Articles

An in-depth look at the Fennec Automatic Weather Station (AWS) Network: how researchers built a climate monitoring system in one of the harshest environments on earth

As the world’s largest desert, the Sahara is known for climatic extremes—temperature and aridity are the two most obvious. But it’s also known for airborne dust. A lot of dust. The Sahara is the single greatest annual source of airborne mineral dust in the world, blanketing the Caribbean and North America with haze. 

In the fall of 1926, the U.S. Weather Bureau announced that radio weather reports were beginning to come in from the northernmost station in the United States: Point Barrow (now Nuvuk), Alaska. But few people would have guessed that the observer at this farthest north weather station was a young woman. Mrs. Beverly A. Morgan and her husband -  the Army Signal Corps radio operator - were two of only a few white inhabitants of the town, which was the coldest and most inaccessible station at that time: 450 miles north of other radio weather outposts. 

September 15, 2021
3:00 to 4:00 PM ET
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Part of the National Academy of Sciences Climate Conversations

Climate Change: Extreme Events

Note: This is not an AMS Weather Band event, but we identified this as a subject that may be of interest to Weather Band members. If you attend, let us know what you thought in the Weather Band Community!

As a result of climate change, extreme events such as floods, wildfires, storms, and heat waves are already becoming more dangerous and destructive. Marshall Shepherd (University of Georgia) will moderate a conversation with Craig Fugate (former FEMA Administrator) and Marissa Aho (Washington State Department of Natural Resources) about the connections between climate change and extreme events, and about how communities and governments at different scales can plan for and become more resilient to the risks from extreme events today and into the future.

Weather spotters play an important role in the severe weather warning system. Since the 1970s, the National Weather Service (NWS) has trained citizens to collect, confirm, verify, or supplement radar and other data, thus, “serving as the nation’s first line of defense against severe weather.” Today, “SKYWARN,” is a volunteer program with over 350,000 trained spotters. The network includes police and fire personnel, 911 dispatchers, emergency management workers, public utility workers, and other concerned citizens.

“How accurate is your data?” 

This is one of the big, never ending, unresolved questions around using and interpreting atmospheric data. Of course uncertainties have existed and will continue to exist in all forms of environmental data. But in order to understand our weather history, and our weather future, there is a need to define, measure, and understand these uncertainties. 

We are excited to announce the AMS Weather Band's first Community and Citizen Science Symposium!

Please join us as a speaker or a participant for this two day, virtual event, that will showcase citizen and community science projects and programs related to weather and the atmospheric sciences. It will take place on Friday, January 21, and Saturday, January 22 12:00 - 5:00 ET.

Rainbows occupy an important place in mythology, culture, and language all over the world. They also helped inspire advances in physics, mathematics, and understanding the nature of light!

Technically, you can only see a rainbow when the sun is behind your head and drops of water are in the air. The water drops might be from a rain shower, a waterfall, or even the spray from a water gun. Explore the infographic below for more rainbow facts. 

It wasn’t clear when Mary Breed Hawley married Carl Edgar Myers in 1871, that by the end of the century they would be one of the powerhouse couples of early aeronautics and create a revolution in American ballooning. 

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!

Superbolts extend extreme lightning impacts into space

A rare type of lightning has had scientists scratching their heads since the late 1970s. “Superbolts” are the most powerful lightning on Earth, with discharges so strong that they cannot be reproduced in the laboratory. The bolts also display geographic and seasonal attributes opposite that of regular lightning, adding to their mystery.

Behind the bloody beaches of D-Day and the deathly bloom of mushroom clouds in the bright desert, behind supercomputers and the weather app on your phone, there is a mainly unrecognized group of young women who wielded the power of math to change the course of history. 

Join Mallory Brooke of Nor'Easter Weather Consulting as she takes us inside the weather and the ski industry to look at teleconnections, forecasting tools, and how forecasts are used for events like the World Cup at Killington. This will also include a deeper dive into different weather issues and their impacts at the World Cup years 2016-2019.

