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Saturday, 11 January 2020
7:30 AM-9:00 AM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
7:30 AM-8:00 PM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
8:00 AM-9:00 AM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
9:00 AM-10:10 AM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
10:10 AM-10:25 AM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
10:25 AM-12:00 PM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
Sometimes we get so caught up in trying to find the perfect job or get into the best graduate school that we forget to take care of our mental and physical health. These breakout sessions will focus on just that; stretching your mind, taking care of your body, and maintaining a healthy attitude towards work and personal time. There are three rotations in this session so you can visit each room in your preferred order.
Session 2A: Mind
Location: Ballroom East (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Between classes, research, and extracurriculars, finding the time to take care of our mental health can be difficult. This session will delve deeper into subjects related to mental health, including managing stress in school and the workplace, time management, maintaining hobbies, and knowing when and how to ask for help.
Work and stress can impact your body’s health just as much as your mental health, especially during finals, field work, and thesis/dissertation writing. Finding a physical activity you enjoy such as running, yoga, hiking, or weight lifting can be an effective strategy for dealing with physical stress. This session will cover different ways our speakers have prioritized their body’s health and how it helps them be better meteorologists.
Maintaining our mental and physical health are important aspects for lifelong health, but a healthy attitude can keep us happy along the way! Listen to Becky and David discuss how to stay positive through stressful times, handle negative social media comments, mitigate imposter syndrome, learn how to respectfully say no and more.
12:05 PM-12:30 PM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
We have a wide variety of professionals from diverse parts of the atmospheric science field ready to answer your questions! In this introduction, our speakers will briefly introduce themselves so that you can choose who you’d like to meet in the next session.
12:30 PM-2:00 PM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
Lunch Break
Location: Ballroom West (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
2:00 PM-3:45 PM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
This session will give you the opportunity to ask our speakers about their education, career path, and more in a small-group, less formal setting. Choose one room for each rotation and get to know professionals in sectors of our field that interest you!
Learn the inside scoop about graduate student life from current graduate students.
Speak to professionals who evaluate graduate admission materials to learn about what makes a good application and mistakes to avoid.
3:45 PM-4:00 PM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
4:00 PM-5:00 PM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
There are so many different paths that your geoscience degree can take you. Use this session to explore just a few of the possibilities for post-grad!
Ever wondered how a weather forecast is used to inform emergency managers and other decision-makers? This session will familiarize you with the Integrated Warning Team and provide information about how to get started with emergency management.
In today's competitive job market, recruiters get hundreds of applications. A great resume is the first step to standing out and securing the job of your dreams. Come to this session to learn the elements of a great resume or CV, ask questions on the hiring process, and receive specialized tips on how to customize your resume for different sectors in meteorology.
So you’re planning on getting your PhD? Great! But what does that entail exactly? This session features individuals with experience in that realm, helping to answer questions like, “What is expected of a good advisor?”, “What kind of work will I do?”, or even “Should I get my PhD?”.
Think that all you can do with your degree is forecast or research? Think again! The weather is relevant to nearly every profession, and this session will highlight just a few of the types of jobs students may not think of when deciding to get a geoscience degree.
5:30 PM-7:30 PM: Saturday, 11 January 2020
Career Resource and Graduate School Fair (Saturday)
Location: East Registration (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Sunday, 12 January 2020
7:30 AM-8:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Registration (Sunday)
Location: North Lobby (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
8:00 AM-9:00 AM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
8:30 AM-9:00 AM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Meet and Greet (Sunday)
Location: Ballroom Foyer (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Here is your chance to have an informal chat with AMS President Jenni Evans, over refreshments. Attendees of both the Student Conference and the Early Career Professionals Conference are welcome to attend.
8:30 AM-8:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Academic Family Tree (Sunday)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
9:00 AM-9:40 AM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Come meet the Board of Early Career Professionals and your peers in this session. Attendees will be lead through conversational exercises that set the stage for an engaged and fulfilling conference experience.
9:00 AM-9:45 AM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
In keeping with the theme for the centennial meeting, this session will discuss progress in the community’s understanding of extreme weather over the last hundred years, our current understanding of extreme events, and the impacts of climate change on extreme events in a look towards the future.
9:00 AM-5:00 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
AMS Oral History Project (Sunday)
Location: Westin Hotel
Guest Welcome and Information Desk
Location: North Lobby (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
9:50 AM-10:45 AM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
As AMS celebrates its 100th year of being a professional society, we want to hear from its members! How has being a member influenced you, both personally and professionally? Who has AMS connected you to that’s made a difference in your career? Why do you think being a member is beneficial? If you have a story you want to tell, we want to hear it during this interactive session of sharing!
In addition to knowing all about how the atmosphere works, it’s also important to develop professional skills that will help you land that dream job. This session will feature four rotations to allow you to choose what skills are most important for your chosen career path.
Social media can be both a powerful and daunting platform for science communication! Stop by this rotation to learn how to navigate through it effectively. Topics to be discussed include conveying sensitive but important subjects in a respectful manner, sharing your work and networking, building a following, and social media verbiage/etiquette both with the general public and the scientific community.
Presentations are how we communicate our scientific findings to other scientists and the general public. Ensuring that these presentations are not only effective communicating the main point of your work, but also interesting is a talent that this session will address. Come by for tips and tricks to make sure your next presentation is stellar!
Getting a job can be an arduous process. Getting a faculty position at any university is no exception. Understanding the ins and outs of applying and interviewing for a faculty position could make the difference between getting your dream professor position or having to look elsewhere. Stop in to learn about the process from someone who has already gone through it all.
To conduct field work is an achievement in itself, let alone managing a project. Stop by and learn about the process of conducting and managing successful field work campaigns and managing workers in a unique environment.
How do you tell a scientific story with your writing? As meteorologists, we must effectively communicate challenging concepts to a variety of audiences. This session will address the hidden link between engaging narratives and technical writing. Come learn how to make hydrostatic balance sound as exciting as Harry Potter.
What is it like to be the face of the weather enterprise? What is it like to spend time every day conveying weather information to the public? This session will give you an opportunity to learn about having a career in the public eye and skills you need to be successful talking to the public.
10:45 AM-10:55 AM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
10:55 AM-11:50 AM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Why participate in field work? While observation is critical for research, skills and insights gained from experience in the field offer many areas for professional development. This session touches on a day in the life in the field and explores how it can be a valuable experience for students and early career professionals.
10:55 AM-11:55 AM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Transitions early in one’s career can be exciting and challenging. Whether it is transitioning to graduate school or into the job market or event from one job to another the unknowns one may face have been faced before by your colleagues and peers. This diverse panel discussion will consist of early career professionals having an open discussion about the challenges and opportunities faced with early career transitions. The panel will not only focus on the professional side of the transition but also personal side.
11:50 AM-12:00 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
11:55 AM-1:00 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
The Board of Private Sector Meteorologists joins the Early Career Board for a unique paneled perspective of alternative routes through the weather enterprise. Hear from individuals who have started their own businesses or who have carved out new roles for themselves that did not exist before. Learn the challenges and benefits of the roads less traveled.
A boxed lunch is included.
12:00 PM-12:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
12:00 PM-3:45 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Speaker Ready Room (Sunday)
Location: 102B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
12:00 PM-8:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Poster Hall
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
12:30 PM-2:00 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Special Presidential Forum Preview: "A Climatologist, an Engineer, and a Social Scientist Walk Into a Bar: Tough Choices on a Warming Planet"
Location: 210AB (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
12:35 PM-2:00 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Lunch (grab a to-go meal and attend the Presidential Forum!)
1:00 PM-2:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Round-table discussion on the Weather-Ready Nation Ambassador Program, Success stories, and future efforts.
1:10 PM-2:20 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Who thinks they are maximizing their worth? Who wants to leave money, or extra vacation days on the table, or pay more on their bills? As with most everything in life, negotiation is a skill that you will need to learn and master in order for this to not happen to you! While the main focus will be on learning to negotiation a better salary, more vacation days, a new title, or other job perks, learning to be a better negotiator can also help you lower cable bill, credit card rate, gym membership, or your cell phone bill. So what is the magic sauce to becoming a negotiation master? You must pick your battles, do your research, practice, and make your case to support getting what you want.
2:00 PM-3:45 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Dive into a new subject and join the fun with these interactive sessions. From learning python to becoming an ally, we have an option for everyone. Note that you need to have signed up in advance for some of these sessions. If you didn’t sign up prior to attending, please feel free to join the audience in the broadcast tape swap or see if there are any additional slots in the resume workshop.
For attendees who signed up at the time of registration , bring your resume to get tailored, one-on-one feedback from job recruiters and professionals across the many sectors of the geoscience nexus. You do not need to attend the first part of the workshop in order to sign-up.
Selected students will present pre-recorded broadcasts to a panel of professional broadcast meteorologists. All are welcome to watch the next generation of broadcasters and learn from our experienced panel of TV meteorologists!
Harassment and bullying endanger the professional and personal well-being of individuals and their communities, and create hostile climates. This interactive workshop, led by the ADVANCEGeo Partnership team, will identify factors that contribute to hostile and exclusionary behaviors in scientific research environments, and provide community bystander intervention strategies and active practice of interventions through discussion of scenarios.
Are you looking to make the transition to Python but unsure of where to start? Do you already know Python but want to see atmospheric science specific applications? Are you looking for data? If so, then please join us for a hands-on Python Users’ Workshop where beginners and experts alike will learn skills that will enhance your ability to find, analyze, and explore data, all while doing so in the cloud. Specialized local software installations are not necessary. All you need is a laptop or tablet (a keyboard may be helpful) and a GitHub login to participate. In-person follow-up help will be available all week, as well as remotely once our time together as a community in Boston comes to an end.
Ensuring public safety during hazardous weather events is no solo performance. Join professionals from the broadcast and public sectors of meteorology, emergency managers, and other leaders in an interactive Integrated Warning Team exercise. With the guidance of these professionals, you will learn how these groups collaborate to protect the public and how physical science and social science intertwine to support decision-making.
2:30 PM-3:10 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Denise Isaac is a bilingual meteorologist at NBC10 Boston, a native of Panama, a two-time Emmy award winner, and a graduate in Meteorology from Florida State Univ.. She has held several positions in broadcast across the country.
2:30 PM-3:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Newcomer's Welcome and Informational Exchange
Location: 104A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
3:15 PM-4:00 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Ever wonder what AMS can do for you? This is your chance to find out from high-ranking AMS officials! Join this informal coffee break where many AMS members will be on hand, including
- AMS Past-Presidents
- AMS Council Members
- AMS Staff
- AMS Commissioners
- AMS Chairs of Boards and Committees
- Current and former members of the Board for Early Career Professionals
- Winners of the AMS Award for Early Career Achievement
- Newly elected AMS Fellows
This is a great chance to meet and network with members, leading up to the Presidential Forum.
4:00 PM-6:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
6:30 PM-8:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Career Resource and Graduate School Fair (Sunday)
Location: East Registration (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Student Conference Poster Session
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Welcome Reception Honoring 2020 AMS Awardees and Newly Elected Fellows
Location: 104A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
6:30 PM-8:35 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
7:00 PM-9:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
The American Weather and Climate Industry Association (AWICA) Reception
Location: Marina Ballroom III (Westin Hotel)
7:30 PM-9:30 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Colour of Weather Reception
Location: Marina Ballroom I (Westin Hotel)
9:00 PM-11:00 PM: Sunday, 12 January 2020
Early Career Professionals Reception
Location: Marina Ballroom II (Westin Hotel)
Do you consider yourself an early career professional? Are you trying to find your niche within the AMS community? Or, perhaps you are looking to connect with other AMS early career professionals? If so, you are not alone! Consider yourself invited to attend this Annual Reception for Early Career Professionals, which will offer an opportunity to mix and mingle with others who are beginning their careers in the public, private, and academic sectors. Cash bar and snacks will be available.
Monday, 13 January 2020
7:30 AM-6:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Quiet Room (Monday)
Location: Commonwealth C (Westin Hotel)
Registration (Monday)
Location: North Lobby (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Speaker Ready Room (Monday)
Location: 102B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
8:30 AM-9:15 AM: Monday, 13 January 2020
8:30 AM-9:45 AM: Monday, 13 January 2020
8:30 AM-10:00 AM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Through the past decades the AMS has had extensive interactions with NSF in general, and the Geosciences directorate in particular. During the early years, along with members of the Univ. Consortium for Atmospheric Research, AMS leadership played an active role in articulating the case for the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The AMS has also been a venue for the wider dissemination of the scientific outcomes resulting from NSF-sponsored research in Hydrology, Atmospheric Sciences and Geospace Sciences.
This will be the third year of this exciting session. Breaking away from the traditional speaking sessions, presenters will be at tables sharing their demonstrations.
As global recognition of space weather societal impacts continues to increase, numerous efforts have come into existence to advance the space weather sciences, improve and sustain observations, implement better space weather services, and integrate space weather risks into emergency management and critical infrastructure plans and sectors. These activities are national, international, and multinational in scope. In this session, we will hear from agency leaders of ongoing space weather activities and as well as planned activities, funding priorities, and opportunities. We will also be updated on the latest Space Weather Action Plan (SWAP), the status of recent space weather legislation, and agency plans to respond.
Discussions on how weather forecasting impacts the day-to-day operations of grid operators
This session follows the overarching theme of AMS centennial celebration: “The AMS Past, Present and Future: Linking Information to Knowledge to Society (LINKS)”. Talks given in this session will set the stage for the rest of the conference by providing a historical context for current and future research endeavours in all three major components of ARAM as well as their corresponding sub-disciplines (e.g., historical overview of turbulence, icing, ceiling and visibility and convective hazards for aviation).
A large fraction of atmospheric aerosols acts as CCN (cloud condensation nuclei), but only a very minor and strongly temperature dependent fraction called INPs (ice nucleating particles) contributes to the primary ice formation in both mixed-phase and cirrus clouds. These direct impacts of aerosol particles on cloud formation are followed by a variety of secondary processes like coalescence, riming, or ice multiplication, which play major roles in the life cycles and climatic impact of clouds as well as the formation, distribution and intensity of precipitation. Ongoing effort in laboratory, field and modelling work aims at better understanding, quantifying and modelling basic cloud condensation, ice nucleation and precipitation formation processes at scales from the microscopic to the global level. This session welcomes contributions from laboratory, field, and modeling work on basic CCN and ice nucleation processes, the development and model application of cloud microphysical parameterizations, ground based and aircraft based CCN, INP and cloud microphysics measurements, as well as new instrument and method developments for measuring CCN, INPs and cloud microphysical processes.
Representatives of national modeling centers will present their organization's current progress in modeling development as well a vision for the future.
How we (re)design cities will play a major role in alleviating climate stressors and building community resilience to extreme events as the world continues to urbanize. Moving forward, the impact of the built environment on urban climate cannot be considered in isolation; it needs to be examined holistically in the context of the human environment, i.e. the people who live in cities, social structures, and public policy implications. This requires a paradigm shift from urban adaptation and mitigation solutions to personal and societal outcomes if those solutions were to be implemented.
This session solicits outcome-focused studies that address critical issues in the urban atmosphere and their impacts on people, communities, and society. We welcome submissions of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams and encourage collaborative studies with practitioners, stakeholders, city managers, emergency responders, NGOs, and partners from industry. We are also interested in studies that help build community resilience to extreme events, support decision-making, and potentially transform policy and practice. Observational and modelling studies are welcome, as well as qualitative and mixed methods research and work that employs novel sensing or simulation techniques, big data products, and machine learning.
This session will cover remote sensing aspects related to ceilometers, microwave radiometers and radiative transfer.
We seek abstracts that explore practices of co-production of science and stakeholder work in weather and climate contexts.
We invite speakers to discuss topics related to Susan’s inspirational leadership in tackling environmental challenges and highlighting environmental successes. Topics include the historical evolution of environmental policy, what we have learned from policy successes, the challenges currently facing our global society, and roadmaps to future success.
A number of regional and national real-time flood forecasting systems are emerging for a variety of different flood-related applications. These new systems are taking advantage of new national hydrologic data standards, new advances in supercomputing availability and improvements in model parameterizations and meteorological forcing datasets. This session encourages contributions from all sectors of the AMS enterprise (academic, government and the private sector) who have built and deployed such systems. Additionally, contributions are welcome from researchers who have developed novel methodologies to sense and model flood generation dynamics at a variety of time and space scales. Research and application contributions from within the U.S. as well as internationally are also encouraged.
Please note that there is a different session in this conference on heavy precipitation events, flood risk under climate change (see "Heavy Precipitation and Flood Risk under a Changing Climate").
This session seeks to increase the visibility and highlight the work of the Regional Node for Pan-America which is the youngest of the three SDS-WAS Nodes. Additionally, the Pan-American region is the home of the oldest dust observation station located at Ragged Point on the east coast of Barbados, the most easterly island in the Caribbean. This station, the Barbados Atmospheric Chemistry Observatory (BACO) is operated by the Univ. of Miami, partnered with the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany.
This session allows federal agencies with weather-related activities and missions to present the current state of their operations and development. In keeping with the Annual Meeting theme, presenters are asked to include a brief history of the agency and how the past relates to the present and future.
Land use and land cover change (LULCC) can significantly contribute to overall climate change. The impacts of LULCC are often complex as they occur in the context of a warming climate. LULCC affects the global concentration of greenhouse gasses, often times removing vegetation and forest cover that acts as a natural carbon sink. This can contribute to already elevated levels of greenhouse gases which can promote a positive feedback leading to further land use change. LULCC can accelerate parts of the hydrologic cycle, such as runoff characteristics and groundwater storage, and in some cases increase the likelihood of extreme flooding events in urban areas. This session serves as a continuation of the previous year’s session to disseminate research that investigates the impact of LULCC on climate across multiple spatio-temporal scales via high resolution, numerical prediction models and observation analysis. Research on best practices and emerging methods in application and implementation of LULCC are also welcome, as no uniform methodology exists in the current literature.
Land-atmosphere and land-ocean interactions play a key role in climate variability and climate/weather predictability across space and time. The land’s role in the earth system – its impact on atmospheric and ocean means and variability across a broad range of timescales, ranging from hours to centuries, for past, present, and future climates – has been the subject of much recent exploratory research. The meteorological, hydrological, biophysical, biogeochemical, ecosystem processes, as well as the boundary-layer processes that underlie the connections between surface and atmosphere are not yet fully understood. The scarcity of relevant observations, the complexity of the underlying processes and feedbacks, and the wide range of scales involved necessitate coordinated and exceedingly interdisciplinary investigations. This session focuses on (1) interfaces between climate, ecosystems, and the land branches of the energy, water, and carbon cycles and the impact of associated land processes, including land-use/land-cover change, on climate variability and change as well as on extreme events (such as droughts and flooding); (2) dynamic, physical, and biogeochemical mechanisms by which the land surface (e.g., soil moisture and temperature, albedo, snow, and vegetation) influences surface water, carbon, and energy balances, atmospheric and ocean processes, and climate; (3) predictability associated with land-surface/atmosphere/ocean interactions and land initialization (such as soil moisture, soil temperature, snow, aerosol in snow, etc.) at sub-seasonal to seasonal, to decadal time scales; and (4) application and analyses of large scale field data and observational networks (such as FLUXNET), satellite remote sensing, and reanalyses data for land model development and land/atmosphere/ocean interaction studies. We welcome papers addressing any of these topics.
Variations in meteorology and climate couple with a range of source types and source activity levels to yield a wide range of regional scale air quality challenges around the globe. This session solicits reports from both observational and modeling perspectives on air pollution in different regions within North America and around the globe. Presentations focusing on improving air quality and air quality challenges are both welcome. Relevant air quality issues include, but are not limited to, ozone, fine particles, smoke from wild and prescribed fires, visibility and regional haze, and reactive nitrogen deposition.
This session will be hosted by the 26th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction (26NWP). We welcome abstracts on topics including (but not limited to) novel methods and applications for bias correction, model-output statistics (MOS), object-based bias correction and post-processing, machine-learning-based bias correction and post-processing, etc.
The surface transportation system is impacted significantly by weather, from public safety and maintenance costs to lost productivity and commerce. In addition, new weather-related solution and support requirements are being established as the transportation industry is experiencing rapid modernization through the development of technologies in automated vehicles, connected vehicles, decision support systems, data sharing, communication, and cloud computing. This session explores research, technologies, techniques, and solutions for identifying, forecasting, and responding to surface transportation weather events for the benefit of the traveling public, commercial interests, and those who operate and maintain the transportation system.
9:00 AM-10:00 AM: Monday, 13 January 2020
This session focus on tools, techniques and community experiences working with large (or complex) data sets using Python.
The July 2019 Mind the Gap Workshop in Boulder, CO, brought together students, academics, and private sector meteorologists to tackle the misalignment between graduating meteorologists and critical skill sets that prevent success in private sector career paths. The workshop’s five core objectives:
1) Identify curriculum gaps related to preparing students for careers in the private sector.
2) Discuss these gaps, challenges, and creative solutions that can be scaled across the academic and private sectors.
3) Create a set of recommendations that can be used by departments across the country to modify their curricula in order to address these gaps.
4) Create a set of recommendations for the private sector to take a more active role in directly addressing skills gaps through internships, capstones, and partnerships with academic programs.
5) Promote future venues for sparking mutual innovation between the private sector and academia, driven by students were discussed at length by groups comprised of private sector professionals, students, and academic faculty members.
At the end of the workshop, group leaders guided report outs that led to the development of short-range (weeks to months), medium-range (months to years), and long-range (several years) goals to address workshop objectives. These goals underpin a roadmap that includes several AMS committees. This roadmap will be presented and discussed during this panel discussion.
9:00 AM-6:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Academic Family Tree (Monday)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Poster Hall (Monday)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
9:00 AM-7:30 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Local Chapter Posters (Monday Session)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
9:15 AM-10:00 AM: Monday, 13 January 2020
9:45 AM-10:00 AM: Monday, 13 January 2020
10:00 AM-10:30 AM: Monday, 13 January 2020
AM Coffee Break (Monday)
Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
10:30 AM-11:30 AM: Monday, 13 January 2020
10:30 AM-11:45 AM: Monday, 13 January 2020
10:30 AM-12:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Hail storms in Oklahoma, snow storms in New Jersey, and haboobs in Arizona share a common thread, their impact to passenger and commercial drivers on roadways. The common belief that overpasses offer protection against tornadoes or the regular occurrence of drivers attempting to cross flooded driveways offers a constant challenge for the meteorological and public safety communities. This panel group will discuss issues, incidents, initiatives related to transportation safety during hazardous weather events, including both passenger and commercial traffic.
A forum featuring panelists with expertise in research, operations, and practice discussing transitions and interactions among those realms.
This year we would like to focus on specific student experiences, either in the field or at the AMS Annual Meeting.
This session would showcase informal weather education outreach activities, programs and events being done in local communities across the US and beyond, including Owlie Skywarn and AMS WeatherFest as examples. Partnerships between local, state and federal government, non-profit and for-profit partners would be highlighted. Examples of partners working together could be NOAA, NWS, NHC, AOML, emergency management agencies, universities, local science museums, corporations, and media. Some of these partners could also be Weather-Ready Nation Ambassadors. Select speakers would make brief presentations followed by a panel discussion for Q&A with the audience.
As society shifts towards more proactive methods of coping with the impacts of climate extremes, the importance of leveraging existing programs and infrastructure, such as those administered by the U.S. government, has significantly grown. An example of this is the groundswell of support for the
U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM), which began as an experimental product in 1999 and quickly became the gold standard for identifying and quantifying drought in the United States and its territories. Originally a partnership between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), along with the National Drought Mitigation Center, the number of individuals and agencies contributing to the product has risen in recent years in proportion to the importance of the USDM to decision makers and the public at large.
Drought, like other climate extremes, does not follow geopolitical or programmatic boundaries. Federal climate services providers, such as NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) programs, USDA Climate Hubs, and Department of Interior (DOI) Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs), must therefore work in a coordinated and partnered manner to prioritize service delivery, avoid duplication of efforts, and best serve the public and steward taxpayer resources.
This session highlights examples of NOAA, USDA, and DOI programs working together on a regional basis to address climate services challenges, using drought as a framing topic. Success stories will be presented where Federal resources were leveraged to deliver drought early warning, impact, and recovery information efficiently and effectively at the landscape level. The challenges of such partnered efforts will also be addressed, and opportunities and solutions for the next decade of Federal climate services program activities articulated.
This session would focus on resilience to extreme weather events as it relates to the built environment. How will hurricanes, tornadoes and floods affect homes, schools and businesses in your local community? How can the TV media communicate the topics of mitigation, retrofitting, hurricane shutters, home wind inspections, local building codes and building code-plus? Building codes need to be upgraded across the country for wind and water, hurricanes and tornadoes. Did you know that for every one dollar spent on mitigation, saves six dollars on damage and clean-up. Home mitigation can translate to insurance discounts and lower payments. Are there homes in your community built in a flood zone or storm surge zone? Are there a lot of residents living in manufactured homes in your viewing area? Speakers would make brief presentations followed by a panel Q&A with the audience.
Discussions focusing on how weather related outages impact the day-to-day operations of grid operators
In the Northeast US, heatwaves are projected to increase in frequency, severity, and duration, and the length of the heat season may stretch further into spring and fall. While this region of the country does not have temperatures that are as extreme as other locations, a low prevalence of air conditioning and historically old buildings that were designed to retain heat during cold winters makes it particularly vulnerable to extreme heat exposures. This session will explore solutions for mitigating heat risk in the Northeast US. Innovative strategies that address both the unique vulnerability of the Northeast US and the pitfalls of solely relying on air conditioning will be discussed with local scientists, health practitioners, and decision makers. Given that the Northeast US has not yet committed to widespread penetration of air conditioning, this session will explore innovative alternative strategies for adapting to increasing heat extremes and mitigating heat related illness. We encourage abstracts that focus on how scientific knowledge is used in decision-making, and invite decision-makers and practitioners from disciplines who may not usually attend an AMS meeting to join us to share their work.
Methods of verification and evaluation of forecasts and their inter-comparison, including statistical significance, with a focus on high resolution applications and object based or process based methodologies.
This session will be hosted in collaboration with the AMS Board on the Urban Environment. The focus of this joint session will be on the following two aspects:
(1) Development and applications of models for simulating airborne pollutant transport and dispersion in the urban environment, including but not limited to Lagrangian particle models, Gaussian plume models, large-eddy simulations, RANS (Reynolds Averaged Navier–Stokes equations) models, WRF-Chem, and other practical models.
(2) Observations and monitoring of air pollution in the urban environment, including but not limited to those based on wind tunnel or water channel experiments, scale model experiments, field campaigns, long-term observations, and remotely sensed data.
Especially, this session encourages submissions on advances in modeling and monitoring the impact of complex urban geometry/landscapes, such as urban vegetation, on pollutant transport and dispersion.
From ozone layer depletion and healing, to chemical-dynamical coupling, to mesospheric physical and chemical processes, it is clear that the middle atmosphere plays important roles in our planet’s health and rich diversity. We invite speakers to discuss the history of middle atmosphere science and recent advances, and to highlight frontier research questions in the community.
Radar and satellite remote sensing applications
We often study expert and public groups to help represent and make visible their concerns, needs, experiences, and challenges. This session focuses on letting our public and experts groups talk back to us.
A number of regional and national real-time flood forecasting systems are emerging for a variety of different flood-related applications. These new systems are taking advantage of new national hydrologic data standards, new advances in supercomputing availability and improvements in model parameterizations and meteorological forcing datasets. This session encourages contributions from all sectors of the AMS enterprise (academic, government and the private sector) who have built and deployed such systems. Additionally, contributions are welcome from researchers who have developed novel methodologies to sense and model flood generation dynamics at a variety of time and space scales. Research and application contributions from within the U.S. as well as internationally are also encouraged.
Please note that there is a different session in this conference on heavy precipitation events, flood risk under climate change (see "Heavy Precipitation and Flood Risk under a Changing Climate").
Over the last few years, significant advances have been made in both in situ and remote sensing technologies for measuring greenhouse gases (GHGs). The launch of global observing systems (such as GOSAT, GOSAT-2, OCO-2, OCO-3, SMAP, TanSat, TROPOMI) as well as deployment of localized surface networks and aircraft field campaigns, is starting to yield more information on natural and anthropogenic sources than ever before. While these multiple observational platforms provide a significant potential for the monitoring of GHG emissions, more and more uncertainties are coming to light regarding our understanding of the global and regional budgets of GHGs, errors due to deficiency in atmospheric transport modeling, and identification and quantification of climate feedback sensitivities. This session solicits abstracts that provide new insights on understanding GHG dynamics at various spatial (local to global) and temporal (sub-diurnal to decadal) scales. We encourage contributions on: (a) current and prospective GHG observational studies that inform both the nature and impact of errors in transport due to convection and large-scale mixing, (b) modeling studies to quantify budgets and/or uncertainties in GHG flux estimates, and (c) evaluation and benchmarking of GHG estimates from Earth System Models using contemporary observations. Submissions that quantify GHG emissions at the urban scale and their uncertainties, or explore policy issues related to GHG monitoring and regulation and how the current state of the science is informing policy decisions, are highly encouraged.
This session allows federal agencies with weather-related activities and missions to present the current state of their operations and development. In keeping with the Annual Meeting theme, presenters are asked to include a brief history of the agency and how the past relates to the present and future.
Land-atmosphere and land-ocean interactions play a key role in climate variability and climate/weather predictability across space and time. The land’s role in the earth system – its impact on atmospheric and ocean means and variability across a broad range of timescales, ranging from hours to centuries, for past, present, and future climates – has been the subject of much recent exploratory research. The meteorological, hydrological, biophysical, biogeochemical, ecosystem processes, as well as the boundary-layer processes that underlie the connections between surface and atmosphere are not yet fully understood. The scarcity of relevant observations, the complexity of the underlying processes and feedbacks, and the wide range of scales involved necessitate coordinated and exceedingly interdisciplinary investigations. This session focuses on (1) interfaces between climate, ecosystems, and the land branches of the energy, water, and carbon cycles and the impact of associated land processes, including land-use/land-cover change, on climate variability and change as well as on extreme events (such as droughts and flooding); (2) dynamic, physical, and biogeochemical mechanisms by which the land surface (e.g., soil moisture and temperature, albedo, snow, and vegetation) influences surface water, carbon, and energy balances, atmospheric and ocean processes, and climate; (3) predictability associated with land-surface/atmosphere/ocean interactions and land initialization (such as soil moisture, soil temperature, snow, aerosol in snow, etc.) at sub-seasonal to seasonal, to decadal time scales; and (4) application and analyses of large scale field data and observational networks (such as FLUXNET), satellite remote sensing, and reanalyses data for land model development and land/atmosphere/ocean interaction studies. We welcome papers addressing any of these topics.
