Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Reflections on a Quarter Century of Storm Forecasting

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As of last week, I have been forecasting and researching severe storms (in SELS-Kansas City and its Norman successor) for 25 years, not counting prior time at NHC and NSSL. That’s 1/4 century of living the dream of a tornado-obsessed kid. Much has transpired professionally and personally in that time span, most of it decidedly for the better. The only negative is that I’m a quarter-century older. Give how little I knew then compared to now, and how little I knew about how little I knew, maybe the geezers of my youth were right, in that youth is wasted on the young.

The science of severe-weather prediction has advanced markedly. More is understood about the development and maintenance of severe storms than ever before. Numerical models also are better than ever, yet still riddled with flaws known to forecasters that belie their hype as panaceas. Most weather media, social media weather pundits outside front-line forecasters, and far too many Twitter-active pure researchers and grad students exhibit naivete and ignorance about both the flaws of models in applied use, and the still-urgent need for humans in forecasting (yes, forecasting, not just so-called “decision support services” a.k.a. DSS).

Fortunately, most of those who actually do the job — the experienced severe-storms-prediction specialists who are my colleagues — know better, and incorporate both the science and art (yes, art!) of meteorology into forecasting, to varying extents. Yet pitfalls lie in our path in forms of several interrelated ideas:

    * Automation: Even if the human forecast is better at a certain time scale, at what point does the bureaucracy (beholden to budget, not excellence) decide the cost-benefit ratio is worth losing some forecast quality to replace humans with bots that don’t take sick leave, join unions, nor collect night differential? I wrote in much more detail about this two years ago, and that discussion touches upon some of what I am re-emphasizing below. Please go back and read that if you haven’t already.

    * Duty creep with loss of diagnostic-understanding time: Cram more nickel-and-dime, non-meteorological side duties into the same time frames with the same staffing levels, a social-media nickel this year, a video-briefing dime the next, and something must give. In my experience, that is analysis and understanding, which in an ironically self-fulfilling way, stagnates human forecast skill (and more importantly, sacrificing concentration and situational understanding) whilst allowing models to catch up. Knowing how bureaucracy works, I suspect this is by design.

    * Mission sidetracking – “DSS” including customized media and social-media services: I don’t deny the importance of DSS; in fact I support it! Outreach is good! Yet DSS should not be done by the full-time, front-line forecasters who ideally need to be laser-focused on meteorological understanding when on duty, and making forecasts the most excellent possible. DSS should be a separate and parallel staffing with social-science-trained specialists in outreach everywhere DSS is required. Otherwise, quality above what the models can provide (which still is possible, especially on Day-1 and day-2, and in complex phenomena like severe and winter storms) will be lost prematurely and unnecessarily.

    * Loss of focus — see the last two bullets: A growing body of psychological literature resoundingly debunks the notion of “multitasking”. We lose focus and delay or dilute accomplishment when concentration is broken and interruptions occur. Management should be focusing on reducing, not increasing, distractions and interruptions on the forecast desk. Forecast quality and human lives are at stake.

    * De-emphasis of science in service: Physical and conceptual understanding matter in the preparation of consistently high-quality forecasts — especially on the complicated, multi-variate area of severe local storms. These are not day-5 dewpoint grids, and this is why my workplace has published more scientific research than any other publicly funded forecasting office, by far. Tornadoes, severe hail and thunderstorm winds are highly dependent on time and space overlaps of multiple kinds of forcings that models still do not often handle well, partly because of the “garbage in, garbage out” phenomenon (input observations are not dense enough), partly due to imperfect model physics and assimilation methods. Severe-storms specialists must have both self-motivation and continued support from above to understand the science — not only by getting training and reading papers, but by writing papers and performing research!

    * Model-driven temptation to complacency: This is a form of Snellman’s meteorological cancer. I wrote about some of these topics here 13 years ago in far more detail, under the umbrella of ensemble forecasting. Please read that discussion! I see no need so far to amend any of it, except to add thoughts about focus and concentration (above). If forecasters don’t think they can improve on a model, even if they really can, or just don’t feel like making effort to do so amidst other demands for time, they’ll just regurgitate the output, at which point their jobs can (and probably should!) be automated.

