a break so I could enter some observations for the W-PING project at NSSL. On a related note station KPVJ in OK reported 0.25" of liquid equivalent in an hour (6.3 mm/hr). Impressive rate. If only we had data for the precipitation rates at all mesonet stations!

It looks like the main issues of the day were (in no particular order):
1. where would cold air be, its depth, and the depth and magnitude of the warm air layer aloft,
2. where would thunderstorms initiate and then travel over,
3. as a result of the position of the cold air, where would the surface low be,
4. and related to 3 where would the maximum divergence aloft be (horizontally coupled jets).

I looked at the SREF placement of the Upper Level Jet (ULJ) and looked at the diagnostics from SUNYA* (irrotational and non-divergent wind at 300 hPa; the 850 q vectors with the along and cross front components of the vertical motion). This event looks very similar to east coast snow storms with coupled jets. In this case the irrotational wind center was intense over OK nearly tripling in value over a 6 hour period (18 to 24 hr forecast) from this mornings NAM. The along front forcing for ascent was forecast to come through in 2 waves ... the leading one much weaker than the 2nd. Aloft the forcing for ascent is forecast to be more widespread and last longer into tomorrow late morning.

There were hints that a coupled jet structure was developing at 0000 UTC this evening. But closer inspection of the soundings suggested that a the true jet was near 200 hPa as evidenced by the 150 knot winds near 210 hPa at LZK and the 120 kts at SGF and 135 at LMN and OUN at about 145 kts. Only 0600 UTC balloons at TOP and LMN could help identify if a coupled jet feature did develop.

*Thanks to Kevin Tyle for trying to keep SUNYPAK alive!

Hype and Communication

2011-01-31T01:04:00.000-06:00

I love a good winter storm. The kind that cripples an area with ridiculous amounts of snow. I grew up in them, I love to play in them, I love to walk, run, sled in them. They are not rare in the traditional sense but it takes a well timed storm of a certain duration with very heavy snowfall (or ice) accumulation. The combination of all these has not been rare this year. The storm before last in NY, CT, MA saw liquid equivalent snowfall rates (assuming they were accurate in 40-50 mph winds) of 6 mm/hour at their peak at multiple stations. The past storm which dumped even more snow had rates approaching 4-5 mm/hour at its peak. The timing was good with snow peaking in the middle of the night but still snowing through mid morning. I believe both storms lasted around 12-24 hours depending on your precise location.

That leads me to Oklahoma where the hype machine was in full effect, and weather impacts and hazards were being communicated as early as Saturday (watch) and early on Sunday (warning) for a Monday night-Tuesday afternoon storm. It is awesome being in the hype. Shelves at Walmart were bare and people were preparing for weeks without power ... though there must be a super secret handshake I must learn so that I can store that much food before it spoils without power to my fridge.

This is good. The models are doing their job, the forecasters are doing theirs, and TV meteorologists are getting the word, and the impacts, and the story out. I am just not sure that I have a lick about the uncertainty. The fact that weather models rarely converge is not well understood let alone efficiently and concisely communicated.

I looked at what was once a "next generation" tool ... the Short range ensemble forecast (SREF). Only in the last few cycles from the last 36 hrs has the precipitation for Tuesday morning begun to highlight the risk for our area. That risk includes the snow missing us to the east! Or giving us 8-12 inches of snow.

We assume that the ensemble (a collection of perturbed models) covers a sufficient range of realistic scenarios and from this we derive a more skillful forecast. But it is extremely difficult to predict these events precisely because of how localized they can be. A small shift east or west puts (possibly) different communities at risk. By small I could mean 6 inches of snow! These types of scenarios are common in winter storms as they are in summertime thunderstorm hazards.

But what do buy to prepare for a tornado? or a roof smashing hail storm? or a downed tree storm?

What kind of information do you need about uncertainty in the forecast for these situations? For your family? for the local hospital? for the local business?

In some sense the hype is nothing more than a teaching opportunity ... or a learning opportunity. Perhaps this is why we rely on experience ... not because it is always right ... but because we are under the impression we have already learned these lessons. And because those lessons are few and far between (misses being more common than hits) we are suckered into convincing ourselves that we have nothing more to learn. perhaps it is not what action must we invoke, but rather changing peoples minds that they have not learned all the lessons they need to make experience based decisions. Controversial? Probably. But only because it is difficult to convince anyone that they have had blinders on. Until they get run over. Then they have proof.

Something I needed to write down

2011-01-28T23:04:00.000-06:00

It would appear to me that one of the biggest hurdles is making teachers efficient. This includes their time in the classroom and outside. Class size is an obvious target for helping in this regard. Fewer students to help means more time, in theory, per student. Colleges handle this with multiple sections.
Perhaps a simple change could be to have sections. Of course this does little to convey what I was really thinking.

I would suggest a long school day 8am to 5pm. But it would require full time and part time teachers. Full time could go from 8-3 as usual, and part time could teach in 2 shifts (say 3-4 hours per day). This would allow more sections to be taught by more than one teacher at different times during the day. I do not assume that all kids go to school at the same time. some may have the typical schedule and others may have a later, lagged schedule. This probably only "works" for high school ... until you consider sports and other "after" school activities, of which teachers are an important part.

Imagine what schools would look like if they could both hold more students and teach more classes. If a student is having trouble, you suddenly have options like different teachers or a different time of day. Or they sit through the same lecture again to help them understand. Perhaps less students would end up in each class and get more time from teachers. Less students may spark more motivation to learn and allow teachers with a passion for teaching to teach at a high level without being drowned in students and homework.

I read an excellent blog post from a teacher today about rules. I enjoyed this quote:

We do not need people who work in fear and submission. We need some creativity, new ideas. We need some originality. We need some flashiness. We need some style.

Schools which can get their teachers and students to do these exact things will probably always be somewhat successful. I know I came from a high school which did this ... in some classes with some teachers. In fact I remember those teachers: Mrs Nicolari (English1), Miss Ploski (Algebra2), Mr. Moriarty (English3), Mr. Macary (Chemistry4), and some whose names I can't recall: sophomore year Biology5 (Mrs Beatty), sophomore year English6 (Mrs Stelavato), and freshmen year Science7 (Mrs Rierra).

1. She wrote half of our critical papers and was a force to be reckoned with. She commanded respect. She respected you enough to always tell the truth no matter how painful. And she cared.

2. Taught me I was smart. Fun and encouraging. And I learned algebra.

3. I remember his passion for acting, reading, understanding and caring. he always asked what we thought and we were never "wrong". I always got the impression he wanted our perspective even uf we answered a question he didn't ask ... he just guided us back.

4. Smart guy who was encouraging. You wanted to do well in his class. Learning was a fun requirement.

5. This woman looked me dead in the eye and said "I believe in you" ...and moved me up to honors chemistry.

6. This lady had us write journal entries for English. She shared her "rules are meant to be broken" essay topic and she backed it up: "I open and then re-wrap my Christmas presents that my family hides from me." Like totally postsecret.com without the postcard. She had passion in her stories and teaching.

7. She had me in her science class and quickly realized I did not belong in track 3 and brought me to college prep science. I owe her a lot for that move. She knew how to teach and I benefited immensely from her encouragement.

That is a lot of teachers that had the freedom to express their passion and have an impact. I recognized this quality about them (go me) while I was in their class and that made it comfortable. They had a style I recognized, appreciated, and wanted to excel in. Those that didn't ... well lets just say that I put in the same effort that the teachers did.

But I was also learning to be a teacher. I did that by teaching 6th graders while I was in Junior Achievement as a senior. I had been through a Dale Carnegie public speaking course. I had been to Operation Enterprise's course through JA. And of course success always sprouts from failure, when I had to deliver a speech to my English class: "Jimmy- You have just put the entire class to sleep!" Mrs. Nicolari. Indeed I did. But you know what ... my students benefited from that statement. I got better. A lot better. And I am happy to say I had many (begin gloating now:) positive evaluations of my passion.

I don't hear too much about teachers, even when I was teaching. Kids came to me because they were failing or having trouble. They always proclaimed high school had been easy. Perhaps they didnt have as many passionate teachers as I did. We should make that our goal. bring back the passion or get out. I already know that teachers are passionate. The challenge is how to lift the burden so this passion will more freely and creatively emerge.

So, I believe class size is an issue. And I think if we give our teachers some help we can improve education. That an better math textbooks.

Thoughts on education

2011-01-27T21:05:00.000-06:00

First I read about how a lawmaker in Florida wants teachers to grade parents. Then I saw the state of the union which had a fair bit focused on education. And lastly I have been listening to the background noise on tiger, lion, teddy, and rabbit parenting with regard to education.

So lets go slow. Parents are responsible not just for raising kids but also educating them. Teachers do not raise kids they mentor and teach them. Teachers do not grade parents nor should they start now. I think there are 2 issues here: 1. making parents the scapegoat for their kids learning ability and teaching them they are not always responsible for their own behavior AND 2. teachers have 30 kids per class and grading 30 extra people is ridiculous if not insulting.

Can we really expect a failing system that produced some of these parents to really teach their kids? The logic becomes circular rather quickly. Needless to say you cant fix the hemorhage with a bandaid. The education system is oddly similar to government to bureacracy.

In the SOTU speech, the president had a few things to say about shouldering responsibility for education and he mentioned them in order of personal responsibility. Parents that need to turn off the TV, not give their kids cell phones (take those away too), and stop blowing smoke up their kids asses with self esteem. As I listened to a few TV voices talk about one stood out above the rest:

If we challenge them, get them excited about learning by being excited about learning, they will succeed. And some of the failure and some of the success will give these kids self esteem.

Need proof? From the SOTU: "Thank you, Mrs. Waters, for showing… that we are smart and we can make it." It wasn't that those kids were dumb. They lacked confidence, skills, and focus. And the new school was able to help those kids achieve.

Which leads my mind to "animal" parenting. All types of parenting can be successful. I think from what I heard the tiger version assumes that the kids need to be focused and disciplined in a boot camp like environment. Where pushing oneself to excel to perfection is worth the sometimes harsh treatment. Others choose a much looser approach ... lets find what your passion is and pursue it. This one takes something that not all families have: patience, money, knowledge, and passion.

What can learned from this: Teachers are mentors and teachers. Sometimes by being good teachers they are mentoring by revealing their passion. Sometimes the mentoring is direct requiring discussion and reflection. This is why teachers can be so great and impact many students. But teachers can't always reach everyone. Either in a mentoring role or even a teaching role. Thats why we have different teachers for different subjects, and subjects like life, coping, emotion, and expectations start at home.

Funding?

2011-01-21T22:38:00.000-06:00

It was interesting to read the Republican spending cut plans.

They want to cut the funding for a subsidy to the IPCC, cut the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, DOE Applied Research, cut the federal travel budget in half, The energy star program, and some farm subsidies, and cuts to commercial space travel.

It will be interesting to see what all this really means and where it all ends up. Having worked in the general vicinity of DOE I can say that as an outsider I was impressed with the way that the government partnered with industry to bring research into the applied arena.

Lets remember that high-risk high-reward research has a place and purpose. The government shoulders the high risk, sometimes because learning needs to be done to make advances possible. The scientists or engineers however have no specific interest though in building products to market. And rightfully they are usually not allowed to profit from them as patents and such remain the property of the organization not the individual. This includes intellectual property. There is a reason industry doesn't engage in this practice and that is the high risk of doing research without a grand plan, without an infinite supply of money and time and resources. Industry can do R and D but it usually has a focus and leverages off someone else's adavances ...typically the government.

A good example is SpaceX as part of the NASA COTS program. They are leveraging NASA assets (launch facilities, engine testing facilities, personnel) and NASA knowledge (materials) and have said quite freely and openly that without NASA they would not have been able to accomplish so much in so little time. Sounds like a sound partnership and a sound investment to me. Even Elon Musk said something like: I don't do this because there is a lot of profit in sending rockets into space. He even told his initial investors he wasn't in it for the profit. He was passionate about space, passionate about building commercial spaceflight capabilities. The next phase of SpaceX will be really exciting as they modify their tested rocket to hold humans to travel to the space station.

I can't tell what the Ag stuff is about or how hard that hurt the family farmer in times like these. They are already trying to cope with deciding whether to grow corn/soy or switch to biofuel crops like switchgrass. Certainly most farmers do not profit that frequently since weather and water are largely out of their control ... farming requires a delicate balance of a good long, wet growing season. Floods hurt, rain at planting time delays, rain at harvest delays, and wilder weather like cold and freezes damages the crops. Farming is high risk-low reward.

I can't quantify the Arts or Humanities .. but it will have an impact.