The surface transportation system is impacted significantly by weather, from public safety and maintenance costs to lost productivity and commerce. In addition, new weather-related solution and support requirements are being established as the transportation industry is experiencing rapid modernization through the development of technologies in automated vehicles, connected vehicles, decision support systems, data sharing, communication, and cloud computing. This session explores research, technologies, techniques, and solutions for identifying, forecasting, and responding to surface transportation weather events for the benefit of the traveling public, commercial interests, and those who operate and maintain the transportation system.
Western North America (WNA) climate variations and changes can have substantial socio-economic impacts within and beyond the WNA region. Some of the most pronounced variations and changes are associated with large scale anomalous atmospheric ridging or troughing over or near WNA that occurring at subseasonal to decadal scales. These anomalies and their direct impacts can extend from the Alaska to Mexico, and from the northeast Pacific to eastern North America, and include, for example, anomalies in surface temperature, atmospheric river activity, precipitation, snow and ice melting, soil moisture, and ocean circulation. These environmental anomalies in turn lead to impacts on, for example, the management of water resources, droughts, floods, wildfires, electric power generation, and fisheries. The overall objectives of this session are to help develop a more comprehensive and integrated understanding of WNA climate variations and changes (especially the role of ridging / troughing events), promote collaborative efforts, and improve prediction and decision support. We invite researchers, operational analysts and forecasters, decision support providers, and others to share their progress in identifying and predicting subseasonal to decadal WNA climate variations and changes. We especially encourage presentations on WNA ridging and troughing events, and related anomalies and impacts. These include, for example, investigations of: ridiculously resilient ridging; northeast Pacific sea surface temperature blobs; climate scale variations and changes in atmospheric rivers, Santa Ana events, wildfires, and coastal upwelling; and decision support for resource and emergency managers. We welcome presentations from observational, theoretical, modeling, forecasting, and applied perspectives, such as studies of: links to El Nino – La Nina, Indian Ocean Dipole, Madden-Julian Oscillation, Arctic Oscillation, and climate change; low frequency wave dynamics, climate-weather interactions, hindcast and forecast skill assessments, multi-decadal projections, and applications of climate information in planning and management.
According to the Census Bureau[2], there are 40 million U.S. residents, age 5 and older, who speak Spanish in their home. Approximately, 44% of those who speak Spanish at home speak English less than “very well.”[3] The Weather Enterprise has many ways to reach these populations. Telemundo, an NBCUniversal owned television network, and Univision are dedicated Spanish-speaking TV stations that hire meteorologists. The National Weather Service (NWS) also formed a Spanish-speaking group to address the growing need to translate NWS products. Weather software companies such as WSI and Baron also suggest Spanish translations in their weather software. The challenge is no one is using the same translation.
Because weather terms are often unique, there is often no agreed upon translation. Additionally, just as there are dialects of English that vary by geography, so too are there different Spanish translations by geography. This is increasingly becoming a challenge for the Weather Enterprise. For example, the NWS Hazard Simplification effort, an evaluation of the watch, warning, advisory system, found that there are many translations of the word, “warning”[4] where as the phrase “outflow boundary” has no direct translation. There is also no standard across all television stations. During Impact Based Warnings focus groups, emergency managers raised concern about translating the terms “considerable” and “catastrophic,” terms used to denote a possible level of damage within tornado warnings. Not only are there direct translation issues, but there is also a lack of context for what the term means in the context of weather.[5]
Additionally, a number of recent efforts cite the need for more Spanish support. The Hurricane Matthew Service Assessment,[6] for example, cited efforts by the NWS Miami Forecast Office who translated key messages regarding hazards from Matthew. The Assessment pointed out that these welcomed efforts are inconsistently available across the enterprise.
In light of this need, this session is requesting abstracts that identify and address the following topics:
- Past and present challenges in translating weather into Spanish
- Existing Spanish weather translation resources
- Ways to address these challenges in the future
[1] https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/about-ams/diversity-and-inclusion-at-ams/
[2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/facts-for-features/2017/cb17-ff17.pdf
[3] Calculated using the following data: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2013/demo/2009-2013-lang-tables.html
[4] Hazard Simplification Workshop/Focus Groups
[5] Impact Based Warnings Focus Group Report
[6] Hurricane Matthew Service Assessment
Investigations into housing resiliency during tornadic events have been on-going for years. Various weather-aware disciplines have investigated the role of space, human reaction, and physical construction (to name a few) to understand and mitigate risk. This panel seeks to convene a multi-disciplinary panel of researchers focused on the implication of housing – specifically manufactured, mobile, modern site-built, older site, built, weak-frame/unsecured housing, and similar. Knowledge from geospatial sciences, civil engineering, and social sciences will be integrated to form a cohesive understanding of physical risks, perceptions of risk, and how that risk is exacerbated or mitigated in space. This work is part of a larger NOAA supported VORTEX-SE effort, and integrates findings across teams to create shared understanding and
Leading Up!
Location: 255 (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
In coordination with the Early Career Leadership Academy, this session will focus (much as the title suggests) on leading up in whatever capacity or sector you work in within the WWC Enterprise. Attendees will be actively participating in this session, discussing real-life, tricky-to-navigate scenarios in small groups. Once you've come up with the answer (or not!), these scenarios and solutions will be presented and discussed amongst the entire group, with facilitators leading the conversation and providing insight and expertise into possible resolutions and ways to lead up in your organization.
10:45 AM-12:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
11:00 AM-12:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
This session is for presentations that fit the general conference theme but do not match with a particular specialty session.
11:00 AM-5:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
AMS Oral History Project (Monday)
Location: Elm I & II (Westin Hotel)
11:30 AM-12:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Humanity has been witnessing evidence of the sun’s influence on Earth for millennia, through aurorae. However, the development of “space weather” was driven by technology that is impacted by solar activity. These new technologies included radio and telegraph communication systems. Combined with improved observational techniques, the relationship between the sun and near-earth space and the many space weather effects became clear, and the disparate sciences involved were eventually merged together into what we now call “Space Weather.” This session has been inspired by the Heliophysics Oral History Project, funded by NASA and conducted by the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics.
This session welcomes presentations about space weather impacts throughout history, advances in understanding and studying space weather phenomena, and evidence of solar-terrestrial connections in the pre-space weather era.
12:00 PM-2:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
12:15 PM-1:15 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Dr. Neil Jacobs will present the administrations' priorities for NOAA along with his vision for the agency. He will also take questions from the audience.
The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-2030 is a unique ten-year, global cooperative program to expand scientific partnerships to support effective science, ocean management, and sustainable development. National and international experts will be invited to engage the AMS members to learn their science priorities and identify opportunities to become involved in the implementation planning process. The Decade will consist of initiatives to map the ocean floor and processes, bolster ocean observation systems in all basins, develop a data and information portal, establish an integrated multi-hazard warning system, advance ocean component in earth-system observation, research and production, and strengthen capacities, ocean literacy and technology cooperation. The Implementation Plan (to be finalized 2020) will seek to achieve additional specific results, driven by the mission needs of society and science, and produce lasting benefits. Members of the Decade Executive Planning Group will solicit AMS input to inform the plans.
The implications of changing environmental conditions are increasingly recognized as threats to human, national and international security now and in the future. This Town Hall provides an opportunity to enhance understanding of the nature of these challenges and encourage consideration of ways to strengthen and expand the critical partnerships necessary to ensure that the AMS Weather, Water and Climate Enterprise can and will actively contribute to addressing these challenges.Through a series of paired presentations, the Town Hall will provide an explanation of select challenges from the perspective of organizations charged with responding coupled with examples of how the Enterprise informs their efforts. This approach is consistent with the Meeting’s theme of “Linking Information to Knowledge to Society.” Organizers anticipate addressing challenges and opportunities related to: extreme weather events; climatic anomalies and changes in food, water, and energy security; and extending partnerships with other disciplines and analytical communities to support decision-making.
Are you interested in spreading awareness about climate change in fun and creative ways? Are you already engaged in science outreach and have ideas to share? In this Town Hall session, student and faculty members of The Climate Consensus, an outreach group at Northern Vermont University-Lyndon, will share their experiences with community engagement on this important topic. They will discuss creative ways they have prompted discussion about climate change within the local community and important lessons learned. This session format will include a panel discussion with audience participation for the purpose of identifying creative ways of improving climate change literacy among the public, while also building community across disciplines at our institutions.
In the fall of 2018, NASA initiated a year-long program to evaluate how observations derived from Earth-orbiting, small-satellite constellations could augment observations from the agency’s fleet of orbiting Earth science missions. NASA awarded contracts to three companies (Planet, DigitalGlobe, and Spire) that met criteria within a public Request for Information (RFI), including: non-geostationary orbits; consistent, global coverage; and satellites designed and operated by non-governmental entities. These datasets are now being evaluated by existing NASA-funded researchers to help determine their utility for advancing NASA’s science and applications development goals. In the fall of 2019, NASA plans to issue another public RFI to continue its observation evaluations with the on-ramping of additional qualified vendors. At this town hall, the NASA Earth Science Division will provide a status update on the pilot activity, answer questions about data access, on-ramps for other constellation owners, and answer questions from the community.
Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act, which requires all non-sensitive government data to be made available in open and machine-readable formats by default is part of the overall Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking (FEBP) Act passed in late 2018. This town hall will bring together data officers and policy makers from NOAA, NSF, NASA and others to discuss the impact of the act on data management strategies going forward.
For much of the past year there have been numerous headlines citing the impact of the deployment of 5G technologies on weather forecasting. The FCC has moved forward with auctions of two different passive remote sensing bands that are critical inputs to numerical weather prediction. The proposal to share spectrum with GOES satellites has also advanced, increasing risk of interference to real-time GOES information to non-NOAA users. Last fall's World Radiocommunication Conference in Egypt also set the international rules around spectrum for the deployment of 5G. This Town Hall will feature international experts from across the enterprise who will highlight these recent challenges and the implications and actions for the weather enterprise moving forward.
The NASA Earth science flight program is a dynamic undertaking consisting of a large fleet of operating satellites, an array of satellite and instrument projects, a robust airborne science program which advances the use of satellite data, and a massive data archiving and distribution system. NASA’s fleet of 23 operating missions provides a wide range of scientific measurements obtained from dedicated Earth science satellites and the ISS. Projects in development are include both directed missions and competitively selected Principal Investigator-led missions. The Earth science flight program benefits from investments by the Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) to develop and demonstrate cutting-edge technologies that can be applied to future NASA Earth science measurements/missions. In addition, the NASA Earth science future portfolio will be evolving in response to the 2017 National Academies of Science Earth Science Decadal Survey. A limited number of box lunches will be provided by Northrop Grumman.
12:15 PM-1:45 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Carl Spector was appointed Commissioner of the Environment Department in 2015. As Environment Commissioner, he oversees programs related to climate mitigation and adaptation, environmental protection, historic preservation, and other aspects of sustainability. Among related programs, the Environment Department includes the Air Pollution and Control Commission, the Conservation Commission, and the Boston Landmarks Commission.Spector and his colleagues in the Environment Department are responsible for steering the City of Boston toward the goals outlined in Boston’s Climate Action Plan Update, which outlines strategies to reduce carbon emissions and prepare for the impacts of climate change. The most significant and recent initiatives led by his team include Climate Ready Boston and Carbon Free Boston. For more information, please contact Jennifer Henderson at Jennifer.Henderson-1@colorado.edu & Robert Brammer at rfbtech@comcast.net
1:00 PM-1:20 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Daily Weather Briefings (Monday Session)
Location: 157C (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
2:00 PM-3:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
This session will be hosted by the 26th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction (26NWP). We welcome abstracts on topics including (but not limited to) novel methods and applications for verification, bias correction, model-output statistics (MOS), object-based bias correction and post-processing, machine-learning-based bias correction and post-processing, etc.
For the past several decades, air quality models have mostly been limited area gridded models that are run sequentially (one-way) with limited area meteorology models. Such systems rely on lateral boundary conditions from other sources and they cannot account for feedbacks from atmospheric chemistry to meteorology. Both of these limitations can be addressed by integrated meteorology-chemistry models on a global mesh with refinements to local scale. There are currently several efforts to couple chemistry with the latest developments in global meteorology models. This session, which should be a joint session with Atmospheric Chemistry, would highlight the development of the next generation of global muti-scale integrated chemistry-meteorology modeling systems.
Discussions on how weather impacts the day-to-day operations of grid operators
A number of regional and national real-time flood forecasting systems are emerging for a variety of different flood-related applications. These new systems are taking advantage of new national hydrologic data standards, new advances in supercomputing availability and improvements in model parameterizations and meteorological forcing datasets. This session encourages contributions from all sectors of the AMS enterprise (academic, government and the private sector) who have built and deployed such systems. Additionally, contributions are welcome from researchers who have developed novel methodologies to sense and model flood generation dynamics at a variety of time and space scales. Research and application contributions from within the U.S. as well as internationally are also encouraged.
Please note that there is a different session in this conference on heavy precipitation events, flood risk under climate change (see "Heavy Precipitation and Flood Risk under a Changing Climate").
Land-atmosphere and land-ocean interactions play a key role in climate variability and climate/weather predictability across space and time. The land’s role in the earth system – its impact on atmospheric and ocean means and variability across a broad range of timescales, ranging from hours to centuries, for past, present, and future climates – has been the subject of much recent exploratory research. The meteorological, hydrological, biophysical, biogeochemical, ecosystem processes, as well as the boundary-layer processes that underlie the connections between surface and atmosphere are not yet fully understood. The scarcity of relevant observations, the complexity of the underlying processes and feedbacks, and the wide range of scales involved necessitate coordinated and exceedingly interdisciplinary investigations. This session focuses on (1) interfaces between climate, ecosystems, and the land branches of the energy, water, and carbon cycles and the impact of associated land processes, including land-use/land-cover change, on climate variability and change as well as on extreme events (such as droughts and flooding); (2) dynamic, physical, and biogeochemical mechanisms by which the land surface (e.g., soil moisture and temperature, albedo, snow, and vegetation) influences surface water, carbon, and energy balances, atmospheric and ocean processes, and climate; (3) predictability associated with land-surface/atmosphere/ocean interactions and land initialization (such as soil moisture, soil temperature, snow, aerosol in snow, etc.) at sub-seasonal to seasonal, to decadal time scales; and (4) application and analyses of large scale field data and observational networks (such as FLUXNET), satellite remote sensing, and reanalyses data for land model development and land/atmosphere/ocean interaction studies. We welcome papers addressing any of these topics.
The Maritime Continent and Indo-Pacific tropical warm pool regions are a global nexus of deep, moist convection that is generated and maintained on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Understanding tightly linked land, oceanic, and atmospheric processes that control the growth and variability of this convection as well as relevant cloud-aerosol processes and air-sea interactions is the focus of numerous recent field campaigns (e.g. CAMP2Ex, CHECSM, DIMOP, MISO-BOB, PISTON, SCSTIMX, YMC). Understanding these multi-scale processes in coupled Earth-system numerical models is vital for improving atmospheric predictability. This session solicits contributions with foci in observations, numerical modeling, or theory related to terrestrial, oceanic and/or atmospheric processes that impact or are influenced by convection over the Indo-Pacific warm pool and Maritime Continent. Contributions related to aforementioned field campaigns that address sub-seasonal-to-seasonal variability of convection and related cloud, aerosol, land, and ocean processes are especially encouraged.
2:00 PM-3:45 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
2:00 PM-4:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Panelists will outline challenges and opportunities associated with forecasting extreme weather at sea, from the Arctic to the tropics, and providing that information to the maritime community.
The WMO Congress that concluded in June 2019 served as a capstone of discussions about the future roles and interactions between and across the weather enterprise - especially between the Private and Public sectors. The approval of the “Geneva Declaration 2019-Building Community for Weather, Water and Climate Actions” brings with it many possibilities and directions for implementation. This session will highlight these crucial discussions beginning with a keynote by WMO Secretary General Peteri Taalas on the outcomes and way forward following the 2019 WMO Congress. This will be followed by a panel of international leaders from the Public and Private Sectors who will discuss challenges, benefits and next steps across WMO’s regions, especially in developing and emerging economies. Of particular focus will be the goals and direction of WMO's Open Consultative Platform and future of the Global Weather Enterprise Forum (GWEF) and related coordinating efforts as a way to further international cooperation across the enterprise.
Ron Przybylinski, the former Science and Operations Officer (SOO) of the National Weather Service Forecast Office in St. Louis, Missouri, left us the legacy of his unending motivation to interconnect weather operations and research in strong and enduring ways. Ron was a master in the transition zone, or nexus, of operations and research. Research interactions with Ron led to large field projects that provided the great benefit both to operations and the general knowledge. Ron Przybylinski inspired the idea of the RON Meetups, which have taken place at the National Weather Association (NWA) Annual Meetings since 2015 and American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meetings since 2018.
This session will provide the opportunity for an interactive "meetup" between research and operational meteorologists. The groups will rotate through a number of stations in speed-mentoring fashion and discuss ideas and themes that could benefit forecast and warning operations. The goal is simple: to build and develop new relationships in the nexus! This year, the meetup will be followed by an additional discussion including R2O/O2R success stories and expert-provided information on how to succeed in O2R/R2O.
The Board for Operational Government Meteorologists is co-sponsoring this session.
Because seating is limited, additional registration (at no cost) is required at the following link: https://forms.gle/fK88UpMmvUsBDQMZA
Submissions are welcomed to new Python tools in the atmospheric and oceanographic sciences. Submissions must specifically either introduce new tools or present significant progress (feature additions) to existing tools. If submitters are wishing to present on tool use please submit to other sessions in the Python Symposium.
This session features applications of machine learning and deep learning to atmospheric, ocean, land, and ice models.
Ensemble-based data assimilation methods have shown amazing skill in reducing initial condition errors for numerical weather prediction. However, challenges still remain for basic ensemble Kalman filter algorithms to perform optimally when applied to highly nonlinear dynamical systems with complex relations between observations and states. Recently, many research groups have made progress in advancing methodologies for scenarios such as nonlinear and multi-scale dynamical systems, deviation from Gaussian distribution for state variables, and complex observation operators. The shear complexity of data assimilation and modeling systems often limits the communication and collaboration among researchers with different scientific foci. Yet, inter-disciplinary collaboration is an important step in cracking the nonlinear data assimilation problem. In this session, we welcome researchers to showcase their new findings in developing ensemble filtering methods that provide better results than basic ensemble Kalman filters for problems with large dimensions and strong nonlinearity. We also encourage authors that participate in this session to provide their insights on what should be the commonly adopted benchmark test cases that reflect the current data assimilation challenges. We envision that the discussion stemming from this session will contribute to wider collaboration among researchers to push forward the frontiers of data assimilation science.
Climate change is the principal challenge of our time, and accordingly it presents unique scientific and policy hurdles. We invite speakers to discuss recent advances in climate research, to review outstanding questions and major challenges, and to reflect on Susan’s contributions to this essential topic.
WMO and its international urban expert team is promoting safe, healthy and resilient cities through the development of Integrated Urban Weather, Environment and Climate Services. The aim is to build urban services that meet the special needs of cities through a combination of dense observation networks, high-resolution forecasts, multi-hazard early warning systems, disaster management plans and climate services. This approach gives cities the tools they need to reduce emissions, build thriving and resilient communities and implement the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
WMO Guidance on Integrated Urban Hydrometeorological, Climate and Environmental Services. Volume 1: Concept and Methodology, WMO-No. 1234. https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=9903
WMO Guidance on IUS. Volume 2: Demonstration Cities. June 2019. https://elioscloud.wmo.int/share/s/Rf3EW264RZWGJuLrCuzo9w
Those working in public health, air quality, and environmental management need environmental data to study and understand the geographic, environmental, and meteorological differences in how extreme events affect the public well-being. Novel applications of satellite data offer a unique vantage point and are advancing these fields as well as increasing the impact of public outreach and partnerships between scientists and stakeholders from across the globe.
This interdisciplinary panel will curate and discuss a wide suite of satellite data, products, and applications, including GOES, TEMPO, MAIA, TROPOMI, SENTINAL 4, GEMS, AQUA, and TERRA available to the imaginative investigator. We will discuss both historical uses of satellite data and its potential for use in applications designed to further the aims of public health, air quality, and environmental groups (including those focused on environmental justice). Finally, the panel will share strategies for engaging the public.
Measurements obtained during field projects are critical to understanding past, present, and future weather and climates. The data obtained from these projects often offers a first glance at previously unstudied or misunderstood phenomena. This session will focus on results obtained from recent field projects using various observation platforms and techniques. Topics include preliminary findings, analysis and review of field project methodologies, and subsequent advancements following project completion.
The commercial application of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), which have much different weather sensitivities than manned aircraft, has shown exponential growth over the past 5 years leading to the need for new weather products tailored to meet their emerging needs. At the same time, plans for developing Unmanned Urban Mobility (UAM) has brought new challenges for the analysis and prediction of aviation weather in urban landscapes. Topics to be covered in this session include assessment of the weather sensitivities of these emerging modes of transportation (e.g., UAS, UAM), development and evaluation of finescale prediction systems to support unmanned operations, urban micrometeorology and impacts translation modeling which supports the integration of finescale weather information into UAS/UAM Traffic Management (UTM).
Over the last few years, significant advances have been made in both in situ and remote sensing technologies for measuring greenhouse gases (GHGs). The launch of global observing systems (such as GOSAT, GOSAT-2, OCO-2, OCO-3, SMAP, TanSat, TROPOMI) as well as deployment of localized surface networks and aircraft field campaigns, is starting to yield more information on natural and anthropogenic sources than ever before. While these multiple observational platforms provide a significant potential for the monitoring of GHG emissions, more and more uncertainties are coming to light regarding our understanding of the global and regional budgets of GHGs, errors due to deficiency in atmospheric transport modeling, and identification and quantification of climate feedback sensitivities. This session solicits abstracts that provide new insights on understanding GHG dynamics at various spatial (local to global) and temporal (sub-diurnal to decadal) scales. We encourage contributions on: (a) current and prospective GHG observational studies that inform both the nature and impact of errors in transport due to convection and large-scale mixing, (b) modeling studies to quantify budgets and/or uncertainties in GHG flux estimates, and (c) evaluation and benchmarking of GHG estimates from Earth System Models using contemporary observations. Submissions that quantify GHG emissions at the urban scale and their uncertainties, or explore policy issues related to GHG monitoring and regulation and how the current state of the science is informing policy decisions, are highly encouraged.
This session aims to bring attention to those applications, technologies, or techniques that are well advanced with respect to the Technology Readiness Level continuum. These applications, technologies, or techniques have not yet been made officially operational by organizations such as the National Weather Service, but are being produced regularly in an "operational like" manner and made available for general use. Historical examples are the HRRR forecast model, the MRMS precipitation and severe weather analysis/nowcasting system, harmful algal bloom (HAB) forecasts, high frequency radar (HFR) wave and current estimates, and the MADIS repository for surface observations and other observations.
Beginning in 2015, NOAA has annually funded research focusing on the special meteorological challenges that accompany tornadoes and tornado genesis in the U.S. southeast. From the beginning, this initiative was built on the recognition that tornadoes in the southeast are often deadlier, not because there is something intrinsically different about tornadoes in this region, but, rather, because of the confluence of challenges regarding storm mode (i.e., QLCS) and timing (i.e., higher prevalence at night or during winter months) and social factors in the southeast (e.g., population density, housing stock, terrain features). In order to acknowledge the holistic nature of the challenge of protecting lives and property in the southeast in the face of tornado threats, NOAA has consistently encouraged and supported a wide range of social science research focusing on behavior, culture, knowledge, awareness, communication, risk perception, and vulnerabilities.
This session will bring together a range of presenters who have conducted social scientific research as part of the many years of VORTEX-SE research cycles in order to summarize their findings and begin to answer a number of questions, including: What are the critical social factors that make the U.S. southeast different from other parts of the country regarding severe weather? How have findings from this social scientific research been brought into conversation with operational or research-oriented meteorology? What can be learned from this research in the southeast that can be applied across the entire U.S. or even globally? What recommendations come out of this work to support NOAA’s mission to protect life and property? What are the next steps and next big questions/challenges we should be pursuing?
We live in a changing world. Our climate is changing, our populations are growing and moving. Data is becoming ever more ubiquitous and available wherever we are in the world. Weather and climate science using some of the biggest super computers and environmental datasets on the planet are producing ever more reliable forecasts at higher resolutions and at time scales that range from minutes to decades. How do we turn this truly amazing science, the bewildering quantities of data and our understanding of how the world is changing into the next generation of environmental hazard risk assessments and risk- or impact-based forecasts and warnings? This session welcomes presentations on how this question is being addressed around the world and we'd like to see lots of different environmental hazards covered at all scales from the local to the global, from the 'warning period' short-term to the seasonal and multi-decadal longer-term.
The continuing growth of adverse impacts from weather and climate on economies globally has led to increasing emphasis on associated risk management by government and private enterprise. For example, the Global Risks 2018 report produced by the World Economic Forum indicates that “extreme weather events,” “natural disasters,” and “failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation” have moved into the top five global risks for both impact and likelihood of occurrence within the next ten years. The American Meteorological Society plays an increasingly important role in the development of robust financial weather and climate risk management sciences through research, education, and interdisciplinary communication. This session seeks presentations both related to extreme weather event and longer-range climate change effects. The goal is to stimulate further interdisciplinary conversation and outcomes leading to the development of financial weather and climate risk management methods and technology.
Identifying signals in the climate system amidst the “noise” of internal variability is a central challenge for the weather and climate communities. Furthermore, understanding the uncertainty due to internal variability is crucial for risk management and robust decision making as we adapt to our changing climate. The proliferation of initial condition large ensembles has provided the scientific community with a valuable tool with which to address this challenge: by design, the spread across the ensemble provides a metric of the noise and the mean of the ensemble can be viewed as the signal. Large ensembles also have proved to be helpful testbeds for hypotheses and methodologies focused on interpreting our single observational record. Our session aims to bring together a diverse set of large ensemble users with foci on (1) the development and application of methods using large ensembles to parse the signal and the noise in the observational record, and (2) the use of large ensembles to aid in decision making. We welcome contributions from a range of scientific fields.
According to the Census Bureau [2], there are 40 million U.S. residents, age 5 and older, who speak Spanish in their home. Approximately, 44% of those who speak Spanish at home speak English less than “very well.”[3] The Weather Enterprise has many ways to reach these populations. Telemundo, an NBCUniversal owned television network, and Univision are dedicated Spanish-speaking TV stations that hire meteorologists. The National Weather Service (NWS) also formed a Spanish-speaking group to address the growing need to translate NWS products. Weather software companies such as WSI and Baron also suggest Spanish translations in their weather software. The challenge is no one is using the same translation.
Because weather terms are often unique, there is often no agreed upon translation. Additionally, just as there are dialects of English that vary by geography, so too are there different Spanish translations by geography. This is increasingly becoming a challenge for the Weather Enterprise. For example, the NWS Hazard Simplification effort, an evaluation of the watch, warning, advisory system, found that there are many translations of the word, “warning”[4] whereas the phrase “outflow boundary” has no direct translation. There is also no standard across all television stations. During Impact Based Warnings focus groups, emergency managers raised concern about translating the terms “considerable” and “catastrophic,” terms used to denote a possible level of damage within tornado warnings. Not only are there direct translation issues, but there is also a lack of context for what the term means in the context of weather.[5]
Additionally, a number of recent efforts cite the need for more Spanish support. The Hurricane Matthew Service Assessment,[6] for example, cited efforts by the NWS Miami Forecast Office who translated key messages regarding hazards from Matthew. The Assessment pointed out that these welcomed efforts are inconsistently available across the enterprise.
In light of this need, this session is requesting abstracts that identify and address the following topics:
- Past and present challenges in translating weather into Spanish
- Existing Spanish weather translation resources
- Ways to address these challenges in the future
[1] https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/about-ams/diversity-and-inclusion-at-ams/
[2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/facts-for-features/2017/cb17-ff17.pdf
[3] Calculated using the following data: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2013/demo/2009-2013-lang-tables.html
[4] Hazard Simplification Workshop/Focus Groups
[5] Impact Based Warnings Focus Group Report
[6] Hurricane Matthew Service Assessment
The challenges that meteorologists, emergency managers and others dealing with high impact natural hazard events must face continues to increase, seemingly on a daily basis. Advances in the field of meteorology have helped increase the accuracy of forecasts for high impact events. But are we really serving the Nation as well as we could in terms of getting the message out?
We propose that there be a session dedicated to presentations and/or discussions on advances in effective weather messaging. We envision presentations from public and private sector meteorologists, social scientists and emergency management personnel, as there is much to learn from each other.
Among the questions to be posed: 1) how do we improve our messaging, especially in a world with many distractions and a seemingly infinite number of methods to receive information; and 2) how do we get our point(s) across most effectively and efficiently?
3:00 PM-4:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Latest research in wind forecasting
During the last three decades many hydrometeorological field and numerical studies have been done in the Amazonia region by researchers from Brazil, Europe, and the United States. This conference session invites contributions related hydrometeorological processes in the Amazonia region. Contributions are welcome to report on analyses and interpretation of historical data sets. Results from numerical modeling studies are particularly welcome. Conference presentations that evaluate the water budget components and address the physical mechanisms involved in precipitation recycling in the Amazon basin are highly encouraged. Findings from studies that report on the interactions between surface processes and the hydrologic cycle, and effects of climate change and drought on the precipitation processes in the Amazon basin are of great interest.
