Articles

The AMS Weather Band is taking a deep dive on weather instruments with the experts themselves! Join us and take your weather observing to the next level. 

Through May, June, and July 2021, Davis, WeatherFlow, Maximum, Pasco and Ambient will offer a series of live webinars and Q&A sessions in the online Weather Band community. They will provide overviews of their products and discuss which instruments are best for different purposes, from beginning weather observers to advanced users. 

Webinars require advance registration, but are open to everyone. The Q&A sessions in the community are available to Weather Band members only. Replays of the live webinars will be posted for all Weather Band members to watch on demand. Replays of the live webinars will be posted for all Weather Band members to watch on demand.

Learn all about the history of CoCoRaHS, how it grew to be the dominant network of weather observers, the impact of all this data collection, and how you can get involved yourself! Noah Newman takes the audience through this important citizen science initiative in this presentation from the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium.

Hailstones are a rare sight in Hawaii due to the high temperatures (averaging 22°C near the coast in February) and a steady trade wind layer shallower than 3 km. However, in winter, midlatitude fronts hit the islands and cumulonimbus associated with them often produce snow at the tops of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa (4202 km and 4172 km in height, respectively). The combination of well-developed cumulonimbus and low temperatures at the surface sometimes leads to the observation of hailstones at ground level even in Hawaii. 

Deep hail accumulations, sometimes up to 50 cm in depth, have occurred frequently enough to catch the attention of the National Weather Service (NWS), the general public, and social/digital media outlets.

Despite the extreme nature of these storms, adequate reports or measurements of accumulated hail depth are currently not collected or archived, and products to track or forecast these events do not exist, preventing guidance from being issued to emergency responders, transportation departments, and the general public.

In this talk presented at the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Dr. Lam introduces a Hong Kong based Community Weather Information Network (Co-WIN) which provides local meteorological information from the rooftops of primary and secondary schools (and has over 170 members). He provides a comprehensive overview of network operations including sensor development, data quality assurance, public engagement and scientific investigation. The talk also includes examples of using the network data for various applications such as numerical downscaling for high-resolution forecast and extreme heat warning signal system for heat stress-related health threats will be covered, illustrating the importance and the contribution of citizen science to  traditional scientific studies. 

Here are a few of the news stories that we've been following in the last week. Do you have a story we missed? Share it in the community!

Scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts have developed a new mathematical approach that they say can substantially improve the prediction of extreme weather events. Analyzing the connectivity and patterns between geographical locations, it could potentially save thousands of lives and avoid billions in economic losses. Prediction times for events like El Niño, monsoons, droughts or extreme rainfall could be increased substantially, to a month or in some cases even a year in advance, depending on the type of the event.

Over the past four summers, community scientists in over 50 US cities have set out to measure the distribution of ambient heat across urban environments as part of a national campaign ("Heat Watch") led by CAPA Strategies and NOAA's National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS). The highly engaging program has involved hundreds of community participants as data collectors with simple-to-use equipment, engaging training material, and meaningful input to study design and interpretation of the resulting ambient heat maps. Gaining an element of civic legitimacy through the participation of local communities, the generated datasets are used by municipal planners, health departments, academic researchers, and others to identify heat vulnerabilities and rapidly advance local heat resilience efforts. 

In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Christopher Bridges discusses how the effectiveness of water resources management projects in rural communities can be limited by a lack of reliable long-term monitoring data. This is particularly important when considering agricultural drainage water, stormwater runoff controls and floodplain management in the erodible soils of the Coastal Plains. Additionally, measurement of extreme precipitation events is essential to understanding flooding risk in rural areas.

This is Part II of the series by Dr. Lea Hartl discussing the history and data records of the automatic weather station on Denali Pass. If you missed Part I, follow this link. 

On February 20th, 1989, a three-person team of Japanese mountaineers climbing the West Buttress route on Denali reached High Camp at 5243 m.a.s.l. The team leader, Noboru Yamada, was hoping to become the first person to summit the highest peaks of the seven continents in winter and was climbing with two other experienced mountaineers, Teruo Saegusa and Kozo Komatsu, on this occasion. The weather on the 20th had been relatively calm.