Join Dr. McGovern for an introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and their applications for severe weather. Dr. Amy McGovern is the Lloyd G. and Joyce Austin Presidential Professor at the School of Computer Science and School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. McGovern is also the director of the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography. Her research focuses on developing and applying trustworthy AI and machine learning methods primarily for severe weather phenomena as changes in weather patterns, oceans, sea level rise, and disaster risk amplify the need for accelerated AI research in the environmental sciences.

This webinar explores perhaps one of the least known but most successful windstorm mitigation programs in the United States, the IBHS FORTIFIED Home Program. We will explore the origins of the program and how decades of wind engineer research was applied to create a practical way to build better for both new homes and retrofits.

"I believe, there might be excellent use made of the Barometer for predicting of Hurricanes, and other Tempests, especially at sea; since I am credibly informed, that a person of quality, who lives by the sea-side...can by the Barometer almost infallibly foretell any great tempest for several hours before it begins.”

As billion dollar disasters continue to take place across the United States, communities are racing to increase their mitigation and response planning for these events. But some are more difficult to plan for than others. Drought in particular can be difficult to get good measurements and data for. It can also have impacts on community life and economic activity that are difficult to separate out from other events. 

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and the authors of the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) are hosting a series of virtual public engagement workshops to inform development of this federal climate report. These workshops are free and open to the public. The information gathered in this workshop will help authors decide which topics to cover in their chapter of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a major U.S. Government report on how climate change affects people and places in the United States.

Join us for the first AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium on January 21 and 22! Our speaker schedule is below. We look forward to seeing you there! 

In addition to art, culture, and philosophy, the European Renaissance (1400-1600 CE) brought the first serious attempts to predict the weather and new approaches to forecasting. While the invention of measurement devices such as the thermometer (in 1607) and the barometer (1643) was yet to come, increased interest in weather observations came from the “discoveries” of new lands and seas, which considerably enlarged and widened old ideas and conceptions. 

Imagine, if you will, spending an entire year on a floating chunk of ice in the Arctic ocean: drifting gently through arctic waters, you are unable to steer around other icebergs or escape storms and left to the mercy of howling winds, snow, and sun. During the winter, 24 hours of darkness is alleviated only by the amount of electricity you can peddle out of a bicycle-powered generator. Your bed will be inside an eider-down tent lined in fur. And every day you wake up to launch weather balloons at strict intervals. 

The Norwegian and British Antarctic expeditions to the South Pole are often regarded as the height of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Using a team of five men and primarily relying on dog sledges, Roald Amundsen first reached the geographic South Pole on 14 December 1911. Just over a month later, a team of five men led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find a tent left by Amundsen.

The development of high-resolution weather forecasts, and immediate issuance of weather warnings requires a high coverage of local and upper-air meteorological observation data to proceed. Conventional weather observation networks have fostered these applications and the advancement in urban meteorology forecast for more than a century. Now, with the emerging trend in citizen science programs, numerous private-owned weather stations using commercial weather instruments are springing up around the world. And this fast growing coverage of observation data has become available to the scientific community.

In 2019, the University at Albany launched the Virtual Operation Support Team (VOST), a student-led, faculty supervised initiative whereby undergraduate and graduate students were trained in crowdsourcing information from social media. As a part of their training, the interns learned about data scraping, misinformation and misinformation management, and the most effective ways to search for, summarize, and present trends in social media data. The VOST also served to support New York State's Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services (DHSES) through the development of social media summaries and after-action reports. The program has had five cohorts of students that tracked sixteen incidents, complied over 70 social media reports, and engaged in one real-time activation. In this presentation, from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Dr. Amber Silver provides an overview of the University at Albany's VOST program, including the benefits to both students and the community at large.

The WeatherBlur Program is a student-led non-hierarchical citizen science platform where your students can wonder, investigate, work with data and then act to make their community a better place! The National Weather Service in Gray, Maine has provided support for the WeatherBlur program for over a decade, supporting impactful K-8 student led investigations across the US. In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Nikki Becker of the National Weather Service leads the audience through the details of the WeatherBlur program and the incredible impact it's having on teachers and students alike.