Large reservoirs provide multiple benefits for water supply, downstream flood reduction, and environmental objectives. Weather and climate forecasts play a critical role in helping reservoir operators balance multiple, often competing objectives. Accordingly, this session will highlight successful examples of collaborative development and application of forecasts to support reservoir management.
The practice of using forecast informed flood management to mitigate downstream flooding is well established and reservoir operators fully consider that information while managing releases through the dam. However, extreme events challenge both forecaster and operators to quickly determine how to manage designated flood storage and prevent failure of the dam, which include: early releases, increasing spillway releases, and storing water. Incorrect forecasts can magnify the impacts to any one requirement. Interdisciplinary cooperation is necessary to understand the accuracy of the forecasts and improve lead time to optimize operational flood management releases and preventing dam failure. For water supply management, utilization of codified forecast informed flood management for reservoir operation and recent advancements in weather forecasts such as those underlying the National Weather Service’s Hydrologic Ensemble Forecasting System (HEFS) afford operators improved capability to develop probabilistic projections to support proactive and dynamic operational decisions, such as how much water to release or divert over the next several days.
As an example, New York City’s Operations Support Tool (OST) is a system simulation platform that integrates a water supply operations model, mechanistic reservoir water quality models, statistical and climatological hydrologic forecasts, and various near-real-time data sources. In addition to routine forecast-driven operating plans, near-term simulations are used to evaluate operational strategies to deal with infrastructure outages, downstream flood mitigation, and weather-driven episodes of degraded water quality. OST simulations are currently being used to support development of an operations plan for an extended shutdown of the City’s critical Delaware Aqueduct, which supplies roughly 60% of the City’s water, based on operational triggers that rely on HEFS forecasts. Critical in development and application of the OST has been collaboration among water supply managers and operators, water resources engineers, hydrologists, and meteorologists in developing a common understanding on end user needs and forecast capabilities.
4:00 PM-6:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Formal Poster Viewing Reception (Mon)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Formal Poster Viewing Reception (Monday)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Posters for the 15th Societal Applications Symposium
This poster session will be for posters submitted to the various sessions within the 8th Conference on Weather, Water and Climate.
Poster session for the Susan Solomon Symposium, featuring presentations on the topics of:
- Wisdom of Solomon: History & Successes in Environmental Policy
- Ozone & the Middle Atmosphere: Past, Present and Future
- Climate Change: The Challenge of the 21st Century
Posters from all EIPT topic areas
A number of regional and national real-time flood forecasting systems are emerging for a variety of different flood-related applications. These new systems are taking advantage of new national hydrologic data standards, new advances in supercomputing availability and improvements in model parameterizations and meteorological forcing datasets. This session encourages contributions from all sectors of the AMS enterprise (academic, government and the private sector) who have built and deployed such systems. Additionally, contributions are welcome from researchers who have developed novel methodologies to sense and model flood generation dynamics at a variety of time and space scales. Research and application contributions from within the U.S. as well as internationally are also encouraged.
Please note that there is a different session in this conference on heavy precipitation events, flood risk under climate change (see "Heavy Precipitation and Flood Risk under a Changing Climate").
This is the corresponding poster session of the same title oral session.
The intrinsic and practical predictability of global weather forecasting is of great interest to all numerical weather prediction centers around the world. This session will have four invited talks by internationally known predictability experts to speak on what we know about intrinsic predictability, where we currently are in actual predictive skill and what improvements could be made to models, observations and data assimilation to push current practical predictability closer to the theoretical limit. All engaged in these topics are encouraged to submit their research and innovations in these areas as posters.
Land-atmosphere and land-ocean interactions play a key role in climate variability and climate/weather predictability across space and time. The land’s role in the earth system – its impact on atmospheric and ocean means and variability across a broad range of timescales, ranging from hours to centuries, for past, present, and future climates – has been the subject of much recent exploratory research. The meteorological, hydrological, biophysical, biogeochemical, ecosystem processes, as well as the boundary-layer processes that underlie the connections between surface and atmosphere are not yet fully understood. The scarcity of relevant observations, the complexity of the underlying processes and feedbacks, and the wide range of scales involved necessitate coordinated and exceedingly interdisciplinary investigations. This session focuses on (1) interfaces between climate, ecosystems, and the land branches of the energy, water, and carbon cycles and the impact of associated land processes, including land-use/land-cover change, on climate variability and change as well as on extreme events (such as droughts and flooding); (2) dynamic, physical, and biogeochemical mechanisms by which the land surface (e.g., soil moisture and temperature, albedo, snow, and vegetation) influences surface water, carbon, and energy balances, atmospheric and ocean processes, and climate; (3) predictability associated with land-surface/atmosphere/ocean interactions and land initialization (such as soil moisture, soil temperature, snow, aerosol in snow, etc.) at sub-seasonal to seasonal, to decadal time scales; and (4) application and analyses of large scale field data and observational networks (such as FLUXNET), satellite remote sensing, and reanalyses data for land model development and land/atmosphere/ocean interaction studies. We welcome papers addressing any of these topics.
This is the corresponding poster session for the oral of same title.
During the last three decades many hydrometeorological field and numerical studies have been done in the Amazonia region by researchers from Brazil, Europe, and the United States. This conference session invites contributions related hydrometeorological processes in the Amazonia region. Contributions are welcome to report on analyses and interpretation of historical data sets. Results from numerical modeling studies are particularly welcome. Conference presentations that evaluate the water budget components and address the physical mechanisms involved in precipitation recycling in the Amazon basin are highly encouraged. Findings from studies that report on the interactions between surface processes and the hydrologic cycle, and effects of climate change and drought on the precipitation processes in the Amazon basin are of great interest.
Land use and land cover change (LULCC) can significantly contribute to overall climate change. The impacts of LULCC are often complex as they occur in the context of a warming climate. LULCC affects the global concentration of greenhouse gasses, often times removing vegetation and forest cover that acts as a natural carbon sink. This can contribute to already elevated levels of greenhouse gases which can promote a positive feedback leading to further land use change. LULCC can accelerate parts of the hydrologic cycle, such as runoff characteristics and groundwater storage, and in some cases increase the likelihood of extreme flooding events in urban areas. This session serves as a continuation of the previous year’s session to disseminate research that investigates the impact of LULCC on climate across multiple spatio-temporal scales via high resolution, numerical prediction models and observation analysis. Research on best practices and emerging methods in application and implementation of LULCC are also welcome, as no uniform methodology exists in the current literature.
Large reservoirs provide multiple benefits for water supply, downstream flood reduction, and environmental objectives. Weather and climate forecasts play a critical role in helping reservoir operators balance multiple, often competing objectives. Accordingly, this session will highlight successful examples of collaborative development and application of forecasts to support reservoir management.
6:00 PM-8:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Exhibit Hall Opening Reception
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Exhibits Opening and Reception
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Historical Instruments Exhibit
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
7:00 PM-9:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
Solomon Dinner
Location: 205C (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
All are invited to attend a banquet to honor Susan Solomon. The Symposium banquet ticket is not included in the conference registration package. Attendees are encouraged to purchase tickets when preregistering since only a limited number will be available on site. Students attendees are especially welcome since this banquet offers great informal opportunities for students to network with mid-career and senior scientists as well as with their peers.
8:00 PM-10:00 PM: Monday, 13 January 2020
CoRioLis Reception
Location: Marina Ballroom III (Westin Hotel)
Sixth Annual Speed Networking Event for Students and Early Career Professionals
Location: East Registration (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Tuesday, 14 January 2020
7:30 AM-6:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Quiet Room (Tuesday)
Location: Commonwealth C (Westin Hotel)
Registration (Tuesday)
Location: North Lobby (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Speaker Ready Room (Tuesday)
Location: 102B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
8:30 AM-9:15 AM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
8:30 AM-9:30 AM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Come attend this rare opportunity to hear directly from a CEO! Mr. David Kenny, CEO and Chief Diversity Officer at Nielsen will offer a special fireside chat for the AMS community.
Mr. David Kenny has a legacy career across the tech sector with experience at many storied corporations including IBM, The Weather Company, Best Buy, Yahoo, Digitas, Akamai and Publicis. He has three decades of consumer and media focused experience in big data, analytics, AI/ML, and cloud technologies. He is passionate about organizational excellence, good leadership, diversity and inclusion, emerging technology, and of course, the AMS community.
Come hear Mr. Kenny share his thoughts on what the world can learn from the AMS and what the AMS might learn from the rest of the world in an inspiring and thought-provoking conversation.
8:30 AM-10:00 AM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Invited oral session of the Middle Atmosphere One-Day Symposium.
This panel is a conversation between industry, government, and the broader AMS community to discuss successes, challenges, and opportunities in technology transfer from research to operations. Panelists will be invited from government and industry to briefly highlight key technology transition examples and to stimulate further discussion.
The panel aims to:
- Discuss successes, challenges, and opportunities experienced by industry and government organizations when transferring technology into operations.
- Inform the AMS community of NOAA operational needs and discuss partnerships and mechanisms to develop and transition new technologies.
- Gain insight and/or ideas from AMS community regarding future applications of technologies in the broader science community.
The economic and environmental impacts of drought in North, Central, and South America and beyond are complex and multi-faceted, and do not adhere to political and programmatic borders. Robust, transboundary coordination that spans drought early warning, response, recovery, and preparedness efforts is therefore critical to insure that drought information is linked to societal applications. In this session, examples of drought science and services partnerships that integrate organizational capacities and perspectives across boundaries are sought from the community. Best practices and lessons learned from such efforts will serve as guideposts for new and continued drought partnerships, with an emphasis on overcoming the challenges of international collaboration.
Operational weather forecasting is a testament to the scientific creativity and rapid technological advances of the past century, marked this year with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the AMS. Coupled with an urgent public need for improved weather information and a culture of service in the meteorological community, the domestic and international capabilities that provide accurate and timely weather forecasts have saved countless lives and protected property and livelihoods. This first century of forecasting in the “Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise” evolved due from a national commitment to reliable and extensive observations, an advanced modeling community, an ever growing infrastructure of communications and information technology, an exceptionally trained workforce that puts mission first, and the extraordinary growth of private sector businesses and associated innovations. In fact, the economic scale of the weather industry is cited as being nearly a one trillion-dollar national enterprise, and the impacts of weather disasters or savings from avoidance of loss are regularly measured at multi-billion dollar levels.
While weather forecasting was developing under the critical eye of the public over one hundred years, similar major advances were being made in life and social sciences. Continuous observing networks both terrestrial and oceanic are now established, advanced ecosystem models have developed, in-situ biological observations are routinely real-time, high resolution and digital, and decision-based methodologies have matured in a realm that must account for behavior in addition to physics. With weather and climate understanding as a backdrop, the interdisciplinary components necessary to “predict nature” for the outcomes of saving lives both human and animal, forecasting environmental changes critical to national policy and actions, and anticipating natural crises before lives are lost are now possible. Given that the “natural capital” industries that trade in water, food, energy, biodiversity and support life on Earth are evaluated at twice the Global Domestic Product of all countries, it is time to harness the power of operational weather and ecosystems forecasts to deliver the next generation of products and services that include living and natural resources.
The Committee on Ecological Forecasting invites you to a Panel Discussion and interactive session that introduces the concepts of ecological forecasts vis a vis weather forecasts, identifies recent operational capabilities and stakeholder requirements, and discusses the critical intersections of public, academic, private sector, and professional society roles and opportunities for this next forecasting Enterprise.
S2S outlooks are becoming some of the most sought after forecasts by decision-makers, while the S2S time scale continues to be the most challenging to forecast. With incremental improvements being made in the field of S2S forecasting research, applying this research into useful and useable products for stakeholders is still emerging. This topic would encourage presentations by those who are developing decision-support tools using S2S forecasts and outlooks. It could also be an opportunity to have an open forum on how to improve communication of uncertainty with current forecasts, while still making them useful.
The session is scheduled to be a 90-minute panel discussion moderated by the co-chairs of the 30th WAF/26th NWP conferences. A 5-minute introduction from each panelist will start the session, with each panelist discussing what they see as Future Challenges in Weather Analysis and Forecasting and how their work addresses said challenges. The remainder of the session (about 60 minutes) will be an open-floor discussion, where audience members will be encouraged to ask questions to the panelists about Future Challenges in Weather Analysis and Forecasting. The discussion will be guided by the moderator(s) as needed.
This session focuses on AI applied to satellite or aircraft data.
Over the last two decades advances in micrometeorological theory and techniques have led to new understanding of the processes governing energy and mass exchange at the Earth-Atmosphere interface. Such advances have been critical for shaping environmental policies and improving models used for weather and air quality forecasting, agricultural management, urban planning, and simulating future climate. This session will focus on state-of-the-art micrometeorological field studies that are providing novel and practical insights regarding energy, water, biogeochemical cycling of greenhouse gases and aerosols over natural, managed, and urban ecosystems. Contributions that highlight the use of novel experimental results to inform land surface model development will also be encouraged.
Many shallow cloud systems are sensitive to changes in aerosol properties, which act as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN, or giant CCN), modulate cloud microphysical properties, and can influence precipitation formation and cloud-scale dynamics. Ultimately, these controls may alter low-cloud radiative properties and climate. Aerosol particles, in turn, are impacted by shallow-cloud processes. Together, these interactions result in a coupling of the aerosol–cloud system whose coupling strength is highly variable and is poorly understood in terms of basic process understanding. Correctly representing this coupling has proven challenging to represent in large-scale models. In this session we invite presentations on all topics related to aerosol–cloud coupling in shallow clouds, including those addressing basic physical understanding, the quantification of aerosol indirect effects, cloud effects on aerosols, and the coupling between aerosols and boundary layer turbulence, cloud dynamics, and precipitation.
This is part 1 of a two part panel. The focus will be on extreme weather and financial risk management. Panelists include invited speakers from the Boston Office of Emergency Management, Insurance Industry executives, and leading researchers on extreme weather events.
Climate-sensitive infectious diseases such as Cholera, Dengue, Valley Fever, Zika, West Nile, Lyme, and Chagas, routinely make headlines, popping up in unexpected places as the distribution, feeding ecology and population dynamics of disease vectors such as mosquitos, Vibrios, ticks, and kissing bugs respond to changing environmental drivers. For example, the 2018 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change indicates that mortality from dengue fever disease is increasing rapidly in the Americas and Southeast Asia, and that as sea surface temperatures rise, the suitability of coastal areas for hosting pathogenic Vibrios increases as well. Meanwhile some climate-sensitive diseases such as Valley Fever are cause by fungal spores which can be carried on the wind – directly linking them to environmental conditions.
There exists an unmet need to develop a deeper understanding of the myriad interlinked climate, vector ecology, and biological mechanisms that can ultimately lead to changes in the epidemiology of these diseases in humans to inform potential health interventions together to avert disease epidemics. This enhanced understanding can be applied to integrated predictive models to increase their skill, and to enable health professionals to plan, prepare, and respond with more lead time.
In this session, we invite abstracts addressing new developments in this field – understanding of mechanics, model improvements, case studies in prediction and early warning, and other outcomes demonstrating and advancing the use of environmental information to manage climate-sensitive infectious diseases.
This session welcomes studies funded by, but not limited to, NASA’s Atmospheric Composition Modeling and Analysis Program (ACMAP). In particular, studies related to global and regional modeling, satellite and aircraft in-situ data analysis in the areas of atmospheric chemistry, air quality, and the oxidation efficiency in the troposphere; stratospheric chemistry and ozone depletion; and interactions between atmospheric chemistry, weather, and the climate are welcome. Studies of long-term trends in atmospheric composition are also of interest, where the connection between the cause and effect is elucidated using models. The session is interested in studies that integrate observations from satellites with models to address attribution and predictions. The synergistic use of satellite, suborbital datasets, in-situ and ground-based measurements is encouraged for modeling constraints and verification where applicable. This session also welcome contributions from aircraft in situ measurements made during the numerous missions over the last decades, which have led to a better understanding of the global troposphere and stratosphere, sources and types of pollution, and the evolution of greenhouse gases.
This session is comprised of oral presentations on the status of AWIPS development, implementation and use. The NWS AWIPS Program Office will present the current status of the entire program, including delivery of the system to users. Development organizations are encouraged to present the status of their own work as it applies to the overall program. We would also like to invite presentations from the user point of view.
While studies of specific cases and different dimensions of a problem are highly important to identifying improvements in the Weather Enterprise, insights into the bigger picture are useful, too. This session moves to a proverbial 30K foot view of different problems, activities, and future directions.
Energy talks
Federal government agencies active in meteorological services and supporting research describe existing and planned programs, projects and coordination mechanisms which involve multiple government agencies, and aim to increase overall effectiveness within the Federal Weather Enterprise. These mechanisms include bi-lateral agreements between agencies for shared use of observing systems, numerical modeling resources and product dissemination systems. Also of interest, standing committees and panels which provide opportunities for synergistic engagement among multiple agencies, particularly in areas such as aviation weather and disaster preparedness and mitigation. The session will begin with a description of the recently established Inter-agency Committee for Advancing Weather Services mandated in the Weather Act of 2017 and the changes it brought to the Federal Weather Enterprise Coordinating Structure.
Over the past couple of years, interest in and discussion about the emotional and mental health of meteorologists has increased across all sectors of the enterprise. These topics have ranged from general discussions on depression and mental health to specific impacts encountered during hazardous weather operations, deployments, and engaging with impacted members of the public during the aftermath. This session will highlight research, internal observations, and evolving initiatives to address critical incident stress and PTSD among the forecasting community--in addition to sharing lessons learned from partners in emergency management, fire services, and disaster response psychology. It is the first of a two-part session and panel.
Space weather affects many of the technologies we have come to depend on in everyday life: access to satellite navigation signals, efficient and timely commercial aviation, and the dependable supply of electricity, to name a few. Awareness of the space weather impacts to these technologies has grown substantially in recent times and continues to mature. Additionally, these impacts and corresponding risks are not static as the technologies themselves have continued to evolve. This session will explore the current state-of-the-art in addressing the space weather impacts to these technologies including where progress been made and where major challenges remain.
The latest research on resource assessment
The connection between extreme rainfall and hydrologic extremes seems obvious, but recent research has shown the relationship to be complex and location-specific. New observing technologies and real-time hydrologic models are improving our ability to monitor and predict droughts and floods. Meanwhile, broad-brush assumptions about climate-driven trends in frequency and intensity of hydrologic extremes fail to capture the interplay between location characteristics, meteorology, soil conditions, and vegetation. This session invites papers on all aspects of extreme rainfall, including their relationships to floods and to the termination of droughts, encompassing observations, modeling, short-term and seasonal prediction, climate change, and risk assessment. Papers exploring the causes and consequences of individual extreme rainfall events that cause floods or terminate droughts, as well as the causes and consequences of changing drought, extreme rainfall, and flood risk are particularly encouraged.
This session highlights advances in the development and application of land data assimilation systems (LDAS), which merge ground- or satellite-based observations with estimates from land surface models. Contributions may include studies that evaluate or refine land DA methods, and/or assess the impact of the assimilation on the quality of LDAS products. These LDAS products may focus on the simulation of the land surface itself, or dependent processes, and could include simulation of surface hydrology, the atmosphere, drought, agriculture, and/or water resources. Contributions focussed on transition of research to operations are particularly encouraged, as are studies that explore assimilation of novel and/or multiple observation types.
This joint session covers broad topics such as Earth system modeling, regional climate modeling, climate change, carbon cycle. Invited keynote speaker: Gordon Bonan (NCAR). Session Chair: Leo Donner (GFDL).
8:30 AM-10:15 AM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
9:00 AM-6:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Academic Family Tree (Tuesday)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Exhibit Hall (Tuesday)
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Exhibits and Poster Hall Open
Location: Hall A & B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Historical Instruments Exhibit (Tuesday)
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Local Chapter Posters (Tuesday Session)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
9:15 AM-10:00 AM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
10:00 AM-10:30 AM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
AM Coffee Break (Tuesday)
Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
Meet President Jenni Evans (Tuesday)
Location: Hall A AMS Booth, No. 335 (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
10:30 AM-11:00 AM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
The latest research on resource assessment
10:30 AM-11:45 AM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
10:30 AM-12:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Session would include numerous papers which address exascale computing and preparations to use this next big leap in computing power.
This session will include speakers from across NWS Headquarters, Regions, and local forecast offices on IDSS and CFP progress.
What do the science policy leaders of The United States envision for the future of Earth system observation, science, and services? How do key federal agencies cooperate and support the broader weather, water, and climate enterprise. How can new collaborations and relationships among public, private, academic and NGO communities be formed and strengthened? This session will provide perspectives of the leaders in federal science policy for weather, water, and climate, at a time when some in Congress and the Administration propose paring back roles and budgets for NOAA, NASA, NSF, USGS, and other agencies at the heart of the weather, water and climate enterprise. Come to this special session to hear from leading policymakers about the current state of federal science and policy.
Invited speakers include leaders from civil agency leaders, such as the NSF, Dept. of Energy, and DoD.
Co-sponsored by the AMS Policy Program and the American Institute of Physics.
- Higgins, Paul A. T. (phiggins@ametsoc.org)
- Mohleji, Shali (mohlejis@gmail.com)
- None, Washington, DC USA
- IBM, Washington, DC USA
- Henry, Michael (mhenry@aip.org)
- American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA
- Droegemeier, Kelvin
- White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, , USA
- Jacobs, Neil
- Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation and Prediction, Washington DC, DC USA
- 371196 Introductory Remarks
- 371058 Policy Leadership in Weather, Water, and Climate. Part II
- Droegemeier, Kelvin (kkd@ou.edu)
- American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA
- Jacobs, Neil A. (njacobs@airdat.com)
- 371197 Panel Discussion
The analysis of meteorological data to recreate weather events can play a significant role in our understanding of disasters. Hazardous materials incidents, fires, auto and aviation accidents, along with severe weather events, often require the reconstruction of the contemporaneous weather to determine exactly what happened. This invited abstract session will focus on the role of forensic meteorology in understanding both weather disasters and other types of incidents affected by weather.
Over the past couple of years, interest in and discussion about the emotional and mental health of meteorologists has increased across all sectors of the enterprise. These topics have ranged from general discussions on depression and mental health to specific impacts encountered during hazardous weather operations, deployments, and engaging with impacted members of the public during the aftermath. This panel will highlight research, internal observations, and evolving initiatives to address critical incident stress and PTSD among the forecasting community--in addition to sharing lessons learned from partners in emergency management, fire services, and disaster response psychology. This is the second of a two-part session and panel
Submissions are welcome on visualization and data discovery using Python. Topics can range from new tools and platforms in visualizing complex data to how Python was used to interrogate and stratify complex data.
With the increase in data volume of Earth Science data over the last decade and the projected increase over the next several years, efficient, automated algorithms are required for the identification of phenomena. The use of artificial intelligence to address this issue is currently in early development and requires further collaboration between physical, data, and computer scientists. Using AI, specifically deep learning methods, Earth Science phenomena can be identified in data and imagery to develop dynamic event databases for detailed scientific process studies, and analyze climatological trends in climate model output. Such databases would serve to provide pathways to improve our current understanding of the physical atmosphere and how it may change in the future. The purpose of this session is to provide an interdisciplinary forum to showcase existing methods and recent advancements for automated detection of Earth Science phenomena using AI techniques. This session seeks submissions from projects that leverage AI techniques for phenomena detection across Earth Science Big Data repositories, promote the development of phenomenon-based climatologies or databases for further scientific investigation, extract/detect rare phenomena in large datasets or imagery, and overcome challenges related to computational limitation or the data representation of various phenomena for specific datasets.
From the early research on warnings to machine learning algorithms mining social media data, social and behavioral science integration into the weather enterprise has a long and meaningful history. Documenting this history and helping to transform the future of SBS, NOAA’s Office of Weather and Air Quality in partnership with the NWS and Federal Highway Administration, funded a National Academies of Science report on Integrating Social and Behavioral Sciences into the Weather Enterprise. Among the findings is a list of barriers to transitioning SBS research including a lack of shared understanding between the social and physical scientists; cultural differences between research and operations; and a lack of shared language.
Many efforts are underway to improve such transitions. For example, the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act requires NOAA “to ensure continuous development and transition of the latest scientific and technological advances.” While using the phrase “transition” provides a research end goal to incorporate valuable research findings into applications, applying research is multidimensional, and as such requires thoughtful care on where and how research findings transition. Although the Weather Act emphasizes technology, there are also people, policies, and mission that guide the application process surrounding these technologies. Each of these areas require different points of contact and organizational knowledge of the NWS, and ultimately a unique transition process.
Equivalently, social and behavioral science research findings also come in many forms. Results may take the form of tangible to less tangible results, such as developing a new end user software tool to providing knowledge on risk communication message improvements. Both the concrete tools and knowledge are critically important to integrating SBS research into NWS operations and seeing the full value of SBS research on empowering public response.
This panel session will reflect on current SBS R2O challenges, take us back to the future by discussing recommendations and best practices for transitioning SBS research as reported at the SBS R2O Workshop held in September 2019, as well as discuss a community vision for transitioning SBS research for the next 100 years.
Unexpected turbulence encounters by commercial aircraft is the main cause of aircraft incidents involving injuries to passengers and flight crew. Improving the detection, prediction and dissemination of turbulence information will be key to reducing the number of turbulence incidents. Topics describing progress in the explicit prediction of turbulence, diagnosis of turbulence from operational numerical weather prediction models and methods for quantifying uncertainties of turbulence predictions are also relevant. Topics may focus on specific turbulence-generating mechanisms such as clear air, mountain wave or convection. Topics can also span the range of spatial scales from estimating turbulence structures within an urban landscape to predicting the likelihood for turbulence at the global scale.
With the AMS celebrating 100 years, it is a great opportunity to pause and reflect upon the role of aircraft as a vital component of modern meteorological observations. Ever since Lieutenant Colonel Joe Duckworth, on a dare, flew his AT-6 Texan into a hurricane off the coast of Galveston on July 27, 1943, aircraft reconnaissance has come to be an essential component in operational forecasting of hurricanes. Today, tropical cyclone reconnaissance and research missions are flown by the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center, USAF Reserves, NCAR, NASA, NRL and a host of agencies from partner nations. Airborne research has expanded over the years to encompass all aspects of meteorology and oceanography. This session will take a look at notable past milestones and achievements but the focus will be on the present and future.
Today, a variety of emerging technologies fly aboard reconnaissance aircraft. Both the USAF and NOAA are looking deeper into the future toward ultimately replacing the WC-130J and WP-3D fleet. The NOAA AOC eagerly awaits the delivery and instrumentation of a next generation Gulfstream 550 high altitude jet in the next couple of years that will have the ability to reach up to the 100 millibar level. The NASA / NOAA Global Hawk has already proven to be a success as a platform with virtually unlimited future research possibilities. The sky is the limit when it comes to future research applications for both manned and unmanned systems.
We propose a session where a variety of agencies are given the opportunity to discuss their present and future systems in the hopes of ensuring attendees from all sub-disciplines within Meteorology are aware of their respective capabilities and plans.
This is the second part of a panel discussion. This panel discussion will focus on climate change and financial risk management. Invited panel speakers from the Boston Commissioner of the Environment (responsible for the Climate Ready Boston and Carbon Free Boston initiatives), as well as major Boston financial asset management firms and other risk management specialists working with scientists to analyze the effects of climate change on their businesses and investments.
This session is comprised of oral presentations on the status of AWIPS development, implementation and use. The NWS AWIPS Program Office will present the current status of the entire program, including delivery of the system to users. Development organizations are encouraged to present the status of their own work as it applies to the overall program. We would also like to invite presentations from the user point of view.
This session covers concepts and practices of mapping and modeling integrating atmospheric, hydrologic, and climatic data with GIS and related technologies demonstrating the relevance of GIS to weather, hydrologic, and climate services. GIS technology gives the user almost limitless potential to convey and contextualize data from different sectors and provide insight into weather and water phenomena. This session will focus on two application areas: 1) using local and cloud-based tools for the analysis of weather and water data integrated with data from areas such as human demographics, modeling, and disaster planning; 2) sharing those analyses in web applications such as dashboards, inquiry tools, and stories.
Atmospheric profiling is an important tool for understanding the nature and interactions of geophysical phenomena. Within the Earth system framework, representing the vertical structure of our atmosphere is crucial to understand the exchange of energy, momentum, and mass between the atmosphere and the surface (land, ocean, and ice), because these processes have direct implications in air quality, convection, severe weather outbreaks, and climate change. Yet, remote measurements of vertical parameters (e.g., temperature, moisture, wind, traces gases and aerosols) from satellite platforms remain a challenge, due to coarse vertical sampling, limitations in simulating surface and atmospheric processes, and satellite orbital constraints, particularly when it comes down to the characterization of the lower atmosphere where we live. As a consequence, improvements in the vertical characterization of the Earth-Atmosphere system are deemed urgent and critical for the next decade.
This session will focus on discussing both current research and operational achievements, as well as future directions of satellite vertical profiling methodology (UV/VIS/IR/MW/GPSRO), and their contributions to improve our understanding of thermodynamics, convection, severe weather, air quality, and climate change. Submissions are welcomed to highlight multi-agency (NASA, NOAA, NRL, and Academia) efforts to retrieve and correct passive and active sensors vertical profiling, as well as explore the synergistic relationship between in-situ observations, remote sensing, and weather and climate modeling. We solicit topics of interest that include:
1. Historical perspective of satellite sounders and advancements over the last 20-years.
2. Experiments that explore improvements in vertical sampling
3. Quantification of retrieval uncertainty
4. Impact on satellite-based vertical retrievals on numerical weather prediction
5. BL probing, and impact of PBL processes on weather and air quality through high vertical and temporal profiling of PBL temperature, moisture, and heights
6. Aerosol, cloud and trace gases vertical retrievals and their effects on climate, air quality and radiative balance
7. Sounder retrieved vertical motion of deep convection, heavy precipitation and clouds
8. Sounder retrievals to better understand the vertical structure of hydrometeors
9. Techniques to improve the vertical resolution of water vapor profiling
10. Next generation sensors and nano-satellites
This session will be co-chaired by:
Primary: Mayra I. Oyola (Mayra.I.Oyola@jpl.nasa.gov)
Eric Fetzer, JPL (Eric.J.Fetzer@jpl.nasa.gov)
Nicholas Nalli, NOAA/NESDIS (nick.nalli@noaa.gov)
Chi Ao, JPL (Chi.O.Ao@jpl.nasa.gov)
Panagiotis Vergados, JPL (Panagiotis.Vergados@jpl.nasa.gov)
Extreme weather and longer-term climate change are increasingly impacting humanitarian operations, both for disaster response and in meeting longer-term development goals. For example, over half of the operations of the Red Cross Red Crescent are now in direct response to weather related events, plus a vast majority compounded by climate shocks and stresses. Weather related humanitarian crises are often complex and situation specific, requiring a deep understanding of the underlying meteorology and its timescales, the resulting hazard, exposure and operational action.
