IN DEEP: A car parked along a street in Freeport, N.Y., is snowed in following the Christmas-weekend blizzard that blanketed the northeastern United States.
Image: COURTESY OF JOSE OQUENDO VIA FLICKR
On one of the busiest travel weekends of the year, the northeastern U.S. was socked with a powerful low-pressure system that brought blizzard and whiteout conditions to a huge region extending from northern New Jersey to Maine. Although a winter storm had been forecast, few were prepared for the intensity of the post-Christmas storm, which included a phenomenon known as thundersnow in some areas, shut down railways and left thousands stranded at airports across the region.
The storm originated in the Pacific Ocean, sending a low-pressure system into the Southwest that swept across the southern states before combining with a system "diving southward from out of the Midwest to produce snow in the South and the whopper snowstorm along the East Coast," according to The Weather Channel's Web site.
People have been fascinated with weather forecasting at least dating back to the ancient Babylonians, who tried to use cloud formations and other atmospheric conditions to predict short-term weather changes. Computers have made the job a lot easier in recent decades by allowing meteorologists to plug massive amounts of data culled from land, sea and air-based sensors into sophisticated algorithms that help produce forecasting models. Still, there will always be an aspect of unpredictability in the atmosphere that foils even the most high-tech attempts to predict the weather.
To find out more about how meteorologists use forecasting models to get ahead of Mother Nature as well as the limitations of this technology, Scientific American spoke with Thomas Else, chief meteorologist and director of meteorological services and computer programming for Hackettstown, N.J.-based weather forecasting consulting firm Weather Works LLC.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
What tools do meteorologists have at their disposal when trying to forecast storms?
We use different computer forecast models that feed initial conditions—including temperatures, humidity, wind speed and wind direction from around the United States and around the world, from the surface all the way up to the jet stream—into different equations. The models are run on National Weather Service supercomputers. Some of the short-term forecasting models are run hourly while other models are run every six hours or twice a day. But the models are only as good as the data we can get into them. One of the big problems with computer models comes when you can't collect accurate data from a particular area. Sometimes a storm will pass through an area where there are fewer sensors, with possibly 50 to 100 miles between each reading. So it may be that the model doesn't have any data for a particular spot on the map and has to use interpolated data.
Where do the data used in these models come from?
We get observations from ground stations, satellites and radiosondes, which are balloons that National Weather Service forecast offices launch twice a day to measure temperature, pressure, humidity, wind direction and wind speed. Satellites are becoming very important because they can do remote sensing, taking and reporting atmospheric measurements. Other data come from commercial airplanes, ships at sea and ocean buoys. So we're getting data from the surface all the way up to 30,000 or 40,000 feet.
Which technological advances will have the greatest impact on improving weather forecasts?
The basic technology is already in place. The main advances in forecasting come from more powerful computers and faster software that can ingest more data coming from a greater number of sources.
What made the Christmas weekend blizzard in the Northeast difficult to accurately forecast?
All coastal storms like this are very tough because you have to do very short-term forecasting called nowcasting as they're developing. You do this because you're trying to predict a couple of days ahead of time something that hasn't formed yet. The best way to explain the behavior of a storm moving from the sea across land is to use the theory of chaos, where any little change in an air mass (its direction, speed or temperature, for example) can throw the whole atmosphere out of balance. The weather that eventually hit the Northeast began developing in the Pacific Ocean, where there isn't a lot of sensor data. It was only as the disturbance moved inland the computer models started picking up on it. Depending upon when they ran their computer models, some meteorologists were predicting a big coastal storm while others were taking the weather disturbance back out to sea. This was fluctuating back and forth until about Friday afternoon.
After such a snowy start, what can people in the northeastern U.S. expect from this winter season?
Short-term, the current cold snap is becoming more moderate as we head into New Year's weekend and into early next week. But this will quickly be followed later next week by another cold blast of air. Longer range, we're going to see more wintry mix events (rain, freezing rain and sleet) this winter instead of these big snowstorms. The ongoing La Niña pattern, where there are colder than normal sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, favors these types of conditions.
