Editor: Jim Elliott
Contributor: Stephanie Kenitzer
Copy Editor: Marcie Weber
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The AMS is planning three special conferences for the Annual Meeting in Orlando. First the Special Conference on African Climate and Environment will be held Sunday 13 January 2002. In this conference, a series of invited scientists will present review lectures from a variety of disciplines. The general topics include 1) monitoring and evaluating climate and the land surface, 2) the mean climate and its variability, 3) causes of variability, 4) feedbacks related to land surface processes, and 5) climate applications and forecasting. The goal of the conference is to foster a greater understanding of issues related to African climate and environment and will help to clear up many of the misperceptions about these issues.
The second is a Communications Workshop designed to improve the relationship and communications between AMS members, the broader community of atmospheric and related scientists, and the media. The workshop will also take place on Sunday 13 January from 8:30 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. The Communications Workshop will be an interactive media training session including a panel discussion with leading journalists on getting stories in the right place, at the right time, and with accurate details; hands-on media training techniques and pointers; and discussions on the value of working with the media for the benefit of the science and science funding and refining media and science communications at the AMS. The workshop is open to all attendees at the Annual Meeting at no fee. Those interested must register on the AMS Web site prior to the meeting.
Finally, the AMS will hold the First AMS Student Conference and Career Fair, organized by the AMS Board of Higher Education. There is no fee for attending the conference but you must preregister, since there will be no on-site registration. Please note registration includes admittance to the Student Conference only. You must register separately for the 82nd AMS Annual Meeting. The conference and career fair is intended for senior undergraduates and first-year graduate students, and will focus on active areas and emerging opportunities in atmospheric and related sciences. Sessions will include invited speakers from the private, academic, and government sectors. It is expected that each year a special session will spotlight one organization, and this year it will be UCAR/NCAR. There will be keynote addresses by leading scientists and a student poster session. A career fair is scheduled to provide a forum for students to personally interact with employers and representatives of graduate institutions, and includes the opportunity to establish contacts and set up interviews.
Annual Meeting attendees can register for these special conferences on the AMS Web site: http://www.ametsoc.org/ams.
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Erik Larson, author of the popular book Isaac’s Storm will be the featured speaker for the closing night of the AMS Annual Meeting. In Isaac’s Storm, Erik Larson blends science and history to tell the story of Galveston, its people, and the hurricane that devastated them. Drawing on hundreds of personal reminiscences of the storm, Larson follows individuals through the fateful day and the storm’s aftermath. At the center of it all is Isaac Cline, in chare of the U.S. Weather Bureau (now National Weather Service) office in Galveston in 1900. Using Cline’s own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man’s heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude.
Larson will share his personal insights on researching and writing the book that earned him the 2002 AMS Louis J. Battan Award. The Battan Award is presented to the author of an outstanding, newly published book on the atmospheric and related sciences of a technical or nontechnical nature, with consideration to those books that foster public understanding of meteorology for children or adults.
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The American Meteorological Society (AMS) in association with the University of Oklahoma is finalizing plans for a 2-day conference that will bring together leaders of government, academia, industry, and the private sector to discuss the nation’s energy crisis and the role weather and climate play in addressing that problem.
Entitled “A Policy Forum: Weather, Climate, and Energy,” the meeting will be held at the Washington Court Hotel on Capitol Hill in Washington, 16–17 October.
The forum will deal with the application of weather and climate information and the production and distribution of energy as a national priority. That information is a vital asset as national energy policy becomes even more critical in the face of a continuing decline in the state of the economy. The forum will explore how weather and climate information produced by the public and private sectors can be used to effectively match energy supply and demand while reducing costs and increasing reliability.”
Energy producers, distributors, traders and users; public and private providers of weather information and services; academic leaders, and government energy policy makers will make presentations. Additionally, a series of panel discussions will address such questions as, How is the energy sector changing and how can it improve its use of weather and climate information? What advances are needed in weather and climate science and services? What special requirements do emerging risk management techniques place on weather and climate services? And what public policies are needed to foster development of weather and climate services and their use by the energy sector?
Additional details are available on the AMS Web site at http://www.ametsoc.org/ams.
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The AMS is pleased to announce a new joint-society initiative, the Dissertations Initiative for the Advancement of Climate Change Research. DISCCRS (pronounced “discourse”) brings together graduates across the atmospheric, terrestrial and aquatic sciences engaged in climate change research.
AMS, the American Geophysical Union, the Ecological Society of America, and the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography are sponsoring this initiative to ensure broad, interdisciplinary participation. The initiative has several elements.
DISCCRS is international in scope. Grants from NASA and NSF support the program and symposium participant costs. For program information, including the Ph.D. Dissertation Registry, registration forms, and symposium information, visit http://aslo.org/phd.html or contact C. Susan Weiler, DISCCRS Program Director, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA 99362 (Tel: 509-527-5948; weiler@whitman.edu).