Although there are several examples of sustained, meaningful engagement between the meteorological and humanitarian communities, there is both a need and an opportunity to build deeper relationships, defining key principals that support increased collaboration. Some of the key issues include:
- How to balance the constraints between research and operations; In applied sciences there is a tension between the need to publish rigorous analysis to uphold the scientific method, while in the humanitarian community there is often the need to use science that is ‘sufficient’ or ‘good enough’.
- The disparity between academic project timescales and the long-term engagement / short-fuse action often required by the humanitarian sector.
- The complexities and lack of incentives for creating tailored versions of existing research output, or for moving from research to applications.
- The disconnect between the content of peer reviewed academic literature and the tailored output needed by the humanitarian sector to make actionable decisions.
- The lack of incentive for those in the humanitarian sector to write up their own research outcomes, along with the logistical and cost barriers to accessing the peer reviewed journal process.
There are many exciting innovations on the horizon to overcome these challenges. These include co-sponsored researchers, dedicated “translator” centres integrated within the structures of humanitarian organizations, or academic funding programmes dedicated to humanitarian linked research. This session uses the "hard talk format" to allow space to candidly discuss these topics, exploring the state of affairs and reflecting on novel approaches to bridge the gap.
The potential impacts of extreme space weather are gaining visibility worldwide and next-generation operational systems are being developed. As our understanding of the physics of near-Earth space (Geospace) events improves, that knowledge will be incorporated into the new systems. This session will address Standards, Metrics, and User needs for next-generational operational space weather, Research-to-Operations and Operations-to-Research (R2O2R) programs. Topics may include: next-generation hardware and software architectures; standards and metrics for comparing models, and for comparing data-assimilation algorithms; User needs and requirements for improved operational products.
The connection between extreme rainfall and hydrologic extremes seems obvious, but recent research has shown the relationship to be complex and location-specific. New observing technologies and real-time hydrologic models are improving our ability to monitor and predict droughts and floods. Meanwhile, broad-brush assumptions about climate-driven trends in frequency and intensity of hydrologic extremes fail to capture the interplay between location characteristics, meteorology, soil conditions, and vegetation. This session invites papers on all aspects of extreme rainfall, including their relationships to floods and to the termination of droughts, encompassing observations, modeling, short-term and seasonal prediction, climate change, and risk assessment. Papers exploring the causes and consequences of individual extreme rainfall events that cause floods or terminate droughts, as well as the causes and consequences of changing drought, extreme rainfall, and flood risk are particularly encouraged.
This session highlights advances in the development and application of land data assimilation systems (LDAS), which merge ground- or satellite-based observations with estimates from land surface models. Contributions may include studies that evaluate or refine land DA methods, and/or assess the impact of the assimilation on the quality of LDAS products. These LDAS products may focus on the simulation of the land surface itself, or dependent processes, and could include simulation of surface hydrology, the atmosphere, drought, agriculture, and/or water resources. Contributions focussed on transition of research to operations are particularly encouraged, as are studies that explore assimilation of novel and/or multiple observation types.
This session covers broad topics such as integration of remote sensing data with land modeling, land model development, land cover/land use change. Invited keynote speaker: Inez Fung (UC-Berkeley). Session Chair: Xubin Zeng (Univ. of Arizona).
Most operational meteorologists don't become great at forecasting until they've been in the field for some time. Also, with emerging technologies out there, it's important to stay up to date on these things, as they look to move up in their career. This is one example for this session.
This session will feature applications of AI and machine learning models for analyzing and understanding our climate.
Extreme weather events and ecosystem changes are increasing with climate change. The health consequences of these events are significant. The environmental hazards of concern span a wide range: extreme temperatures, storms, aeroallergens, wildfire, and drought. This session invites presentations on the economic valuation of the health impacts associated with these hazards. Beyond estimation of risks and impacts, the session also welcomes presentations on the economic cost and effectiveness of interventions aimed to reduce the health impacts. The presentations can be related to, but not restricted to, health costs to healthcare systems and individuals, health insurance implications associated with extreme weather events, and implications of these extreme events on economic and social equity.
10:30 AM-12:15 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
10:45 AM-12:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Antarctica occupies 10% of the Earth’s land area and when combined with sea ice the area doubles from summer to winter. The combination/interaction of topography, ice, surrounding ocean and overlying atmosphere produce a significant role in global climate. Unique ice core records provide important clues about past and recent climates. In fact, Antarctic meteorological and oceanographic science is crucial for understanding how the planet operates as a global system. Antarctica is the continent for science and international cooperation, with significant progress since the cooperation of the International Geophysical Year (IGY, 1957-8).
The progress has been supported by significant developments in Satellite Meteorology which have improved polar, mid-latitude and tropical meteorology, particularly analysis and forecasting. Many countries have participated in Antarctic research, including via inter-hemispheric cooperation, one example being the International Antarctic Analysis Centre in Melbourne Australia in the 1960s. Much research and cooperation has also been related to Satellite Meteorology and data assimilation, starting for example in the area of quantitative cloud picture interpretation and finishing for example with hyperspectral sounding. The advances in these area have supported a fuller understanding of the global circulation and Antarctica.
This session will focus on the progress that has been made in Antarctic science since the IGY and on current research and outstanding issues for weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry and oceans surrounding Antarctica. The Session will also focus on progress that has been made in satellite remote sensing since TIROS1 and on current research and outstanding issues for weather, climate, oceans, atmospheric chemistry, space weather and satellite data assimilation.
The Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS) is pleased to help support this session under the umbrella of its MOU with the AMS.
11:00 AM-12:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Latest research in wind forecasting
12:00 PM-1:30 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Women in the Atmospheric Sciences Luncheon
Location: 205C (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
12:15 PM-1:15 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is committed to producing use-inspired environmental information products to serve every sector of the U.S. economy to enable robust decision making. Requirements from user interactions guide NCEI's science, research and product innovation, and support the advancement of NCEI’s future product plans.To further NOAA and NCEI’s use-inspired mission goals, NCEI routinely hosts engagement events and engages at sectoral conferences to understand and incorporate user needs into NCEI's suite of products and services, freely available to the public.In May 2019, NCEI hosted a Users’ Conference that convened industry leaders from 14 sectors, government and academia to provide insight and perspectives on the use of NCEI’s environmental data products. This Town Hall focuses on conference outcomes, highlighting common themes and requirements raised by industry sector participants. It will also highlight NCEI’s commitment to making products and services more relevant to the user community.
Forecast-informed reservoir operations" (FIRO) are being explored as an option for improvement of water-supply and flood-risk management, often without major new infrastructure, in reservoirs around the Nation, and greater clarity in the use of the term is needed. This Town Hall provides an opportunity to discuss and contribute to a definition of FIRO that is being developed for the Glossary of Meteorology. The working definition now reads: "Forecast-informed reservoir operations (FIRO) is a reservoir-operations strategy that uses enhanced monitoring and improved weather and water forecasts to inform decision making to selectively retain or release water from reservoirs to optimize water supply reliability and environmental co-benefits and to enhance flood-risk reduction."
This PBS documentary tells the remarkable story of how scientists discovered the deadly hole in the ozone – and the even more remarkable story of how the world’s leaders came together to fix it.
This Town Hall will consist of a presentation by Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, focussing on NASA's programs including space weather and space science in general. The last part of the Town Hall will be a question and answer session with the audience.
At the last few AMS Annual meetings, the NOAA Modeling Forum has been held as a place to socialize (operational) model development and receive community input. This year's forum will focus on progress being made with developing a Unified Forecast System (UFS) for community model development, general research and NOAA's operational production suite. Whereas the actual format and speakers will be determined closer to the Annual Meeting dates, we expect to cover * Progress toward a UFS made this year. * The formal NCAR-NWS-OAR partnership on developing the infrastructure for the UFS * The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and its relation to the UFS
Some of the most extreme events that endanger and take lives and damage property are volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, other seismic activity, tsunami, and their associated hazardous and detrimental environmental effects. The volatile Ring of Fire around much of the Pacific Basin has been historically the origin of the majority and most severe events. These phenomena have been extremely difficult to predict in order to provide timely and meaningful warnings for the people and property affected. Some progress has been made in using satellite observations to support the monitoring and understanding of such events. Panelists from the US and partnering nations will discuss how satellite observations from advanced national and international satellite systems might be used to improve the monitoring and understanding of these phenomena in order to eventually predict and warn of oncoming events.
The USAF Weather Systems Program Office (Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Weather Systems Branch) will present a systems roadmap for USAF weather capabilities and programs to interested industry, academia, and government research organizations, as part of general market research and awareness outreach. Addressed will be likely research and procurement opportunities of weather systems with meteorological in-situ and remote sensing, modeling and high-performance computing, large-scale processing and dissemination, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and forecaster applications.
NASA has selected two Earth Venture Instrument projects for launch in the 2022 timeframe which will provide data of interest to the health and air quality communities. The NASA Multi-angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) instrument is currently in development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and will be launched into low-Earth polar orbit. MAIA will provide high spatial resolution speciated PM products over a set of globally distributed target areas. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution (TEMPO) project will provide high temporal resolution measurements of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and other key species critical to air pollution over North America from geostationary orbit. This town hall will provide an opportunity for epidemiologists, environmental health researchers, air quality managers, and other interested people to hear from members of the MAIA and TEMPO teams and the NASA Applied Science Program about the investigations and opportunities to get involved as an Early Adopter.
Operational forecasting and meteorological research that leverages the flexibility and scalability of cloud computing environments is rapidly becoming a reality, and enabling capabilities and dataflow at a velocity previously considered out of reach. Join thought leaders from the private and public sectors to discuss real world examples of success and the emergent trends in this domain. We will be discussing examples and best practices focused on: short term forecasting and Numerical Weather Prediction; empowering statistical, machine learning, and AI applications; ingesting large and diverse data sets; and building scalable, resilient and cost effective systems.
1:00 PM-1:20 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Daily Weather Briefings (Tuesday Session)
Location: 157C (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
1:30 PM-2:30 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
This session covers broad topics such as planetary waves, atmospheric circulations. Invited keynote speaker: Angel F. Adames-Corraliza (Univ. of Michigan). Session Chair: Richard Rood (Univ. of Michigan).
Earth System Prediction relies heavily on High-Performance Computing (HPC); its needs are expanding as the demands of earth system modeling (ESM) push the limits of computational efficiency. Advances in private sector capabilities including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud-based HPC may enhance the ability of academic and federal research communities to explore the constantly emerging frontiers of ESM. Previous studies have shown the benefits and drawbacks of reliance upon proprietary systems. This session invites abstracts highlighting advances and challenges in HPC capability for research in ESM including, but not limited to, data storage, cloud computing, interconnect technology, code refactorization, computational efficiency, and evolving market-based priorities. The session seeks to incorporate industry perspectives on new architectures and capabilities, engagement with the ESM community and current ESM-related HPC.
NWS Evolve initiatives: The latest achievements and next steps.
Sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) predictions are rapidly filling up the gap between the weather and climate predictions in the operational suites. Tropical-extratropical interactions, sea-ice, soil moisture, stratosphere-troposphere interactions have emerged as untapped sources of predictability on the S2S time scales. An extensive database of S2S forecasts and reforecasts from operational centers has been created by the WWRP/WCRP S2S project that enables these sources of predictability to be studied, forecast skill assessed, and early warning systems developed. Contributions are solicited on recent advancements in assessing the predictability on S2S time scales, S2S prediction skill and remaining challenges with emphasis of making use of the S2S database, and development of metrics for measuring the success of forecasts in ways that are useful to stakeholder communities.
Atmospheric aerosols impact the effective assimilation of satellite radiance observations sensitive to their presence. Presentations in this session describe methods to account for and assimilate aerosol-affected channels.
New for 2019 interactive tutorial sessions allow attendees to get an in-depth demonstration from the presenter. We will be using interactive tools like Binder and Jupyter notebooks to allow attendees to run through examples at the same time as the material is presented.
This session would showcase informal weather education outreach activities, programs and events being done in local communities across the US and beyond, including Owlie Skywarn and AMS WeatherFest as examples. Partnerships between local, state and federal government, non-profit and for-profit partners would be highlighted. Examples of partners working together could be NOAA, NWS, NHC, AOML, emergency management agencies, universities, local science museums, corporations, and media. Some of these partners could also be Weather-Ready Nation Ambassadors. Select speakers would make brief presentations followed by a panel discussion for Q&A with the audience.
Viewership for local TV news continues to slowly decrease. But "trust" in local news and weather casters remains high. Numerous organizations and station group owners are exploring different innovative approaches to build their trust and connections to local communities. We'll look at various ways of analyzing the formats and practices of local news stations, and suggestions for new ways of telling stories that can better engage diverse audience. What's the future of local weather forecasting?
Built on the Earth sciences, the “Weather Enterprise” exists to observe, model, forecast, and communicate data and information about weather, water, and climate for the benefit of society. The entire weather information process extends past the activities of the weather enterprise to the communication, reception, comprehension, use, and value of weather information. Over the last several decades there have been numerous calls from the hydro-meteorological community, from policy makers, and organizations and individuals concerned with societal impacts of weather, water, and climate events to develop a better understanding of the societal aspects of hydro-meteorological events and forecasts of these events. A focus on economics comes from a desire to use economic information to justify programs or to use economics to prioritize investments in the weather enterprise. A broader understanding of economics sees the potential of economics as a study of human behavior and the general misunderstanding that social sciences entail a broad set of disciplines, methods, and applications that are important in meeting the needs of the Earth science and weather community and society. Presentations in two related sessions discuss efforts to develop a socio-economic capacity for the weather enterprise; characterize and communicate the value of information to various sectors; and specific studies and analysis of the benefits of observations, communication, and warning processes.
Proposed by: Jeffrey K. Lazo and William Hooke (hooke@ametsoc.org)
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is preparing to produce a new set of normals for the United States for the 1991-2020 period. Many normals will be generated in a similar manner to the most recent 1981-2010 cycle. NCEI seeks input from the user community regarding their suggestions for improving current products and methods of access. Requirements for potential new products of greater utility to user communities will also be collected.
Our natural environment affects our mental health. Temperature extremes, storms, floods, and droughts are associated with increases in depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, and substance abuse. Mental health also can be affected by climate change altering income, water, and food security, or through conflict and displacement. Climate-sensitive vectorborne diseases can contribute to cognitive, neurological, and mental health problems. This session welcomes abstracts (1) exploring the mental health consequences of weather, climate variability, and climate change; (2) describing populations particularly vulnerable or resilient to these impacts; and (3) exploring approaches to building psychosocial resilience and mental well-being.
AI applications for Water Quality
5B
Environet
Location: 156BC (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Presentations on the status of the Environet Initiative and insights from AI applied to Environet datasets.
How best to adequately represent small-scale atmosphere motion in the range of scales of the order of 100 meters and less based on Numerical Model output, remains a topic of debate. Several methods need to be investigated with a goal to identify an optimal approach to reproduce realistic near-surface flow fields between the range of 50 meter to 100 meters resolution scale via dynamic downscaling or statistical methods.
Why we need a Downscaling? One of the major hurricane threats is damaging winds. Sustained winds and gusts of hurricanes have proved to be catastrophic for many homes. Most of the damage caused by hurricane winds occurs within the first few hours during a hurricane’s landfall. Hurricane Michael (2018), Harvey (2018), Irma (2017) some of the recent hurricanes cased huge damages across the coastal areas. We need downscaling discussion (not only hurricane but other application as well) to reach out knowledge at meter scale and link its application to the society. With our current and possible future computing powers, we are ready to deliver at 10-100 meters scale applications that will directly connect to the society (LINKS).
The wind gust generated by large transient eddies are the most likely culprits for producing damage patterns of a few hundred meter in scale or even smaller (Ping Zhu 2008). The coastal hurricane wind damage is determined by various building design codes but at the same time we need to improve our understanding on fine-scale structure of damaging winds.Understanding the wind dynamics of landfalling hurricanes and predicting wind changes at or near the time of landfall are of vital importance, not only for scientific study of land- falling hurricanes, but also for hurricane preparation and assessment of hurricane damage and financial losses in the landfall regions. However, the detailed structure and change of surface winds during landfall, which is controlled by the multi-scale interactions among the storm-scale circulation, meso-vortices, turbulence-scale eddies, and the underlying surface, cannot be obtained from operational numerical simulations (Ping Zhu 2008).
In our downscaling session, we want people from different background and addressing the challenges in the downscaling techniques for many applications such as landfall cyclone damages in the coastal areas, downscaling flash flood forecasting & reconstruction, applications of using fine scale (at meters resolution) landuse/landcover along with topography, Build Large Eddy Simulation (LES) framework for fine parcel-scale applications (Dynamic downscaling), Statistical downscaling.
The Idea of downscaling session is a good fit to the AMS 2020 Theme as this downscaling session bring greater knowledge of the situation to more positive impact on society (LINKS).
- Zhu, P., 2008: Simulation and parameterization of the turbulent transport in the hurricane boundary layer by large eddies. J. Geophys. Res., 113, D17104
Sensor integration provides improved methods for taking a multitude of observations with a single sensing platform. Topics in this session include integrating sensors into singular platforms for observations, platform design, software engineering to support sensor integration, integrating observations across sensing platforms for improved data collection and analysis, and network design.
This named session honors, John T. Madura, for his efforts in revolutionizing range meteorology to improve the safety and efficiency of range aerospace operations. Topics appropriate for this session include those that describe the history of range meteorology, current state of the art technologies used in operations, explore gaps or existing needs and research and development efforts applicable to improving the efficiency and safety of range operations in the coming decades.
This session will delve into cloud hosting solutions applied to benefit the environmental sciences and specifically applications for processing and displaying environmental information. Cloud computing have moved beyond the model of simple VM hosting, towards more sophisticated specialized hosting options such as co-locating large to big data in the cloud with analysis programs and developing new models and modeling platforms in the cloud. While cloud hosting does present many solutions, migrating legacy application to a cloud platform is challenging. Presentations on the cloud migration challenges or hosting limitations and how these constraints were resolved for weather, ocean, or climate relevant applications will be welcomed. Presentations might also include novel uses of the cloud and real-world use cases including costs and platform selection.
New and evolving technologies in satellite, radar and other meteorological observation systems, and the continuing increase in computing power, all provide a wealth of meteorological, climatological and related data to scientists. Adequate visualization and interaction techniques can help to explore such large and heterogeneous data sets. Visualization enables researchers to find interesting features, to detect spatial, temporal, or multivariate relationships, or to evaluate uncertainties in the data. This facilitates the understanding of atmospheric processes and feedbacks between Earth system components. How can these improvements in technologies related to observation and processing be best communicated to meteorologists and others so that the great increase in knowledge is best communicated to society in general? How do you demonstrate new data and visualization techniques to facilitate understanding of those new data? How do you show the multispectral nature of the observations easily? How can immersive displays help you communicate important scientific observations to stakeholders, forecasters, and the general public? This session welcomes contributions from research fields such as scientific visualization, information visualization or visual analytics that are applicable to data sets from climatology, meteorology or related disciplines, and how those new systems and datasets can be best described to, for example, educators.
The connection between extreme rainfall and hydrologic extremes seems obvious, but recent research has shown the relationship to be complex and location-specific. New observing technologies and real-time hydrologic models are improving our ability to monitor and predict droughts and floods. Meanwhile, broad-brush assumptions about climate-driven trends in frequency and intensity of hydrologic extremes fail to capture the interplay between location characteristics, meteorology, soil conditions, and vegetation. This session invites papers on all aspects of extreme rainfall, including their relationships to floods and to the termination of droughts, encompassing observations, modeling, short-term and seasonal prediction, climate change, and risk assessment. Papers exploring the causes and consequences of individual extreme rainfall events that cause floods or terminate droughts, as well as the causes and consequences of changing drought, extreme rainfall, and flood risk are particularly encouraged.
8
Offshore Wind
Location: 256 (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Latest research in offshore wind energy development including met-ocean observations and modeling
Over the last several decades, substantial progress has been achieved in probabilistic hydrometeorological forecasting theories and applications. However, significant challenges still exist in assessing the uncertainty of complex hydrometeorological processes and improving hydrometeorological predictions, especially extreme hydrometeorological events. This session solicits papers that focus on, but not limit to, (1) addressing uncertainty in hydrometeorological forecasting from a number of sources in both offline and couple systems, and (2) innovative methods in hydrometeorological ensemble forecasting. The former includes uncertainties in forcing data (e.g., quantitative precipitation estimation and meteorological forcing data), initial conditions (e.g., soil moisture and snow status), parameters (e.g., land use and soil texture), model structure (e.g., assumptions, formulations and numerical solutions), and calibration (e.g., single-objective optimization and multi-objective optimizations). The latter emphasizes integrated ensemble methods to improve hydrometeorological forecasting, verification methods to evaluate probabilistic forecasting, and statistical postprocessing techniques to generate hydrometeorological data products.
In a warming climate, heat waves have become more and more frequent. However, there is no universal definition or clear understanding of the causes of heat waves. Yet, the impacts on society can be catastrophic from human and animal diseases and even deaths to crop failures resulting in famine and power outages. This joint session with the 33rd Conference on Climate Variability and Change (CVC) will bring together the international climate and health research communities, health practitioners, and decision makers, focusing on climate information and its applications to heat vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation. Oral and poster presentations are solicited on all topics related to heat waves world wide, that address improved understanding of the mechanism associated with heat waves and predictability at all time scales, hazards of heat waves on human and animal health, and early warning systems to mitigate the impacts of heat waves.
Atmospheric aerosols from natural or anthropogenic sources have profound impacts on
Earth's radiation budget, hydrological cycle, as well as regional and global climate. Currently, the radiative forcing of aerosols in the climate system remains highly uncertain, representing the largest uncertainty in climate predictions. For the direct effect, aerosols scatter and absorb solar radiation. Light scattering by aerosols changes the radiative fluxes at the top-of-atmosphere (TOA), at the surface, and within the atmospheric column, while aerosol absorption modifies the atmospheric temperature structure, decreases the solar radiation at the surface, and lowers surface sensible and latent fluxes, suppressing convection and reducing cloud fraction. Also, aerosols indirectly impact climate by altering cloud development, lifetime, albedo, and precipitation efficiency. On the other hand, climate variabilities also affect aerosol cycle and lifetime by altering aerosol removal processes. Current treatments of aerosol-cloud-radiation interactions remain crude in climate models. This session aims to review the state of current understanding on aerosol-climate interaction, so we invite any paper on the related subjects.
Introductory Remarks (10 minutes): Kelly Nunez, Pennsylvania State Univ.
1:30 PM-3:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
This would be a session of invited talks. This session builds upon the work that former AMS President Fred Carr initiated several years ago, when he conducted a large-scale survey of many of the attendees at the annual meeting regarding their use and future needs for observations. In this session, Fred Carr will provide the results of that survey, and additional speakers will provide additional views from various perspectives (e.g., NOAA, Univ., private industry).
It’s been close to ten years since the AMS Committee on Climate Services was very active. One of its last activities was the preparation of the AMS Policy Statement on Climate Services, officially adopted by the AMS Council in 2015. Five years later, do these statements still hold true? With respect to our world’s changing climate (figuratively, politically, socially), has the current status of climate services changed? What have we achieved within the recommendations, and are they still relevant today? This panel discussion will be an opportunity to examine the current landscape of climate services and where we want to go from here.
2:30 PM-3:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
PM Coffee Break (Tuesday)
Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
3:00 PM-4:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
What steps are governments taking to allow integration of renewables into the power supply
This panel discussion will give members an opportunity to share in the planning for the future of the AMS Conference on Education
Cloud computing is becoming pervasive in a broad range of computational domains and is being explored to determine the benefits to the Weather, Water and Climate community. The cloud promises lower cost, ease of use, ease of access, and flexible provisioning, but there are challenges to gaining these benefits and the cloud may not be appropriate for all workloads. This session solicits papers presenting experiences in using HPC in the cloud for Weather, Water and Climate applications as well as analyses addressing suitability of cloud platforms for delivering HPC to various Weather, Water and Climate applications. Speakers will address challenges and lessons learned from the experience, including issues of issues of performance, availability, data storage, data transfer and security.
Two long-standing maxims persist across the Weather Enterprise: 1. We can never have enough data; and 2. All data should be free. Unfortunately, there are costs to producing data, particularly high-quality data, and some entity must pay for that data to be produced and processed. This session explores two questions: 1. How much data do we really need to do our job (is there a point of diminishing returns?), and 2. Who should (or should not) pay for those data to be produced? This session explores various community endeavors working to address these issues.
Ocean and land surface processes influence atmospheric predictability from weeks to two years. This session focuses on prediction improvements from advances in high-resolution, subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) models via improvements in modeling coastal ocean processes, ocean eddies, combinations of land-ice-air-ocean coupling techniques, transient Arctic/Antarctic ice, and vertical/horizontal atmospheric resolution, in addition to improvements to overall model skill and predictability via stochastic methods.
Various projects that fall under the FACETs umbrella.
Part of the JCSDA Mission is to develop and test new DA techniques and accelerate the assimilation of new sensor data. This session is intended to incorporate several, varied contributions addressing these objectives.
This session welcomes submissions that discuss the use of Python in operations and/or how Python was used to to move knowledge/tools from research to operations.
For more than 60 years, the National Weather Service (NWS) has conducted national service assessments for significant hydrometeorological, oceanographic, or geological events. Service assessments evaluate NWS performance and ensure the effectiveness of products and services in meeting the mission. The goal of service assessments is to evaluate the performance of the NWS and improve the ability of the NWS to protect life and property by identifying and sharing best practices in operations and procedures, recommending service enhancements, and addressing service deficiencies. Traditionally, this process – which serves as an evaluative mechanism to assess activities before, during, and after events to determine the usefulness of NWS products and services – has been composed of assessment teams that have been predominantly meteorologists. However, given the lack of capacity within NWS to adequately address topics concerning the human dimensions of weather, NWS must reach across other line offices within NOAA and outside of government to gather the appropriate expertise. In lieu of this expertise, NWS staff, most of whom are not trained in the science of collecting social and behavioral data, must devise a plan to collect data from its various partners and stakeholders.
This panel will discuss the benefits of integrating physical and social science for a multidisciplinary approach, the challenges and needs to implement a more robust inclusive approach (e.g., training, research design), and outcomes for linking the knowledge ascertained from multidisciplinary service assessments to policy and society. Though this panel will focus on NWS service assessments, it also serves as a forum for the broader challenge of integrating social and physical science in order to further understand how the weather community can inform and benefit society. Panelists include the following:
Cindy Woods, NOAA/National Weather Service, Chief, Operations Division
Vankita Brown, NOAA/National Weather Service, Research Social Scientist, Operations Division
Ayeisha Brinson, NOAA/Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Economist, Office of Performance, Risk and Social Science
Chris Ellis, NOAA/National Ocean Service, Social Scientist, Office for Coastal Management
Jeff Gorman, NOAA/National Weather Service, Meteorologist In Charge, Cheyenne Weather Forecast Office
Logan Johnson, NOAA/National Weather Service, Meteorologist In Charge, Seattle Weather Forecast Office
Suzanne Van Cooten, NOAA/National Weather Service, Hydrologist In Charge, Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center
Leticia Williams, Post-Doctoral Fellow, NOAA Center for Atmospheric Science and Meteorology
Built on the Earth sciences, the “Weather Enterprise” exists to observe, model, forecast, and communicate data and information about weather, water, and climate for the benefit of society. The entire weather information process extends past the activities of the weather enterprise to the communication, reception, comprehension, use, and value of weather information. Over the last several decades there have been numerous calls from the hydro-meteorological community, from policy makers, and organizations and individuals concerned with societal impacts of weather, water, and climate events to develop a better understanding of the societal aspects of hydro-meteorological events and forecasts of these events. A focus on economics comes from a desire to use economic information to justify programs or to use economics to prioritize investments in the weather enterprise. A broader understanding of economics sees the potential of economics as a study of human behavior and the general misunderstanding that social sciences entail a broad set of disciplines, methods, and applications that are important in meeting the needs of the Earth science and weather community and society. Presentations in two related sessions discuss efforts to develop a socio-economic capacity for the weather enterprise; characterize and communicate the value of information to various sectors; and specific studies and analysis of the benefits of observations, communication, and warning processes.
The session will feature a keynote on the history of AI in the atmospheric sciences, a presentation on the evolution of the AI committee, and a Q&A with former AI committee chairs.
Effective weather impact management for aviation meteorology is often accomplished when decision-makers are well-informed not about the weather, but by how that weather may constrain or impact key operational resources or objectives. This is best accomplished through effective aviation impact modeling, which converts meteorological context to operationally-meaningful information and guidance. This session will include topics focused on the continued advancement and application of aviation weather impact translation models developed for various meteorological phenomena (e.g., convection, low visibility, winter weather, turbulence, hazards winds).
This session will delve into cloud hosting solutions applied to benefit the environmental sciences and specifically applications for processing and displaying environmental information. Cloud computing have moved beyond the model of simple VM hosting, towards more sophisticated specialized hosting options such as co-locating large to big data in the cloud with analysis programs and developing new models and modeling platforms in the cloud. While cloud hosting does present many solutions, migrating legacy application to a cloud platform is challenging. Presentations on the cloud migration challenges or hosting limitations and how these constraints were resolved for weather, ocean, or climate relevant applications will be welcomed. Presentations might also include novel uses of the cloud and real-world use cases including costs and platform selection.