I know I will see the results of federal travel cut in half since I work in close proximity to federal folks. It will even serve to hurt part of the planned activities for my job. How badly I do not know. But it will have repercussions and I can only hope we have the tools to minimize them.

Be wary of across the board cuts and pay attention to what is not cut, too. Clearly the government needs to tighten the belt but it needs to do so carefully and thoughtfully. Some programs dont have quantifiable value but that doesn't make them candidates. Government still has a responsibility to represent its citizens and those numbers continue to grow. We cant have small government because our populous is getting larger and larger (taxation without representation rings a bell). We also know it can't do everything. We must choose wisely on non-partisan reasons...

Ice is nice

2011-01-20T21:53:00.000-06:00

http://www.mesonet.org/index.php/weather/meteogram/

The Norman time series of weather data, specifically wind, was rather strange today. Just after 2:20am the wind began to slow down dropping to 3-4 mph. Funny thing is I remember it being windy at the site around 9am. This is the effect of freezing rain on an anemometer. The propeller didn't freeze altogether as I have seen in Iowa data but the extra mass made it harder to spin. The entire assembly didn't freeze either as the wind direction did change albeit slightly.

The airport in Norman first reported unknown precipitation at 2:11 am at a temperature of 30 and it dropped from there, while the winds stayed in the 15-20mph range throughout the night.

As far as good data goes, I think there is a sonic anemometer but it is made of metal and I wonder how good the wind data would be with a coat of ice on it. Therefore it would be difficult to correct. Human quality control could handle this but I doubt with station to station comparison this time series could be flagged as being questionable. Realize that the rain gauge at the site is not a typical heated tipping bucket so there was no precipitation recorded at the station.

This is not a criticism of the data in any way; rather it highlights the difficulty of making all-weather observations year round even on well funded networks. This even happens in hurricanes when the power goes out or when water tops the instruments or penetrates the wiring.

Its important to maintain the observations that are good for future work either in weather or climate and hopefully this provides a gut-check. Some observations will sneak in that are bad and therefore it is important to realize that no observation system is perfect or error-free. Sometimes this is why "tricks" or manipulation must be performed because real data has issues and they must be sorted out, flagged, approved or removed.

Science and Adults

2011-01-03T22:23:00.000-06:00

Science had an interesting essay published:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/01/science.1186994

"Without a basic understanding of how science works, the public is vulnerable to antiscience propaganda, which engenders distrust of science when it comes to social issues, consumer choices, and policy decisions."

A profound statement. Sadly this is a core problem since we must consider that the scientific method is taught, at a minimum, from grades 3 to at least 10. Thus having any education in science should yield at least cursory understanding of how science works.

However education advances very slowly whereas the speed of science is accelerating. I think most people in a classroom in high school would acknowledge that the smart kids stand way out because they are continually challenged, whereas the rest prefer to not be challenged. Sometimes it is the education system itself which leads to a demoralization ... especially as teachers expect less from underachieving students. We are leaving behind students and advancing others ... this produces a gap.

Science itself produces gaps as increasingly complex problems become addressed by a self selected few (lets call them really intelligent scientists). This type of accelerated learning is happening in all fields due to the growth of science itself. It used to be in discrete leaps (think Einstein and his peers followed by the government development of nuclear weapons). It takes real hard work to follow in these folks footsteps. Consider that a particle physicist may spend 10 years getting a PhD! Contrast that with a meteorologist (a relatively young field of study) who may spend 3-6 years.

Now consider that, as is the current state of affairs, such gaps begin to effect science policy and fiscal expenditures. Some may say we lack the financial fortitude to increase our science spending, and they would be correct in their analysis of available funds. And in doing so they forget that research precedes development. In fact, industry does research specific to its problems. Interestingly enough, some of the largest practical science developments have occurred in the process of researching very different problems. So in order for big technological advances, the government funds research precisely so that development can ensue. Consider a quote taken from:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mooney-science-20101226,0,4203638.story
"And we need to recognize that the cost of basic science, and the time it
takes, require a sustained government commitment because industry can't
be relied on to fund incremental and high-risk science for its own sake
without any guarantee of a payoff."

Industry seeks profit. This should not be a surprise nor a negative. Industry must be profitable to sustain itself. And even more profitable to fund its own research: think Bell labs! The terms high-risk high reward should be common knowledge. Are they? Most people should also know how expensive incremental science is, since that is how we fund graduate students in most fields. Sadly they do not.

So, we have some work to do on both educating our students so as to produce science-literate adults, and also scientific communication such that as the gaps continue to grow we have intelligent people keeping those with whom science is foreign or too difficult, in touch.

Kids and Science

2010-12-28T17:44:00.000-06:00

I heard through the grapevine that a bunch of 8-10 year old kids in the U.K. published in a prestigious journal, led by their teacher and a research scientist. The topic was bees and my interest lies not in the publishing part but in the science and kids part, especially treating science like a game or puzzle. The kids formulated the questions and hypothesis and constructed the game and analyzed the results ... even writing up the manuscript. As the essay stated, which accompanied the article, the kids were proud of what they had learned and wanted to share that knowledge. Now that is some good science education.

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/12/18/rsbl.2010.1056.full?sid=c43f1415-9fbc-4f1b-94b3-51866e5edbd2

Scales of uncertainty

2010-12-25T14:48:00.000-06:00

The latest fuss in meteorological circles has focused rather intently on the Storm of Christmas, then the day after, and now the day after the day after Christmas storm. The storm has been "delayed" by 2 days over the course of the last week, and has shifted position numerous times in the forecast (gonna miss far to the east, bounce back to the west for a hit). We call this behavior uncertainty.

So what is uncertainty? "not confirmed", "still undecided", a "lack in confidence"

In modeling terms, the forecast solution has not yet converged. Our current capabilities, however, are quite robust at short range, meaning we expect the solution (over many initialization cycles) to converge. This time period is usually between 48 and 72 hours depending on the modeling system, the scale of the features that need to be resolved well, and the overall scale of the dynamical system which we seek to predict.

Over the years, despite many advances in satellite data, data assimilation systems, and numerical models and their increasingly sophisticated methods ... we still need to wait for the disturbances to enter the well instrumented radiosonde network*. Alas this too can be deceiving as was the case for the Surprise snowstorm of January 2000. You see a classic nor'easter can have origins from the Pacific Northwest which travels in amplified flow towards the gulf coast. The system itself may never leave the well instrumented but the warm gulf, cool temperatures aloft, and strong wind shear may foster convection ... thunderstorms ... or organized noise. This noise can then feedback from the large scale to the small scale ... outside the network and remain outside the network as the coastal low forms and deepens as it travels up the coast.

So, you can see how a "converged" solution of where the storm will be, can help us have confidence on predicting the other aspects of the storms. But uncertainty remains in where the precipitation will be, what precipitation type will fall, and for how long.

This uncertainty about snowfall placement and amount is very similar to the summer forecasting of thunderstorms. We may have a converged solution of the larger scale details but the smaller scale details can have a large effect on where, when, which storms will form and how severe they might be.

This where the art of forecasting kicks in. Where the analog experience of forecasters contributes. Knowing how they were fooled last time, or how they picked up on certain observed details which caused them to do better than the models. The forecaster has the ability to understand these scales of uncertainty. Only in the last few years have methods been developed, like the Ensemble Kalman Filter, which can show us where the uncertainty is for a specified region at 3,5,7 day lead time. In fact the Winter Weather Reconaissance program is designed to use these methods, then collect data in the uncertain regions to see how that can change the forecast and its uncertainty!

Turkey and Construction

2010-12-01T17:02:00.000-06:00

I like to read blogs and watch TED talks. So naturally, staying home with a fever allows me to catch up from Thanksgiving travel.

Tuned In had a great perspective on Turkey and Thanksgiving. How often do we cook turkey aside from Thanksgiving or order turkey from a restaurant? I never considered this take on turkey. It was ingrained. I need to enhance my turkey perspective since i know that turkeys are now bred for Thanksgiving. Is this a sustainable practice?

Earlier I watched a builder (Dan Phillips) discuss the philosophical underpinning behind modern construction techniques/practices. he said there are two groups of people for which I am sure the spellings are completely wrong: Dionysians and Appelonians. The former demands perfection and elegance, brand new materials, constructed perfectly, no imperfections anywhere. This view of modern construction produces a lot of waste. Waste that this builder uses to build imperfect houses. And they are interesting! Clearly I am a practical Appelonian who can live with flaws. Things only need to be fixed when they cease to function. When they cease to function you harvest the parts, or break them, to create new parts. His closing statement said that we have put vanity at the foundation of our lives. And this is not sustainable.

This was a fascinating talk on many levels. So why blog about Turkey and Philosophical Construction Practices? Both are ingrained into our perspective of how things are. Right Now. As a society we need to be concerned with how we want the future to unfold. We want our perspective to be rich, dense, and broad. This is how we make our traditions sustainable. We need to be aware of the consequences or at least put some forethought into what the consequences might be. Our founding fathers did and stated this. They wrote it down in many ways and acknowledged the imperfections both in the document itself and themselves. That is pretty profound and very rich in perspective.

We are failing in this regard. Our perspective is about wants in the here and now. We all need to get back to needs. And perhaps it starts with changing our perspective. Unless you try to serve ham at Thanksgiving.

Enabling students to cheat

2010-11-16T22:59:00.000-06:00

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

Right from the horses mouth. Someone who wants to be a writer so bad they will choose to write papers deceptively. But this person asks us to overlook this minor indiscretion in favor of the bigger picture. The bigger picture is WHY students request this service:
An education system that somehow failed?
A lazy student who couldn't be bothered to do any work?
Or rather a student who did more work prepping the cheater to be successful so they could be free of this hassle?

"It is my hope that this essay will initiate such a conversation. As for me, I'm planning to retire. I'm tired of helping you make your students look competent."

Thanks. Conversation initiated. I am glad you are retiring. I also hope your business has not been passed on.

I don't believe you were ever asked by teachers to make our students look competent. Rather we expected to our students to WANT to be competent. That want is motivation. But that alone is not enough. At some point you have to DO. You have to strive to achieve that which you are not capable of doing now, or capable of doing without help.

We ~~ask~~ beg our students to seek help when they need it. The best professors always offer help and guidance. We have not enabled them like you have. We have demanded improvement, self motivation, commitment, and LEARNING. As I demonstrated in one class, knowledge is not served on a silver platter for the taking. It is acquired, over time, with work and practice.

You gave them an alternative. An easier alternative albeit expensive. You enabled them to be lazy.

I have no qualms with pointing fingers at our education system. Part of it is institutional involving "teaching to the test". Part of it may be the teachers (some old that don't care, some young that don't know how, some that are not passionate, and some that have no choice but to be a glorified teen-sitter). part of it may be generational (tried and true teaching methods may no longer be working in the age of internet "knowledge" ... "I can just look that up why do I need to remember that fact").

Convenient that he can not remember the clients' name. Perhaps revealing who these people are might help the "conversation" you have started. It might help to explain why some of them are in leadership roles who can't lead, bosses who are idiots, or prevent real thinkers from advancing into roles where they can be most useful.

It only gets worse when you contribute to the problem and then leave it for someone else to clean up. Thanks for the legacy. Release the names of your clients. Post it on Google. Thesis titles too please. I know those are easy to look up.

The generational divide is causing more problems than I know how to fathom. The problems are non-linear and cumbersome and difficult to divide and conquer as is. Enabling is a symptom of this. Your lack of perspective and moral consequences will be remembered. Most importantly, don't be confused. You are no scholar. A scholar would be concerned with ethics because the process and the work are important.

Changing thinking

2010-11-09T21:53:00.000-06:00

I have been recently obsessed with TED talks:

From Elizabeth Gilberts' nurturing creativity to Jill Bolte Taylors' stroke of insight to Malcolm Gladwells' tale of Spaghetti Sauce.

http://www.ted.com/talks?orderedby=MOSTFAVORITED

They all have a unique perspective that transforms the way they view the current culture of thinking. In essence, they adopt the opposite point of view of the currently held belief (for lack of a better term). This isn't fair to Jill since she had no choice and neither was it fair for Elizabeth since she was pestered into a corner.

The people that make the biggest gains in thinking seem to be able to critically observe what we do now and evaluate if that model fits now. Observe is the operative word. Like a good joke by a comedian. "We" get so used to doing things one way that we start choosing to do things incrementally in that same way. (Yin and Yang) Until someone looks around and changes the game instead of changing the rules.