    * Meddling in the mission by distant, detached bureaucratic ignoramuses. Schism between upper-management assumptions and real front-line knowledge is a common theme across all governmental and corporate bureaucracies, and is nothing new across generations. In my arena, it manifests as lack of understanding and appreciation for the difficulty and complexity of the work, and in the difference in respecting the absolutely urgent need for direct, devoted, focused human involvement. The very first people with whom policy-makers should discuss severe-storms-prediction issues are the front-line severe-storms forecasters — that is, if knowledge and understanding matter at all in making policy.

At this stage of my career, I’m neither an embittered old cynic nor a tail-wagging puppy panting with naive glee. I never was the latter and I intend not to turn into the former. Instead I observe and study developments in a level-headed way, as both an idealist and a realist, assess them with reason and logic, and report about them with brutal honesty. I doing so, I’ll say that there is cause for both optimism and pessimism at this critical juncture. I’ve covered the pitfalls (pessimism) already.

How can optimism be realized? It’s straightforward, though not easy. We must continue to grow the science, emphasize the human element of physical and conceptual understanding (including the still-important role of human understanding and the art of meteorology) in such complex and multivariate phenomena, use ever-improving (but still highly imperfect!) models as tools and not crutches, study and learn every single day, minimize distractions/disruptions, and most of all, focus on and fight for excellence!

I’m now decidedly closer to retirement than to the start of my career. Yet you can count on this: you won’t see me coast, nor go FIGMO, nor be merely “good enough for government work”! Such behavior is absolutely unacceptable, pathologically lazy, morally wrong, and completely counter to my nature. The passion for atmospheric violence still burns hot as ever.

Excellence is not synonymous with perfection, and the latter is impossible anyway. I will issue occasional bad forecasts, and I hope, far more great ones. Regardless of the fickle vagaries of individual events, I must start each new day for what it is — a different challenge ready to be tackled, compartmentalized unto itself, not the same as the great or crappy forecast of the previous shift. I must settle for nothing less than consistency of excellence in performance, lead the next generation by example in effort, and advance the science further. I’ll be pouring the best reasoning I know into each forecast, even if that is necessarily imperfect and incomplete. I’ll be doing research and writing more papers. I’ll be educating and speaking and writing and raising awareness on severe-storms topics, trying to pass understanding on to both users of the forecasts and forecasters of the future.

I’m paid well enough, and the taxpayer deserves no less than excellence in return for his/her investment in me. That is my driven purpose in the years remaining in full-time severe-weather forecasting.

Norman: Keep Rejecting Storm-water Utility

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In 2016, Norman voters overwhelmingly rejected a new storm-water utility. I was one. Yet mayor Lynne Miller and most of the city council either misread the results as the opposite of what they were, or just as damning, deliberately ignored them, with statements of brazen Orwellian doublespeak such as this quoted in the linked story: “…citizens have moved way far down the road in understanding the need for a stormwater (sic) utility.” Wrong! The citizens did not see a need for it, hence, the vote against it! Duh…

A year and a half passed and along came yesterday’s city council elections, wherein most candidates with a position on the matter expressly or implicitly favored such a new utility — and by extension, higher effective taxes paid by the citizenry in the form of its inevitably additional sets of fees. Credit one of those candidates, Joe Carter from Ward 2 (not my ward), for at least having the guts to solicit input, even as he seemed to favor the idea in a Facebook post. My initial response (edited lightly for grammar, usage and typos, addition for your benefit in brackets):

——

    Here is the problem: that is a new bureaucracy, with its own structure and overhead, its own managerial ladder and administrative lattice, in parallel to an existing water and sewer utility, itself with an administrative ladder and lattice, under whose umbrella storm-water management can and could function with less overhead and greater efficiency.

    That, along with some ridiculous treatment of the relatively minuscule coverage of impervious surface in the rural majority of Norman’s land area (as if it were urban), caused the resounding downfall of the storm-water utility in the referendum.