New and evolving technologies in satellite, radar and other meteorological observation systems, and the continuing increase in computing power, all provide a wealth of meteorological, climatological and related data to scientists. Adequate visualization and interaction techniques can help to explore such large and heterogeneous data sets. Visualization enables researchers to find interesting features, to detect spatial, temporal, or multivariate relationships, or to evaluate uncertainties in the data. This facilitates the understanding of atmospheric processes and feedbacks between Earth system components. How can these improvements in technologies related to observation and processing be best communicated to meteorologists and others so that the great increase in knowledge is best communicated to society in general? How do you demonstrate new data and visualization techniques to facilitate understanding of those new data? How do you show the multispectral nature of the observations easily? How can immersive displays help you communicate important scientific observations to stakeholders, forecasters, and the general public? This session welcomes contributions from research fields such as scientific visualization, information visualization or visual analytics that are applicable to data sets from climatology, meteorology or related disciplines, and how those new systems and datasets can be best described to, for example, educators.
Abstracts in this session can include:
- Air Quality Forecasting in Urban Areas
This session will be partly supported by the World Meteorological Organization
The connection between extreme rainfall and hydrologic extremes seems obvious, but recent research has shown the relationship to be complex and location-specific. New observing technologies and real-time hydrologic models are improving our ability to monitor and predict droughts and floods. Meanwhile, broad-brush assumptions about climate-driven trends in frequency and intensity of hydrologic extremes fail to capture the interplay between location characteristics, meteorology, soil conditions, and vegetation. This session invites papers on all aspects of extreme rainfall, including their relationships to floods and to the termination of droughts, encompassing observations, modeling, short-term and seasonal prediction, climate change, and risk assessment. Papers exploring the causes and consequences of individual extreme rainfall events that cause floods or terminate droughts, as well as the causes and consequences of changing drought, extreme rainfall, and flood risk are particularly encouraged.
While overall space weather is generally suppressed near solar minimum, there are some aspects of space weather that can vary inversely with the solar cycle. Additionally, space weather can still happen in and around solar minimum, as history has shown. There are also important, observable signs of what the next solar cycle can hold. This session will explore any events of interest as we approach solar minimum as well as a look ahead to what’s to come as Solar Cycle 25 predictions are released and refined. What does the next decade and beyond hold for the space weather community and how well can we predict that trend?
This joint session covers broad topics such as results from climate modeling, using analogs such as volcanic eruptions and ship tracks, and development of technology to actually implement solar geoengineering. Papers on the physics of climate engineering should be submitted to this joint session, and on ethical and governance issues related to climate engineering to the session "Ethics and governance of weather modification and geoengineering" at the 22nd Conference on Planned and Inadvertent Weather Modification. Invited keynote speaker: Simone Tilmes (NCAR). Session Chair: Alan Robock (Rutgers Univ.).
Over the last several decades, substantial progress has been achieved in probabilistic hydrometeorological forecasting theories and applications. However, significant challenges still exist in assessing the uncertainty of complex hydrometeorological processes and improving hydrometeorological predictions, especially extreme hydrometeorological events. This session solicits papers that focus on, but not limit to, (1) addressing uncertainty in hydrometeorological forecasting from a number of sources in both offline and couple systems, and (2) innovative methods in hydrometeorological ensemble forecasting. The former includes uncertainties in forcing data (e.g., quantitative precipitation estimation and meteorological forcing data), initial conditions (e.g., soil moisture and snow status), parameters (e.g., land use and soil texture), model structure (e.g., assumptions, formulations and numerical solutions), and calibration (e.g., single-objective optimization and multi-objective optimizations). The latter emphasizes integrated ensemble methods to improve hydrometeorological forecasting, verification methods to evaluate probabilistic forecasting, and statistical postprocessing techniques to generate hydrometeorological data products.
Description: All observing and assimilation systems contain a wide-variety of parameters. These parameters could control the quality of retrievals from observing systems. They might be used to represent background/observation error variances or even the structure of ensemble localization/inflation in assimilation systems. In all cases these parameters are typically estimated from training sets using statistical methods. This session intends to provide a broad overview of both theory and practice in the application of statistical parameter estimation for integrated observing and assimilation systems for the atmosphere, oceans, and land surface. Subject areas of particular interest include, but are not limited to, the following: statistical estimation methods for observation operator development; estimation methods for observation and background error covariance matrices (e.g. Desroziers, Höllingsworth-Lonnberg, etc.); estimation methods for prior/posterior inflation as well as ensemble covariance localization parameters; as well as the application of artificial intelligence/machine learning methods to the tuning/configuration/diagnosis of observing and assimilation systems.
Atmospheric aerosols from natural or anthropogenic sources have profound impacts on Earth's radiation budget, hydrological cycle, as well as regional and global climate. Currently, the radiative forcing of aerosols in the climate system remains highly uncertain, representing the largest uncertainty in climate predictions. For the direct effect, aerosols scatter and absorb solar radiation. Light scattering by aerosols changes the radiative fluxes at the top-of-atmosphere (TOA), at the surface, and within the atmospheric column, while aerosol absorption modifies the atmospheric temperature structure, decreases the solar radiation at the surface, and lowers surface sensible and latent fluxes, suppressing convection and reducing cloud fraction. Also, aerosols indirectly impact climate by altering cloud development, lifetime, albedo, and precipitation efficiency. On the other hand, climate variabilities also affect aerosol cycle and lifetime by altering aerosol removal processes. Current treatments of aerosol-cloud-radiation interactions remain crude in climate models. This session aims to review the state of current understanding on aerosol-climate interaction, so we invite any paper on the related subjects.
This session would feature presentations on efforts to transition AI, machine learning, and deep learning weather prediction models from research to operational use. The presenters would be encouraged to discuss the progress they have made in bringing their algorithms to operations and the challenges experienced in the process. This session would be a joint session with the AI for Environmental Science conference and potentially the Python Symposium.
Tropical convection, through its control of tropical cloud cover, humidity, and rainfall, is important for both tropical weather and tropical and global climate variability. Organized tropical convection, on a variety of scales, is of particular importance in this regard. Yet important scientific and technical gaps remain in our ability to understand and simulate tropical convection, particularly with regards to the coupling between dynamics and diabatic processes. Contributions should be encouraged from theoretical, modeling, and observational studies that address any aspect of tropical shallow and deep convective dynamics, including convective organization, diurnal variations, local circulations (island, sea-breeze, etc..), interactions with the large-scale environment and tropical weather phenomena, and the role of tropical convection in climate.
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3:00 PM-4:15 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
4:00 PM-6:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Formal Poster Viewing Reception (Tues)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Formal Poster Viewing Reception (Tuesday)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Climatology and meteorology are data-driven disciplines, and advancements in these fields are influenced by the quality and accessibility of data and information. Climate data and tools are also valuable instruments for communication between climate scientists and decision makers. This session provides a forum for climate data producers and tool developers to showcase their latest and greatest climate tools to AMS attendees. We welcome submissions of web-based interfaces for climate datasets and monitoring networks, data analysis and visualization tools, and other novel climate tools. Presenters will exhibit their web-based tools on laptops or tablets at stations set within a poster session environment to allow customized demonstration of their tools to attendees.
Joint poster session
The economic impacts of hydrologic extremes (such as droughts or floods) are extensive and difficult to capture, however products such as the NCEI
Billion dollar disasters report and map have greatly improved our ability to assess these damages and to help society appreciate the magnitude of these impacts by putting a dollar value on them. The human health impacts of hydrologic extremes are also extensive and difficult to capture, and we know that health maintenance is essential to a thriving society, yet there is no commensurate systemic assessment of the health impacts of hydrologic extremes. In this session, speakers should examine the myriad health impacts of these extremes--primarily droughts and floods--and examine what this means at a personal level. From this session, we hope to inspire a community effort to work toward understanding the health disaster of hydrologic extremes. One guiding question, to consider is: how do different groups communicate and manage public health risks related to flood and drought? This session will also put a human face on hydrologic extremes by also inviting practitioners to speak to their lived experiences in coping with recent disasters.
HPC Poster Session
Poster session
New instruments, platforms and initiatives for space weather currently have unprecedented opportunities to observe the physical systems that drive and that are driven by space weather phenomena. Commercial access to space, smallsats and cubesats, high altitude ballons, ISS continuing status, and many other investments by DoD, Civilian Agencies, Academia, International efforts, and crowd-sourcing are paving the way for new science and greater understanding of the physics and impacts of space weather. This session invites those who are involved in these efforts that have recent results, have upcoming missions, can provide space weather observing access, or a promising initiative that can observe space weather phenomena.
Only 20 of the ~45 abstracts submitted to the 8th symposium on the JCSDA can be accommodated with oral presentations. The creations of this requested poster session on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 14, 2020 will allow many of these other works to be presented and discussed by the community, including a number for which poster presentation was listed as the preferred option by the submitting authors.
Posters on topics on Python in the Atmospheric and Oceanographic Sciences.
Posters for the 15th Societal Applications Symposium
Posters from all EIPT topic areas
Over the last several decades, substantial progress has been achieved in probabilistic hydrometeorological forecasting theories and applications. However, significant challenges still exist in assessing the uncertainty of complex hydrometeorological processes and improving hydrometeorological predictions, especially extreme hydrometeorological events. This session solicits papers that focus on, but not limit to, (1) addressing uncertainty in hydrometeorological forecasting from a number of sources in both offline and couple systems, and (2) innovative methods in hydrometeorological ensemble forecasting. The former includes uncertainties in forcing data (e.g., quantitative precipitation estimation and meteorological forcing data), initial conditions (e.g., soil moisture and snow status), parameters (e.g., land use and soil texture), model structure (e.g., assumptions, formulations and numerical solutions), and calibration (e.g., single-objective optimization and multi-objective optimizations). The latter emphasizes integrated ensemble methods to improve hydrometeorological forecasting, verification methods to evaluate probabilistic forecasting, and statistical postprocessing techniques to generate hydrometeorological data products.
This is the corresponding poster session to the above.
This is the poster version of the corresponding session of same title.
Advances in the estimation of evapotranspiration (ET) and atmospheric evaporative demand (Eo) are made across a broad range of scales and techniques, from in-situ observations to remote sensing and modeling. Specific topics for this session may include but are not limited to: (1) estimating ET from various perspectives: remote sensing platforms, ground-based point observations and parameterizations, plant-based experimentation, and water budgets; (2) operational ET estimation; (3) land surface-atmosphere feedbacks; (4) future remote sensing missions and needs for ET; (5) Eo as an input to operational LSMs to derive ET, schedule crop irrigation, and as a metric of hydroclimatic trends and variability. New methods are emerging to more robustly partition total ET between evaporation and transpiration fluxes from both a modeling and a measurement perspective. We encourage papers with a focus on information conveyed by E and T, as well as ET. This year, recognizing that transpiration is regulated through vegetation hydrodynamics, we are particularly seeking submissions relating to both experimental and theoretical work linking plant hydrodynamics, ecology, hydrology, and meteorology. Understanding and simulating these hydraulic behaviors of vegetation and their outcomes, in terms of water and carbon flux, is key to improving land-surface and hydrologic models. Advances in remote sensing of water content and new databases compiling extensive monitoring records of site- and plant-level water flux and hydraulic trait data are poised for incorporation into such models through an emerging body of vegetation hydrodynamics modeling frameworks.
This is the poster version of the corresponding oral session.
The connection between extreme rainfall and hydrologic extremes seems obvious, but recent research has shown the relationship to be complex and location-specific. New observing technologies and real-time hydrologic models are improving our ability to monitor and predict droughts and floods. Meanwhile, broad-brush assumptions about climate-driven trends in frequency and intensity of hydrologic extremes fail to capture the interplay between location characteristics, meteorology, soil conditions, and vegetation. This session invites papers on all aspects of extreme rainfall, including their relationships to floods and to the termination of droughts, encompassing observations, modeling, short-term and seasonal prediction, climate change, and risk assessment. Papers exploring the causes and consequences of individual extreme rainfall events that cause floods or terminate droughts, as well as the causes and consequences of changing drought, extreme rainfall, and flood risk are particularly encouraged.
This session highlights advances in the development and application of land data assimilation systems (LDAS), which merge ground- or satellite-based observations with estimates from land surface models. Contributions may include studies that evaluate or refine land DA methods, and/or assess the impact of the assimilation on the quality of LDAS products. These LDAS products may focus on the simulation of the land surface itself, or dependent processes, and could include simulation of surface hydrology, the atmosphere, drought, agriculture, and/or water resources. Contributions focussed on transition of research to operations are particularly encouraged, as are studies that explore assimilation of novel and/or multiple observation types.
Keynote Speakers: Ben Kirtman (Univ. of Miami), Ping Chang (Texas A&M Univ.), Sarah Kapnick (GFDL)
6:00 PM-7:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Over the past 27 years, the National Center for Atmospheric Research/Earth Observing Laboratory (NCAR/EOL) has provided complete life-cycle scientific data management including research and operational data collection, data processing, quality assurance/control, and long-term data archival, access, and stewardship for national and international field projects. Recently, legacy observational research projects and datasets have been added to the NCAR/EOL data archive from campaigns held from the 1960s - 1990s. With the complementary legacy data additions, the NCAR/EOL data archive has grown to include over 500 field projects and nearly 12,000 datasets.This town hall will provide an opportunity for the scientific community to provide input to NCAR/EOL on current and future needs for field project data management, discovery, and access. This input will be used to inform our data services improvement and development plan. Input is needed from all stakeholders including modelers, observationalists, and current and potential future users of the NCAR/EOL data archive.
NASA’s Earth Science Division (ESD) leadership team will present an update of status and plans, with significant time for discussion with the audience, which is expected to comprise current and potential investigators in ESD’s programs and/or those of its partner agencies, as well as current and potential users of its products. Highlighted items include status of operating and future satellite missions; implementation of Venture Class activities; evolution of and plans for the research, applied sciences, and technology elements; contribution to interagency and international Earth observation and global change programs, and response to and preparation for community-based guiding documents. A particular focus of this year’s Town Hall will be on ESD actions, plans, and mechanisms for community interaction in response to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Decadal Survey, Thriving on Our Changing Planet: A Decadal Strategy for Earth Observation from Space, that was released in late 2017.
There is rapidly growing interest and compelling need to model and understand the complex interactions, interdependencies, and co-evolutionary pathways of human and natural systems, including the effects of changing weather patterns and extremes, natural resources (e.g., land, water, and energy), economic development, and infrastructure expansion. Addressing this grand challenge requires convergence among the natural, socioeconomic, and decision sciences. In this Town Hall, DOE will describe its research portfolio, one supporting rapid innovations in integrated human-Earth system modeling centered on open source data and modeling frameworks, HPC, functional communities-of-practice, and collaborative mechanisms. Topics and geographies of interest will be discussed, from integrated hydro-terrestrial modeling to coastal and Arctic regions. Finally, DOE will outline its methods for strengthening stakeholder input (including development of quantitative metrics). Both federal program managers and leading scientists will be presenting with time for audience discussion and feedback.
7:00 PM-10:00 PM: Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Robert Dickinson Symposium Dinner
Location: 205C (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Wednesday, 15 January 2020
7:30 AM-6:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Quiet Room (Wednesday)
Location: Commonwealth C (Westin Hotel)
Registration (Wednesday)
Location: North Lobby (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Speaker Ready Room (Wednesday)
Location: 102B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
8:30 AM-9:00 AM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
8:30 AM-10:00 AM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
System hysteresis pushes the worst impacts climate change into the future. Effectively, the benefits in the human condition that fossil energy has afforded current generations in the developed world has come at the expense of future generations. This panel will discuss the evidence for and consequences of the environmental impacts resulting from Earth’s destabilizing climate system.
Responding to incidents involving hazardous materials is a complex process that involves each member of the integrated warning team. Coordinating appropriate protective action response, ensuring consistent messaging through social media, and understanding effective use of plume modeling are just some of the communication challenges that these events can pose. This panel discussion will include the teamwork of the integrated warning team in Houston, TX during the 2019 Deer Park chemical fire. Best practices and recommendations for high visibility events with multiple panelists will also be explored.
Tropical programmatic updates along with hurricane topics will be presented.
This session focuses on quantifying the value and/or impact of various commercial sources of data to public service. Commercial data providers collect a significant quantity of data, which makes a considerable and positive contribution to the Weather Enterprise. This session focuses on: 1. Specific examples of networks and fields that positively impact government operations and NWP; and 2. Techniques used to quantify the impacts of data from non-federal sources.
Dust aerosols play important roles in the Earth system by degrading air quality, influencing weather systems, perturbing radiation budget, modulating biogeochemical cycles, and affecting the climate. Assessing these impacts requires realistic and accurate characterization of dust emissions, particle properties, and transport. This session invites presentations that report the latest advances in modeling and observational studies of dust characterization and impacts on various components of the Earth system, including but not limited to: (1) in situ and remote sensing characterizations of the properties and distributions of dust; (2) quantifying dust emission and transport using observations and models; (3) dust variability in association with climate variability and anthropogenic activities on various time scales; (4) effects of dust aerosols on radiation budget and cloud microphysics; (5) interactions of dust with regional climate and global biogeochemical cycle; and (6) novel use of observations to constrain dust modeling.
With the advent of the Internet, social media platforms, and mobile-based devices, members of the public can find weather forecast and warning information from a variety of public, private, and academic weather sources. As a result, meteorologists have concerns that weather messages expressed to members of the public are inconsistent, and in turn, may have a negative effect on public risk perception. Over the past four years, the weather community has organized conference sessions, panels, webinars, and workshops in hopes of overcoming these operational concerns and identifying best practices for communicating a consistent message. However, without an established definition of ‘message consistency,’ panelists and participants found it difficult to discuss operational best practices, ground rules, and recommendations for approaching ‘consistency’ in the Weather Enterprise. During the 2019 AMS Annual Meeting, health communication scholars, who similarly struggle with communicating a consistent message, offered the meteorological community a working definition and a body of research outlining the negative effects of conflicting or inconsistent information. Drawing on this new-found knowledge, this panel will (1) reflect on the lessons learned from previous efforts over the past four years, (2) consider the weather communication implications of conflicting information that was brought to bear this year by health communication scholars, and (3) contemplate best practices, recommendations, and the future of ‘message consistency’ in the Weather Enterprise.
Infrastructure is exposed to, and potentially vulnerable to, the effects and extremes of climate and weather, including heat waves, high winds, storm surges, droughts, floods, fires and accumulations of ice and snow. Engineering practices and standards have been developed to provide acceptably low risks of failures regarding functionality, durability and safety over the service lives of infrastructure systems, which can be 50 to 100 years. In today’s world, engineers need to plan and design infrastructure for the climate and weather extremes of the future. But they face daunting challenges in trying to quantify these future extremes. Engineering design and planning is generally conducted at the regional and local scales, but global climate projections typically have coarse spatial resolutions and are most reliable at longer time scales.
Engineering standards often depend on estimates of probabilities to provide specified levels of safety. There is no accepted method to estimate the probability of future extremes in the face of climate change. In addition, there are multiple sources of uncertainty in the projection of future climate extremes, some of which may not be quantifiable. Nonstationarity, and in particular multi-year and decadal variability further compound the challenge. This session highlights presentations from both climate scientists and engineers to provide different perspectives and promote dialog between these diverse communities on the topic of climate change and infrastructure, and is a joint activity of the AMS Water Resources Committee and the ASCE Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate. This session is part 1 of 2.
This session will highlight papers describing Artificial Intelligence techniques used with interpretation of radar observations, both for real time as well as post analysis applications.
This session will be hosted by the 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF). We welcome abstracts on the use of new radar data (mobile radars, phased-array, dual-polarization products, etc.) and novel applications of pre-existing radar data.
This session will be hosted by the 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF). It will discuss analysis and forecasting techniques for fire weather, including recent extremes (e.g., extreme fire seasons in western North America and the Canadian sub-Arctic), pyrocumulonimbus, decision support for fire suppression, new fire-weather parameters used in forecasting, etc.
New methods for observations are continually being developed to address data collection challenges across a wide spectrum of observations. Topics in this session include new measurement techniques, combining sensors to develop new innovative measurements, newly developed or improved algorithms for measurements, design concepts for new measurement methodologies, improved remote sensing methodologies and low-cost sensor development.
Supercooled water drops and high concentrations of small ice crystals are critical hazards for general and commercial aviation, respectively. This session will encompass research and development related to improving the analysis and prediction of environmental conditions that lead to aircraft or engine icing. Topics may include research related to instrumentation, analysis techniques, cloud microphysical parameterizations, and/or data assimilation methods that will lead to improvements in the analysis and forecast of icing hazards including terminal icing, inflight icing and high ice water content. Studies describing recent field programs and associated analyses toward improve numerical weather prediction of aircraft icing conditions (e.g., ICICLE, HAIC, HIWC) are also encouraged.
After more than three decades of field and theoretical studies in Amazonia, we have gained a great deal of knowledge about atmospheric boundary layer processes and biogeochemistry in one of the world’s rainiest and most ecologically diverse regions. This knowledge has been employed to improve regional and global weather and climate models. In addition, the international partnerships and collaborations forged to complete the research projects have contributed to the long-term legacy of capacity building and professional development of several cohorts of junior scholars.
Therefore, this proposal seeks to organize special conference sessions to have invited and regular speakers to report on the synthesis of research findings gained in Amazonia during the last three decades. Leading and junior scientists from Brazil, the United States, other South American countries, and Europe who have played pivotal roles in experiments and numerical studies scientists will be invited to make oral presentations. The planned conference sessions will offer an unprecedented and historical opportunity for research leaders from various Amazonia projects to gather at a single venue. Dr. Carlos Nobre, a very well know Brazilian atmospheric scientist, has been preliminary contacted about the planned conference sessions. He has expressed interest in giving a plenary presentation on the theme related to “The legacy of the Amazonian research project (LBA) and future directions for climate change issues”. Because the planned conference sessions will be part of centennial celebrations of the American Meteorological Society, it is expected numerous speakers will accept the invitation to partake in the conference sessions.
These sessions are devoted to current and next generation weather radars, with emphasis on radar meteorology science, weather radar applications, weather radar signal processing, weather radar prototype developments, experimental weather radar data collections, and essentially all radar meteorological algorithms. Presentations about advanced radar technologies, including phased array radars, polarimetry, multi-function scan strategies, retrieval algorithms, signal processing for clutter rejection, etc. will be a focus of these sessions. Outcomes could include radar measurements in the context of numerical model assimilation and radar-based short term forecasts. Example of presentations may include the SENSR initiative, the dual-pol WSR-88D, etc.
Advances in the estimation of evapotranspiration (ET) and atmospheric evaporative demand (Eo) are made across a broad range of scales and techniques, from in-situ observations to remote sensing and modeling. Specific topics for this session may include but are not limited to: (1) estimating ET from various perspectives: remote sensing platforms, ground-based point observations and parameterizations, plant-based experimentation, and water budgets; (2) operational ET estimation; (3) land surface-atmosphere feedbacks; (4) future remote sensing missions and needs for ET; (5) Eo as an input to operational LSMs to derive ET, schedule crop irrigation, and as a metric of hydroclimatic trends and variability. New methods are emerging to more robustly partition total ET between evaporation and transpiration fluxes from both a modeling and a measurement perspective. We encourage papers with a focus on information conveyed by E and T, as well as ET. This year, recognizing that transpiration is regulated through vegetation hydrodynamics, we are particularly seeking submissions relating to both experimental and theoretical work linking plant hydrodynamics, ecology, hydrology, and meteorology. Understanding and simulating these hydraulic behaviors of vegetation and their outcomes, in terms of water and carbon flux, is key to improving land-surface and hydrologic models. Advances in remote sensing of water content and new databases compiling extensive monitoring records of site- and plant-level water flux and hydraulic trait data are poised for incorporation into such models through an emerging body of vegetation hydrodynamics modeling frameworks.
Space weather forecasters and researchers have made progress in using adaptive approaches to improve forecast accuracy. These approaches include ensemble modeling, where a series of model inputs are generated representing the range of possible values, and data assimilation, where recent measurements are used to update the simulation. Ensemble forecasts combine many model predictions to create an ensemble that is more accurate than separate models, and allow the modeler to characterize how the uncertainty in model inputs result in output uncertainty. Another way to handle model output uncertainty is through data assimilation, where a physical model's accuracy can be improved by including, or assimilating additional information and data. These approaches, and other probabilistic methods, pave the wave for more accurate future forecasts, and make optimal use of all available information.
Updates on Solar Forecasting projects through DOE grants and beyond
This session brings together the four conferences under the Board for Environmental Information Processing Technologies. Presentations should address the common technologies used across the weather enterprise. The views can be from the past, present or future. For example, what were the prevalent programming languages 30 years ago, 10 years ago, now and in the future.
The economic impacts of hydrologic extremes (such as droughts or floods) are extensive and difficult to capture, however products such as the NCEI
Billion dollar disasters report and map have greatly improved our ability to assess these damages and to help society appreciate the magnitude of these impacts by putting a dollar value on them. The human health impacts of hydrologic extremes are also extensive and difficult to capture, and we know that health maintenance is essential to a thriving society, yet there is no commensurate systemic assessment of the health impacts of hydrologic extremes. In this session, speakers should examine the myriad health impacts of these extremes--primarily droughts and floods--and examine what this means at a personal level. From this session, we hope to inspire a community effort to work toward understanding the health disaster of hydrologic extremes. One guiding question, to consider is: how do different groups communicate and manage public health risks related to flood and drought? This session will also put a human face on hydrologic extremes by also inviting practitioners to speak to their lived experiences in coping with recent disasters.
Through collaborative efforts, Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) of weather phenomena of interest to aviation is constantly evolving. Improvements to data assimilation and verification techniques has allowed for continued advancement of predicting clouds, visibility, turbulence, icing, and convection: all hazards that pose a threat to aviation. Probabilistic forecasting is also being explored as a means of predicting risks and communicating uncertainty associated with these hazards and their impact on aviation. This session will address recent progress and accomplishments across these areas.
Physical interpretability in machine learning
Abstracts in this session can include:
- Need, Insights, Opportunities & Barriers;
- Big Data in Hyperlocal Assessments.
8:45 AM-10:00 AM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
The history of our sciences is a shared history from the beginnings until 2020 and into the future and from the surface, to space, whether liquid, solid, gas, particulate, micro, meso, or macro scale. The history is a wonderful story of great advances in our sciences and the application of our sciences to our fellow earthly inhabitants, our economy and our societies. Integral to the advances in our physical sciences, there has always been a way of communicating what we observe now, or in the past, and what we believe the future will be. Weather and climate, observing, forecasting and communicating have been and helped make history since we could first communicate. "How's the weather" may be a universal greeting in every language.
A joint half day session or "town hall" with the conference on broadcast meteorology, weather analysis and forecasting, weather water and climate Enterprise, weather ready nation, societal applications and other conferences and symposia, will create the opportunity to jointly celebrate our shared histories of science and service, discuss common goals and think about a future where the perfect observation and forecast leads to a perfect decision be it minutes, hours, days or decades.
A brief look back at the beginning of the AMS and where understanding of weather and climate was in 1919 and how forecasts were communicated and a quick time travel to 2020 will set the stage for discussing where we are now, what our shared challenges are, scientific, economic and even political and what might be a common path or at least neighborly paths forward. Speakers will include a number of invited leaders outside of our weather, climate hydrologic sciences to provide unifying thoughts and ideas. Names such as James Lee Witt, Baruch Fishoff, Tom Wallsten, Senator Ed Markey, Andy Revkin, Ray Kurzweil more and some very young original thinkers who live near Boston and would be happy to give us off the wall ideas to think about. A panel discussion with the attending conference chairs would give reaction to the day or 1/2 day and what the headlines will be in 10, 50 or 100 years.
Our AMS100 Annual Meeting has almost 40 different titled conferences, symposia and programs. It is important, as we celebrate 100, that we have some inclusive, unifying sessions or town halls and celebrate our commonality and may help guide some coherence in our future as scientists, professionals, businesses, communicators, and more.
In recent years, the U.S. experienced extreme cold and heat, pollution, and flooding events that have had adverse impacts on human health and livelihoods. According to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, “impacts from climate change on extreme weather and climate-related events, air quality, and the transmission of disease through insects and pests, food, and water increasingly threaten the health and well-being of the American people, particularly populations that are already vulnerable.” Some of the most vulnerable populations to environmental hazards on human health are underrepresented groups in society (e.g. socioeconomically-disadvantaged, special needs, youth, and the elderly). Scientists must ask ourselves: are we adequately preparing all members of the population for an increase in environmental disasters? Scientists must work together to effectively communicate the hazards to these underrepresented communities and to brainstorm solutions to address their specific needs and concerns regarding climate change and extreme weather. A joint session between the Board on Environment and Health and the Board on Women and Minorities highlights the intersectionality between environmental disasters, human health and livelihood, and vulnerable populations. Topics such as vulnerable populations and extreme weather, human health and air pollution, and environmental racism/justice are encouraged.
9:00 AM-10:00 AM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
9:00 AM-6:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Academic Family Tree (Wednesday)
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Exhibits and Poster Hall Open (Wednesday)
Location: Hall A & B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Historical Instruments Exhibit (Wednesday)
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
9:00 AM-6:30 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Exhibit Hall (Wed)
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Local Chapter Posters (Wednesday Session)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
10:00 AM-10:30 AM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
AM Coffee Break (Wednesday)
Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
Meet President Jenni Evans (Wednesday)
Location: Hall A AMS Booth, No. 335 (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
10:30 AM-11:15 AM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
10:30 AM-11:30 AM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Updates on Solar Forecasting projects through DOE grants and beyond
10:30 AM-11:45 AM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
10:30 AM-12:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
We invite abstracts on the topic of the ethics and governance of deliberate modification of weather and climate. This session is intended to cover the topics of weather modification as well as the range of proposed geoengineering methodologies to offset human induced climate change.
No matter how quickly we reduce GHG emissions, mitigation can at best deliver a badly disrupted climate. Climate restoration combines mitigation with draw down and envisions lowering atmospheric CO2 from 415 ppm, where it is today, to below 300 ppm. Both the technology and financing methods already exist to reclaim the safe and healthy climate we enjoyed before the industrial revolution. Specific examples of promising technologies with potential commercial viability to deploy at the scale necessary will be discussed.
AMS: The Last 100 Years and the Next 100 Years
The continuing three year cycle of sessions focusing on this year's topic.