Rights & Permissions
See what we're tweeting about
7 Comments
Add CommentThe bees in July seemed to know it was going to be a hard winter in the UK
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBee warned! LETTERS
| Daily Mail (London, England), The, Nov 12, 2010
Bee warned! BATTEN down the hatches, cram your log and coal stores to bursting, fill the freezer and buy a warm overcoat: you have been warned!
Never in all my decades of beekeeping have I stood in disbelief at my millions of bees and their forewarning.
From the end of July, their hive entrances have been intricately blocked with beeswax to unbelievable proportions. They have prepared insuperable defences against wind, rain and snow that would drown and ravage their hives.
All I ask is: are we doing the same? Are our local councils ready for the ice age ahead? The bees were spot-on last year, the worst and wettest since records began 100 years ago.
And keep a jar of raw honey at hand -- there is nothing better for winter coughs and colds ... GLORIA HAVENHAND, (beekeeper and author of Honey -- Nature's Golden Healer), Troway Hall, Derbys.
r in the UK.
Hey, where is the Piers Corbyn fan club. I bet his secret equations include the "Bee" factor, maybe even squared or cubed, to go along with the solar flare and solar particle data.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is theory of chaos in layman terms?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would say the simplest understanding I have of Chaos Theory is that incredibly small changes can produce incredibly large effects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe example often given is of a butterfly flapping it's wings can cause a hurricane, or something to that effect.
I believe it did originate from studying weather systems, where researchers put data into their models to a certain accuracy as it was as accurate as they could manage and then the discovered that a change in these data of less than would be noticeable at their level of accuracy produced vastly different predictions.
For example if they entered temperature data of 20.00001 Celsius and the actual temperature was 20.000009 or 20.000011, then these changes of 0.000001 degrees would produce vastly different predictions in their models. But all three would be rounded to the same value at an accuracy of 5 decimal places.
I hope this helps, and has not been overly complicated.
Satellite data is the only way to predict storms. The problem is that cloud cover is not being used properly. In the sunlight, clouds reflect sunlight, and so they moderate climate. At night, clouds emit photons toward the ground to moderate night temperature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCO2 lowers surface temperature because ALL 15-micron photons are filtered out of sunlight. CO2 thus acts like clouds to moderate climate. But since ALL 15-micron photons are already filtered out of sunlight, limiting CO2 emissions will NOT alter climate.
Chaos theory is absurd. It is NOT possible for a butterfly flapping its wings to create enough energy to result in a tornado in Texas (which is the original statement)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInstead of blaming the butterfly why not blame the cold front from Canada interacting with the warm tropical energy combinung to form the tornado? The butterfly effect is so small as to be totally irrelevant.
On the weather forecasting subject, why not attribute it to Global Warming, since it is being blamed for everything else. Sorry guys but I am serious!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a paper in www.scribd.com called "Gravity causes Climate Change". This theory says that the potential energy of Earth decreases as it gets closer to the sun, or to other planets, and increases as the planet or sun gets further away. This then controls the total amount of energy that is available to cause weather (along with all the other high & low pressure systems & forecasting in the computer models.)
THe paper identifies that in October of 2010 both Jupiter and Venus were at or near their closest points to Earth. Earlier in the year we saw the hottest year ever, and heat waves and fires in Russia. After this date we have suffered the worst northern winter in decades if not 100s of years. Such a rapid change would occur if we went from minimizing potential energy (& so maximizing kinetic or heat energy) to the reverse where more heat energy is turned into potential energy as the planets move further away (ie our current cold winter) This same phenomenon occurred in 1998 when we last saw the same planets at their closest points. It also happened about 60 years ago as we went from the 1930s-40s heatwaves to a colder climate for the next few decades through the 70s. A similar energy/temperature peak due to the proximity of Venus is also due in January 2014 meaning a milder early winter followed by a cold snap in January 2014.
Perhaps the weather forecasting people can become astronomers and incorporate these absolute (and PREDICTABLE) energy fluctuations into their systems to improve their forecasts?
A question for the beekeepers. Was the increased bee activity evident before the October 24th date when Jupiter reached its nearest point and the effects of a potential energy reversal would have been evident to a sensitive enough instrument such as a bee?