    Do it better if you’re going to sell the concept, because as it stands, the majority of us aren’t buying the sales pitch.

——

Again, to his credit, he responded to my comment by asking for my ideas. Folks who know me understand well that I most certainly will offer lots of ideas unsolicited; when you solicit them…well, be careful what you ask for, lest you get it. Here’s the feedback I provided:

——

    So you’ll know, for background: I’ve been living here off and on since August 1985 (with stints in Miami and Kansas City). Because I work rotating shifts, including a lot of night shifts, I’m afraid I cannot reliably serve on a citizen’s board or council (at least until retirement). So these ideas are freely provided for you and anybody else to put to use until such a time as I can put more direct effort into advocating for and executing them. I hope it’s not necessary, because it will have been done by then!

    This is long and will be delivered in two parts, because the issue is not as simple as the referendum made it seem, and needs to be attacked two ways.

    PART 1: Need for separate utility bureaucracy?

    Short answer: Not necessary. Keep it all in existing water/sewer department. Add a wastewater division.

    Long answer: It’s water. Thematically, it fits in the existing administrative and physical-overhead latticework of water/sewer. An entirely separate, parallel bureaucracy, with its own separate tree of administrative salaries and physical overhead, is overkill, and not a streamlined and efficient use of taxpayer dollars.

    Instead, waste-water drainage should be, at most, a division within the water/sewer department, sharing computational resources, office equipment/supplies, top-level (highest-salary) managerial oversight, and physical office space. This is in order to run more economically and efficiently, and to promote better collaboration and cooperation through physical collocation.

    If the existing office space is insufficient to expand slightly by introducing a new division, it probably won’t handle any future growth of the water/sewer department as Norman itself grows, regardless. Therefore leasing larger space through competitive lease-bid processes would be forward-thinking and cheaper than waiting 5-10 years to do what will need to be done at some point, anyway. Think 3 or 4 chess moves ahead! As for any eventual billing to pay for waste-water improvements: itemize it within the existing water/sewer bills using the same overhead and resources.

    PART 2: Solutions for analyzing use and assessing storm-water fees

    Short answer is not possible. See long answer.

    Long answer: It’s physical and logical folly to treat rural Norman the same way as urbanized Norman for the sake of storm-water drainage. Urban (and much of suburban) Norman drains off larger aggregated concrete areas per square mile, largely into storm sewers that vector water rapidly into the river with almost no time for natural settling and filtration. Rural Norman drains off far less concrete per square mile, into a mix of surrounding ground and creeks. The land uses are not the same. The collective imperviousness is not the same. The drainage is not the same. Therefore the per-square-foot storm-water assessments must not be the same. If we are to fairly pay for storm-water mitigation, it should be done on one of two bases, or a combination of both:

      * Presence or lack of storm sewers draining the plat. If storm sewers drain the property, higher cost per square ft of surface area.

      * Percentage of property covered by impermeability (instead of absolute amount). Rates are paid on a sliding scale so that (for example) a concrete-covered parking lot with only a strip of curb grass pays the highest rate, whereas a rural acreage with just a house and gravel or dirt driveway pays far lower. Obviously undeveloped land pays bottom. There’s incentive here to reduce impermeability, if that’s a goal, but it does not unfairly penalize the rural landowner. [Concept: A 2500-square-ft house surrounded by 5 acres unpaved land (with just a driveway) will offer less roof runoff to the river or lake than one on a small city lot emptying straight into storm sewers.]

    Also, for either or both solutions, grandfather in existing development at a rate substantially less than new development built after the effective date of the statute. This encourages smarter, more permeable newer development.

    Yes, this is more complicated than the original referendum and will require explaining, probably with a flow chart. But it is fairer to all and more taxpayer-friendly.

    Thank you.

——

Now these ideas are not some 137-page impact-assessment report chock full of statistics, figures and bureaucratic bingo-lingo. Yet they represent a fairer and more thoughtful way of dealing with the matter of dirty and noxious runoff than an entirely new bureaucracy that just is not necessary.