As the Nation experiences increasing variability and change in precipitation patterns, flooding, drought, and other complex climate and water issues, NOAA’s mission to understand and predict these changes, and to share that knowledge becomes critically important. Key to this effort is the transformation of how products are developed, and how information is translated for the decision- maker. To best serve the public, large organizations must learn ways to implement a coordinated decision support/service delivery mechanism that carefully leverages partnerships and informs the development of use-inspired products and services. To achieve this, user needs must be fully understood; the existing products and services must be known; and the ongoing, frequent engagement for capacity building and response to needs must be regularly evaluated. This session seeks contributions from service delivery and user engagement personnel, as well as from effectively served decision-makers. Papers should highlight the structure and function of those mechanisms, examples of use-inspired products, and demonstrations of how the needs of the customer are built into the framework of large organizations.
Submissions are welcomed describing experiences in teaching, training and building communities specifically around the use of the Python programming language.
This session will tackle some of the highest priority Weather-Ready Nation projects.
Infrastructure is exposed to, and potentially vulnerable to, the effects and extremes of climate and weather, including heat waves, high winds, storm surges, droughts, floods, fires and accumulations of ice and snow. Engineering practices and standards have been developed to provide acceptably low risks of failures regarding functionality, durability and safety over the service lives of infrastructure systems, which can be 50 to 100 years. In today’s world, engineers need to plan and design infrastructure for the climate and weather extremes of the future. But they face daunting challenges in trying to quantify these future extremes. Engineering design and planning is generally conducted at the regional and local scales, but global climate projections typically have coarse spatial resolutions and are most reliable at longer time scales.
Engineering standards often depend on estimates of probabilities to provide specified levels of safety. There is no accepted method to estimate the probability of future extremes in the face of climate change. In addition, there are multiple sources of uncertainty in the projection of future climate extremes, some of which may not be quantifiable. Nonstationarity, and in particular multi-year and decadal variability further compound the challenge. This session highlights presentations from both climate scientists and engineers to provide different perspectives and promote dialog between these diverse communities on the topic of climate change and infrastructure, and is a joint activity of the AMS Water Resources Committee and the ASCE Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate. This session is part 2 of 2.
This session will be hosted by the 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF). We welcome abstracts on phenomena including (but not limited to) snow-banding, drylines and associated circulations, bores, density currents, etc. -- as well as their upscale influence on the larger environment.
Keynote Speakers: Céline Bonfils (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Friederike Otto (Oxford), Marty Hoerling (NOAA), Suzana Camargo (Columbia Univ.)
The importance of severe weather events is underscored by the severe effects in human lives, infrastructure and the environment. Severe storms cause disruption in services nation-wide provided by the Coast Guard, Port and transportation authorities, and electric power utilities, among others; for example, weather-induced blackouts of electricity distribution grids have caused over $1.5 trillion of damage in the US since the 1980s according to the 2018 report “Billion-Dollar Weather/Climate Disasters” by the U.S. Department of Commerce NOAA/NCDC. Skillful prediction of such extreme events through numerical weather prediction, statistical techniques or their combination in hybrid dynamical-statistical methods is crucial for managing preparedness, emergency response, and mitigation of impacts. Forecast uncertainty estimation and communication of severe weather predictions remain a challenge and often overshadow the successes and improvements in weather forecasting over the last decade. There is a need to connect state-of-the-science severe weather forecast methods with communication of the forecast and its uncertainties to inform, educate and protect the public as well as critical infrastructure. This session is dedicated to the prediction of severe weather and solicits abstracts from a broad range of research focused on: forecasting extreme weather events; understanding sources of forecast uncertainty and methods for improvement; and addressing the communication of the forecast between scientists, stakeholders and the general public by defining the best use of forecast information.
Satellite-based climate studies critically depend on consistent and homogenized data records of sufficient length (i.e., decadal to multi-decadal) for the purpose of better detecting and understanding climate variability and trends. The creation of such records requires the merging of data from different instruments and satellite missions via sophisticated intercalibration processes. The development of products using such processes has led to an internationally-recognized class of satellite products often referred to as Climate Data Records (CDRs) as well as to a formal framework and taxonomy in terms of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs).
Given the launch of next-generation sensors that have higher radiometric, spatial, and temporal resolutions, and more stable orbits, the purpose of this session is to facilitate consideration of the challenges and opportunities that exist in ensuring the continuity of critical legacy products and in incorporating data from newer sensor platforms. Presentations and posters from developers and users of satellite CDRs and ECVs are welcome. Of particular interest are those that cover the following topics:
- the state of the science of the sensors, processing algorithms, and intercalibration methods involved in producing both fundamental CDRs and the ECVs, or thematic CDRs, derived from them;
- evaluations and applications of CDRs and ECV data products; and
- the status of existing CDRs and ECVs, along with related developmental activities associated with overlaps between legacy products and products that involve newer sensors.
At this time of multiple satellite sensor transitions, the session directly supports the annual meeting theme of "The AMS Past, Present and Future: Linking Information to Knowledge to Society" in that it covers well-established products, state-of-the-art techniques, and new technologies. The organizers hope that it will also enhance communication among government scientists, non-government experts, and data users from all sectors about the salient issues surrounding the continuity of fundamental and thematic CDRs.
This session would invite papers on multi-scale studies of wildfire driven by fire weather in a changing climate. Topics can range from wildfire frequency, behavior and spread to area burned estimates in response to spatiotemporal shifts in fire weather, to impacts on soil and fuel conditions, and the consequnces of wildfire emissions for atmospheric chemical budgets. Papers examining the impacts of changes in wildfire attributes on air quaity over time are encouraged. Papers examining trends in retrospective periods, as well as projected trends in the future will be considered.
This session presents the results from the use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASV) and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) to gather observations, better assess impacts, determine damage indicators, and understand environmental change. Application of these platforms increase our understanding of natural hazards like tornadoes, hail, floods and hurricanes and human induced hazards such as oil spills and shipwrecks. Terrestrial, coastal zone, and offshore applications will be included. The session is open to all natural and human-induced hazard UAS/UAV/ASV/UUV studies.
This will be the second part of the session on extreme heat.
Severe air pollution can be extremely harmful to the population, thus being able to anticipate the occurrence of severe pollution episodes is useful for people to plan their like around them (e.g., avoid exercising in bad air days). Also, in countries such as Chile, France, and China, where severe air pollution episodes struck quite frequently, the government has the capability to invoke temporary measures to reduce emissions that could lower the impact of such episodes. However, these measures need to be invoked before the episode unfolds to have the desired impact; Thus there is a growing need to have accurate air quality forecasts that could predict pollution episodes a few days in advance. This session focuses on research activities related to the air quality forecasting of severe pollution episodes from various anthropogenic and natural sources. Relevant topics include but are not limited to: 1) linkage between severe pollution episodes and large-scale meteorology and climate change; 2) development of air quality forecasting tools and observational and modeling studies aimed to improve the forecasting, and 3) transition of the forecasting to operations.
These sessions are devoted to current and next generation weather radars, with emphasis on radar meteorology science, weather radar applications, weather radar signal processing, weather radar prototype developments, experimental weather radar data collections, and essentially all radar meteorological algorithms. Presentations about advanced radar technologies, including phased array radars, polarimetry, multi-function scan strategies, retrieval algorithms, signal processing for clutter rejection, etc. will be a focus of these sessions. Outcomes could include radar measurements in the context of numerical model assimilation and radar-based short term forecasts. Example of presentations may include the SENSR initiative, the dual-pol WSR-88D, etc.
Advances in the estimation of evapotranspiration (ET) and atmospheric evaporative demand (Eo) are made across a broad range of scales and techniques, from in-situ observations to remote sensing and modeling. Specific topics for this session may include but are not limited to: (1) estimating ET from various perspectives: remote sensing platforms, ground-based point observations and parameterizations, plant-based experimentation, and water budgets; (2) operational ET estimation; (3) land surface-atmosphere feedbacks; (4) future remote sensing missions and needs for ET; (5) Eo as an input to operational LSMs to derive ET, schedule crop irrigation, and as a metric of hydroclimatic trends and variability. New methods are emerging to more robustly partition total ET between evaporation and transpiration fluxes from both a modeling and a measurement perspective. We encourage papers with a focus on information conveyed by E and T, as well as ET. This year, recognizing that transpiration is regulated through vegetation hydrodynamics, we are particularly seeking submissions relating to both experimental and theoretical work linking plant hydrodynamics, ecology, hydrology, and meteorology. Understanding and simulating these hydraulic behaviors of vegetation and their outcomes, in terms of water and carbon flux, is key to improving land-surface and hydrologic models. Advances in remote sensing of water content and new databases compiling extensive monitoring records of site- and plant-level water flux and hydraulic trait data are poised for incorporation into such models through an emerging body of vegetation hydrodynamics modeling frameworks.
In snow-dominated basins across the globe, efficient water resource management requires accurate, timely estimates of both snow water equivalent (SWE) and snow melt onset. Melting snow provides a reliable water supply and can also produce wide-scale flooding hazards, particularly when combined with rainfall. An accurate estimate of snow volume, melt timing and the spatial distribution of both parameters is important for predicting runoff response for water resource and hydropower management as well as providing insight into important ecological and biogeochemical processes. Remote sensing and modeling techniques provide methods for observing and detecting snow evolution, onset of snowmelt, spatial extent of melt processes, and vulnerability to extreme flood hazards that may result. Both existing and novel remote sensing techniques have been developed to estimate snow evolution timing including the detection of liquid water in the snowpack. Snow reconstruction and energy balance snow models have shown the ability to estimate snow properties, such as snow volume, liquid water content and melt. Observational, in-situ datasets that drive these models with meteorological inputs and modify the model through data assimilation techniques are critical in accurately portraying the natural phenomena of snow evolution. Reanalysis datasets have also proven valuable to forensically investigate large flooding events caused by snow melt. This session invites interdisciplinary research on existing and novel methods for remote sensing, modeling, and data assimilation of snow evolution, particularly snow melt timing and efforts linked to increased volume of discharge for water resource and hydropower management as well as resiliency and vulnerability to extreme flood events.
Studies using statisitcal techniques to derive additional information related to the analysis and prediction of aviation weather hazards
This session will feature applications of AI for analyzing tropical cyclone intensity and structure as well as improving predictions of tropical cyclone track and intensity.
Although rainfall accounts for 25% of tropical cyclone-related fatalities in the United States, the threat of rainfall is somewhat underestimated in comparison to other hazards. Furthermore, rainfall is an interdisciplinary hazard, from the remaining unknowns in the underlying physics, to the effect on downstream hazards, and the difficulties associated with decision making. In terms of physical processes, rainfall is a complex mixture of drop creation, growth, and seeding by frozen hydrometeors, where the kinematic and thermodynamic environment determine the relative contributions of warm rain and ice phase microphysical processes and the ultimate particle trajectories. In addition, external influences such as vertical wind shear and topography can modify the azimuthal distribution of rainfall intensity and microphysical processes. After the rain reaches the ground, flooding, landslides, and river runoff are dangerous hazards that cause both fatalities and economic losses. Other indirect consequences of heavy rainfall, such as disruption of local transit networks, can negatively affect response and recovery efforts. Finally, forecast uncertainty due to model error, insufficient model resolution, and microphysical deficiencies make the communication of the rainfall threat challenging.
The proposed session would solicit abstracts on the aforementioned topics, with a specific interest in recent tropical cyclones (e.g., Hurricanes Harvey 2017, Florence 2018, Maria 2017, Lane 2018, Typhoon Mangkhut 2018, Tropical Cyclone Idai 2019). Ideally, the session would solicit abstracts on a variety of topics, including but not limited to: observational and modeling research, emergency management and decision-making studies, and forecasting successes and failures. We hope to take advantage of the diverse attendees to have a conversation about the complicated and interdisciplinary nature of tropical cyclone rainfall understanding, prediction, and mitigation.
This invited session will feature Directors and Senior Managers from HPC Centers serving the Weather, Water and Climate community addressing the challenges they face in providing HPC services for research and operations. Each speaker will address the topic in a short presentation, followed by a panel discussion and questions from session attendees.
10:45 AM-12:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
In our globalized society, local and regional issues can quickly escalate into global challenges. The health and wealth of nations globally interconnected, as are our supporting natural systems. Human changes to local environments are having global impacts, with climate change a diver of new extremes in our hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and cryosphere. Future droughts, hurricanes, heat waves, and other extremes may drive future health risks, including from famines, pandemics of water- and vector-borne diseases, and declines in respiratory health.
This joint session will take the mantle from the Town Hall on Environmental Security, at the AMS Centennial. We will continue the discussion begun there with a special focus on global environmental & health security. We invite abstracts that address research and practice in this area, particularly those focused on the Arctic and Middle East/Horn of Africa.
11:15 AM-12:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
11:30 AM-12:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Latest research in solar forecasting
11:45 AM-12:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
New instruments, platforms and initiatives for space weather currently have unprecedented opportunities to observe the physical systems that drive and that are driven by space weather phenomena. Commercial access to space, smallsats and cubesats, high altitude ballons, ISS continuing status, and many other investments by DoD, Civilian Agencies, Academia, International efforts, and crowd-sourcing are paving the way for new science and greater understanding of the physics and impacts of space weather. This session invites those who are involved in these efforts that have recent results, have upcoming missions, can provide space weather observing access, or a promising initiative that can observe space weather phenomena.
12:00 PM-1:30 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Wayne Schubert Luncheon
Location: 205C (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
12:15 PM-1:15 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Recent surveys and a sweeping report from the National Academy of Sciences document a surprising and unacceptable level of unethical behavior in all sciences, including the geosciences. AGU, GSA, National Academy of Sciences, and other professional societies are taking a stand against harassment, bullying, and discrimination. AMS is also taking a proactive approach to confront these problems. This town hall will feature a panel of individuals from AMS leadership and experts from outside of the Society, to have a facilitated discussion of scientific ethics and conduct, including topics such as harassment, discrimination, bullying, and bias. By having an open conversation with members of the Society, we hope to bring forth increased awareness of these issues, and specific actions that can reduce or eliminate the problem. Ultimately, this will promote a more inclusive, equitable, vibrant, and diverse AMS, and will help to improve the professional climate and culture of the society.
The American Meteorological Society’s Forecast Improvement Group will host a town hall that focuses on the next 100 years of forecasting. We are inviting visionary leaders across the public, private, and academic sectors to share their visions and dreams for the future. We’ll pose this future through provocative questions about a range of topics including automation, micro-observing systems, cloud and high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the impact of diversity and demographic changes that will play a role in the needs of the American people over the next 100 years. This townhall will allow the AMS community to share their thoughts and concerns about how to prepare our our organization for the future, and the role that the AMS should play in paving the way.
Climate experts from NOAA and NASA will discuss the release of new data on annual global temperatures for 2019, including the most important climate trends of the year, during a combined in-person and telecon media opportunity
The NASA Living With A Star Institutes, sponsored by UCAR, will present a joint panel on the current state and future directions of aviation radiation and atmospheric drag and how to better understand and mitigate space weather related risks. These include the radiation environment created by extrasolar, solar, and magnetospheric charged particles at the surface through aviation and commercial space altitudes up to low Earth orbit. In addition, changes in upper atmosphere densities affecting satellite orbits due to dynamic solar and geomagnetic conditions are included in the panel discussion. Panel members will broadly overview the current state of space weather risks to our technology from environmental sources and identify the tall tentpoles of poorly constrained challenges. In addition, industry stakeholders will be invited to participate in this discussion.
The National Weather Service (NWS) is undertaking a new initiative to help improve US weather forecasting. This new process under the revised NWS Governance provides guidance to first collecting the forecasting needs from the field of operational forecasters, next developing requirements from the needs, and then delivering those requirements to developers who create solutions to meet those needs. For 0-18 hour forecasting, however, this process has not yet been fully executed due to a lack of awareness and difficulty in imposing it, and obstacles to change the traditional way of developing solutions first. Challenges arise in consolidating the forecasting needs into requirements and passing those requirements to developers while ensuring this new process does not delay development schedules. The Analysis and Nowcast Branch of the Analyze, Forecast and Support Office is organizing a Town Hall Meeting to discuss ways to alleviate these issues and improve the NWS’ 0-18 hour forecasting.
NOAA's Big Data Project (BDP) has completed its fourth year, come hear how the Project has engaged with the user community and CRADA partners to develop new pathways and applications to serve up NOAA's observations and model outputs through public cloud services. In this town hall, presenters will provide an update on the progress of the NOAA BDP efforts, including impact on research and applications, lessons learned, and plans for the future.
Leadership from NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) will overview future commitment in maintaining continuity of core mission observations while augmenting new commercial and technological capability. NESDIS visions an age of enterprise over the next decade through the exploration, development, and launch, of new capabilities both in observation and information systems. The agency is working towards new ways to partner with international agencies and the private sector to make observations better and more affordable through joint development of instruments, commercial hosting and data buys, and launch ride-shares. NESDIS invites the community to join in this discussion.
This town hall will provide an overview of the NWS Evolve Initiative from both a tactical and strategic perspective. NWS Evolve is a key component of the NWS Strategic Plan and is focused on delivering consistent, collaborated and effective Impact-Based Decision Support Services (IDSS) to the core partners of the NWS. The Evolve effort has achieved several critical incremental milestones in the last year.The Evolve effort has significant activities planned for the year ahead, and NWS Evolve will work towards meeting our partner’s demands for risk based decision making through the delivery of IDSS as well as leveraging emerging technologies for the targeted delivery of that information.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Earth Observing Laboratory (NCAR/EOL) is designing and building a C-band, dual-polarimetric, dual-Doppler research radar to fly on the NSF/NCAR C-130 aircraft called the Airborne Phased Array Radar (APAR). It is planned that APAR will become part of the Deployment Pool as a resource for the NSF research community. The APAR concept represents advances in research airborne radars including; agile scanning and C-band operating wavelength having lower attenuation in heavy precipitation. These capabilities mounted on the high-endurance and high-payload-capacity C-130 aircraft offer a uniquely capable research platform. The progress to date, funding status and the plans moving forward will be addressed. Community feedback is important for the APAR development. We invite members of the research community to hear the latest news about the APAR development and provide us information about how you might use the radar and what tools and capabilities would maximize its utility.
In 2019, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) established a U.S. Global Energy and Water EXchanges (GEWEX) Program, a U.S. specific, multi-agency effort focused on Federal water and energy cycle research that aligns scientifically with the GEWEX core project of the World Climate Research Program. Previous GEWEX-related projects in the U.S. include the GEWEX America’s Prediction Project (GAPP), supported by NOAA and coordinated with relevant NASA, DOE, and NSF-funded programs. Initial efforts of U.S. GEWEX may include leveraging collaboration between current agency investments and exploring improving connectivity between different 1) precipitation modeling and prediction efforts, and/or 2) land-surface interaction field campaigns and research studies. In this town hall, USGCRP executive and office leadership and Federal program managers will share early developments and outlooks. and engage with the AMS community on pressing science needs and opportunities.
Social media have become a primary mode of communication in all aspects of life, including science. The panel will consist of scientists and science journalists who are adept at this mode of communication. In opening remarks, each panelist will provide guidelines about how to best use social media, with an emphasis on Twitter, to communicate information on climate and climate change with high accuracy to a broad audience. These opening statements will be followed by questions from and discussions with the attendees. The goal is to encourage and enable more atmospheric scientists to interact with the public and news media in clearly communicating science - including a basic understanding of scientific processes as well as interpreting new results and observations.
1:00 PM-1:20 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Daily Weather Briefings (Wednesday Session)
Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
1:00 PM-5:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
AMS Oral History Project (Wednesday)
Location: Elm I & II (Westin Hotel)
1:00 PM-6:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Free Legal Consultations (provided by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund)
Location: Executive Boardroom (Westin Hotel)
1:30 PM-2:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
This year the awards for the best books on atmospheric science and climate published in 2019 will be presented in the ASLI Conference Rm. 259B. Please join us to honor the authors and publishers.
1:30 PM-2:30 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
This session will present a panel comprised of leaders and visionaries from industry, government, and academia to discuss the needs, challenges, and opportunities for managing adverse weather conditions as part of aviation operations in 2050 and beyond. This session follows the overarching theme of AMS centennial celebration: “The AMS Past, Present, and Future: Linking Information to Knowledge to Society (LINKS).”
The panel discussion will provide high-level, imagination-driven description of what experts anticipate will be the biggest interdisciplinary challenges in meteorology and climatology relevant to the ARAM community over the next 50 years. Examples might include the growth of the private space industry, package-delivering drones, and the prospect of air taxis becoming a mainstay of urban transportation. Also to be considered are topics related to potential impacts of climate change on aviation, range and aerospace meteorology.
“Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are used to answer central questions about climate change, from how the world could avoid 1.5C of global warming at the lowest cost, through to the implications of countries’ current pledges to cut emissions. They combine different strands of knowledge to explore how human development and societal choices interact with and affect the natural world. This includes the physical laws driving natural systems, as well as the changing habits and preferences that drive human society.” This session focuses on solutions IAMs reveal that lead to the economic transformation necessary to optimally address the urgency of climate change. These are solutions that might be implemented if most engineers, 97% of climate scientists, and 3,500 economists had their way.
Atmospheric science is a contact sport. Students who are completing undergraduate degrees in atmospheric science or are considering entering graduate school in atmospheric science can benefit from involvement on meaningful experiential learning opportunities off campus. This session is designed to offer a forum for sharing of experiential learning opportunities including aspects from organizational issues to funding, conducting and assessment.
New for 2019 interactive tutorial sessions allow attendees to get an in-depth demonstration from the presenter. We will be using interactive tools like Binder and Jupyter notebooks to allow attendees to run through examples at the same time as the material is presented.
As the Nation experiences increasing variability and change in precipitation patterns, flooding, drought, and other complex climate and water issues, NOAA’s mission to understand and predict these changes, and to share that knowledge becomes critically important. Key to this effort is the transformation of how products are developed, and how information is translated for the decision- maker. To best serve the public, large organizations must learn ways to implement a coordinated decision support/service delivery mechanism that carefully leverages partnerships and informs the development of use-inspired products and services. To achieve this, user needs must be fully understood; the existing products and services must be known; and the ongoing, frequent engagement for capacity building and response to needs must be regularly evaluated. This session seeks contributions from service delivery and user engagement personnel, as well as from effectively served decision-makers. Papers should highlight the structure and function of those mechanisms, examples of use-inspired products, and demonstrations of how the needs of the customer are built into the framework of large organizations.
The challenge continuously faced by our society and its servicing partners (e.g., emergency managers, broadcasters, America’s Weather Industry, etc.) as we tackle the impacts of extreme weather, water and climate events will be developing the ability to maximize the effectiveness of our decisions, so as to minimize the loss of life and property from severe storms and events. To that end, the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act (P.L. 115-25, also known as the “Weather Act”) was signed into law in April 2017, with goals to improve
NOAA’s weather research through investments in observational, computing, and modeling capabilities, improvements in weather forecasting and prediction of high impact weather events, and expansion of commercial opportunities for the provision of weather data. The Weather Act bolsters NOAA’s commitment to advancing weather research by providing a legislative mandate to conduct weather research. This includes developing improved understanding of and forecast capabilities for atmospheric events and their impacts, as well as prioritizing development of more accurate, timely, and effective warnings and forecasts of high impact weather events.
Focus areas of the Weather Act include:
- Improvement and extension of tornado forecasts, predictions, and warnings, including the prediction of tornadoes beyond one hour in advance;
- Developing and extending accurate hurricane forecasts and warnings;
- Improvements to U.S. numerical modeling capabilities;
- Improving the transition processes from research to operations (R2O); and
- Improving subseasonal (2 weeks to 3 months) and seasonal (3 months to 2 years) forecasts of temperature and precipitation and its impacts
NOAA’s implementation strategy for the Weather Act includes improving the science behind extreme and severe weather events, and enhancing hazardous weather and water research. Additionally, NOAA is continuously seeking to gain insight from the scientific community on the impact of the Weather Act on their research activities for possible opportunities of coordination and engagement, as well as the integration of social science to improve risk communication and unified modeling capabilities. This session highlights research aligned with the goals and mission of the Weather Act. Participants are encouraged to submit presentations related to the focus areas discussed above. Additionally, all submitted presentations will describe how their research meets the requirements of the Weather Act by enabling improvements to weather forecasts, supporting community-based engagement programs focused on risk communication and preparedness for severe storm events, and promoting improvements to weather forecasts.
State Climatologists are the recognized subject matter experts on the climate for their respective states. They also develop a deep understanding of the requirements for climate services at the state, county and local levels through their extensive networks of stakeholders and customers.
They direct State Climate Offices in executing effective programs to provide individual customer support, developing applied climatology products, monitoring and coordinating on climate conditions throughout the state and responding to extreme events, and in conducting education and outreach.
This makes the State Climatologist a critical part of the National Climate Services Partnership, which provides a continuum of climate products and services from the Federal, to the Regional, to the State and local levels.
This session provides an overview of several diverse State Climate Offices and how they leverage Regional Climate Centers and Federal Partners to provide effective climate services at the state and local levels.
It also describes the role of the Regional Climate Centers and how they provide critical services to facilitate the work of the State Climate Offices. Specifically, the RCCs provide regional and sector-specific data products and services. They also offer robust computer-based infrastructure for providing climate information and web services.
Finally, it describes the role of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) as the national partner. NCEI is responsible for the archive, quality control, dissemination, monitoring, and description of global and nationally observed climate data. These data are the source for local, regional, national, and global climate descriptors and summaries produced by NCEI.
Keynote Speakers: Céline Bonfils (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Friederike Otto (Oxford), Marty Hoerling (NOAA), Suzana Camargo (Columbia Univ.)
This session will offer research across different threats and populations on how risks are perceived, experienced, and communicated.
Applications of Machine Learning techniques for pre-processing, post-processing and forecasting of S2S environmental variables.
This session will be hosted by the 26th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction (26NWP). We welcome abstracts on topics including (but not limited to) direct numerical simulation of wildfires, coupled fire-atmosphere models, and wildfire impacts (e.g., the effect of burn scars on hydrology, as well as their deleterious effects on model initialization and forecasting if they are not assimilated into the model). Abstracts that focus primarily on wildfire smoke/pollution should be submitted to the 22nd Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry.
This session seeks to address how critical global/local issues facing communities of all kinds might be conceptualized in ways that ensure community voices and priorities are paramount. This is especially important as extreme events, community needs, and quality of life factors conflate driven by technological change, politically charged contexts, and economic instability. Questions include: How can social science, partnerships across the weather enterprise, and advances in prediction capability be developed in new and powerful ways to meet the approaching challenges of the 21st century? What do we mean by social justice and how we might identify with local groups issues important to communities? We seek analysis of issues related to social justice and scientific practice broadly construed.
The importance of severe weather events is underscored by the severe effects in human lives, infrastructure and the environment. Severe storms cause disruption in services nation-wide provided by the Coast Guard, Port and transportation authorities, and electric power utilities, among others; for example, weather-induced blackouts of electricity distribution grids have caused over $1.5 trillion of damage in the US since the 1980s according to the 2018 report “Billion-Dollar Weather/Climate Disasters” by the U.S. Department of Commerce NOAA/NCDC. Skillful prediction of such extreme events through numerical weather prediction, statistical techniques or their combination in hybrid dynamical-statistical methods is crucial for managing preparedness, emergency response, and mitigation of impacts. Forecast uncertainty estimation and communication of severe weather predictions remain a challenge and often overshadow the successes and improvements in weather forecasting over the last decade. There is a need to connect state-of-the-science severe weather forecast methods with communication of the forecast and its uncertainties to inform, educate and protect the public as well as critical infrastructure. This session is dedicated to the prediction of severe weather and solicits abstracts from a broad range of research focused on: forecasting extreme weather events; understanding sources of forecast uncertainty and methods for improvement; and addressing the communication of the forecast between scientists, stakeholders and the general public by defining the best use of forecast information.
Abstracts in this session can include:
- Advances in boundary layer and dispersion modeling for Green House Gasses;
- The roles of plume, puff, Lagrangian particle, and other approaches;
- Long-range transport models;
- Use of mesoscale models for providing meteorological data driving applied dispersion models;
- Dispersion predictions for short averaging times (sec to minutes) in hazards and other assessments.
Imbalances among geography, ecology, economy, society and institutions are compromising the future sustainability of cities. Rapid demographic growth, economic expansion, and the increasing environmental footprint of cities have triggered dynamics that challenge city institutions. There are now more than 37 megacities – cities with populations of more than 10 million inhabitants – and more than half of urban populations are concentrated in cities with at least one million inhabitants. Furthermore, most cities are located in areas highly vulnerable to disasters, with cities in less-developed regions both at higher risk of exposure to disaster and more vulnerable to disaster-related economic losses and mortality. New tools and integrated approaches that strengthen city governance can reduce disaster risk and better protect human, economic, and environmental assets. Earth Observations are emerging as an important resource for monitoring environmental hazards, quantifying risk and providing complex visualizations on the interconnectedness of populations, key infrastructure, and climate-related processes. For example, remote sensing imagery is being used to delineate human settlements as well as the locations of critical infrastructure, e.g., roads, highways, bridges. This session will explore how Earth Observations are being applied at the city scale, particularly when they are integrated with information about the cities’ economic, physical and social systems. Specifically, the session will examine how remote sensing and Earth system modeling can enhance local organizations' planning and operations. This session seeks submissions that consider:
- Integration of Earth Observations, models and tools for the benefit of cities at short-term (e.g., air quality, water quality, disaster response) and longer-term scales (e.g., infrastructure planning, transportation policy);
- Research combining social science and physical science to improve understanding of vulnerability and exposure within cities; and
- Examples of programmatic and technical approaches that build predictive capacity within city institutions and local networks by harnessing Earth Observations.
Presentations in this session will explore general software engineering best practices and technologies behind successful cyberinfrastructure implementations.
