Articles

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.

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

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! 

Learn more about Jen Carfagno's background, career, and life at the Weather Channel! She shares her top weather stories, looks back at the progression of weather technology, and gives us an inside look at her job in this conversation with AMS Weather Band members and friends.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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 talk presented at the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Dr. Victoria Slonosky discusses how citizen scientists around the world have been transcribing historical weather observations. Her project, the McGill DRAW (Data Rescue: Archives and Weather) is working with citizen scientists to transcribe the McGill Observatory weather records, which represent one of the best sets of historical weather in Canada. The complete original records are being transcribed, including variables such as cloud cover and weather symbols. Nearly 1.5 million data points have been transcribed by hundreds of users, with a core group of superusers becoming experts in historical climate observations.

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.

In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Dr. Becky Bolinger, Assistant State Climatologist for Colorado, presents some interesting results from CoCoRaHS Condition Monitoring reports. CoCoRaHS observers can enter reports describing how dry or wet their location has been, called Condition Monitoring reports. Here, she has gathered all the reports made during and after the 2018 drought across CO, NM, AZ, and UT and evaluated them compared to drought data.

We are thrilled to have an amazing line up of speakers for the upcoming Weather Band Citizen and Community Science Symposium. To give you a small sneak preview of what's to come, here are short biographies for some of our speakers. They are arranged alphabetically, with more to come in the weeks ahead. A huge thank you to all of our speakers, and don't forget to register for the event! 

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).

Interested in becoming a CoCoRaHS volunteer or just want to know more about what it's like to be a volunteer? Watch this fun video from James Kendall, who shared his experiences as part of the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium.

Using soil moisture and rain/snowfall data, Peter Callen has come up with a system of rating each month's overall relative wetness/dryness on a scale from -2 to +2. In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Peter details how the months are added up for each year, and how he creates charts shows the monthly and yearly changes for the past 10 years.

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. 

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.