Severe Weather

In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Craig Lowe shows how Bahamian Storm and Hurricane Interceptors came to be and what they do to assist The Bahamas Department of Meteorology and The National Emergency Management Agency with valuable information on active Weather Threats.

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.

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 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 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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Here are a few of the news stories from the weather and atmospheric sciences and space that we've been following the last two weeks. Do you have a story we missed? Share it in the community!

Higher waves in the Arctic create ice-containing clouds

A team of scientists led by Dr. Jun Inoue of the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan, sought to answer a peculiar question: can higher waves in the Arctic Sea promote the development of ice-containing clouds? This question may seem strange at first, because most people would not have fathomed that a link could exist between those two natural phenomena. But the findings of this study indicate that there most likely is a connection. 

Join the AMS Weather Band for a talk from Jared Rennie of the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies!

His recent research analyzes and expands on the current understanding of extreme heat events. This presentation looks at how extreme heat events are classified; how heat waves impact human health; what meteorological data besides temperature matter most for understanding heat impacts; and what different warning products can be created to help people avoid severe impacts.

Here are a few of the news stories from the weather and atmospheric sciences world that we've been following this week. Do you have a story we missed? Share it in the community!

Where Ida got its fuel

As Hurricane Ida headed into the Gulf of Mexico, a team of scientists was monitoring a large pool of warm water that swirled directly in its path. An oceanographer from that team breaks down how the Loop Current helped turn Hurricane Ida into such a gigantic storm, and how he monitors the oceans in order to help with severe weather prediction. 

This high energy conversation between Bruckner Chase and Weather-Ready Nation's Doug Hilderbrand focuses on beach and coastline safety and forecasting. Bruckner is an internationally renowned adventure-athlete, ocean advocate, and resident expert for NOAA Ocean and Coastal Safety campaigns. You'll get a taste of what it means to be a weather expert at and for the ocean, and get an inside look at the lifeguard mindset by learning more about what to look for to stay safe at the beach, how to forecast and plan for hazards, and what the major hazards might be in different weather conditions.

Here are a few of the news stories from the weather and atmospheric sciences world that we've been following this week. Do you have a story we missed? Share it in the community!

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. 

From culture to technology, typhoons changed the course of history in Japan. At the time of Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, the Mongolian Empire stretched east to west from The Pacific to the Caspian Sea and from southern Russia to Tibet. In the next 30 odd years, Mongolian leaders expanded the empire in all directions, with periodic contractions back to the capital of Karakorum in order to decide on succession and crown a new great khan. When Kublai Khan consolidated his power in 1264, Japan was squarely in his sights. The only thing that could stop him? The weather.  

Join us for a variety of events throughout May. We've got an amazing conversation with Lt. Col. Nicole Mitchell, formerly of the Hurricane Hunters, to celebrate Hurricane Preparedness Week, and the Weather Band will be hosting instrument companies for Q&A sessions beginning May 19th and continuing into June.