These sessions are devoted to current and next generation weather radars, with emphasis on radar meteorology science, weather radar applications, weather radar signal processing, weather radar prototype developments, experimental weather radar data collections, and essentially all radar meteorological algorithms. Presentations about advanced radar technologies, including phased array radars, polarimetry, multi-function scan strategies, retrieval algorithms, signal processing for clutter rejection, etc. will be a focus of these sessions. Outcomes could include radar measurements in the context of numerical model assimilation and radar-based short term forecasts. Example of presentations may include the SENSR initiative, the dual-pol WSR-88D, etc.
Latest research in solar forecasting
Since the founding of AMS in 1920, understanding the interconnections between weather and health has been a core interest and motivation of the society. Early records of the AMS include numerous articles on “physiological meteorology” debating the influence of climate on health. In the 1950s-60s members of the AMS played a key role establishing the negative effects of air pollution on human health, driving efforts to reduce pollution. Each year members of the AMS do essential work understanding the linkages between the environment and health, including but not limited to heat stress, rainfall, disease, and morbidity/mortality, driving towards improved resilience, warning, and prediction systems. 11 years ago the AMS Board of Environment and Health (BEH) was established to provide a home for this important dialogue.
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the AMS, and in joint between the Board of Environment and Health and History Symposium, this session explores the history of environment and health research. We welcome a wide range of topics, but particularly encourage submissions related to the history of health-related research in the AMS, past extreme events (ie the 1995 Chicago heat wave; Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico) and revolutionary prior studies which have altered the trajectory of environment and health research, and interactions between meteorologists, epidemiologists, and health practitioners that have shaped local and national health policy. We hope that this session will provide perspective on the previous 100 years of environment and health research, to shape innovative and productive research agendas for the next century.
This session will be a joint session between the 6th Symposium on High-Performance Computing for Weather, Water, and Climate (6HPC) and the 19th Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science. As datasets grow larger and artificial intelligence methods grow more complex, researchers have pushed the need for more powerful computing resources to make scientific advances. This session will explore how these Big Data projects are enabled by researchers using new computing methods, greater levels of parallelism, faster storage systems, better optimized algorithms, and more to push artificial intelligence and machine learning forward. Example submissions may include (but are not limited to) using clusters of specialized hardware such as graphical processing units (GPUs) to enable shorter time to results or larger pools of results, optimized storage systems that can reduce the latency of delivering data to learning algorithms distributed over a high-performance system, or work creating or using advanced algorithms that improve scalability towards exascale computing.
1:30 PM-4:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Symposium on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Workshop on Work Climate: Responding to Sexual Harassment
Location: 205C (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
2:00 PM-2:30 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
2:30 PM-3:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
PM Coffee Break (Wednesday)
Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
3:00 PM-4:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Physical parameterizations play a key role in Tropical Cyclone (TC) prediction. The prediction of TC rapid intensification and weakening, eye-wall replacement cycles, precipitation, and landfall, among others, often show strong sensitivity to model physics. Additionally, the increasing resolution of global models poses a new challenge on the use of parameterization schemes originally developed for coarse model resolutions, while the scale-aware cumulus schemes have shown some promise in improving TC prediction.
We welcome papers on the sensitivity of TC prediction to physical parameterizations and studies on the evaluation of TC forecasts against observations. We also encourage studies related to the development of parameterizations for the seamless prediction in a unified forecast system and the challenges faced by modelers.
Broadcast meteorologists are positioned at a crucial intersection between climate scientists and the general public. They have the opportunity to use their scientific training and public communication skills to educate viewers about climate change. This session will explore key issues facing broadcast meteorologists who want to make a difference on the climate crisis, including:
- Obstacles broadcast meteorologist face when attempting to include climate change in their broadcasts
- Online sources and AMS support available to assist in presenting climate change information
- Taking the next step and communicating about the array of possible climate change solutions
- How to discuss climate issues in conservative markets
In response to the major hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, and Maria) that impacted the United States during the devastating 2017 hurricane season, congress has provided the Disaster Related Appropriations Supplemental (DRAS) funding as part of the
Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. The goal of the supplemental funding is to accelerate the weather community’s established plans for improving high priority operational warning and forecasting of hurricanes. The project themes within the Improving Forecasting and Assimilation (IFAA) portfolio of the DRAS include 4 main focus areas:
- Accelerate Improvements in Weather Forecasting
- Accelerate Improvements in Flood Forecasting and Mitigation
- Accelerate Improvements in Hurricane Intensity Forecasting
- Accelerate Data Assimilation from Observations to Improve Forecasting
These focus areas have been further broken down into 27 supplemental projects with appropriate funding. The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR)/ Office of Weather and Air Quality (OWAQ) has partnered with the National Weather Service (NWS)/ Office of Science Technology Integration (STI), the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), National Ocean Service (NOS) and Office of Marine and Aviation Operations (OMAO) to ensure successful coordination, execution, and reporting of the 27 supplemental projects and funds. This session highlights the ongoing programmatic work and technical research that is conducted as a result of the hurricane supplemental funding. Participants are encouraged to submit programmatic as well as technical presentations related to the execution of these 27 projects. Additionally, all submitted talks will discuss how their research will accelerate the operational warning and forecasting of hurricanes and ultimately contribute to a Weather Ready Nation.
As the Nation experiences increasing variability and change in precipitation patterns, flooding, drought, and other complex climate and water issues, NOAA’s mission to understand and predict these changes, and to share that knowledge becomes critically important. Key to this effort is the transformation of how products are developed, and how information is translated for the decision- maker. To best serve the public, large organizations must learn ways to implement a coordinated decision support/service delivery mechanism that carefully leverages partnerships and informs the development of use-inspired products and services. To achieve this, user needs must be fully understood; the existing products and services must be known; and the ongoing, frequent engagement for capacity building and response to needs must be regularly evaluated. This session seeks contributions from service delivery and user engagement personnel, as well as from effectively served decision-makers. Papers should highlight the structure and function of those mechanisms, examples of use-inspired products, and demonstrations of how the needs of the customer are built into the framework of large organizations.
This session welcomes submissions that discuss the use of Python in operations and/or how Python was used to to move knowledge/tools from research to operations.
This session will offer research across different threats and populations on how risks are perceived, experienced, and communicated.
This session will feature talks on what roles AI will play in the Environmental Sciences over the next 5-10 years.
This session will be hosted by the 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF). We welcome abstracts on the use of new radar data (mobile radars, phased-array, dual-polarization products, etc.) and novel applications of pre-existing radar data.
This session will be hosted by the 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF). We welcome abstracts on phenomena including (but not limited to) snow-banding, drylines and associated circulations, bores, density currents, etc. -- as well as their upscale influence on the larger environment.
This session will advance the use of satellite and airborne Earth observations, ground observational networks and modeling tools to support decision in agriculture and food security. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to crop monitoring, yield estimation, crop modeling, agricultural water availability and use, food security, irrigation and fertilization management, land use change impact, climate sensitive regions, sustainable development, natural resource optimization, multi-spectral/resolution/platform remote sensing data, big Earth data solutions and cloud-computing. Presentations and open discussions will highlight stakeholder and end-users engagement in research and applications to strengthen co-development, innovation and the wider application of research.
Historical observations can oftentimes be as important as current observations, especially as we continue to expand our knowledge of atmospheric processes and climate change. Topics in this session will focus on historical observations, including recently discovered historical observations, noteworthy historical observations, impacts of historical observations on climate measurements, unique historical sensors and their associated measurements, historical methodologies for measurements and observations, and historical archives. Biographies on historical people who made significant contributions to observations and measurements are also welcome.
Imbalances among geography, ecology, economy, society and institutions are compromising the future sustainability of cities. Rapid demographic growth, economic expansion, and the increasing environmental footprint of cities have triggered dynamics that challenge city institutions. There are now more than 37 megacities – cities with populations of more than 10 million inhabitants – and more than half of urban populations are concentrated in cities with at least one million inhabitants. Furthermore, most cities are located in areas highly vulnerable to disasters, with cities in less-developed regions both at higher risk of exposure to disaster and more vulnerable to disaster-related economic losses and mortality. New tools and integrated approaches that strengthen city governance can reduce disaster risk and better protect human, economic, and environmental assets. Earth Observations are emerging as an important resource for monitoring environmental hazards, quantifying risk and providing complex visualizations on the interconnectedness of populations, key infrastructure, and climate-related processes. For example, remote sensing imagery is being used to delineate human settlements as well as the locations of critical infrastructure, e.g., roads, highways, bridges. This session will explore how Earth Observations are being applied at the city scale, particularly when they are integrated with information about the cities’ economic, physical and social systems. Specifically, the session will examine how remote sensing and Earth system modeling can enhance local organizations' planning and operations. This session seeks submissions that consider:
- Integration of Earth Observations, models and tools for the benefit of cities at short-term (e.g., air quality, water quality, disaster response) and longer-term scales (e.g., infrastructure planning, transportation policy);
- Research combining social science and physical science to improve understanding of vulnerability and exposure within cities; and
- Examples of programmatic and technical approaches that build predictive capacity within city institutions and local networks by harnessing Earth Observations.
These sessions are devoted to current and next generation weather radars, with emphasis on radar meteorology science, weather radar applications, weather radar signal processing, weather radar prototype developments, experimental weather radar data collections, and essentially all radar meteorological algorithms. Presentations about advanced radar technologies, including phased array radars, polarimetry, multi-function scan strategies, retrieval algorithms, signal processing for clutter rejection, etc. will be a focus of these sessions. Outcomes could include radar measurements in the context of numerical model assimilation and radar-based short term forecasts. Example of presentations may include the SENSR initiative, the dual-pol WSR-88D, etc.
Forecasting space weather events presents the ultimate challenge to a space physics model. A forecasting model should satisfy not only observational constraints such as the onset time, severity, and duration of actual events but also the practical requirement of timeliness, accuracy, and robustness under realistic conditions. Modern space weather forecasters and users rely on a wide variety of forecast methods, encompassing simple nonlinear regressions, complex empirical (assimilative) algorithms, physical/theoretical models, and hybrid methods. For a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of solar influences on Earth, models must relate remote sensing data and the driving influences of solar events on the magnetosphere/ionosphere in terms of physical mechanisms.
Forecast Evaluation Methods – How are different methods better suited for different circumstances?
Also, some general energy weather presentations.
Scientific data are critical to the advancement of atmospheric and related sciences, the provision of products and services for the benefit of society, and the promotion of commerce and private-sector activities. Many governmental scientific agencies within the United States and internationally have created or updated policies in recent years to ensure that scientific data are preserved and made available at little or no cost to users. Publishers, including the AMS, are also emphasizing sharing and archiving data that underlie scientific publications.
In this session, we invite submissions that discuss projects, initiatives, and ideas that advance community understanding of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) Data and Open Data within the atmospheric and related sciences. We welcome technical, policy, and community-focused submissions on a range of topics related to facilitating transparency and reproducibility of science, including: data discoverability, metadata creation and management, data and metadata formats, data provenance tracking, data distribution and storage, and other relevant topics.
Global warming is expected to intensify the hydrological cycle and lead to more frequent and intense precipitation events. Projections of more intense rainfall events naturally lead to assumptions that flooding in human communities will also increase, but flood response to precipitation events can vary widely. While urban areas have many impervious surfaces and thus high runoff ratios, river response to rainfall events over rural and natural land cover is strongly mediated by watershed antecedent conditions. For example, heavy precipitation may not produce flooding during warm season months when soil moisture is low and evapotranspiration is high. Conversely, moderate rain events can generate large floods if they fall on snow and frozen ground, or on saturated ground during leaf-off conditions. Further complicating our ability to predict how changes in precipitation will translate to river floods is the potential for climate change to affect these mediating influences—like changing the phenology of deciduous plants or reducing snow cover. Human communities and infrastructure are found across watersheds with a wide range of land cover types from natural to urban, and thus are exposed to both urban and river flooding. Thus a major challenge for developing flood-resilient communities in response to future climate change is understanding both kinds of flood response to heavy precipitation, and how they may interact in different environments. This session seeks contributions addressing recent research advances, technological developments, and management practices associated with flood response to heavy precipitation events expected with climate change. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): understanding urban flooding dynamics under heavy precipitation, examining the relationship between precipitation magnitude or intensity and river flood magnitude, predicting urban and more natural river floods under climate change, understanding and/or predicting compound flood risks in urban settings, and flooding risk assessment and communication.
This will be a joint session between the 8th Symposium on Building a Weather-ready Nation (8WRN), 10th Conference on Transition of Research to Operations (10R2O), and 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF). We welcome abstracts from emergency managers, social scientists, operational forecasters, researchers with R2O products, and others at the R2O nexus, to discuss the challenges they face in communication and decision support.
Focus on applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the coastal environment such as oceanic, atmospheric and air-sea interactions modeling, beach and marsh dynamic, identification of coastal environments from imagery, digital elevation models for the coastal zone, ...
CSK
Health adaptation aims to protect population health from climate variability and change, and to strengthen health systems to increase preparedness of health care and public health infrastructure to climate-related hazards. Modifications to policies and programs are needed to more effectively manage the multiple, simultaneous challenges that individuals, communities, and health systems will experience over coming decades. To be effective in protecting population health, adaptation plans should incorporate strategies to manage the upstream drivers of adverse health outcomes, explicitly incorporating management of uncertainties. The session will highlight lessons learned and best practices in health adaptation.
This will be a joint session between the 6th Symposium on High-performance Computing for Weather, Water, and Climate (6HPC) and the 26th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction (26NWP). This session will explore the use of high-performance computing to develop, run, enhance the performance of, and post-process output from numerical weather models such as WRF, convection-allowing models, convection-allowing ensembles, etc. Abstract topics may include (but are not limited to) improving computational efficiency, improving scalability, preparing for exascale computing, and optimizing numerical weather models to benefit from the use of specialized hardware in HPC environments, such as graphical processing units (GPUs).
4:00 PM-6:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Formal Poster Viewing Reception (Wed)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Formal Poster Viewing Reception (Wednesday)
Location: Hall B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Aerosol–Cloud–Climate Interactions Posters
Posters for the 15th Societal Applications Symposium
Posters from all EIPT topic areas
Global warming is expected to intensify the hydrological cycle and lead to more frequent and intense precipitation events. Projections of more intense rainfall events naturally lead to assumptions that flooding in human communities will also increase, but flood response to precipitation events can vary widely. While urban areas have many impervious surfaces and thus high runoff ratios, river response to rainfall events over rural and natural land cover is strongly mediated by watershed antecedent conditions. For example, heavy precipitation may not produce flooding during warm season months when soil moisture is low and evapotranspiration is high. Conversely, moderate rain events can generate large floods if they fall on snow and frozen ground, or on saturated ground during leaf-off conditions. Further complicating our ability to predict how changes in precipitation will translate to river floods is the potential for climate change to affect these mediating influences—like changing the phenology of deciduous plants or reducing snow cover. Human communities and infrastructure are found across watersheds with a wide range of land cover types from natural to urban, and thus are exposed to both urban and river flooding. Thus a major challenge for developing flood-resilient communities in response to future climate change is understanding both kinds of flood response to heavy precipitation, and how they may interact in different environments. This session seeks contributions addressing recent research advances, technological developments, and management practices associated with flood response to heavy precipitation events expected with climate change. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): understanding urban flooding dynamics under heavy precipitation, examining the relationship between precipitation magnitude or intensity and river flood magnitude, predicting urban and more natural river floods under climate change, understanding and/or predicting compound flood risks in urban settings, and flooding risk assessment and communication.
This is the poster session for the corresponding oral session.
This is the poster version of this session.
This session will advance the use of satellite and airborne Earth observations, ground observational networks and modeling tools to support decision in agriculture and food security. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to crop monitoring, yield estimation, crop modeling, agricultural water availability and use, food security, irrigation and fertilization management, land use change impact, climate sensitive regions, sustainable development, natural resource optimization, multi-spectral/resolution/platform remote sensing data, big Earth data solutions and cloud-computing. Presentations and open discussions will highlight stakeholder and end-users engagement in research and applications to strengthen co-development, innovation and the wider application of research.
This is the poster session version of the oral session of same title.
The environmental and economic consequences of drought are among the most serious of all natural disasters. However, not all droughts are the same. The onset and intensification of drought can occur at exceptionally rapid rates. Such events, called flash droughts can precede long term drought with both types of drought resulting in devastating impacts on agriculture, depletion of water resources, and through placing excessive moisture stress on both managed and natural ecosystems. In a warming climate, drought is expected to increase in frequency, duration, and intensity at both regional and global scales. Improving analysis and prediction of all drought types requires the combination of multiple data sources, including remote sensing data, surface observations, and even indicators of societal impact. Satellite hydrological variables and vegetation indices have contributed dramatically to understand the mechanisms of drought occurrence and development, as well as de-couple the drought signals from normal hydrological conditions and vegetation status. Remotely sensed land observations are used to force or parameterize models, and the hydrological outputs provide the foundation for existing drought indicators. However, taking drought monitoring and prediction to the next level not only requires advances in understanding drought mechanisms, but also the societal impacts and how to better manage water resources. There are still many open scientific questions related to data fusion, integration of drought indicators, emerging social media data sources and the optimal combination of these data sets for providing insights to climate, environmental and societal changes with respect to drought events. This session invites submissions that advance our understanding of the causes and characteristics of both flash drought and long term drought, through climatological analyses, case studies of recent events, impacts of land-atmosphere interactions, and numerical simulations. Application of remote sensing land observations, social media data or the fusion of the two for understanding, monitoring and predicting drought are especially encouraged.
This is the poster session for the corresponding oral session of same title.
The precipitation session focuses on precipitation observation, modeling, estimation, and applications of in-situ and remotely sensed precipitation products. Topics include, but are not limited to (1) precipitation processes and modeling; (2) advances in remote sensing of precipitation from satellite, airborne, and ground-based platforms; (3) recent development pertaining to fusion and downscaling of precipitation products; (4) assimilation of precipitation and precipitation-related variables in weather or water models; (5) impact of uncertainties associated with precipitation observations on hydrologic design and modeling, (6) assessment of precipitation variability, including extremes, across scales.
In snow-dominated basins across the globe, efficient water resource management requires accurate, timely estimates of both snow water equivalent (SWE) and snow melt onset. Melting snow provides a reliable water supply and can also produce wide-scale flooding hazards, particularly when combined with rainfall. An accurate estimate of snow volume, melt timing and the spatial distribution of both parameters is important for predicting runoff response for water resource and hydropower management as well as providing insight into important ecological and biogeochemical processes. Remote sensing and modeling techniques provide methods for observing and detecting snow evolution, onset of snowmelt, spatial extent of melt processes, and vulnerability to extreme flood hazards that may result. Both existing and novel remote sensing techniques have been developed to estimate snow evolution timing including the detection of liquid water in the snowpack. Snow reconstruction and energy balance snow models have shown the ability to estimate snow properties, such as snow volume, liquid water content and melt. Observational, in-situ datasets that drive these models with meteorological inputs and modify the model through data assimilation techniques are critical in accurately portraying the natural phenomena of snow evolution. Reanalysis datasets have also proven valuable to forensically investigate large flooding events caused by snow melt. This session invites interdisciplinary research on existing and novel methods for remote sensing, modeling, and data assimilation of snow evolution, particularly snow melt timing and efforts linked to increased volume of discharge for water resource and hydropower management as well as resiliency and vulnerability to extreme flood events.
5:30 PM-6:30 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Exhibit Hall Networking Reception
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
6:30 PM-9:00 PM: Wednesday, 15 January 2020
Thursday, 16 January 2020
7:30 AM-3:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Quiet Room (Thursday)
Location: Commonwealth C (Westin Hotel)
Registration (Thursday)
Location: North Lobby (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
7:30 AM-5:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Speaker Ready Room (Thursday)
Location: 102B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
8:30 AM-9:15 AM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
8:30 AM-9:30 AM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
This will be a joint panel session between the 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF) and 26th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction (26NWP). Each of 5 invited panelists will be given 18 minutes (14-15 minutes of presenting followed by 3-4 minutes of Q&A) to discuss their perspective on the history of the weather/water/climate enterprise. We will invite both prominent late-career scientists and historians.
From forecast issuance to warning dissemination, emergency managers and business continuity specialists ingest all forms of weather data to aid them in the execution of their duties. While these private- and public-sector professionals have varying responsibilities, from mitigating interruptions in the global supply chain to responding to isolated incidents in small geographies, they’re united in a common use of forecast probabilities, uncertainties, and scenarios. This panel discussion will look into the emerging trend of “big data” use by emergency managers, both public and private, and how decision-makers use meteorological probabilities to inform data-driven decisions.
Recently, the interactions between the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans have been attracting more attention, mainly because of their distinct impacts on the global climate variabilities, and the complicated underlying mechanisms. Therefore, I propose an “inter-basin interaction” session to be held at the 100
th AMS meeting, to better demonstrate the recent progresses of this topic.
It is well known that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the dominant mode of global interannual variability, can significantly impact on the physical processes over the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean interannual variability may feedback to the Pacific in turn: The El Niño-induced Indian Ocean warming usually influences the northwestern Pacific in the summer of the second year, known as the Indian Ocean-capacitor effect. The Atlantic Niño may trigger an east Pacific La Niña event, while the north tropical Atlantic warming usually drive a central Pacific La Niña, together augmenting the ENSO diversity. On decadal time scales, the positive phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) can heat the Indian Ocean and drive the Pacific into a negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) mode, etc.
These inter-basin teleconnections exert distinct impacts on the global climate system. The Atlantic decadal variability may impact on the global energy balance and thus the “global warming hiatus” through its interactions with the Pacific. The Atlantic-Pacific interaction also has the potential to impact on the polar climate, triggering changes in the sea ice and land ice, and further the global sea level and the deep ocean circulation. The physical processes behind these teleconnections also have broad implications for the seasonal to multi-year predictability of the global climate system, as well as the projection of future climate.
Nevertheless, the mechanisms behind these teleconnections are very complicated. Interactions between different ocean basins are usually attributed to the resonance of multiple mechanisms and pathways. For example, the ENSO events may impact on the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic through the adjustment of the Walker circulation, and the stationary Rossby wave dynamics. On the other hand, the Atlantic warming may feedback to the Pacific through the wind-evaporation-SST (WES) effect and the Bjerknes feedback. More importantly, recent studies suggest that two-way interaction between any two oceans could be more vigorous than previously thought, that the three basins as a whole are a tightly interconnected system. These findings further complicate the physical mechanisms and pathways behind the interactions of the three ocean basins, which desire further discussion and investigation.
Above all, because of its significant climate impacts and complicated mechanisms, I propose a session focusing on “the interactions between the three ocean basins and their implication for the global climate variability”. It will cover topics including the establishment of teleconnection pathways, the impacts of inter-basin teleconnections on regional and global climate, the mechanisms of different teleconnection pathways, and implications of these inter-basin interactions for climate predictability and projection.
Ports and the associated trade flows are the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. By providing access to international markets, U.S. seaports support economic activities that in 2016 had a total economic impact to the national economy that exceeded $3.6 trillion and supported more than 20 million jobs. The volume of traffic and the value of exports and imports at U.S. seaports is expected to double by 2021, and double again shortly after.
According to the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA), “To be able to receive post-Panamax size ships, a port must have a channel depth of 50 feet. By 2030, post-Panamax vessels are projected to make up 62 percent of total container ship capacity. Of the 175 top U.S. seaports only 15 ports have that ability (or currently upgrading to be there)...”
Today's ships are moving through U.S. seaports with little room under their keels. As vessel drafts increase, the navigation margins become smaller and the need for more accurate and timely environmental information increases. Unfortunately, the tools currently available to mariners for making safe operational decisions have not changed significantly over the last twenty years forcing increased vessel load and wait times in ports. Delays and lightering due to the uncertainties posed by environmental factors can equate to millions of dollars a year in lost revenue for shipping companies and ports.
The goal of NOAA’s precision navigation program is to provide high-resolution bathymetry and nautical charts along with real-time observations and forecasts of winds, waves, water levels, and currents for display on navigational display systems onboard ships and also for use by real-time under-keel estimation software. As a result, mariners will be better equipped to make critical navigation decisions. Since precision navigation involves many types and sources of data, it is a coordinated effort across several NOAA offices.
This session seeks abstracts from a wide range of practitioners--NWS operations to private sector professionals, social scientists to organizational communication staff, managers to researchers--whose work examines weather warning messaging practices or raises key questions about what innovation is needed to develop reliable and easily managed communication practices, including those that might be adopted by practitioners across the weather enterprise.
- Large-scale synoptic patterns and multi-scale interactions of East-Asia Monsoon Frontal System
- Synergistic Observations from ground-based, aircraft, and satellites for East-Asia Monsoon Frontal System
- Simulation and evaluation of the heavy precipitation of East-Asia Monsoon Frontal System
- River basin flood disaster warning
Management of multi-disciplinary, multi-partner science-related projects is becoming increasingly important to ensure successful outcomes. Best practices for coordination and management, including incorporation of multiple types of expertise and knowledge, are not broadly or widely available for sharing, despite being critical to ensuring that the final work products are societally useful.
Additionally, many complex science programs include societal relevance, with interdisciplinary work that requires technical scientists to understand how to effectively partner with non-technical experts from across the private and public sectors. For example, many government researchers are learning to effectively work with non-governmental programs and individuals, collaborating with them as co-researchers, not just individual technical collaborators; this represents a significant challenge to how complex scientific projects have often been run. Many of these programs benefit from a management structure that oversees the whole project, especially where there are a significant number of collaborators and funding streams.
This session will highlight complex science management programs and projects, with a goal of understanding more deeply the process and best practices of successful science program management. Talks will highlight interdisciplinary projects or programs that analyze the effects of global change on the natural environment, in areas such as agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and/or biological diversity, among other topics.
This session will be hosted by the 26th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction (30NWP). We welcome abstracts on numerical modeling used to support recent field campaigns and testbeds, as well as advances in numerical modeling pursuant to recent campaigns and testbeds. Examples of recent campaigns and testbeds include (but are not limited to) VORTEX-SE, RELAMPAGO, TORUS, PISTON, the WPC Hydrometeorological Testbed, WPC Winter Weather Experiment, WPC Flash Flood and Intense Rainfall Experiment (FFaiR), NOAA Spring Forecasting Experiment, etc.
This session will advance the use of satellite and airborne Earth observations, ground observational networks and modeling tools to support decision in agriculture and food security. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to crop monitoring, yield estimation, crop modeling, agricultural water availability and use, food security, irrigation and fertilization management, land use change impact, climate sensitive regions, sustainable development, natural resource optimization, multi-spectral/resolution/platform remote sensing data, big Earth data solutions and cloud-computing. Presentations and open discussions will highlight stakeholder and end-users engagement in research and applications to strengthen co-development, innovation and the wider application of research.
Abstracts in this session can include:
- Observational studies that include new field instrumentation;
- Air pollution experimental and network design/execution;
- Improvements in remote sensing including satellite-based observations;
- Studies characterizing the impacts of new EPA standards;
- Laboratory Simulations of Atmospheric Dispersion Processes;
- Advancements in measuring/modeling air pollution sources to demonstrate regulatory compliance.
This session will cover all aspects related to solid precipitation measurement. This includes advances in measurement techniques, intercomparison measurements, corrections for wind undercatch, and other topics related to solid precipitation measurements.
Observations indicate that the magnitude and spatial distribution of ozone pre-cursor emissions have changed substantially across the globe in recent decades. However, the impacts of these changes on surface and tropospheric and ozone are not well known, and there are substantial differences in decadal-scale trends in ozone from in situ, ozone-sonde, and satellite measurements. Understanding how tropospheric ozone has responded to emissions changes is critical for quantifying the role of economic trends and regulatory policies on air quality and, in turn, their effects on human health and ecosystems. This session solicits presentations that discuss state-of-the-science approaches for quantifying changes in global ozone precursor emissions and in surface and tropospheric ozone, using both top-down and bottom-up approaches, and for understanding the relationships between them. We also solicit presentations on how changes in air quality over the past few decades have affected human and ecosystem health.
These sessions are devoted to current and next generation weather radars, with emphasis on radar meteorology science, weather radar applications, weather radar signal processing, weather radar prototype developments, experimental weather radar data collections, and essentially all radar meteorological algorithms. Presentations about advanced radar technologies, including phased array radars, polarimetry, multi-function scan strategies, retrieval algorithms, signal processing for clutter rejection, etc. will be a focus of these sessions. Outcomes could include radar measurements in the context of numerical model assimilation and radar-based short term forecasts. Example of presentations may include the SENSR initiative, the dual-pol WSR-88D, etc.
The characteristics of different solar system bodies and how they respond to the dynamic heliospheric conditions can be used as an analog for space weather conditions at exoplanets in different stellar systems. With the availability of detailed spacecraft observations in the heliosphere, in combination with advanced modeling techniques, we may now better understand space weather conditions and effects at planets and satellites within our solar system and apply this knowledge towards studies of space weather at exoplanetary bodies. In particular, the heliospheric influences on various bodies can be different for a given solar eruption event, depending on the plasma environment of the planet (e.g., airless or tenuous atmosphere, with or without a magnetosphere).
This session will cover a range of interrelated topics, including the propagation and evolution of ICMEs and SEPs in the heliosphere, the space weather responses by planets, moons, and asteroids, and the expected space weather conditions at exoplanets, particular those within habitable zones of their stellar systems. We welcome both observational and modeling studies on the heliosphere and exoplanetary systems.
Scientific data are critical to the advancement of atmospheric and related sciences, the provision of products and services for the benefit of society, and the promotion of commerce and private-sector activities. Many governmental scientific agencies within the United States and internationally have created or updated policies in recent years to ensure that scientific data are preserved and made available at little or no cost to users. Publishers, including the AMS, are also emphasizing sharing and archiving data that underlie scientific publications.