Which leads my strange mind into the last TED talk about what leads to success. Which if you need a link you really aren't that motivated to hear the talk. Being smart was not one of the 8. So I decided to be clever:
Good Ideas Persist. Focused Work Serves. Push your Passion.
Passion Pushes Good, Focused Ideas with Persistent Work to Serve.

So, take a step or two back and look around.

UPDATE:
My line of thinking did not include saying incremental science is bad. rather, incrementally, the science improved to the extent that it could before it required a new direction. Often it seems these transformations in thinking are natural ... but "we" have no way of comparing these transformations to the changes in thinking which went nowhere.

From hurricane to weak storm: Tomas

2010-11-01T20:07:00.000-05:00

Tomas weakened rapidly as "shear" tore it apart. It became obvious this wasnt upper level shear but rather midlevel shear as the mid-level vortex decoupled from the low-level vortex. Animations of this period show a very strong band of convection to the southeast actually develop its own outflow signature. This area of convection persisted even as Tomas' CDO decayed to reveal the low level swirl this morning. The upper level shear probably did change as Tomas excellent outflow was virtually absent in the southern quadrant. Deep convection refired late in the morning but was pretty ragged and the HH aircraft found Tomas significantly weakened and disorganized.

hard to know what may have actually happened, but I am stuck wondering what role the SE area of convection played in Tomas demise, more specifically how that area of convection established its own outflow and how that interacted with Tomas. Also, what was the decoupling mechanism and how vertically confined was it to shear the vortex apart and only briefly stall deep convection?

Anywho, this is not my area of expertise. I am interested in where Tomas goes and how it interacts with the cutoff cyclone in the Gulf by Saturday.

The GFS takes the upper level low into the gulf where it rapidly weakens in 18 hours, though the effects of the low may be felt very far south as a cold surge. Though cold might be a relative term. The GFS is rampant with parameterized convective rainfall and that could be one mechanism for the destruction of PV aloft. The other mechanism for not leaving the cutoff over the gulf is another disturbance on the dynamic tropopause that crosses the ridge and helps keep moving things along.

Either way how things play out with Tomas and the cutoff low is rather interesting from a predictability standpoint, for all the individual elements (TC, cutoff low, cold surge, and heavy rainfall for Florida, Cuba and Haiti). Expect some impacts from this entanglement. In the meantime I need to look closely at the GFS ensemble.

Impressive Jet streak off the Pac coast

2010-10-24T22:59:00.000-05:00

The new radiosondes with GPS winds really have made a difference, though there has been little talk or even research on this. The difference has really been the availability of upper tropospheric winds in strong jets. I did a little work in this area to look into where and when the old radiosondes would lose the wind data. I will have to dig it up at some point.

The inspiration for this post came as I checked my email this evening and was made aware that the RUC model failed in its initial attempt at a forecast today. The reason was a strong jet entering the Pac Coast. Here is the 250 hPa map:

And the sounding for MFR:

167 knots or 86 m s-1! And there was still wind data all the way to 7 hPa! These speeds are not too much higher than this morning with 157 and 149 knots at SLE and MFR.

Upon further reflection though, October 500 hPa temperatures at -25 C seem a little extreme. And thats not even in the core of the extratropical cyclone! Maybe it will come ashore tomorrow near UIL.

Portland has thunderstorms in the forecast and there is lightning along the coast.

I will have to dig into how extreme these temperatures are for the Pacific Coast in October.

UPDATE: 195 knots from MFR this morning!

Interesting Null tornado event

2010-10-23T23:56:00.000-05:00

The tornado watch appeared promising. Plenty of shear with a bulk wind difference near 25 m s-1, CAPE was solid at 1000-1500 J kg-1 and storms had initiated in proximity to the dry line outflow boundary intersection. The storms stayed small and very early on began to split with small left movers that dissipated rapidly north of the outflow boundary.

Yet, despite having supercell like qualities they faded into obscurity after 2-3 hours.

Missing from the closest observed sounding (taken AFTER the storms and somewhat well removed from the INITIAL area, but was later just south of an area of again small storms) was a layer of steep lapse rates, and a cap. Seemingly the near isothermal area around 500 hPa was a CAPE robber.

This sounding is intriguing only when we look at the overall 12 hour changes in the area of interest. The 850, 700, 500 temperatures had cooled at OUN. At FWD, 850 and 700 T was down 1 degree C, but the 500 T had warmed by 3 C while at 601 T had cooled by 2.6C! The upper low which showed a jetlet rounding the base of the trough at 500 hPa had weakened by 5 m s-1.

Water vapor imagery doesn't show this 500-600 presumed frontal zone as the upper levels were quite moist. It appears a subtropical jet/ shortwave was influencing the action over Texas. Maybe this "front" was a small scale circulation. I found it about the same pressure level, same potential temperature at DRT 12 hours prior albeit weaker.

Nothing at the surface really jumps out. Dew points held in the 59-62 F range in advance of the storms. Something mesoscale was happening for sure but its difficult to understand what. Model simulations anyone?

Sidenote: I did happen to see a wave-like feature that had passed over the CI area just prior to CI on IR imagery that interacted with some small storms in OK. Easily seen on Visible as cirrus.

Comments on Climate Change adaptation

2010-10-18T22:31:00.000-05:00

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/matthew-kahn-answers-your-climatopolis-questions/

A couple of comments:
1. "Most people live in cities". This may be True but there are alot of people who live on the coastline.

2. "If the world had 1 bald guy there would be no Rogaine." I don't think that one follows logically from the other. rather, there was a need to invent Rogaine because 1 guy didn't like being bald or figured out bald people don't like being bald. This is capitalism. Not adaptation. Adaptation would have been the bald guy figuring out that some chicks dig dudes with no hair or wearing a nice hat. After all Rogaine was a solution to a problem, whereas adaptation is learning to live with the problem or (more my way of thinking) not treating your lack of hair as a problem.

3. "Free market capitalism will protect us from climate change." The free market built up our coastlines while hurricanes went slightly dormant for a 20 year spell. And when they raged back alot of people lost their homes on the coastline ... see point 1.

4. "People update their probabilities as new information arises." ~~And Monkeys fly out of my ass...~~ People are generally good at assessing their risk. People are generally bad about acting timely on that risk because they misjudge based on imperfect information. Its why people in New Orleans and East decided to stay put. They had good intel. BIG storm surge, powerful hurricane, strong winds. They had heard this and the evacuation orders. Some still stayed citing previous experience with hurricanes. Some 1700 people died. They updated their probabilities but we will never know how much weight they assigned to those probabilities.

5. I like the eternal optimist: "Educate the citizens about heat waves." Perhaps you are more likely to survive if you can afford, and consequently purchase an air conditioner. But first, after I update my probabilities, I realize that a heat wave just happened and wont return for at least a while so i will wait. I will wait because my first priority will be to put food on the table instead of waiting 1,2,5,10 years before the next heat wave hits.

6. "In Climatopolis, I assume that such a dramatic event would occur gradually." Rarely has drought been gradual. It is sudden and lasts for a while. The impacts are slow because first you realize you are in a drought after the drought has started (reminds me of a recession, or a post-recession). Then you realize you have find some method of rationing which is gradual and increases as the length of the drought increases. Afterall predicting how, where, when, and why a drought is relieved is no easy business.

But this is the point. These opinions make certain assumptions about the rapidity of discrete events. They also make assumptions about the rapidity of innovation to discrete events. Maybe you can take Einstein as an example: from mathematics failure to patent guy teaching himself mathematics. That took time and experience and a whole host of other factors. With climate there may not be sudden achievable advances with which to adapt. rather we will have to know not just our next set of circumstances but the ones after that. We will have adapted in some ways, over time, but we are not built to continually adapt (henceforth accelerated adaptation).

Certainly the community (academic, industrial, manufacturing) we have built is adapting and it shows. Bio-diesel from corn, algae or whatever. But that is one maybe two steps forward but no less realizable on a global scale. The ideas will come out, with this I agree. But, will the time it takes to realize these ideas come faster and faster as the need, not just arises, but indeed accelerates?

This is why climate change science needs to be done. We need to understand the possible outcomes, or impacts of regional climate change. People will have to be making decisions in advance, with limited information. Only this will apply to those who have the means to afford those decisions in advance. Some of us live month to month, day to day and simply cannot afford to make decisions without some sense of certainty (picking up and moving to a new area without the means to support oneself with a job all based on uncertain information with no timetable of when "climate change" will occur.

Pondering perspective in ensemble modeling

2010-10-07T21:53:00.000-05:00

When forecasting anything, one must always consider the perspective one has. This is not easily achieved since our point of view is necessarily biased, either by a previous forecast, previous experience, analogs, or instinct.

Perspective "is the choice of a context or a reference (or the result of this choice) from which to sense, categorize, measure or codify experience, cohesively forming a coherent belief, typically for comparing with another." - From wikipedia.

Note the implied bias: "typically for comparing with another".

This is why ensembles are so neat in modeling the weather. The whole point of an ensemble is provide perspective or perhaps more appropriately predictability and by extension certainty (or uncertainty). This is particularly true even if the range of solutions does not cover the phase space of what is possible. In most instances, the mean of the ensemble is better than any individual member.

In the case where the outlier has the most value (no matter how wrong it is), the forecasters perspective may be the only real clue that it is even remotely likely for it to be correct. That is the value of the human forecaster and their experience is most likely to recognize the value of an outlier. There is significant risk associated with favoring an outlier. For one, you are going against what all the other members of the ensemble are trying to convey. So, you have to have good reasoning and great perspective on why so many members could be wrong.

In my opinion, this is why so many BIG forecast failures have occurred. It is difficult to trust an outlier, in a timely manner, because it takes a long time to discount a lot of members AND analyze the outlier in question in great detail such that you trust the solution. This is a major issue in severe storms research since the forecast period is short, the lifetime of some storms and their hazards are even shorter, and the models we use are shrouded in uncertainty (initial data, model spin up time, resolution, physics, dynamics).

Let us not forget that even ensembles have difficulty in predicting the certainty. Just because all the members are similar does not mean the forecast is certain. The issues we face now are just as much technical as they are scientific. Navigating the world of coarse ensembles and fine resolution ensembles will be fascinating.

Welcome to Kansas

2010-09-28T23:38:00.000-05:00

The weather has always nudged and poked and prodded me. So when I packed my stuff into a truck and drove 28 hours over 2 days to Salina, Kansas I was hoping for some big displays of thunder and lightning and rain. Instead I awoke to see the front about an hour north and I was heading south.

I stopped to gas up, collect my thoughts, and look up. Indeed my welcome into the Great Plains was some kind of gravity wave and/or bore. I joked with myself about it prior to leaving the hotel saying how funny it would be to see a wave or bore. And there they were.

below are the velocity images to prove what my awful cell phone pictures are trying to depict.

The shades of blue within the gold colors are the waves and there appear to be two specific areas. The gravity wave was behind the bores, of which there were two cloud lines. The two areas were spaced roughly ten minutes apart while I was driving 70 mph straight south. The leading edge of the bore was interesting because the roll cloud feature was elevated and their were diffuse cumulus clouds underneath it, almost water fall like.

The structures within the clouds were fishbone like, indicative of a spectrum of wave activity present on a scale of meters rather than kilometers.

the gravity wave was only recognizable since I had seen the IEMs web cam animation of a similar wave/bore here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXnkzeCU3bE

This wave has been written about recently in the AMS journals.

My wave appeared stagnant but then again I was not standing still taking 6 second images so I could animate them.

Times: 7:08, 7:22, 7:28

The first picture showed what appeared to be an arc shape with clouds in the ridge, while the middle shows the southern most portion of the bore front. The last pic is of the bore front looking east to see the fishbone structure and a bit of the cumulus that was vertically below the "smoother" wave clouds.

Without a doubt its nice to see the radar had something that resembled the bore I thought I was seeing.

UPDATE: I don't know why I didn't include a satellite image. Thanks Adam Clark for the suggestion:

This was the clearest image after sunrise showing the wave clouds over Kansas. The 1 minute ASOS data might be able to capture the pressure perturbations associated with these waves...more on that once the data for September are published.

My First Real Job

2010-09-17T23:35:00.000-05:00

So, I have completed almost all the steps of claiming my first real job. The Post Doc position I am in was to expire in October, but an opportunity presented itself at The Storm Prediction Center and I took it. I have been preaching blog-style about FIT and this position fits me well.

It is one I can be excited about since it is all about utilizing models to help forecast severe storms, preparing model data sets via post-processing, and hopefully doing lots of research I have put off in order to learn regional climate research. I hope to be back doing actual modeling of supercells and MCSs.