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The AMS Washington, D.C., office will be moving to its new location at 1120 G Street, NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20005, on 5 October 2001. The new telephone numbers for the office, effective Monday 8 October, are
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Owing to the Congressional recess in August and the current national emergency, there is very little new to report on the status of federal appropriations issues. Subcommittee recommendations for NOAA, NASA, and Department of Energy’s Biological and Environmental Research (DOE BER) in both Houses have been passed by the full House and Senate appropriations Committees and were then ratified on the Floor of both bodies. What remains are conference committees to iron out any differences; duplicate bills will then be produced for votes by both full House and Senate, and then they will be sent to the President for signature.
Given the national emergency, the chances limited that funding were not signed by the end of the fiscal year, 30 September. Congress will most likely pass a “Continuing Resolution” that will fund the federal government at least through mid-October at FY01 rates of outlays.
One bills of special interest is the VA-HUD appropriations bills that contain funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF). The House recommended a 9.4% increase in funding for NSF; while the Senate, which has historically been a strong supporter of “doubling” the NSF budget, recommended increase of only 5.6%. At this time there is no way to determine which number the conferees might lean to. AMS hopes there might be an opportunity to for the conference committee to emerge with a number that recognizes the importance of basic science research funding to the economy and national security of the country and leans to the higher number.
AMS has weighed in with conferees on NSF, and has also contacted conferees responsible for the appropriations bill covering NOAA. The Society will be urging strong support for programs within DOE’s BER program and has been monitoring the appropriations process for other programs of interest to AMS.
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Over the past 21 years, parts of the Northern Hemisphere have become much greener than they used to be.
Researchers using satellite data have confirmed that plant life above 40°N latitude (New York, Madrid, Ankara, Beijing) has been growing more vigorously since 1981. One suspected cause is rising temperatures, possibly linked to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Eurasia seems to be greening more than North America, with more lush vegetation for longer periods of time.
These results will appear in the 16 September issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research—Atmospheres, published by the American Geophysical Union. The authors are Liming Zhou, Robert Kaufmann, Nikolai Shabanov, and Ranga Myneni of Boston University, and Daniel Slayback and Compton Tucker of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
“When we looked at temperature and satellite vegetation data, we saw that year to year changes in growth and duration of the growing season of northern vegetation are tightly linked to year to year changes in temperature,” Zhou said. The area of vegetation has not extended, but the existing vegetation has increased in density.
The authors also looked at the differences in vegetation growth between North America and Eurasia, because the patterns and magnitudes of warming are different on the two continents. The greenness data from satellites were strongly correlated to temperature data from thousands of meteorological stations on both continents. The Eurasian greening was especially persistent over a broad contiguous swath of land from central Europe through Siberia to far-east Russia, where most of the vegetation is forests and woodlands. North America, in comparison, shows a fragmented pattern of change notable only in the forests of the east and grasslands of the upper Midwest.
Dramatic changes in the timing of both the appearance and fall of leaves are recorded in these two decades of satellite data. The authors report a growing season that is now almost 18 days longer, on average, in Eurasia, with spring arriving a week early and autumn delayed by 10 days. In North America, the growing season appears to be as much as 12 days longer.
The researchers used a temperature dataset developed from the Global Historical Climate Network. Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who developed this dataset, said, “The data were compiled from several thousand meteorological stations in the United States and around the world. The stations also include many rural sites where the data are collected by cooperative private observers.”
Myneni suggested that these results are indicative of a greener greenhouse. “This is an important finding because of possible implications to the global carbon cycle,” he said. Carbon dioxide is a main greenhouse gas and is thought to play a major role in rising global temperatures. Further, Myneni said, under the Kyoto protocol, most of the developed countries in the north can use certain vegetation carbon sinks to meet their greenhouse gas emissions reduction commitments. If the northern forests are greening, they may already be absorbing carbon. Myneni said, “As to how much and for how long, that needs more research.”
Tucker developed the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) product to help determine the “greening” of plant life. The NDVI uses red and near-infrared solar radiation reflected back to sensors of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers (AVHRRs) aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) series of polar-orbiting satellites. These data are records of sensor observations of every patch of land on earth, at least once a day, continuously from July 1981. Processing of such massive amounts of data is a time consuming task, even on modern computers, and requires special methods to correct for atmospheric obscuration of the earth’s surface. The NDVI developed from processed data shows greening and browning of plants as they relate to seasonal changes and conditions such as drought or abundant rainfall.