Global warming is expected to intensify the hydrological cycle and lead to more frequent and intense precipitation events. Projections of more intense rainfall events naturally lead to assumptions that flooding in human communities will also increase, but flood response to precipitation events can vary widely. While urban areas have many impervious surfaces and thus high runoff ratios, river response to rainfall events over rural and natural land cover is strongly mediated by watershed antecedent conditions. For example, heavy precipitation may not produce flooding during warm season months when soil moisture is low and evapotranspiration is high. Conversely, moderate rain events can generate large floods if they fall on snow and frozen ground, or on saturated ground during leaf-off conditions. Further complicating our ability to predict how changes in precipitation will translate to river floods is the potential for climate change to affect these mediating influences—like changing the phenology of deciduous plants or reducing snow cover. Human communities and infrastructure are found across watersheds with a wide range of land cover types from natural to urban, and thus are exposed to both urban and river flooding. Thus a major challenge for developing flood-resilient communities in response to future climate change is understanding both kinds of flood response to heavy precipitation, and how they may interact in different environments. This session seeks contributions addressing recent research advances, technological developments, and management practices associated with flood response to heavy precipitation events expected with climate change. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): understanding urban flooding dynamics under heavy precipitation, examining the relationship between precipitation magnitude or intensity and river flood magnitude, predicting urban and more natural river floods under climate change, understanding and/or predicting compound flood risks in urban settings, and flooding risk assessment and communication.
This will be a joint session between the 6th Symposium on High-performance Computing for Weather, Water, and Climate (6HPC) and the 26th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction (26NWP). This session will explore the use of high-performance computing to develop, run, enhance the performance of, and post-process output from numerical weather models such as WRF, convection-allowing models, convection-allowing ensembles, etc. Abstract topics may include (but are not limited to) improving computational efficiency, improving scalability, preparing for exascale computing, and optimizing numerical weather models to benefit from the use of specialized hardware in HPC environments, such as graphical processing units (GPUs).
Data science and machine learning are increasingly being incorporated into all 3 sectors of the atmospheric science enterprise, and graduating students with these skills are in high demand. How are atmospheric science programs at universities changing their curricula and classes to incorporate data science and machine learning skills? How are research labs, government agencies, and private companies training their staff to use data science and machine learning in their work? This session would feature presentations from representatives of the different atmospheric science sectors to discuss what education efforts they are undertaking in their institutions. What education methods, such as classes, short courses, seminar series, have worked well? What challenges remain in educating the broader community in these topics? This session would be sponsored jointly by the Conference on AI for Environmental Science and the Education Conference.
8:45 AM-10:30 AM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
How and to what extent the aerosols can affect regional weather systems and global circulation patterns remains an open question. Answering the above question requires comprehensive understanding of the direct, indirect and semi-direct radiative effects of aerosols in order to accurately model the energy budget of the atmosphere and surface. The aerosol-induced changes to the energy budget are manifest in cloud processes and the thermal structure of the atmosphere, and consequently the circulation. The aerosol-modified circulation, in turn, alters the aerosol transport by the mean and eddy portions of the flow. Examples of aerosol-modified circulations include, but are not limited to, the African easterly jet–African easterly wave system, the African monsoon, tropical cyclones, mesoscale convective complexes and springtime cyclones.
9:00 AM-12:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Exhibit Hall (Thurs)
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Exhibits Hall Open (Thursday)
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Historical Instruments Exhibit
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
9:00 AM-5:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
AMS Oral History Project (Thursday)
Location: Elm I & II (Westin Hotel)
9:30 AM-9:55 AM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Meet President Jenni Evans (Thursday)
Location: Hall A AMS Booth, No. 335 (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
9:30 AM-10:30 AM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Exhibit Hall Breakfast
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
Exhibit Hall Breakfast
Location: Hall A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
10:00 AM-11:00 AM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
10:30 AM-11:00 AM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
10:30 AM-11:30 AM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
10:30 AM-12:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
This panel discussion that will take a look at some of the history of diversity and ethics within AMS. The panelists will also update members on recent happenings within the out community and within the society, and seek input from the audience on where the AMS could and should be moving in the future.
Better and more proactive decisions are being made by commercial airline operation centers and other aviation service providers using various forms of weather uncertainty. This not only includes probability forecasts, but also considers risk exposure, forecast confidence (from various sources) and creative ways to use model ensemble data. This session will highlight users and weather providers that are working to make safer and more cost efficient decisions for the flying public.
Recently, the interactions between the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans have been attracting more attention, mainly because of their distinct impacts on the global climate variabilities, and the complicated underlying mechanisms. Therefore, I propose an “inter-basin interaction” session to be held at the 100
th AMS meeting, to better demonstrate the recent progresses of this topic.
It is well known that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the dominant mode of global interannual variability, can significantly impact on the physical processes over the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean interannual variability may feedback to the Pacific in turn: The El Niño-induced Indian Ocean warming usually influences the northwestern Pacific in the summer of the second year, known as the Indian Ocean-capacitor effect. The Atlantic Niño may trigger an east Pacific La Niña event, while the north tropical Atlantic warming usually drive a central Pacific La Niña, together augmenting the ENSO diversity. On decadal time scales, the positive phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) can heat the Indian Ocean and drive the Pacific into a negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) mode, etc.
These inter-basin teleconnections exert distinct impacts on the global climate system. The Atlantic decadal variability may impact on the global energy balance and thus the “global warming hiatus” through its interactions with the Pacific. The Atlantic-Pacific interaction also has the potential to impact on the polar climate, triggering changes in the sea ice and land ice, and further the global sea level and the deep ocean circulation. The physical processes behind these teleconnections also have broad implications for the seasonal to multi-year predictability of the global climate system, as well as the projection of future climate.
Nevertheless, the mechanisms behind these teleconnections are very complicated. Interactions between different ocean basins are usually attributed to the resonance of multiple mechanisms and pathways. For example, the ENSO events may impact on the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic through the adjustment of the Walker circulation, and the stationary Rossby wave dynamics. On the other hand, the Atlantic warming may feedback to the Pacific through the wind-evaporation-SST (WES) effect and the Bjerknes feedback. More importantly, recent studies suggest that two-way interaction between any two oceans could be more vigorous than previously thought, that the three basins as a whole are a tightly interconnected system. These findings further complicate the physical mechanisms and pathways behind the interactions of the three ocean basins, which desire further discussion and investigation.
Above all, because of its significant climate impacts and complicated mechanisms, I propose a session focusing on “the interactions between the three ocean basins and their implication for the global climate variability”. It will cover topics including the establishment of teleconnection pathways, the impacts of inter-basin teleconnections on regional and global climate, the mechanisms of different teleconnection pathways, and implications of these inter-basin interactions for climate predictability and projection.
In this session, we will highlight the latest research on current and next-generation physical parametrization addressing formulation, development and evaluation of parameterization of numerical model physical processes on short-, medium, extended-range and climate time scales. Additionally, we invite discussion of the design and development of community software tools that enable physics interoperability in an efficient and standardized manner in community models. We encourage contributions from the National Earth System Prediction Capability (ESPC) and the NOAA Unified Forecast System, as well as other modeling efforts.
This session highlights research and practitioner perspectives that investigate dimensions of vulnerability and resilience amid various communities.
This session will be hosted by the 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF). We welcome abstracts on analysis and forecasting methods used to support recent field campaigns and testbeds, as well as advances in analysis and forecasting methods pursuant to recent campaigns and testbeds. Examples of recent campaigns and testbeds include (but are not limited to) VORTEX-SE, RELAMPAGO, TORUS, PISTON, the WPC Hydrometeorological Testbed, WPC Winter Weather Experiment, WPC Flash Flood and Intense Rainfall Experiment (FFaiR), NOAA Spring Forecasting Experiment, etc.
As sensor technology evolves, so does the need to establish proper calibration procedures and methods for intercomparing sensors. Topics in this session include instrument intercomparisons techniques and analyses, methods for developing sensor intercomparisons, results from sensor intercomparisons, calibration procedures for new sensors, and improved calibration procedures for existing sensors.
This session will advance the use of satellite and airborne Earth observations, ground observational networks and modeling tools to support decision in agriculture and food security. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to crop monitoring, yield estimation, crop modeling, agricultural water availability and use, food security, irrigation and fertilization management, land use change impact, climate sensitive regions, sustainable development, natural resource optimization, multi-spectral/resolution/platform remote sensing data, big Earth data solutions and cloud-computing. Presentations and open discussions will highlight stakeholder and end-users engagement in research and applications to strengthen co-development, innovation and the wider application of research.
The precipitation session focuses on precipitation observation, modeling, estimation, and applications of in-situ and remotely sensed precipitation products. Topics include, but are not limited to (1) precipitation processes and modeling; (2) advances in remote sensing of precipitation from satellite, airborne, and ground-based platforms; (3) recent development pertaining to fusion and downscaling of precipitation products; (4) assimilation of precipitation and precipitation-related variables in weather or water models; (5) impact of uncertainties associated with precipitation observations on hydrologic design and modeling, (6) assessment of precipitation variability, including extremes, across scales.
These sessions are devoted to current and next generation weather radars, with emphasis on radar meteorology science, weather radar applications, weather radar signal processing, weather radar prototype developments, experimental weather radar data collections, and essentially all radar meteorological algorithms. Presentations about advanced radar technologies, including phased array radars, polarimetry, multi-function scan strategies, retrieval algorithms, signal processing for clutter rejection, etc. will be a focus of these sessions. Outcomes could include radar measurements in the context of numerical model assimilation and radar-based short term forecasts. Example of presentations may include the SENSR initiative, the dual-pol WSR-88D, etc.
Scientific data are critical to the advancement of atmospheric and related sciences, the provision of products and services for the benefit of society, and the promotion of commerce and private-sector activities. Many governmental scientific agencies within the United States and internationally have created or updated policies in recent years to ensure that scientific data are preserved and made available at little or no cost to users. Publishers, including the AMS, are also emphasizing sharing and archiving data that underlie scientific publications.
Machine learning applications related to energy.
This session will feature presentations on using machine learning models for parameterizing subgrid processes in numerical weather and climate models.
12:00 PM-1:30 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
12:15 PM-1:15 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
In anticipation of the 100th year of the AMS, the leadership established a Centennial Committee chaired by former AMS President Bill Gail. One goal of the Committee was to assess emerging issues and anticipate the grand challenges of the future. The AMS community was invited to contribute perspectives on the greatest challenges facing our society in the coming 100 years. Three overarching themes emerged as the feedback was organized: advance science, applications, capabilities, & ourselves; amplify our impact on society; and respond to society's growing needs and opportunities. The top priority for each theme was identified through an AMS-wide voting process: to educate new generations, to enhance dialogue with the public and Congress, and to ensure sustainability of Earth and its resources. Led by Bill Gail, this town hall will be an engaging, participatory dialog designed to identify how AMS-members can respond to the challenges identified through this society-wide process.
A growing number of U.S. scientists are participating in science-related advocacy and activism. Doing so requires skills and knowledge that should be part of every researcher’s professional development: Knowing how to communicate your research to non-experts, how to convey credibility and confidence, and having an awareness of how your work might end up in political crosshairs. In this town hall, attendees will learn these skills, as well as how they can safely and effectively serve as expert witnesses, discuss issues with members of Congress, and participate in the federal public comment process for proposed rulemaking. A primary focus will be on why and how scientists should separate personal advocacy and activism from their professional role. We’ll also discuss how federally-funded scientists can be politically active without violating anti-lobbying laws, and use a variety of avenues to promote evidence-based policies in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.
This Town Hall will provide an introduction to the GEOS-Chem model of atmospheric chemistry for new and prospective users, as well as an update on the latest model developments for experienced users. We will cover (1) the classic GEOS-Chem model; (2) the high-performance GEOS-Chem model; (3) GEOS-Chem as a chemical module for meteorological models including CESM and WRF; (4) using GEOS-Chem on the AWS cloud. Overview presentations on different aspects of the model will be given by the Model Scientist and Steering Committee members. There will be ample time for questions and for open discussion of model issues and development priorities.
USGEO is the interagency coordination mechanism for Federal Agencies’ civil Earth observation activities, including observation data management practices, the Satellite Needs Working Group and the National Plan for Civil Earth Observations. It is chaired by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with current co-chairs from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). In this Town Hall, USGEO leadership from OSTP, NOAA, NASA, and USGS will outline the second National Plan for Civil Earth Observations. Attendees will learn about the major themes of the plan and discuss near-term USGEO activities with the community.
1:00 PM-1:20 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Daily Weather Briefings (Thursday Session)
Location: 157C (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
1:00 PM-4:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Sustainability Tour at Boston University
Location: Boston University
1:30 PM-2:15 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
1:30 PM-2:45 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Use of satellite and ground based remote sensing observations has become more and more important in atmospheric and environmental research. Numerous sensors have been developed to retrieve atmospheric compositions including aerosols and trace gases, providing unprecedented opportunities to improve climate and air quality modeling and forecasting. On one hand, observations by different sensors can be joined to reveal a more complete picture of the composition of the atmosphere. For example, MODIS and CALIPSO measurements together form a 3D view of atmospheric aerosols. Observations of aerosol precursor such as SO2 and NO2 can provide insights into the causes of aerosol variability. Many research works have been conducted to understand the formation and evolution of air pollution using multiple observational datasets. On the other hand, because different sensors have different optical design, sampling frequency, and spatial/temporal resolution characteristics, it is necessary to explore the integrated usage of these multi-sensor data in order to maximize their capabilities. For example, satellite can provide spatial variability of atmospheric component, whereas ground based sensors typically have higher accuracy and temporal resolution. These two types of observations can thus be combined to for more accurate information with high spatial and temporal coverage. Many data synergy or data fusion techniques have been developed for this purpose. Considering the importance of combining multiple datasets in climate and environmental research, it is quite appropriate and necessary to hold a session about this topic at the 100th AMS annual meeting, in order to better demonstrate recent progresses and to promote collaborate. This session will cover works including the validation/cross validation of multi-sensor data, developments of data fusion techniques, joint retrieval of atmospheric composition (including aerosols and trace gases) using multiple satellite and ground based platforms, joint application of multi-sensor data in climate and environmental problems and the assimilation of multi-sensor data in weather, climate and air quality modeling and forecasting.
1:30 PM-3:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) is the first of the new generation of NASA Earth Venture missions. It consists of a constellation of eight satellites that has been operating in low inclination (tropical) Earth orbit since December 2016. Each satellite carries a four-channel bi-static radar receiver that measures GPS signals scattered by the Earth surface. Over ocean, surface roughness, near surface wind speed and air-sea heat flux are estimated. Over land, near surface soil moisture and flood inundation are estimated. The measurements are unique in several respects, most notably in their ability to penetrate through all levels of precipitation, made possible by the low frequency at which GPS operates, and in the frequent sampling of extreme weather and complete sampling of the diurnal cycle, made possible by the large number of satellites.
Level 2 science data products are produced for near surface (10 m referenced) ocean wind speed, ocean surface roughness (mean square slope) and surface sensible and latent heat flux. Level 3 gridded versions of the L2 products are available. A set of Level 4 products are also in development for direct tropical cyclone overpasses. These include the storm intensity (peak sustained winds) and size (radius of maximum winds), its extent (34, 50 and 64 knot wind radii), and its integrated kinetic energy. The use of CYGNSS wind speed products to improve hurricane numerical weather predictions is also under investigation. Over land, Level 2 soil moisture and flood inundation extent algorithms are in development.
We expect the oral and poster presentations in this session to include some or all of the following topics:
- Mission overview and status update
- Assessments of science data product quality
- Results of scientific investigations using CYGNSS data products, including:
- Tropical cyclones
- Tropical convection and convectively coupled waves
- Air-sea interaction
- Soil moisture
- Flood inundation
Convective weather and cloud electrification and lightning pose significant risks to the safety and efficiency of aviation, aerospace, and range operations. The impacts associated with these phenomena are multi-faceted, and planning for associated impact mitigation is done on the order of minutes to days. Needs for safe, effective management of convective weather and lightning risks to these operational domains have led to significant advancements in observations, predictions, and decision support. Topics to be covered in this session include enhanced convective weather and lightning observations and remote sensing, initiation, evolution, and cessation predictions, and operational guidance supporting aviation, aerospace, and range missions.
The Coupled Air-Sea Processes and Electromagnetic ducting Research (CASPER) is a five-year multiple disciplinary research program aimed at improving the understanding and prediction of environmental conditions resulting in ducting of electromagnetic waves (EM), mostly associated with the atmospheric surface layer or the boundary layer capping inversion. Two intensive field campaigns and multiple efforts of numerical modeling studies utilizing large eddy simulation (LES) and mesoscale models, as well as EM propagation models, have been conducted during the CAPSER period. This session provides the opportunity to present recent advances from the CASPER efforts in understanding air-sea interaction processes, coastal internal boundary layer development, coastal upper ocean processes, and EM ducting in the measured and modeled atmospheric environment. The session presentations will especially address major scientific gaps in accurately capturing and representing the vertical gradients of wind and thermodynamic properties and small-scale turbulence structure in the marine environment.
Recently, the interactions between the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans have been attracting more attention, mainly because of their distinct impacts on the global climate variabilities, and the complicated underlying mechanisms. Therefore, I propose an “inter-basin interaction” session to be held at the 100
th AMS meeting, to better demonstrate the recent progresses of this topic.
It is well known that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the dominant mode of global interannual variability, can significantly impact on the physical processes over the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean interannual variability may feedback to the Pacific in turn: The El Niño-induced Indian Ocean warming usually influences the northwestern Pacific in the summer of the second year, known as the Indian Ocean-capacitor effect. The Atlantic Niño may trigger an east Pacific La Niña event, while the north tropical Atlantic warming usually drive a central Pacific La Niña, together augmenting the ENSO diversity. On decadal time scales, the positive phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) can heat the Indian Ocean and drive the Pacific into a negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) mode, etc.
These inter-basin teleconnections exert distinct impacts on the global climate system. The Atlantic decadal variability may impact on the global energy balance and thus the “global warming hiatus” through its interactions with the Pacific. The Atlantic-Pacific interaction also has the potential to impact on the polar climate, triggering changes in the sea ice and land ice, and further the global sea level and the deep ocean circulation. The physical processes behind these teleconnections also have broad implications for the seasonal to multi-year predictability of the global climate system, as well as the projection of future climate.
Nevertheless, the mechanisms behind these teleconnections are very complicated. Interactions between different ocean basins are usually attributed to the resonance of multiple mechanisms and pathways. For example, the ENSO events may impact on the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic through the adjustment of the Walker circulation, and the stationary Rossby wave dynamics. On the other hand, the Atlantic warming may feedback to the Pacific through the wind-evaporation-SST (WES) effect and the Bjerknes feedback. More importantly, recent studies suggest that two-way interaction between any two oceans could be more vigorous than previously thought, that the three basins as a whole are a tightly interconnected system. These findings further complicate the physical mechanisms and pathways behind the interactions of the three ocean basins, which desire further discussion and investigation.
Above all, because of its significant climate impacts and complicated mechanisms, I propose a session focusing on “the interactions between the three ocean basins and their implication for the global climate variability”. It will cover topics including the establishment of teleconnection pathways, the impacts of inter-basin teleconnections on regional and global climate, the mechanisms of different teleconnection pathways, and implications of these inter-basin interactions for climate predictability and projection.
This session will be hosted by the 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF). We welcome abstracts on the use of new satellite data (GOES-16, GOES-17, Himawari-8, Geostationary Lightning Mapper, etc.) and novel applications of pre-existing satellite data.
The combined efforts of fusing social science into hazardous weather communication efforts to improve messaging to decision makers of all stripes, and an increased focus by public safety officials on risk assessment and risk management with natural hazards - most of them weather-related - one of three critical components of the threat and identification process, has reached a critical juncture on this 100th anniversary of the AMS.
Exponentially improved computing capabilities in the 21st Century have allowed the development of high resolution atmospheric forecast models whose multi-day accuracy is better than ever before. In addition, probabilistic forecasting of potentially hazardous weather elements is creating a baseline of threat communication, the first critical element of risk assessment. Similar computational improvements have allowed more accurate assessments of physical impact and vulnerability communication through measurement of natural and man-made infrastructure, from micro-scale geographic differences to infrastructural differences and changes to each.
Social science research applied to the potential impact on weather on the physical world to human behavior. Human behavior based on a diverse set of factors (demographics, culture, education, income, etc) informs the behavioral side of vulnerability.
The combination of knowledge, computing power, and an increased need for true risk assessment in a world with more extreme meteorological events and larger populations in harm's way has opened the door for researchers and developers to produce an increasing number of research studies and computer applications that can help all decision-makers to assess risk, from the granular (personal) level to the holistic (jurisdictional) level. Such studies and applications must be better connected to unify the process of risk communication in order to meet a shared goal of protecting life and property from potential weather disasters.
This session can become a springboard to begin and move forward a unified process, one that serves the entire Weather Enterprise in the shared goal of public safety and ultimately a reduction in weather-related disasters.
New approaches are emerging to develop probabilistic forecast information to help convey forecast uncertainty for decision making. This session will explore techniques and applications of NWP, particularly ensembles and model blends, to produce probabilistic forecasts of rainfall, snowfall, and ice accumulations. The session will also address methods to assess the skill and utility of probabilistic precipitation forecast information.
This session is designed to highlight new sensors, observing techniques, and applications of data associated with state mesonet systems. For example, mesonsets are now expanding to include vertical profiling sensors, snow water equivalent (SWE) measurements, and flux monitoring. One network is expanding sensing capabilities to facilitate health (heat index) monitoring, while yet another is looking to add sensors to monitor tree growth properties. This session would specifically aim to highlight those unique expansions of network capabilities.
The environmental and economic consequences of drought are among the most serious of all natural disasters. However, not all droughts are the same. The onset and intensification of drought can occur at exceptionally rapid rates. Such events, called flash droughts can precede long term drought with both types of drought resulting in devastating impacts on agriculture, depletion of water resources, and through placing excessive moisture stress on both managed and natural ecosystems. In a warming climate, drought is expected to increase in frequency, duration, and intensity at both regional and global scales. Improving analysis and prediction of all drought types requires the combination of multiple data sources, including remote sensing data, surface observations, and even indicators of societal impact. Satellite hydrological variables and vegetation indices have contributed dramatically to understand the mechanisms of drought occurrence and development, as well as de-couple the drought signals from normal hydrological conditions and vegetation status. Remotely sensed land observations are used to force or parameterize models, and the hydrological outputs provide the foundation for existing drought indicators. However, taking drought monitoring and prediction to the next level not only requires advances in understanding drought mechanisms, but also the societal impacts and how to better manage water resources. There are still many open scientific questions related to data fusion, integration of drought indicators, emerging social media data sources and the optimal combination of these data sets for providing insights to climate, environmental and societal changes with respect to drought events. This session invites submissions that advance our understanding of the causes and characteristics of both flash drought and long term drought, through climatological analyses, case studies of recent events, impacts of land-atmosphere interactions, and numerical simulations. Application of remote sensing land observations, social media data or the fusion of the two for understanding, monitoring and predicting drought are especially encouraged.
Halogen talks
The precipitation session focuses on precipitation observation, modeling, estimation, and applications of in-situ and remotely sensed precipitation products. Topics include, but are not limited to (1) precipitation processes and modeling; (2) advances in remote sensing of precipitation from satellite, airborne, and ground-based platforms; (3) recent development pertaining to fusion and downscaling of precipitation products; (4) assimilation of precipitation and precipitation-related variables in weather or water models; (5) impact of uncertainties associated with precipitation observations on hydrologic design and modeling, (6) assessment of precipitation variability, including extremes, across scales.
Discussions on new research pertaining to wind energy
This will be a joint session between the 36th Conference on Environmental Information-processing Technologies (36EIPT) and 30th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting (30WAF). In the past decade Python has rapidly gained popularity in the geosciences, including in weather analysis and forecasting. Tools such as MetPy, SHARPpy METplus, and Siphon are used regularly by both researchers and forecasters. Additionally, many researchers and forecasters have developed their own Python tools, and many institutions have developed their own in-house tools. We welcome abstracts on novel Python tools, or novel uses of pre-existing Python tools, for weather analysis and forecasting.
This session will feature AI applications for supporting aviation meteorology, including predicting turbulence, icing, and thunderstorms.
Machine learning creates new opportunities in the Space Weather community for identification, classification, modeling and forecasting. Bridging the gap between the space science and the machine learning community is crucial to working with the enormous datasets collected by space missions. Large, and freely available datasets of in-situ and remote observations collected over several decades of space missions allow for space weather to be an ideal application for machine learning. Utilizing imagery, geomagnetic indices, particle fluxes, magnetograms, and more, one can understand more about complex nature of the solar-terrestiral system in which we live. This session welcomes presentations on the advances in space weather utilizing information theory, neural networks, clustering algorithms, nonlinear auto-regression models, and other nontraditional approaches that take into account the nonlinear and complex dynamics of space weather to improve forecasting, predictions, classification, identification, and uncertainty propagation.
1:30 PM-5:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Free Legal Consultations (provided by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund)
Location: Executive Boardroom (Westin Hotel)
2:15 PM-3:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
Mixed-phase clouds composed of a mixture of supercooled liquid droplets and ice crystals are found across the globe. They are the dominant cloud type during the colder three-quarters of the year in the Arctic while at lower latitudes, mixed-phase clouds occur are associated with deep convection, synoptic-scale midlatitude weather systems, and orographic clouds. Aerosols by serving both cloud condensation nuclei and ice nuclei can alter mixed-phase cloud properties, and consequently modulate the regional hydrological cycle. This session invites papers on any of the following or related subjects: (1) characterization of mixed-phase clouds using observations and modeling; (2) process-level understanding of CCN/IN impacts on mixed-phase clouds; (3) assessment of the climatic influence of aerosol–cloud interaction in mixed-phase clouds, especially over the Arctic; (4) evaluation and improvement of mixed-phase clouds in numerical models.
3:00 PM-3:30 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
PM Coffee Break (Thursday)
Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
3:30 PM-4:30 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
3:30 PM-4:45 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
3:30 PM-5:00 PM: Thursday, 16 January 2020
We welcome abstracts on methods for evaluating weather forecasts in the Tropics. The quality of numerical weather prediction (NWP) in the Tropics is important not only because of the local impact of tropical convection, but also because improved forecasts of convective activity in the Tropics can positively impact forecast skill in Mid-latitudes several days later. Differences in the dynamics between Mid-latitudes and Tropics suggest that different metrics may be necessary to evaluate numerical weather forecasts in those regions. Standard metrics such as QPF and anomaly correlations may need to be augmented with process-based metrics and diagnostics taking into account known model biases/ difficulties in the Tropics in addition to current knowledge of tropical dynamics. Contributions proposing new methods for evaluating NWP forecasts in the Tropics, for example how to assess the models' forecast skill of phenomena with time scales longer than a few days, or diagnostics based on energy budgets, are particularly encouraged.
Expected topics include diagnostics of tropical convection and dynamical contributions to tropical convection, metrics describing tropical - extratropical interactions, and comparison of NWP model performance in the Tropics.
The European Space Agency launched the first space-based Doppler wind lidar (DWL) into space in August 2018. The mission is progressing to produce global wind profiles and corresponding aerosol data products. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is already demonstrating impacts of the preliminary Aeolus wind profiles. Meanwhile the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Satellite Observing System Architecture (NSOSA) Study includes a potential DWL as part of its future architecture. This session seeks papers related to a) application of this new generation Aeolus satellite observations to numerical weather prediction and process studies, b) building on the Aeolus DWL experience for a follow-on wind lidar mission, and c) objectives and roadmaps for a DWL in the next generation U.S. weather satellite architecture.
Atmospheric processes occurring over complex terrain pose many challenges for hydrological and meteorological prediction. These processes are 3-D, multi-scale, and affected by terrain slope, heterogeneous surface roughness, and other land-cover characteristics. Understanding the physics associated with these processes is critical to predicting a large number of geophysical phenomena (e.g., the timing of snow melt and runoff, glacier-mass balance and retreat, fire weather, etc.).
Meteorological instrumentation varies widely in the atmospheric science research and operational weather forecasting industry, and the observations from these instruments routinely need to be processed through quality control and quality assurance procedures. However, these procedures can be different for the same instrumentation depending on individual research groups or weather agencies requirements. This session aims to allow researchers and weather industry groups to share their quality control procedures in an effort to improve data quality within the atmospheric science and meteorology-related fields. Topics include quality control methods and techniques, quality assurance procedures, real-time automated quality control algorithms, and quality control methods for large datasets.
The environmental and economic consequences of drought are among the most serious of all natural disasters. However, not all droughts are the same. The onset and intensification of drought can occur at exceptionally rapid rates. Such events, called flash droughts can precede long term drought with both types of drought resulting in devastating impacts on agriculture, depletion of water resources, and through placing excessive moisture stress on both managed and natural ecosystems. In a warming climate, drought is expected to increase in frequency, duration, and intensity at both regional and global scales. Improving analysis and prediction of all drought types requires the combination of multiple data sources, including remote sensing data, surface observations, and even indicators of societal impact. Satellite hydrological variables and vegetation indices have contributed dramatically to understand the mechanisms of drought occurrence and development, as well as de-couple the drought signals from normal hydrological conditions and vegetation status. Remotely sensed land observations are used to force or parameterize models, and the hydrological outputs provide the foundation for existing drought indicators. However, taking drought monitoring and prediction to the next level not only requires advances in understanding drought mechanisms, but also the societal impacts and how to better manage water resources. There are still many open scientific questions related to data fusion, integration of drought indicators, emerging social media data sources and the optimal combination of these data sets for providing insights to climate, environmental and societal changes with respect to drought events. This session invites submissions that advance our understanding of the causes and characteristics of both flash drought and long term drought, through climatological analyses, case studies of recent events, impacts of land-atmosphere interactions, and numerical simulations. Application of remote sensing land observations, social media data or the fusion of the two for understanding, monitoring and predicting drought are especially encouraged.
Halogen talks
The precipitation session focuses on precipitation observation, modeling, estimation, and applications of in-situ and remotely sensed precipitation products. Topics include, but are not limited to (1) precipitation processes and modeling; (2) advances in remote sensing of precipitation from satellite, airborne, and ground-based platforms; (3) recent development pertaining to fusion and downscaling of precipitation products; (4) assimilation of precipitation and precipitation-related variables in weather or water models; (5) impact of uncertainties associated with precipitation observations on hydrologic design and modeling, (6) assessment of precipitation variability, including extremes, across scales.
This will be a joint session between the 26th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction (26NWP) and 34th Conference on Hydrology (34HYDRO). We welcome abstracts on topics including (but not limited to) coupled atmosphere-hydrological models and automated guidance for atmospheric rivers, flash floods, and other hydrometeorological extremes.