The journey has been long and hard and I expect that will continue. I know the passion has already returned as I can feel the lift in my spirit. You can probably get a feeling for that spirit in this blog. I also felt that spirit when I volunteered at my daughters therapeutic horseback riding twice in the last 8 weeks. I was missing the service aspect of life and career.

As I learn more about my position and my role within SPC I will blog. Though I am unsure how much I will be able say since I probably need a disclaimer about not representing the government, NOAA, the NWS or SPC.

Politically off topic post

2010-09-08T03:39:00.000-05:00

Nate Silver's work over at 538 on the NY Times showed what candidates are talking about for the mid terms.

I was struck at the discrepancy on Education (72 vs 31 percent for Dem vs Rep), Environment (17 vs 7), and immigration (28 vs 59).

Clearly part of the difference is strategy. Some issues from some parties are the bread and butter of the base (Education), while others are current issues (immigration), and others only get attention in some cases (Environment).

What has been surprising on a purely political level is the size of government issue which the republicans have glommed onto (0 vs 28 percent). How can anyone justify lower government size in the face of exponentially increasing population? As a result of the increased population, we are exposed to increased geophysical risks which can amount to large financial disaster. We are also exposed to increased risk due to crumbling infrastructure (electricity grid, mass transit, etc.) This contrasts the fact that politicians are complaining about deficits and spending. Last time I checked even a small government can spend un-wisely.

Aha on perspective

2010-08-28T22:57:00.000-05:00

I was pondering on a talk I will give at the lab about communicating effectively to the potential buyer of your resume. Part of my presentation was specifically devoted to perspective. Instead of thinking about YOU, you need to be thinking about them. What will they want, need, look for and how will you sell yourself in that light. If you can't you are clearly not passionate at this level.

Upon thinking more about perspective it dawned on me. Perspective is defined as a comparison of views. You have yours and they have theirs. To have perspective, you analyze the other side. Not just once mind you, but an ensemble of viewpoints. This makes your analysis more robust because you can rationalize more about what they want and don't want. That is part of the exercise on perspective.

It would appear in our current polarized society, people pretend to have perspective ... having considered someone else's viewpoint. But the prevailing character has been either a biased viewpoint (one interpretation only) or fundamentally flawed viewpoint from which they can disregard that viewpoint.

Putting it another way, you believe X to be true. Someone else believes Y to be true. The person who thinks X, casts Y in a bad light, discounts the value of that viewpoint and then dismisses it. The whole point of perspective is to acknowledge that point of view and incorporate it. Sure if it is flawed, you should point it out. But typically people think in very different ways, and before summarily dismissing anothers view you need to assess its validity, or validate your own viewpoint. In a sense we always to calibrate our view in order to validate our perspective.

I find the current political discourse to be much ado about nothing. To me it is a lack of perspective from, now three sides, of the same coin. The level of communication is reduced to soundbites of attention getting non-sense or rallies about fundamentals. Some of these issues spring up because people have not found appropriate people with which to debate accurately or objectively.

A third political party has long been thought unnecessary. I disagree. I think we need a third team, who sits on the fence of the argument understands or strives to understand AND then communicate the broader and FINER points of the conversation as an arbiter. A negotiator if you will. An agent of compromise.

It is ironic that we strive for peace in the middle east for generations, and we dont strive for perspective or communication or facts in our political discourse.

I suppose the same happens all across America, in business arrangements (Reality TV shows are predicated on people who fail on many levels to communicate or lack perspective), families (divorce rate is pretty high, plus there is wife-swap the TV show), and friendships.

I can see the broadness of these effects in my microcosm, perhaps even being one of these people who lacks perspective or fails to communicate. ID'ing the issue is one thing. Fixing it is difficult but hardly does it qualify as impossible. Unfortunately it takes 3 people and time to fix it.

Katrina - My look back

2010-08-26T01:47:00.001-05:00

5 years ago I gave my Intro class an assignment. Forecast the landfall and intensity of Katrina.

It was a forecasting exercise. They weren't supposed to be justified or have reasoning of any kind. I gave them the National Hurricane Center link where they could follow it along. I was hoping they would loop satellite imagery, read forecast discussions, follow the projected track over the several day period.

I wanted them to take ownership of their forecast. That is, I wanted them to realize what they were doing more than what they were forecasting. They were making a projection of doom. A projection where people, actual real people, in their own country, maybe even in their own state, would act based on that forecast. If they watched the news they got to see what those forecasts brought about:

Mandatory Evacuation orders;
Descriptions of doom along the coastline;
the evacuation of countless people via clogged highway;
The media reports of people NOT leaving nor worrying.

Then the other night, NatGeo presented Witness: Katrina.

It showed the beer laden hurricane parties. People preparing with duct tape, candles, and supplies. people evacuating. Police doing city wide patrols. News media covering the storm. Stormchasers stormchasing. People trapped in the rafters watching the water rise. people hanging onto their front porch for two days. People being rescued by helicopter. Dead bodies floating in the water.

The very definition of destruction was accurately viewed through regular, everyday cameras from regular people.

I knew it was going to hit close to New Orleans and that the storm surge would be impressive. Upwards of 35 feet of water at the coast, which if I recall was a few feet above forecasts. The track of Katrina, her strength prior to landfall and the shape of the coastline made for the perfect surge event. The levies were an afterthought, especially s the media reports rolled in during that morning. I knew they would come, it was just a matter of when and where and how.

Not sure what those kids learned that week. But I am pretty sure a few of them will remember that exercise and the aftermath. I hope I made them appreciate the strength and unpredictability of severe weather hazards, and the predictability of shorter range forecasts. Perhaps even the predictability of unpredictability of the storm surge in Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama.

As far as my personal feelings go, it was a tragedy of course. On par with OKC and 9-11 but without the "we hate you" part added in. It was as disastrous as natural disasters can be. But that comes with an asterisk ...because it could have been worse. Had Katrina finished her eyewall cycle 9 hours earlier she would have been stronger, bigger, with more surge.

We really wont know Katrina's impact until the next big coastal city is threatened. Sure there have been a few already. But Katrina was the beginning since it was the biggest. They didnt make movies after Isabel wrecked southwest FL in a very small path of destruction. Nor did Ike inspire documentaries and tv shows. Only time will tell.

One thing is for certain. The hurricane research community responded rather well. Currently 3 field programs trying to better understand hurricane genesis, hurricane prediction, and hurricane processes this year. One was ongoing doing Katrina too. The results are flowing in, but there is still alot to understand ... including communicating with the public.

The hunt for jobs

2010-08-15T22:38:00.000-05:00

I was recently asked to give my perspective on the hunt for jobs in my field. This came on the heels of a seminar which was a job interview that I saw. I have also been watching too much reality TV (cooking primarily), but this has given me a new perspective on the current challenges of job seeking, interviewing, and job getting.

Lets start with Food Network's requirements:
1. have star power yet be relatable and command respect,
2. food knowledge, tricks, tips, and authority,
3. getting your Point Of View to shine through even the dishes you dont like.

So, to put these in meteorology speak:
1. Publications
2. a complete tool box of skills
3. able to communicate to sell your science (1) and sell your work (2).

It sounds simple. But there is much more too it. People that hire are looking for more:
1. Fit: Not just will you fit in around here. Its more fit in with the people who do this work or fit in with the dynamics of the group (personality), and fit in with the direction of your work and its application.
2. Fit: Is this the place where you will be dedicated and passionate about your work? Can you make sustainable progress on projects?
3. Skill: Do you have the skills now to begin your work, and are you capable of adding new skills, or open new avenues of work?
4. Savvy: Can you sell your work, your science, your skills, and you? Can you make people feel good about hiring you? Not just make people feel good they picked the best of 5 candidates (all 5 could have sucked, you were just the least sucky), but rather got the best fit for the position?

This pretty much sums it up. These are hard things to ask a bunch of scientists who have been hell bent on computer programming their way through publications which interest them or have interested their mentors. These questions require something different: PERSPECTIVE.

Perspective takes time. It requires an analysis of the past 3 degrees, multiple papers, multiple projects, and most of all success and FAILURES. If you have not failed you might already have perspective that has allowed to avoid that part of the journey. Chances are if you are reading my perspective, you have failed at something. As I have.

The good thing about perspective is that everybody has it. Yours, theirs, someone else's. Very few people have the ability to communicate directly with you about their perspective. Frankly, few scientists have the ability to constructively give you their perspective of you without smashing your dreams and having you hate them. Therefore most people won't give you an accurate depiction of their perspective of you...until it is too late. they would much rather watch as you fall off the cliff and as you are dangling there holding on by a thread, you ask them, and they tell you. Your first reaction will be to let go.

And that is my perspective. Harsh. Brutal. Robust. And then you pick yourself up with your new perspective and march on having learned a new lesson. This is science ... just as cut-throat as business. Produce or you too can be replaced.

back to the hunt.

Now that you have your perspective, it is your JOB to sell every bit of yourself as you can.
Where does your passion lie?
What skills have you acquired?
What types of problems do you like to solve and what problems are you capable of solving?
What have you already accomplished and what do you want to accomplish in the next 5 years?
Where do you want to work and what will get you there?

The point here is to have a Plan. It doesn't have to be glamorous or over-the-top. It has to be something you can be passionate about. Something you can talk about for hours. A serious interest. Something where: If someone approached me on the street to talk about "that cloud over there", I could get serious and start yapping endlessly about what I instantly observe. Yet I realize who I am speaking with and speak appropriately. That is the job interview elevator speech for recruiters. The yapping part, well, thats when you are talking to the pro's who want to hire you ... only by yapping I mean speaking clearly and intelligently without making assumptions. Speak what you know and the uncertainty with which you know it.

It is always the right time to plan ahead for the job you want. Practice makes perfect. This includes writing your CV, cover letter, research or teaching statements, or writing essays on how bad you want the dream job that just opened up. This also goes for interviewing skills. Apply for positions you might fit in but dont want. Use the opportunity to practice your interview skills. Taking to people you don't know, about things they like talking about, and spending whole days with strangers requires practice at the professional level. Someday the people you are talking with will be hiring for your dream job and you want to look polished ... a true veteran of the interview process so you can handle the subtleties of getting that dream job. You cant be the least sucky, you have to be the one they are desperate to hire or else they will have to start their search all over again.

Little swirls

2010-08-09T03:11:00.000-05:00

It is also neat to watch the various types of tropical storms that develop either in very favorable conditions, or sheared conditions. Tropical Storm Colin was highly sheared and the convection that was over the low level center became displaced to the east exposing this low level center. One particular "hot tower" went up just as the low level center attempted to re-align with the mid level center, and as that tower collapsed a little whirl emerged. What I always find to be remarkable is how long it takes to spin up one of these little whirls: 1.5-2 hours. The animation is much more impressive as this little hot tower goes up, dissipates and out spins the little whirl.

Forecasting thoughts

2010-07-31T22:49:00.000-05:00

I read Chuck Doswell's essay on project Vortex 2 and a few folks have commented who are in the know on some things. I found it to be quite interesting.

Chuck wrote:
Consensus wins by virtue of avoiding extremes. In the process, it is consistently mediocre. A really good forecaster can beat consensus consistently.

In my mind, consensus is essentially a human ensemble of forecasts. Take the average of all forecasts issued by the forecasters and you get consensus. I don't think consensus wins by avoiding extremes, actually it does well no matter how (and maybe even because) individual forecasters go extreme (in both directions sometimes). It covers the phase space.

I am hard pressed to say that consensus is mediocre, though it is possible. Rather consensus tends to do quite well over the long term. (Wishing I had access to my old UAlbany forecast contest results). That being said, a good forecaster knows WHEN to beat a model that forecasters rely on and knows HOW to beat it. Playing the game you can easily make good bets or poor bets consistently, but to make big leaps in "skill" required risk taking. This comment applies mostly to the numbers (Max/ Min temperature, POP, precip amount).

Consensus on thunderstorm forecasting might be a different story, and supercells would be in another league entirely.

I too am a big fan of the dropsonde and I was very much disappointed that learjet dropsonde was not going to be used. (I tried to keep up with the mobile upsonde reports to see there progress. I really don't have much to say on if they succeeded in their mission or not, publications will have to tell that story.) I think what is most missed though will be a tremendous variety of environmental soundings. Not that the upsonde teams failed in any way. I think they have already published a paper on an MCS ...clearly not the goal of V2 alone.

But I think an opportunity was missed to really explore the environment around supercells which would have required a lot more forecasting precision (initiation location and time, relevant mechanisms teased out for sample flying patterns (across fronts, boundaries, moisture discontinuities, etc)).