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NOAA researchers and scientists are presently monitoring the formation of a possible weak El Niño and predict that the United States could experience very weak-to-marginal impacts late winter to early spring 2002. The latest (September 2001) edition of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation Diagnostic Discussion indicates the presence of some initial El Niño features in oceanic and atmospheric analyses. The researchers caution that at this early stage there is a great deal of uncertainty about the timing and intensity of the next El Niño.
“Although slightly warmer-than-normal ocean waters are being observed in the equatorial Pacific, current conditions in the tropical Pacific are closer to neutral than either El Niño or La Niña,” said NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, a component of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, meteorologist Vernon Kousky. “Over the last two months we have been monitoring warmer than average temperatures in the tropical central Pacific, but slightly warm sea surface temperatures alone do not make an El Niño.”
August climate data indicate that the waters in the central equatorial Pacific, near the international date line, have averaged at least 84°F, which is approximately 1.0°F above normal. Researchers say they have not seen any changes in the global temperature and precipitation pattern that would be consistent with an El Niño.
El Niño is an abnormal warming of the ocean temperatures across the eastern tropical Pacific that affects weather around the globe. El Niño episodes usually occur approximately every 4–5 years. It has been a little over 4 years since the last El Niño event.
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Early data show that the ozone hole that develops each year over Antarctica has reached about the same magnitude as those of the past several years, according to scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA.
Last year, the geographic area covered by the ozone hole was one of the largest on record. By early October, additional data will provide a more complete picture of the extent and intensity of this year’s ozone hole in Antarctica.
The primary cause of the ozone hole, which has occurred each year over Antarctica since the early to mid-1980s, is the chemical reactions that release chlorine and bromine into the atmosphere. The source of these chemicals is human-produced chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and bromine-containing compounds used in a variety of industrial and commercial applications.
“While chlorine has started to decline in the atmosphere, very high concentrations still remain at the altitude of the ozone layer,” said NOAA researcher Sam Oltmans. “The amounts are more than sufficient to cause the ozone hole we observe each year.”
These chemicals, in combination with very cold temperatures that form high-altitude clouds during the polar night, and a confined circumpolar wind system, produce potent conditions for ozone destruction. These ozone-destroying chemicals are no longer increasing because of the regulations put in place by the Montreal Protocol. However, they break down very slowly in the earth’s atmosphere, and a recurring annual ozone hole will be present for several more decades. Year-to-year fluctuations in the area of the ozone hole can be expected due to variations in upper atmospheric weather patterns.
NASA and NOAA use satellites to measure the extent and depth of the ozone hole. NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), currently aboard the Earth Probe satellite, and NOAA’s Solar Backscattering Ultra-Violet (SBUV/2) instrument aboard the polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites, have been measuring Antarctic ozone levels for more than 20 years. NOAA also monitors the ozone hole at the South Pole using instrumented balloons that take vertical profiles of the atmosphere and measure the amount of total ozone present.
The ozone hole is defined as area of the region with total ozone below 220 Dobson units. A Dobson unit describes the thickness of the ozone layer in a column directly above the location being measured.
“This year preliminary satellite data show that as of early September, ozone hole area was in excess of 20 million square kilometers (8 million square miles), about twice the size of the contiguous United States,” said Lawrence Flynn, a research scientist with NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS).
The hole’s size is similar to last year at this time and about 50% larger than the 10-year (1991–2000) average for early September. With very cold temperatures over Antarctica and with the circumpolar wind currents (the polar vortex) in a stable pattern, a large ozone hole, similar to the past several years has already developed.
The global ozone layer has also suffered from depletion because of an increase in stratospheric chlorine and bromine but not to the degree that is observed each spring in Antarctica. Ozone forms a layer that surrounds and protects the earth from the harmful effects of the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Excessive amounts of UV radiation can damage important plant and animal life on earth and in the oceans as well as contribute to increases in skin cancer and cataracts in humans.
Additional information on the science and on measurements of the ozone hole and of atmospheric ozone depletion in general can be found at http://www.ozonelayer.noaa.gov and http://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov.
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Normal temperatures and precipitation levels for your area may have changed as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center recently released new “normal” data for about 8000 weather stations. The data defines the normal temperature at locations across the United States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and U.S. Pacific Islands. These data are used as a benchmark for weather forecasters to calculate day-to-day temperature and rainfall departures from typical levels and are also used by business, government, and industry for planning, design, and operations.
The new figures, based from 1971 to 2000, are computed every 10 years by NCDC in Asheville, North Carolina. The new normal temperature and precipitation levels will replace those from 1961 to 1990 and includes data for 1275 more weather stations than the previous edition. NOAA’s National Weather Service will begin using the new figures for daily and monthly climate reports in January 2002.
A climatological normal is the average temperature, precipitation, or degree days over a 30-year period for a specific location. Official climatological stations meet quality standards prescribed by NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization.