Following on from Part I of Weather and Death on Everest, there follows here an indepth look at the meteorological foundations of the storm and the resulting physiological effects on the mountaineers

Analyzing the Into Thin Air Storm

From the 8th to the 13th of May 1996, the summit temperature on Mount Everest underwent an approximate 10°C drop.

Watch this presentation from the research team that installed the highest weather stations on earth: at the summit of Mount Everest. 

You'll also learn why there's such a desperate need for more high elevation weather observations and the challenges that the team faced in getting their gear where it needed to be.

Weather service providers around the world offer the public forecasts and warnings to improve decision making and protect life and property. Recent surveys have found that, in the United States, weather news is one of the most popular items in the media (Pew Research Center 2008; Wilson 2008). In fact, it has been estimated that 300 billion forecasts are obtained by U.S. adults on an annual basis (Lazo et al. 2009). But there are very few studies that look at how and why the public gets, reads, and responds to weather information, even though this research is fundamental to the design of weather products and communication strategies.

Ken Pomeroy has worked in basketball for 15 years, providing analytics for college basketball teams through his web site and consulting for NBA teams since 2003. His work has been used by coaches, media, and fans, and his ratings are used by the NCAA’s basketball committee to help select teams for its postseason tournament. But his path to the sport began as a grad student in Atmospheric Science at University of Wyoming and then as a meteorologist with the National Weather Service for 12 years, where he learned the science of making predictions. Many principles of weather prediction have direct application to predicting basketball outcomes, both for players and teams. In this talk for the Weather Band, Ken discusses his background in weather prediction and how the lessons he learned there helped him succeed with sports analytics.

In the photograph file of the U. S. Weather Bureau at Washington is an odd-appearing weather map, as big as an ordinary letter head, done in pale blue-green ink on white paper, and carefully preserved under a celluloid "glass." Someday this rather crude little map will possess great historic interest. If you examine it carefully you see that its every line is made up of many short lines, running parallel to each other and very close together, in the top-to-bottom direction on the paper.

The earliest origins of radar meteorology are difficult to uncover. The secrecy surrounding radar in World War II delayed reporting about technological breakthroughs until 1945 and later. But as far as can be determined, radio-location technology was fairly similar across different nations at the outbreak of the war. British work was slightly more advanced, largely due to the efforts of Sir Robert A. Watson-Watt. A Scottish physicist and meteorologist, Watson-Watt was a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society by 1915, published a paper on radio waves created by lightning in 1922, and delivered the Symons Memorial Lecture in 1929 on ‘‘Weather and Wireless.’’ 

In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Michael Ray describes how the Nurse Tree Design citizen science project seeks to mimic biological strategies for mitigating and adapting to temperature extremes in order to protect a raised garden through four seasons in the desert southwest. Extreme weather conditions at the garden site in Tucson Arizona can fluctuate 100 degrees (17 F to 117 F).

What does climate change mean in one's own backyard? By monitoring earlier ripening apples and creating an Excel analysis of KSEA temperature data Gerald Myers manages to catch a glimpse of the future for himself and his garden in this presentation from the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium. 

Weather impacts airplane flights and airport operations in a variety of ways and is a major concern for the aviation community (Kulesa 2003). Pilots need to avoid weather that will endanger a flight, and also need to understand how weather will impact the performance of the aircraft. Air traffic controllers need to understand where hazardous weather is located so that they can direct aircraft to safety or hold aircraft on the ground

In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Ted Best illustrates through case examples how the use of citizen weather observations can elucidate mesoscale convective events. A convective wind event, a long-lived thunderstorm with hail, and a mesoscale convective system with heavy rain show how individual observations can be collected to form a more detailed picture of an event for study. A combination of storm spotting, storm reports, CoCoRaHS observations, and radar images is presented for each case. These observations can call attention to events that might otherwise be missed in a busy and complex environment and can be helpful for improving future forecasts.

New research locates geographic hotspots for lightning “megaflashes.”

Technically defined as “a mesoscale lightning flash that is at least 100 km long” megaflashes can span hundreds of miles and create multiple lightning strikes far away from the convective core of thunderstorms, coming seemingly out of the blue or calm gray skies. This phenomenon has only recently been described and is still the subject of research. By exploring megaflash characteristics and locating the areas where these types of strikes most often occur, this study argues for the need to increase the precision and effectiveness of lightning safety warnings.