The stated goals that were outlined in the essay:

How, when, and why do tornadoes form? Why some are violent and long lasting while others are weak and short lived?
What is the structure of tornadoes? How strong are the winds near the ground? How exactly do they do damage?
How can we learn to forecast tornadoes better?

I know the mobile radars in their entirety were all about documenting the structure of tornados, getting close to ground wind speed measurements, and understanding the damage patterns. I think there is a clear linkage between the observation platforms and the goal. Even the first goal can be accomplished withe the variety of storm scale, tornado scale radars ... though I am pretty sure that dual doppler would be needed since we already have single doppler coverage.

I am less certain they can answer why a tornado was short lived (since we have no proof it should have lasted longer) or long lived (since we have no proof it should have been shorter lived). Thats where sample size becomes an issue (and where the project will prove its worth). Are 40 tornado's enough? Do you need to have 40 similar tornado's paired with 40 similar storms to draw some conclusions? Only time will tell.

The last goal sets the bar very high and is another reason why a dropsonde platform would have been so key. Researchers have opted to use the RUC model to circumvent this. It is a decent quality model that has proved its worth but it is still a model. It is always desirable to have observations since it is the small details that tend to matter most. And more soundings over a larger area is exactly what would help. Spatial and temporal coverage needs to improve, but when V2 is over and the mobile radars go home we are left with the "old" network to work with. It would be nice to have perspective and quantification on how good or uncertain some proximity soundings are, and if these proximity soundings tell us something more than tornadoes are possible. We still have no clue why some storms produce them, why some storms don't, and why some storms don't rotate when we think rotation is possible. They should be able to differentiate whether storm scale or environmental processes are dominating with the help of model sensitivity studies.

Has anyone showed how poor or how good we already forecast tornado's? I believe there is one study showing the lead time of warnings but I am unaware of anything else that truly shows skill at tornado forecasting. I will have to check into that.

Nocturnal storms in the Tri Cities!

2010-07-31T22:29:00.000-05:00

If only they could have occurred when I was awake. 1013 UTC thunderstorms developed over Southern WA. We have had altocumulus in the skies the last two days, morning and afternoon. Last night there was some well to the east and I figured perhaps the threat was gone and didnt even bother to pay attention to dessert weather. Surprise! at 315 I awoke to "plink!" "plink!" on the fireplace. A sign that it was raining big drops, but not pouring down. I peaked outside to verify and quickly went back to sleep.

Radar loops show this very nicely. I will have to make a movie of it since it is indeed rare (maybe 1 or 2 nocturnal events in the summertime). I saw very little on the surface chart, perhaps local flows were more dominant given the proximity of the hills around here. Area soundings showed 2C decreases at 500 hPa from 00 to 12 UTC, and a 3C increase at 700 hPa at Spokane. We happen to be on the cold side of the jet and it did not appear to be related to any jet streak circulation especially with anticyclonic curvature.

The dew point has been higher than usual, especially with the missed rain of the other day. It rained south of here 2 days ago, but yesterday was dry and the dew points dipped down into the mid-50s only, then came back up to 60. Of course our weather has been marked decidedly by the regular passage of midlatitude cyclones, which I must say has had a profound effect on Seattle, but not apparently us.

Day 2 update: more TS obs ! 1230-4am, and again this am from 9-11am!

They seem to initiate off the the hills to the south of the basin. Looks similar to the cap rock area.

This afternoon there is a TS playground out by Yakima which is awesome from my westward facing balcony. Just a wall of cumulonimbus:

I watched the failed attempts at CI along the boundary as it moved in, then behind the boundary attached to the weakening storms. Some interesting cloud features for around these parts.

multiscale convection initiation 29 July 2010

2010-07-29T23:56:00.000-05:00

Tis the season for CI close to the mountains. I have been saving the water vapor image for 0645 UTC so I can look at the monsoon season over AZ and MCSs over the midwest for the season in its entirety. The other evening I saw that the WV imagery depicted some weak mountain generated convection in Northern CO and Southern WY. This is a late season hot spot for convection (proof required, so this is anecdotal at the moment). The story unfolded at the surface as simply southeasterly flow with dew points in the upper 60's. At 850 hPa the situation could be described as a moisture pool along a warm front.

In any case, it didnt look dynamic until 300 hPa, where an upper level anticyclonic shear zone was situated along the NE SD border, with an anticyclonically curved jet streak approaching. So the situation unfolded as short-lived convection in a pretty humid pouch failed ... drifted eastward and by 0845 UTC CI was underway in this pouch. It was not a big event but did drop copious amounts of rain in the FSD area in eastern SD over into Storm Lake in Iowa.

This appears to be an established corridor for storms this evening. Some could argue it is intimately tied to the developing monsoon moisture stream. Tonights storms initiated over the Rapid City area (mountain generated). They have currently split with a slow moving portion of the high cloud tops over NE and drifting slowly SE, while further to the east in SD the storms are just slightly north of last nights storms.

Storm reports are absent in this corridor with the exception of tonight, so this type of event would only stand out as being different in terms of the precip. The NSSL model run handled this quite nicely though the second diurnal cycle appears to be extreme ... this case could be examined quite well.

Hopefully these types of events don't get ignored since the storm report numbers were low. How was convection initiated? What were the dynamical controls, and how much did the upslope, moist flow at the surface contribute, and what role did pre-existing convection play and how did it manifest itself (humidification or boundary development)?

Predictability

2010-07-15T00:09:00.000-05:00

Tough forecast day for SPC in light of the disappearance of the spring forecast experiment model suite. I know I felt the loss of NCARs model when I was making my forecast for Minnesota and Iowa.

The story starts with obscenely high values of dew points across the midwest ... 80+ dew points in Iowa and above 75 just about everywhere else. A potent little low was forecast to move through the area around the Twin Cities with a moderate risk of tornadoes given the extreme instability and large vertical shear.

What was more obvious today was that the hodograph curvature would be decreasing through the day as the cold front advanced eastward. A remnant MCS was forecast to depart the area and another was forecast to erupt in its wake. The NSSL model had a hard time with that component of the forecast, instead developing the convection along the cold front and slightly ahead.

The hard part was utilizing this model run to determine what role the remnant MCS would play in terms of any leftover boundaries, the role of the associated cloud field to the west, and the cold front even further to the west. As it turned out, the departing MCS gave way to another MCS accompanied by damaging winds and tornadoes. The cold front lit up in sections appearing to be linear but isolated enough to warrant tornado warnings before collapsing. About 5 hours later as the front passed the Twin Cities it lit up again.

All in all it was a hard forecast because the model simulation was not quite capturing the episodic nature of the convection. This is one forecast where the model was working against the forecasters despite the somewhat strong forcing for ascent. The details were absolutely lacking in the model forecast and this case will be a prime candidate for further research into why this happened.

This radar image sums it up nicely with the western most convection marking the cold front and accompanied by TOR warnings, Then the cloud field marked by the 25-30 dBz echo, then the isolated convection which exploded into the MCS over the Twin Cities, and the remnant MCS is off to the east.

Updated: MCS

2010-07-05T02:29:00.000-05:00

Here is the update of the MCSs that occurred over the last 5 weeks (May 28 - July 4) at 0645 UTC:
If I counted correctly, something like 26 systems (of various sizes) over that span,
not including multiple MCS events, or the fact that multiple systems could be identified on radar under one cloud shield.

The precipitation anomaly for the last 30 days still indicate 8" swaths from NE through IA. Lets recall the radical flooding in OK City on 14-15 June (which also has their 30 day anomaly above 5"). KS also participated in the events but it was much less a focus for extreme precipitation totals.

60 day anomalies were significantly less revealing the reduced May rainfall in Ia, NE and northern KS.

Compared to 2008 and 2009, June 2010 was literally the summation of the last two Junes. In 2008, 8" anomalies were common in IA and northern MO and a small part of eastern KS. In 2009, 8" anomalies were common in western NE and a sliver in KS, NE and MO (1 small corridor). 2006 and 2007 were very different from these last 3 years, but 2005 was similar to 2009.

Iowa is currently in flood mode with 35 of 99 counties under some kind flood watch or warning. Interestingly, the Iowa Environmental Mesonet reported that DSM had 22 days of measurable rain and more is on the way this week. up until the 22nd the IEM reported the highest mixing ratio average for the state since 1902!

The complete scientist

2010-07-02T11:40:00.000-05:00

http://blog.agu.org/sciencecommunication/2010/06/29/complete-scientists/

A classic argument between being just a scientist and being an applied scientist. It is worthy of considering, since science is not just done for pure fun and amusement by the curious. We are, afterall, interested in using science for the betterment of society. Knowledge gains are practical too, since they provide a foundation from which applied science may be constructed.

I took issue with little in this blog post, but I have my 2 cents:
1. The requirement to go out and be social! I like this point but it is far from practical for your average university professor or average young scientist. These are people busy building not just their knowledge base and communication skills, but also their reputation in the scientific community. They are busy expanding their career and acquiring future funding. There is seldom time for such outreach activities. This is not to say they should not be doing outreach, but rather that their time is better spent in the construction and development phase of their career. Personally I would much rather the elder scientists participate in outreach activities and from what I see, this happens fairly regularly.

2. watches and warnings are not intuitive. Oh yeah:
person 1: watch out, their might be a something bad around the corner.
person 2: warning, anvil is about to fall on your head from that coyote!

Seems pretty intuitive to me. watch = prepare, warning=action. See the difference?

The confusion lies in the perception of risk that is built into those words from the culmination of life experiences. I was watching "After the catch" about a fisherman from LA who survived Katrina. He did not evacuate and he almost payed dearly. He thought: I survived before and this one wont be so bad. the gist of his story is his wife floated away, to be found alive 6 hours later, and most of his family held onto trees until they got in a boat.

This type of story is common. The forecasting community recognizes these types of social behavior but there isn't too much to do yet. I do know that an NWS office issued tornado warnings when the eyewall of a certain storm was passing through LA. They wanted the gravity of that situation understood in plain words: all hell is about to break loose if you can hear this message (and in particular, if you havent already realized the gravity of the situation). Kudos to you NWS.

Breaking the myth of how poor weather forecasts used to be and educating the public on how good they are is difficult to do. I was in an airport a while back and a random conversation ensued: "As a meteorologist I get to keep my job precisely because the forecast was wrong". May seem strange, but bad forecasts imply there are tools we need to improve and situations we need to learn from. The publics perception is that we are always wrong (not precise). But that is the entire point we need to convey ... being precise is not what makes a good forecast. Knowing the evolution is much better that getting all the numbers correct*.

*getting all the numbers correct serves a different purpose: Farmers want to know how the heat will affect crops, or how much rain to expect. People in general want to know what the temp will be and how humid and how sunny. But being precise isnt what is promised. A range is always better since local variations will always be present.

Interesting Iowa weather

2010-07-02T11:14:00.000-05:00

Radar imagery from the morning of the 27th showed what could be either a gravity wave, bore, or cold outflow. The two waves seen as finelines of about 25 dBz are over AMW and approaching DSM.

The time series from the roof of the ISU Agronomy building:
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/plotting/iemcc/?year=2010&month=6&day=27

The time series shows a small drop (1.2F in 5 minutes) in temperature and dew point, a brief recovery, then a second drop (3F in 7 minutes). The third drop is actually the outflow boundary from the storms to the west, not the north. So it is plausible that the bore or gravity wave arrived first followed closely by the outflow boundary.

The temp and pressure relationship was non-existent for the 1st "wave" (dp = 0), but strong for the 2nd (dp = 0.5 hPa). the wind speeds in the 2nd wave peaked after the min pressure occurred during the t fall. The last wind speed increase occurred in the wake of the 2nd wave but prior to the rapid, small pressure oscillations. I wonder if the pressure sensor is affected at particular wind directions.

Supercell formation observation

2010-06-20T23:24:00.000-05:00

I have seen a number of supercell initiations this year and it occurred to me that there is a distinction between a pure supercell initiation and a cluster of cells conglomerate supercell initiation. What do I mean?

Earlier this year in OK and way back in Nov 2005, dryline or near boundary initiation of supercells follow what appears to be a very linear low level reflectivity storm structure. From there these storms take time to evolve classic supercell structure at least in the low levels. (mental note: is this shear-instability dependent?)

This other mode evolves differently. Multiple, close proximity storms initiate and seemingly "merge" or form a conglomerate. The pictures to the left illustrate this process. The southernmost storm in the cluster appears to dominate. The one tornado was reported around 2200 UTC.