Beginning 1 October 2001, customers may order the new normal files online by visiting NCDC’s “Online Store” at http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html. More information on the 1971–2000 normals is available at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/normals.html.
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The Houston-based Weather Research Center is hosting a 2-day forum next month on hurricanes and industry. The 7–8 November conference is designed for industrial planners, architects, construction managers, engineers, utility officials, and scientists to come together and discuss what happened during the 2001 hurricane season, what went right, what went wrong, how improvements can be made. Hands-on workshops will allow the attendees to improve their current plans.
With Tropical Storm Allison making landfall on the Texas coast, stalling in east Texas, and allowing phenomenal amounts of rain to flood the Houston area, the time for the Hurricanes & Industry conference in Houston in November is perfect. This conference is designed to bring together Houston’s many industries, government, utilities, and meteorologists to discuss hurricanes.
The workshop will be held at the Marriott West Loop Houston, Texas. The fee is $75 for all registration forms received prior to 15 October 2001. After 15 October the fee is $100. Additional details are available at http://www.wxresearch.com/hurricane&industry or contact Lane DuBois-Freeman (713) 529-3076.
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The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has published a new book entitled Space Weather edited by Paul Song of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; Howard J. Singer of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado; and Professor George L. Siscoe of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics.
The publication this month of Space Weather, the first peer-reviewed scientific book on the subject, marks the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the U.S. National Space Weather Program. During that time the science has moved from simply observing solar storms to the beginnings of prediction, allowing managers of sensitive equipment on earth and in space to take steps before damage occurs.
In March 2000, more than 160 scientists and students from a dozen countries gathered in Clearwater, Florida, to assess progress in the science of space weather. Their reports form the basis of Space Weather. The book draws together multidisciplinary research over 5 years, enabling scientists in any relevant area of research to learn what colleagues have discovered in other areas. The first nine chapters are nontechnical, outlining the nature and history of space weather observations, and are accessible to lay readers.
Space Weather is available from the publisher at http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/agubookstore. It is the latest in AGU’s Geophysical Monograph Series, 2001, Volume 125, 440 pages, hardbound, ISBN 0-87590-984-1, $85 for nonmembers of AGU. It may also be available from online book suppliers.
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Conrad Lautenbacher Jr. has been nominated as the Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. Lautenbacher is currently the President and CEO of the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education (CORE) and was previously an Associate with Technology, Strategies and Alliances.
A member of the U.S. Navy from 1964 to 2000, Lautenbacher served in a variety of positions at the Department of the Navy. He served as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations from 1997 to 2000, Director of the Office of Program Appraisal from 1996 to 1997, and Commander of the U.S. Third Fleet from 1994 to 1996.
Additionally, from 1996 to 1999, Lautenbacher was Chairman of the Board of the United Services Benefit Association. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and received both a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Congress must confirm Lautenbacher before he can officially become director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Confirmation hearings have not been scheduled.
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The Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has awarded an $8.7 million contract to the Enterprise Electronics Corporation, Enterprise, Alabama, to build and install a Doppler weather radar system at a location northwest of Evansville, Indiana. The new system will supplement weather radar coverage within the existing NOAA National Weather Service radar network.
Providing Doppler weather data coverage to a radius of 125 miles around the Evansville area, the new system will replace a leased radar unit. The radar unit’s features include: color graphical displays and the capability to feed data directly into the national Doppler radar network.
This fixed-price contract for the manufacture, installation and maintenance of the Doppler weather radar is for a 10-year period of performance.
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Two new faculty members have joined the Atmospheric Sciences Department at the John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences at the University of North Dakota. Mark Askelson and Paul Kucera have been hired as assistant professors.
Askelson earned his B.S. in Meteorological Studies in 1993 at the University of North Dakota, an M.S. in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma in 1996, and work for his Ph.D. degree was completed in Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma in 2001. Askelson’s current research interests include mesoscale weather prediction, model initialization, objective analysis, storm dynamics, cloud physics, cloud modeling, and radar meteorology.
Kucera earned his B.S. in Meteorological Studies in 1991 at the University of North Dakota, an M.S. in Atmospheric Sciences from Texas Tech University in Lubbock in 1993, and work for his Ph.D. degree was completed at the University of Iowa in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Kucera has extensive knowledge and experience collecting and analyzing radar and other meteorological data. He also has vast experience in radar algorithm development and analysis, especially in the area of satellite and radar rainfall estimation.
The Department of Atmospheric Science offers a Bachelor of Science, a Master of Science, and an undergraduate minor program in Atmospheric Sciences. Research areas of interest include atmospheric chemistry, surface transportation meteorology, radar meteorology, mesoscale modeling, climate analysis, cloud physics, aviation meteorology, forecasting, and weather modification.
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