Bringing the science of weather to Worcester

This year's Southern New England Weather Conference was held at Holy Cross on Saturday. About 140 amateur weather nerds and professional meteorologists, including those we see on TV, spent a cloudless day discussing weather reporting, forecasting, and climatology.^[1]. Through the presentations, discussions between sessions, and in the Twittersphere, a couple themes kept showing up:

1. How do yo engage the public, particularly school kids, in science, in general, and meteorology, in particular?
2. How do you convey scientific information, with all of its nuances, uncertainty, and urgency, through often fractious channels of media and government, to an impatient public?

Next year, I will try to bring one or more of the grandchildren. I think that they would have enjoyed hearing  someone such as 11-year-old Dew Butler, who maintains stormtopia.com, give a weather analysis that was sharp, funny, and fun. They'd be intrigued by Matt Noyes of NECN and his disarmingly easy-going approach to science education. Jonathan Byrne is both the Mad Scientist and thoughtful educator, bringing the best out of our students. Even the technical analysis of a meteotsunami, dense with math and physics, is pretty cool when you see a video of boats bouncing around Boothbay Harbor on an otherwise calm day. They might have wondered while some of the adults teared up a bit at Barry Burbank's tribute to Don Kent, who passed away this past year.
Winter weather is more that just knowing how much it's going to snow. Some storms, such as our 2008 Ice Storm and sundry blizzards, can be life-threatening and economically devastating, not to mention keeping kids in school until the end of June.
Forecasting severe and dangerous weather, including hurricanes, is so much better now that we miss completely the worsening ability to get urgent news to the public. Bryan Norcross of the Weather Channel and America's Emergency Network, compared his experience with Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to our situation today. While we're able to forecast with much greater accuracy now and we have cell phones and all manner of Internet-based communications, we're less effective in being able to handle such a situation without power.
The problem of the last mile, getting official news to people in a emergency, has worsened in our hyper-connected lives.Our cell phone networks don't support broadcast messages. ("Send a reverse 911 to all Verizon Wireless subscribers.") Our TV and radio stations have cut back on their news staffs. Many radio outlets, for example, do not have local staff at all, except for an engineer to receive and rebroadcast a satellite signal. Those stations that do have local staff are often concentrated in large cities, leaving outlying areas without meaningful news. And, even if  the radio stations can do the job, fewer people are likely to have a battery-powered AM/FM radio in their homes. It's these issues that America's Emergency Network is helping us solve. These are also issues that can engage young people, helping us keep our emergency supplies, including a working radio, in ready condition.
The people we watch regularly, such as Kevin Lemanowicz of Fox25, Tim Kelley of NECN, who does the only Worcester-specific broadcast, Burbank of WBZ, who visited Holden last year, and Noyes, are very approachable. They appreciate the challenge of balancing the  roles as TV personalities and scientists. They understand the complexities the weather in central Massachusetts. They'll be thoughtful as some guy launches into a discourse on probabilistic forecasting, risk analysis, and our culture's poor grasp of statistical analysis. Grandkids (and children and spouses) might roll their eyes when they hear talk like that, but these folks are patient and respectful.

Joseph D’Aleo's winter forecast

And, then, few minutes later, they become as excited as school kids. They talk about long-range indicators suggesting a pattern of wintry weather next week, leading to a discussion about the overall prospects for winter.(It may snow a lot.)

^[1] Last year's conference was visited by a frontal passage, bringing a squall through the region and sending the weather folk to the windows.

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