It is odd, but it appears that "upscale" growth occurs via merging. The assumption I have been using without explicitly stating it, is that supercells appear to need to reach a critical size to become productive in terms of tornadoes. I wonder what the supercell size distribution is, but from what I have observed via radar, it can not be a wide distribution, and I wonder if the tornadic supercells fit neatly into a portion of the middle of that distribution. A certain size might be necessary to withstand shear, and may be dependent on the shear-instability relationship.

Another issue is how crazy it is to have all those storms to the north produce very little wind or hail reports while no more than 2 counties south you have a supercell. This is a weak example of that, but there are many scenarios where storms are in a similar environment, yet only a few random cells are rotating. Maybe this is size related, or more in line with Markowski and Richardson's work, in which locally the SRH is very different via different hodographs or storm motions or both.

Tornado aloft

2010-06-16T00:17:00.000-05:00

I have never seen a "tornado aloft" description on a damage survey. Technically I guess this means that the tornado was intermittently in contact with the ground and the track was discernible. This would tend to cast some doubt on the definition of a tornado via wikipedia:

"A tornado is a violent, rotating column of air which is in contact with both the surface of the earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud."

Perhaps the inclusion of some sort of damage metric would be helpful to quantify "contact with the ground". Otherwise, technically this is mesocyclone damage. But this has scale implications as well because the damage pattern locally would be different.

Risk perspective

2010-06-15T23:41:00.000-05:00

http://www.whartonmagazine.com/issues/815.php

I saw this article about a game for understanding human behavior in the face of certain disaster. It was interesting to see what people thought especially in regard to hurricane risk.

The game is played such that you have a house, 20,000 in the bank earning 10 percent interest, and a guaranteed 3-5 earthquakes (either severe or mild) before the game is finished. Let us assume that this is real life. I thought of two scenarios:
1. Let the house fail. Keep the money growing and just rebuild. (maximize cash to counter asset loss)
2. Fortify my house to a reasonable extent and increase the money. (minimize asset loss and cash loss)
3. Build and upgrade your house as much as possible. (maximize your asset)

The authors say that students who play this game opt for the money. This is a good risk from my perspective. The certainty is knowing that you will lose the house. So why invest in it when its a foregone conclusion you will suffer damage or total loss. This apparently makes you "lose" the game.

The "winning" idea is to rapidly upgrade your house to quickly deal with the certainty of a quake.

I happen to prefer the minimization technique though it is not clear at all if this strategy would pay off more than times than not.

The authors claim that the human mind fixates on short term gain rather than long term planning. The results appears counter-intuitive to me. The long term planning assigns the destruction as a certainty. It WILL happen. After all, what else would people do in a throw away economy? I understand why people would accept this as truth. This does not get at risk evaluation though. Risk is the lack of certainty on the potential destruction. Lack of Certainty. Potential destruction.

Once you include these factors things get more interesting. Rather than a severe or mild disaster, you need more of a distribution and a random one at that. Especially one that favors the shape of the true distribution (i.e. a long tail at the high end). Low probability of a strong quake. No guarantee of a quake. No potential threat assessment. Now do you protect your house minimally or increase your protection as time evolves given your interest rate?

Some argue that quakes and hurricanes are different. Hurricanes may have a few days warning and quakes happen without warning. Same to me given that interest accumulates on a different time scale.

MCS a plenty

2010-06-12T22:43:00.000-05:00

The storm track has been active enough to produce a number of MCSs. The movie above gives a fair depiction of the number of MCSs in the last 14 days or so. In fact over NE the 14 day rainfall departure has a large area of 4 inches above normal with peaks in the 8 inch range. The area shrinks if you go out 30 days but the numbers hold up. Pretty impressive narrow rainfall corridor.

Below are the 1000 hPa Reanalysis 2 temperature, 925 hPa specfic humidity, 850 hPa v wind, and 300 hPa vector wind anomalies maps. The low level warm anomaly centered over CO-NM is accompanied to its northeast by a large anomaly in specific humidity near 4 g/kg coincident with a 3 m/s v wind anomaly. The upper level jet is also anomalously strong and lies just north of NE where most of the MCS activity has been.

[As an aside, this El Nino pattern for the interior Pac NW where I live has seen some abundant rainfall as well. My locale is 1" above normal as of June 10 which is the equivalent in climatology of October 1st! ]

The El Nino pattern and thus some of the seasonal outlooks I have seen have suggested that the western Great Plains would be anomalously high in precipitation AND slightly below normal in terms of temperature. The funny thing about El Nino patterns for the Plains: the precipitation signal is weak but present, but the temperature signal is very weak. This is a new area of research for me so my discussion here is lacking. However, this particular El Nino emerged rapidly from a La Nina state {and is currently forecast to go back into a La Nina state}. This last happened in 2006 but previously did not happen since 1976.

In terms of the severe weather season we have been having, statistically it appears dull. The tornado count is hovering near the 25th percentile despite an active early May and an intermittent late May and early June.

This year has seen an active May (not compared to 2008) which is somewhat unusual on this graph but I dont believe is unusual over the last 20 years. I will have to check that out.

Convection initiation

2010-06-06T23:37:00.000-05:00

The event on the June 3rd was an interesting case of CI. Apologies in advance for the 1D depiction of the maps. I think I have decided I want a blog with a little more functionality ... like manipulating imagery more than just size, left or right...anyway.

This was a Vortex2 day where the shear was sufficient with plenty of moisture. The hodograph curvature was good enough and even made it into the outlook discussion:

However, only 1 tornado developed despite multiple storms developing. The storms appeared to stay small. The few that were able to grow larger became severe with 1 tornado produced.

What was more intriguing to me was the model forecasts that I had perused. The night before NSSL WRF run and NCARs WRF run from the night before and the morning of the event. I saved some imagery for this event for some crude verification.

Here are some (side by side apparently not possible ... a little help blogger?!) images of the NSSL vs NCAR 0000 UTC run:

Now here is the morning run from NCAR:

The discussion is as follows:
NSSL's run shows CI in western NE by 21 UTC from an area of low reflectivity which looks like noise. By 2300 UTC two areas stand out: southern SD and an area to the south in central NE. by 0100 there is a secondary band of broken convection that merges with the easternmost convection.

The NCAR run shows a large area of low reflectivity enter in western NE that gradually and then suddenly diminishes into an of small cells by 1900 UTC. By 2000 UTC these cells consolidate and CI commences in an arc. The arc of convection never intensifies except for the southernmost cell. But eventually the line falls apart and only two areas remain: southern NE and southeastern SD.

The morning run from NCAR had CI in western NE west of LBF by 1900 UTC, again from what appear to be remnants of a low reflectivity band. Again two areas develop, with the southern most cell in NE becoming the largest and breaking away southeastward. The cells in Northern NE and southern SD stay cellular through 0000 UTC.

Largely, the forecasts had a few things right. Convection would develop between 1900-2100 UTC, with two main areas of concern in NE and SD. The threats for supercells appear to be justified, given that models tend not to develop isolated cells in general, and the NCAR trend of not developing a squall line.

Water vapor imagery shows that CI occurred between 2200 and 2300 UTC in central NE first, followed by SD by 2315 UTC. The convection becomes washed out, by satellite perspective after 0600 UTC.

I also show the OAX soundings for the two NCAR runs versus the observation. The 24 hr forecast OAX sounding has evidence of anvil cloudiness and a stronger wind field aloft. Despite this the thermodynamic structure is similar enough in shape minus the ability to resolve the low level inversion. Much can be said of the 12 hour forecast for OAX. Though the inversion structure is different, the hodograph is much more comparable.

This leaves me with a few thoughts:
It would appear the kinematic fields can determine the location of CI despite similar evolution of the thermodynamic fields.

Why do the 24 hour forecasts show dissipation of the convection even though the cells form a line the NSSL run and an arc in the NCAR run? The formation of a squall line should build a cold pool that helps sustain convection.

It is interesting that if you directly compare the 00 vs 12 UTC runs one gets a sense of consistency or reliability. The differences might appear to be large, but if we don't take the NWP output too literally and add more uncertainty to the 00 UTC forecast I believe the models achieve a relative consistency and thus reliability. It would be very interesting to vary the boundary layer physics to see what variety of CI scenario's emerge in this context.

MCS development in CO-NM

2010-06-06T01:33:00.000-05:00

An MCS developed tonight in CO-NM in an impressively warm environment aloft.

At first glance, it appears upslope flow penetrated deep into CO and Northern NM, underneath westerly flow. The terrain served to initiate convection. The upslope flow was responsible for transporting some moisture approaching 50 F to the region.

The impressively warm atmosphere apparently did not stop convection along the NM-AZ border either. As with a previous study (Bunkers et al. 2010), this highlights that warm temperatures aloft do not necessarily reflect convective inhibition. The low level moisture, lapse rate aloft, and forcing are important. So why the reliance on these warm temperatures? Forecasters rule of thumb, that when the mid level temps get warm, convection becomes increasingly unlikely. Most likely this "rule" was the recognition of a process of warming by subsidence such that a cap was present and forcing was either weak or non-existent.

So, now that my script is done running here are some stats at 500 hPa:
STATION T    T90
ABQ       -4C    -6C
DDC       -4C    -6C
LBF    -5C    -7C
MAF      -3C -5C
AMA     -4C    -6C
top          -7C    -7C
oun         -3C    -6C
fwd -4C    -5C
epz          -4C    -5C
oax          -6C    -7C
drt           -4C -4C
crp           -4C    -4 C
bro           -6C    -4C
dnr           -7C    -7C
sgf           -5C    -6C
lzk           -4C    -6C

These are the ones I have checked and all but 1, have exceeded the 90th percentile. It would be interesting to see how often all these stations have simultaneously hit the 90th percentile of warm Temperatures.

post storm analysis

2010-05-19T22:56:00.001-05:00

Well my gut telling me that south central OK would be the best play wasn't quite correct.

The second initiation of convection to the south near Lawton just took forever to congeal into a supercell after many many mergers of smaller storms. The hint is that the cap was too strong, or the shear was too strong for the minimal instability being released. This would suggest that the stronger dynamical forcing to the north was a key factor in the rapid transition from small cells into bigger supercells.

The shear though was also questionable at FWD , despite 200 SRH, only the lowest km had significant hodograph curvature. aloft the hodograph was a straight line. At OUN, within some sort of convection, the hodograph was much larger and curvature much more pronounced.

The observed 500 hPa frontal zone was pretty much in contact with the main supercell of the day and had a pretty good connection to the initiation in southern OK. V2 soundings might shed light on this .

Overall I am not sure what to think of an event like this. The soundings to the north in OK appeared to be uncapped and the shear great. Tornado production was similar to the day before ... apparently present but most short lived. Moisture was present, SRH was high, BRNSHR was in the 10-80 range, and the hodographs all had good curvature.

To the south, there was a cap, perhaps weaker forcing until much later, hodographs were curved by trended to be more straightline (window of opportunity was shorter to the south perhaps), but the instability was greater. I did notice that the southern supercells, had outflow attached to them. So perhaps the mid level dryness enhanced cold pool strength. This case has lots of interesting questions.

dynamical devil

2010-05-19T14:11:00.000-05:00

The dryline bulge is in western Oklahoma somewhat removed from the 500 hPa frontal zone as seen in water vapor imagery. However the circulation about this front has resulted (or speculated to have resulted in a narrow moist tongue over the proximate location of the dryline in OK.

I expect CI to be imminent, and perusal of vis sat imagery confirms the presence of a cumulus field in western OK. Not sure if the remnant outflow boundary is really a front or if the nocturnal MCS simply cooled and clouded over the northern portion of the front. Thus, not sure if this front is very active....or if it will truly be a focus for CI.

Vis imagery wave clouds would indicate that it is still relatively stable in Central and southern OK.

First echos on the dryline at 18:56 strengthened by 19:14 UTC. Looks like convection is right on time.

The devil is in the dynamics

2010-05-19T10:40:00.001-05:00

A nice little potential outbreak today for OK and North TX. Complicated situation as the night time MCS moves away from OKC, with no outflow boundary clearly visible. The low level cloud field is eerily similar to previous days. The complications are that the elevated mixed layer is well into the area, and the 500 hPa frontal zone is already through AMA. Surface convergence will be there to the north but it may be the dynamics that sets this thing off.

The cap is the big player and the models favor this opinion. NCAR ARW run from last night says multiple periods of initiation to the north, remniscent of May 10, again occurring earlier in the 18-19 UTC time frame. Then later on initiation occurs along a dryline boundary (around 22 UTC) before growing upscale. NSSL ARW run is a lot different probably because of the poor precipitation forecast it produced to the west of the MCS. So too much precipitation to the west virtually ensures that a subsequent trigger for new convection occurs earlier.

Both models agree that initial development will be scattered but not isolated. Thus storm interactions and outflow development may hinder chances at discreet, cyclic tornadic supercells. Today may be a tail-end Charlie kind of day.

The models are not very different with the dryline, but it appears the 500 hPa front is much stronger in NCARs run...though i have no proof since the NSSL run does not make available fields aloft...however the CI that occurs in NCARs run appears associated with the 500 hPa frontal circulation. This is inconclusive however because the 850 RH field is near saturated as well. Breaking the cap is easier when the PBL top becomes saturated.

If I were chasing today, I would try to be south of OKC, probably in Norman. Wait to see how the cap holds to the north and if early storms stay isolated and discreet go for them. Then haul ass south later in the day as the next wave of CI occurs along the 500 hPa front. Otherwise south and east of Norman. The show should start by 19-20 UTC either way...3 hours from now.

Not sure of the tornado potential. Yesterday appeared to be ripe for tornados, yet the pictures and reports indicate short lived but strong tornados. Nice supercells on radar, though. wonder if the shear profiles were not ideal enough. The shear profiles from NCARs model at OUN at 21-23 UTC appear good enough, so this may be a right time right place scenario...brief window is implied. To the north it is less certain since storms may be on the warm front. I am still hedging my bets southward of OKC ...

warm front MCS

2010-05-12T22:41:00.000-05:00

So I fell asleep last night and missed out on real time watching of the Mesoscale Convective Systems that formed. May 11-12 2010 .

I am always fascinated by the different evolutionary modes of convective initiation. Yesterday's mode was scattered convection under a moderate shear-high instability day. But it was effectively capped, given that multiple elevated supercells formed and quickly dissipated much to the chagrin of VORTEX2 participants. It was a classic Iowa warm front event, with little to no forcing but shear and instability abound.

at 2200 UTC, the first supercell was in the process of initiating in SW OK and after 1 hour falls apart. It skirts an area to the north just south of woodward I believe, and another set of CI takes place between 2345 and 0015 UTC. Again short lived supercells. However, the anvil aloft is cold and the cloud does not dissipate. So it looks like a storm is there, but on radar it was a useless blob of 30 dbz echo.

By 0145 the warm front in SE KS gets hot and explodes into the primary MCS. This initial convection gets going and after perhaps 45 minutes to an hour backbuilds to the west along the front while that old cloud shield drifts in by 0402. Not much longer later the old cloud shield is rapidly dissipated around the MCS as it swells to maximum size virtually covering MO by 1100 UTC.

at 0345 UTC SW KS sees another MCS initiate and suddenly from KS into NE convection is firing up. This MCS looks asymmetric almost half circle like but looks very similar to an MCC. Once these two systems get close enough to each other the eastern MCS appears to dissipate, at least its western end. The radar reflectivity pattern was chaotic in nature. This is a different breed of cloud system most notably MCC like. It doesnt come with much severe weather oddly enough given its environment. But the cloud shields are huge.

After looping tonights water vapor imagery .... the eastern MCS traveled from IL through VA out over the Atlantic. I noticed a pretty compelling anticyclonic gyre aloft. very classic long lived system.

Also note that CI occurred on both sides of the water vapor dry slot ... to the east failed and to the west got going.

The surface data doesn't look that compelling .. where the warm front convergence was occuring in SE KS is where CI took place along the front. beyond that moisture was slowly working north (implied moisture convergence). Both systems were on the anticyclonic shear side of the upper level jet which was just by position only since the wind field aloft was pretty homogenous.

Soundings from LMN indicated the cap had weakened boasting CAPE of between 2-3000 J kg-1 at 2100 UTC. The wind sbacked at 0000 UTC and the low levels became saturated as the cap layer seemed to strengthen a bit. though perhaps the lapse rate steepened under slight cooling aloft. 6 hours later the layer below 850 had a nasty 50 kt LLJ and warmed and moistened appreciably. moisture depth to the east was high, as the low levels appeared to be saturated.

visible imagery indicated some sort of cloud boundaries, like elevated outflow boundaries that might be implicated here. But I dont have access to the OK mesonet data to see if anything showed up there. In my experience it doesnt show up on the sfc winds, but it might be in the pressure field.

Interesting day. Maybe V2 will have some photogrammetry of these supercell initiations.

Post storm wrap up

2010-05-10T22:13:00.000-05:00

Wild day. 37 reported tornados. maximum hail size of 4.25". Max reported wind gust to 100 mph.
Looks like a number of fatalities have occurred as well.

Well forecast event by SPC. The uncertainty was well forecast at 1200 and 1300 Day 1 outlooks:
1. Initial storms would take time to organize thus Initiation area would be removed from maximum tornado risk.
2. moisture return would not be an issue.

BUT, the 1630 UTC update suggested that 21 UTC would be the new initiation time. Doubt crept in. Even to go as far as to say that central and southern OK would be capped and that models were over-aggressive. The 2000 UTC update re-instated the aggressive coverage southward based on the satellite data: cumulus cloud field developed in advance of and in proximity to the dryline.

What was not well forecast was the timing of CI. SPC was calling for a 18-19 UTC CI in SW KS, with another bout further south into OK by 21-22 UTC then further south into central and southern OK. The focus was on the cap and favorable moisture return.

Indeed the actual event sequence began like SPC said: SW KS near DDC for 2nd and 3rd storms in a bunch at 18 UTC. The storms appeared further SE into OK to the northwest of WWR by 1850 UTC and another east southeast of Gage and a few weak storms further south. These storms never really got going though they were players later when they merged with the northern storm ... that storm became tornadic after those mergers though it isnt clear they were the cause.

Now heres where the forecast goes awry. The dryline has not been dogged by storms. It was still going strong. At 2000 UTC a weak storm complex was near JWG. It almost dies, then out of nowhere re-intensifies into a nasty linear looking supercell. Much like the Nov 2005 Ames tornadic supercell or really much like high shear supercells.

By 2100 UTC a new batch of weak storms in advance of the dryline form and these quickly become supercellular in a cluster. The dryline is far removed from these storms. Much further south more storms get going, more likely previously involved storms with the dryline down there. Between these 2 areas another loan supercell formed and merged with the OUN cluster. This rogue supercell seemingly merged into the southern side of the northern supercells and that was in Norman or close by. differential storm motion for some reason on that storm.

New storms form off the dryline by JWG and move northeast to form a more linear looking cluster. By 2142 more storms form on the dryline to the west of OUN. This cluster appeared to form a line before devolving or maybe evolving into nasty hook echo supercells. Quite spectacular.

The supercells came in waves, seperated by time and/or space in clusters. They were at times poorly spaced but productive, and well spaced and spectacular. We saw the whole range of high shear supercells. More importantly we saw that the model forecast paradigm broke down. The soundings launched by vortex2 will be invaluable to assessing the environment on this day. This will be one of the most studied days in VORTEX2.

Big cities under the gun

2010-05-10T16:53:00.000-05:00

Wichita and Oklahoma city are under tornado warnings and basically in between. A number of large tornado reports have come out, amidst the very brief 30s to 3 minute variety. The supercells have shown all kinds of high shear characteristics today.

The most crazy is a left mover split that eventually produced tornado warnings in kansas off the woodward storm. It crept in behind another storm, and then that one went tornadic as well. The woodward or likely a variant of it, because it merged with at least two other storms (of linear shape and very weak reflectivity speaking).

and the reports are coming out fast. You actually have to wonder what the impact of having a great weather dept. at OU has done for safety in Oklahoma. If there are storms you can bet like 30-60 chasers will be out combing the plains for tornados, and some of them will be relaying information back to the NWS. This doesnt prevent damage, but it should make people more aware of tornados and there warnings.

and the tornado warnings come out

2010-05-10T14:38:00.001-05:00

Couple of reported tornados in what looks like a set of massive circular blobs which was the most continuous feature associated with the shortwave trough.

DDC initial storm just got its act together. Possible hook and strong rotation noted on radar. It appeared the evolution of such storms were very typical of high shear environments ... stretched out along the mean wind until repeated bouts of deep convection upshear culminated in protecting the storm.

This is also the case for the woodward storm though it got going later and split with the left mover not moving very far off yet. The main tornadic portion of the cell appeared to be linear! it now has a kidney bean shape with reflectivity over 65.

Situation is still somewhat chaotic between these two nice storms. no warnings and there appears to be no organization with them which is strange.

Dew points up to 68-70 in OK just west and south of OKC. Despite that the storms south of the woddward storm just cant get going. They are struggling. would love to see the sounding from OUN, as there might be a stronger cap in place which would protect OUN till later tonight.

FWD sounding was strongly capped. so was DDC though I will have to review the radar data at 1715 to see which air mass was being sampled, environment of low level storm.

Nice outflow in CO.

2010-05-10T13:16:00.000-05:00

1st big storm went up by DDC in advance of the dryline along a cloud street. ci took 20-25 minutes. appears to have a second storm on its flank over the same initiation area. This area is where the winds have stayed from the southeast with dew points near 61 in DDC.

Storms that were ongoing associated with the low actually became tor warned first. DDC storms and initiation zippered along the dryline south still not doing much.

Cumulus cloud field sprang up in OK in apparent advance of the dryline where temperatures have gotten to 90 F with dew points into 20's. The structure of the cloud fields kind of resembles the model bulges in dryline position especially the NCAR ARW run from 00 UTC last night valid at 18 UTC. Indeed the OKMESONET says the dryline is in OK...what a surge that was...but probably not given the station spacing down there.

Northeast storm motion on these initial cells especially down into the woodward region. I am starting to think that a round 2 may be likely as the drying evident in water vapor imagery over the western TX panhandle increases and indicates that is the base of the shortwave trough. in advance of this feature is a secondary line of moisture evident on vis imagery which I believed to be part of the main dryline, but it may behind the surface dryline and may overtake the dryline in a few hours. This paradigm indicates a 2nd bout of CI as the forcing coincides with the dryline boundary...I am out on a limb here.

afternoon update

2010-05-10T12:06:00.000-05:00

Indeed the severe weather risk areas migrate towards SW KS in advance of the surface low. Per my thinking in the previous post, storm initiation is indeed being forecast earlier. The dryline is really beefing up with dew points dropping down to near 10 F and surface winds sustained to nearly 35-40 mph with gusts to 50-60.

Current sat trends indicate multiple "cloud streets" though not of the fine scale variety behind the dry line. This indicates to me that low precip supercells may be the initial mode, however the speed at which the shortwave is progressing suggests that by the time CI does occur, they may be right in the moisture plume which argues against the low precip mode.

However, the linear banding of the cloud features at this point points to a more linear development mode. One wonders if this early convection, if it gets going, will be round 1 followed by round 2 of supercells later in the afternoon. Still more cloud lines popping up now near rthe dryline at 1715 UTC.

Waiting for 18 UTC sounding for DDC...maybe another hour or so before it appears on line if they launched at 1710 UTC like I hope they did. I also expect one from AMA at 18 or 21 UTC and one at OUN at 20 or 21 UTC. Hopefully the ARM site at LMN will also launch a few.

Dryline just went by Liberal KS, 82 over 45 this hour, was 75 over 59. Interesting that the dryline appears to be making north easterly gains into KS but not strong easterly surges in the panhandle ... recent trends indicate it is moving but not as fast further to the south. Will have to watch the progression.

Max dewpoints in OK up to 68 in the south, still holding strong at 65 in the plume to the north.

CI iminent along a line from the TX-OK border North to DDC in the next hour and a half over the OK panhandle.

The morning update

2010-05-10T09:57:00.001-05:00

Much to my surprise, the moisture is returning with dew points up to 60 in OKC at 15 UTC with a 65 just south into TX in the narrow plume of moisture to the west of FWD. It looks like the moisture is deep at FWD on the sounding from this morning. The shear is already large and there is no reason to suspect it will diminish. The hodographs are large and semi-circular from 0-3km.

Currently though there is a deep low cloud deck with indications of wave clouds. This corresponds nicely with OUN's sounding and low level stable layer. The water vapor imagery continues to indicate a dry intrusion aloft is setting up from MAF to OUN to Tulsa. The dryline itself is already in place at AMA, and should be moving rather quickly with the arrival of the shortwave in the next few hours. Convective initiation should occur according to the data prior to 21 UTC and possibly as early as 19 UTC if I have done my wave phase speed analysis correctly.

Presumed 700 hPa cold advection is already occurring into the TX panhandle. BIG question is when will the cloud cover break up over Oklahoma, and where it will recede long enough for temperatures to climb. If the clouds hold strong, which is in doubt, then where they do break up will determine the locations, at least partly, for CI. Sounds like May 3rd all over again.

East moving storms with right movers to the south-southeast. Gonna be a long day for some folks in Oklahoma. And SPC and I are of the same opinion ... maximum threat over a limited window of time. As per my discussion last night, the rightfully acknowledge the limited span of the best thermodynamics and rightfully acknowledge that the shear may be too strong such that storms may need time to fully organize. Thus the CI forecast location is somewhat removed from the maximum tornado risk area. I still wonder though if the environment is really conducive to long track tornados.

I think the answer is yes, but I wouldnt be surprised if a few storms go up, put down a tornado, then proceed to do nothing more that put down very large hail.

Also the nature of the straightline hodograph over the CI area might be conducive to splitting supercells initially. At least a portion of the northern end of the CI area may rapidly transition to an MCS.

ARW run from NCAR indicates that CI will occur by 20 UTC, and I would guess is probably an hour or two late given the use of the MYJ PBL scheme. But it does indicate that the threat area for more isolated storms along the dryline will be further south into Oklahoma. But once storms like these get going in the model there is no telling how correct it is given the bad mass fluxes at this scale (3 km). Suffice it to say the model is trending towards my line of thinking.

Clouds starting to thin over SW OK ... game on. First batch of CI I forecast for east of Liberal KS. If I were chaing today I would be in Oklahoma City east side waiting for data until 1pm.

Potentially dangerous situation tornado watchboxes should be the norm today.

May 10 the forecast for tornadoes?

2010-05-10T00:09:00.000-05:00

It isn't rare to have a day 2 moderate risk for the central plains including OK and KS. It is rare to see a moderate risk during VORTEX2 operations ;) . The prevailing wisdom is that if you put 100 vehicles and 400 scientists and 8 radar trucks in the Plains ...ain't nuthin' going to happen.

So I thought I would get in on the forecast action.

Broad scale specifics from the NAM model: a sfc low races out of CO tonight across southern KS and moves into northeast KS by tomorrow night. This feature is due to a pretty sharp shortwave trough at 500 hPa (about half way up in the atmosphere in terms of mass) which gives the appearance of a negative tilt into tomorrow. Note that the flow around this trough (the jet streak too) is cyclonically curved. The jet streak itself is actually located across OK and TX panhandle. The jet streak at 300 hPa is located further north and there is a hint that the flow aloft will be anticyclonic in nature across southern Oklahoma.

Players in Convective initiation: The warm from will be a breeding ground for all kinds of convection tonight into tomorrow evening. The dryline will be a major player as it punches into Oklahoma City. BUT the shear appears to be oriented perpendicular to the boundaries ... a sign that storms should start and possibly remain discreet.

The odd things I see:
The motion is fast for the shortwave aloft, and thus the moisture return may be in question ... moisture takes time to be transported in great quantities. 0500 UTC data in Texas show 60's creeping into the TX panhandle but dew points only 50 at OKC and DFW. Hi-res NSSL model is consistent through 6 hours with observed data. Models are indicating this to be the case ... that only low to mid 60's with high temperatures near 83 will be possible, though behind the dryline it may hit 90.

NSSL model also indicating the low may stall. Operational models may be aggressive in bringing this system out. Complicating factor is the system to the NW that drops in behind, and system to the east which seems to not move too much. Hard to know since the jet aloft to the rear of the shortwave is not fully ashore.

Day 1 outlook updated to reflect a high risk. Can't argue against that. Models are all producing favorable parameters for Oklahoma tornados. This is easy to forecast maximum risk where all parameters come together nicely. However, as a chaser, where would you want to be knowing:
1. fast storm motions
2. seemingly moisture limited to the east (from the limited model runs I have seen)
3. complicated cloud forecast
4. complicated surface low and dryline evolution and thus placement.

It appears SPC is playing up the moisture (to 70 F) with temps in the mid 80's, and heavily favoring the track of the midlevel jet (rightfully so).

The BIG question is what kind of supercells will be the norm? low precip, high precip, or classic? If low precip come off the dryline how will they evolve in the face of ridiculous shear (40 meters per second) and a somewhat strong cap which is sure to come out given the steady fetch from ABQ?

I have to wonder if there will be early storms in KS that get into OK and further complicate this situation with outflow boundaries. There doesn't appear to be a whole lot of limiting factors the models are picking up on, so the devil is in the details ... morning models will be key as well as the radar and moisture progress on the soundings.

High risk is warranted but there is more going on here. May 3rd 1999 comes to mind in terms of an OKC to Tulsa outbreak. Needless to say I will have the radar looping tomorrow.

Can't get enough

2010-04-30T23:07:00.001-05:00

I took my eyes off the weather today and BAM! night time tornado's abound.

Quick off the cuff impressions and analysis:
1. I am utterly impressed but not that surprised that the sounding structures observed from FWD, LIT, SHV, LCH, SGF changed so little with respect to the moisture and degree of saturation, and height of the inversion. The soundings appeared to be tropical like... with near saturation to 700 hPa.

2. infrared satellite loop over the last few hours indicate Convective Initiation along multiple parallel boundaries (presumed boundaries). The cloud fields developed on the individual cells perpendicular to the flow (like transverse bands). They slammed into the main cloud mass as they moved northeast. Early cells did not survive individually. All appear to be training with common initiation areas in bursts. This was prevalent 20-23:59 UTC.

Nice case to model I would bet. 5-1-10 0000 UTC.

Less Interesting event

2010-04-30T00:29:00.001-05:00

Nice forecast by SPC today. I was concerned that the threat was marginalized by the wording of their outlook this morning. The concerns of the day were going to be the timing of CI and the strength of the cap in the warm sector, and the position of boundaries. There wasnt much mentioned about the tornado threat other than isolated threat. That is true, of course. The reasoning of limited moisture and also that storms would weaken after dark were incorrect.

There was little mention of hodograph shape or the evolution of hodographs. This was surprising to me and seemed to be quite important. The hodograph evolution I saw was that of little curvature near the front but big curvature away from the front. Worse was the evolution from curved to straightline hodographs. The 21 and 00 UTC soundings from OAX and TOP pseudo-confirmed the hi-res model hodographs I saw (NCAR WRF 3km convection from their 18-24 hour forecast from 29 April 00 UTC Run). I am not using a direct comparison mind you ... more like temporal neighborhood similarity.

That is the forecast reasoning depended was sullied by rather typical information and model data were discounted. Bias is models is always problem. When do you trust them and when don't you. In highly dynamic environments it is easy for them to be correct. When they go astray is usually in organizing the convection or missing the initial convective mode. The linear nature to todays convection was fully captured by the model even if the forecasters did not anticipate this initial mixed mode.

I say mixed mode because I am sure there were a few supercells, but they were lined up on the front. The scale of such linear organization along a boundary might be predicted well as opposed to smaller scale isolated cells. This is the big test of these models. What CI events do they capture well AND how well do they predict the evolution? Current techniques exist to test for this and I believe them to be regime dependent. Just dont ask which regimes yet. That awaits further research. I will update when I get the model hodographs downloaded and compare to the soundings.

High risk for Day 3

2010-04-24T23:01:00.000-05:00

The high risk certainly verified today. Looks like either a few tornadic supercells were out prowling around or 1 cyclic tornadic supercell was about laying down multi-state sorts of damage. Cant wait to see the damage survey. I wish you well Yazoo City (and all the other cities/people affected ) in your recovery efforts.

Today was a story all about large hodographs despite what can only be considered to be marginal instability (in general) but still enough to be dangerous.

Situational awareness needed to be much higher for the average citizen out there today. I cant blame the people as much as I might want to. The High and Moderate Risk areas for today was LARGE; 4 and 6 states respectively. The event was ongoing in the morning, with multiple waves of severe weather expected.

The first tornado report was listed 2.5 hours after the convective outlook was issued. We all need to be better equipped to explain and communicate the risk. Its a serious business we are in. We dont just provide information for the average person to consume. We provide meteorological information from which a serious number of people make decisions.

From the local TV and radio coverage disseminating NWS warnings, to emergency managers trained to respond to a crisis, to the fire and police department who are also trained to monitor (in a limited role) and respond. By what do real people need to know?

This phenomena is distinct. It is short lived locally (5 to 90 minutes). Can occur in waves or epsiodes. They can be misleading. One storm can be tornadic and depending on your position can come "out of nowhere", be right in front of you for 10 minutes, or appear to be suddenly upon you though you didnt think it was that close. The local motion of the storm and the tornado may be different. The storm itself may not be that visible.

So:
1. should you travel during the storm? Check the radar. Read about the people who had their kids in the car and were caught in the storm as power lines and trees pummeled them. They claimed taking the kids out of the carseat was a good idea when they hid inside the car. A tree hit them apparently damaging the car where one child would have been. I dont want to know what would have happened if the car became airborne in that situation.

2. should you flee the storm and drive somewhere else? No. Read the article about the people who drove to the family restaurant to hide in the freezer. They ended up in the restaurant ... in their car ...thrown by the tornado they were trying to hide from.

If you are out, stay put. its easier to find shelter where you are than to relocate and find shelter.
If you are home, the basement of a well built house, or a bathroom on the lowest floor s the best option (not necessarily safe though; remember we are talking about tornado's ... they make cars fly far).

The day after tornado season started

2010-04-23T23:00:00.000-05:00

An interesting severe weather day. Big threats for supercells in multiple regions.

The models gave us false impressions of the cap. This is a case for extensive numerical modeling of a null event in Nebraska and Kansas. The water vapor imagery combined with multiple soundings available for analysis make this case worthwhile to explore numerically.

The instability and moisture were well predicted. It appears the shear was well predicted. The timing in the NSSL and NCAR WRF models was too early and too widespread. I want to say that the models ejected the long wave trough out too quickly...but is a few meters per second really too quickly in phase speed? Or perhaps the models did not capture the vorticity evolution on the back side of this large rossby wave?
anyway the cap issue is nicely shown by the Topeka sounding (where the action was predicted by 21-00 UTC.
Note the low level cloud layer. There appeared to be shallow cumulus. Does parcel theory collapse when a cloud layer is already present? To speculate is poor science, but ideas emerge from speculation. Perhaps the cloud layer is so dynamic (entrainment at the PBL top, less than well mixed below) that parcels can only emerge or organize with the thermodynamics of the cloud layer. In that case, a parcel lifted from the cloud layer would immediately have convective inhibition.

Dr Adam Houston has published some work indicating that the lapse rate above the LCL and LFC might be very important here as well. The steeper the better which is not really observed on this sounding. Another factor may very well be the path that parcels take. That is the forcing for ascent locally may not have been favorable despite the PBL circulations.

Clearly though, the dry layer alofyt at TOP was associated with a dry intrusion of very limited extent as the inversion is not present just 4 hours later at any station. water vapor loops indicate the invsersion may have been present from 1845 to 2045 and was weakening. It was oriented north to south ... probably why SGF showed only a hint of it and why it wasnt seen elsewhere.

As the event unfolds now, Iowa and Nebraska are just now seeing the late evening initiation I was expecting if the afternoon stuff didnt go. I have some anecdotal evidence that when the warm front in Iowa is involved, chances are the cap holds until night time. I wish I could explore that issue further.

Not too much actual severe weather to report on. 8 tornado reports in 4 states.

Tornado season is upon us

2010-04-22T23:03:00.000-05:00

Some quick facts. Today marked the latest day in the year where a moderate risk of severe weather was forecast by SPC. Interesting enough, the MOD risk was not forecast until the 20 UTC update.

Overall, the NSSL WRF model did pretty well from what I can see. It was spotty and sluggish but the put the idea out there that small scale convection was possible.

The result: 31 local storm report tornadoes.

The hodographs were nicely curved today and the moisture got into eastern Colorado. The low level cloud cover kept dew point depressions low (low lcl heights) near the warm front. There were a number of splitting supercells in very close proximity to other supercells which did not split. At the very least, my perception tells me they were supercells but it is possible that supercells were not the only organizational mode out there today.

I dont know what to make of the deep low level cloud layer at OUN. The OKC ASOS showed the overcast skies but did not that much moisture really pour into Oklahoma today? Preliminary analysis says yes since FWD reported similar low level moisture observations almost of the tropical variety.

In fact, in searching through the soundings, the elevated mixed layer was surprisingly far south in Brownsville and still weak in DRT. Not really sure what to make of that factoid. Then again I wasnt following this event very closely.

anyway, here are the pics. Wish I was out there chasing. The Plains of Colorado is some nice empty country.