Now let’s see if Joe Carter (who won in a landslide) and others are willing to take serious note of the concerns of the “no” voters, and not ignore or whitewash them. In a municipality of over 100,000 that doesn’t install right-turn lanes on newly rebuilding major intersections, still hasn’t synchronized its traffic lights citywide, 40+ years after some other cities around the nation — and which has not installed a smart-light system to adjust traffic signals fluidly for traffic volume, trains, events, and flow patterns — I am highly skeptical of its competence of city planning in all areas.

Bernie Sanders Fans: How to Overcome Socioeconomic Ignorance

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Bernie Sanders lost in a rigged and patently unfair primary process over a year ago to the neoliberal establishment candidate and paid Goldman Sachs shill, Hillary Clinton. I get that. I agree with that. However, it’s time to grow up and lose the notion that what he had to say substantively was worth the electrons used to broadcast it to your screen.

Bernie-lemming “democratic socialists”: what is your major malfunction? Your very slogan — democratic socialism — is a self-contradictory, oxymoronic, and just plain moronic load of bull cookies.

Equality and fairness are not synonyms! We may be loved equally in God’s eyes, but God did not give us equal genetics, sizes, shapes, interests, intellects, or talents. No matter how hard I try, I cannot play basketball like MJ. MJ was not constructed to lift weights like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold could never be the kind of scientist his fellow German-speaker Einstein was. Einstein wasn’t able to be on Mozart’s musical level…and so forth.

We each, individually, have different individual abilities, purposes and motivations. That’s true diversity! We are not made to benefit equally from economic outcomes, and therefore, we should not.

Socialism innately dissuades both diversity and productive quality. When you force equal outcomes across unequal individuals, by whatever sociopolitical means, you disincentivize productivity because (please read carefully!) human nature is fundamentally both selfish and survivalist. That’s just the cold, brutally honest truth, and you are not going to change that. People want reward for work, and consistent with human nature, that means money to buy what they both need and want. Having things provided for people “for free’ (at someone else’s expense, naturally) only incentivizes dependency. Dependency, in turn, yields sloth.

It’s not your job to decide what someone else should or should not possess — despite the patronizing attitudes of white liberals toward minority “needs”, and despite the fundamental arrogance of the socialist myth that the rich man’s money belongs to others who haven’t earned it. Yes, humans at all levels of the ladder are fundamentally selfish, economically. Anecdotal exceptions of altruism aside, people by in large demand tangible incentive (capital) to produce, to create, to innovate.

Less innovation, less incentive, less progress, less efficiency, slower gains, and loss of personal freedom…is this what you want, you fools? Because if you entrust centralized, federal Big Bureaucracy to mechanisms now done by for-profit business (however imperfect they are now), they will become more imperfect, more inefficient, with bigger overhead, less creative, slower, and more wasteful. Such is the historical, inherent, unavoidable, and inevitable nature of distant and detached central bureaus. If you do not believe this, then for once, study history. Or if in government, join a federal employees’ union, like I have — ironically, being a union member has shown me more than I ever could read in a textbook about the ineptitude, nefariousness and oppressiveness of upper management in a governmental bureaucracy!

There’s a lot more to this than I can give you here, and you need to do most of the lifting and learning yourself. For starters, though, look up and read and watch the related material from two highly regarded economists: late, Nobel-prizewinning economics professor Milton Friedman, and the Jim Crow-era North Carolina/Harlem-raised black economist and writer, Thomas Sowell.

Their expertise and credentials in these issues are much greater than yours, and you need to learn from them. And after doing so, don’t come back to me with the ridiculous and baseless arguments akin to, “That was then, this is now, we are better.” No provable basis exists for that argument. It is a logical and rhetorical recency fallacy, a head-in-sand mentality that ignores precedent and reality, in favor of a nonexistent Utopian dreamland full of unicorns crapping Skittles.

Consider health care and public policy…Bernie vs. Friedman:

And more general discussion on the end game of socialism itself:

In fact, in the last 100 years, the great majority of the tangible economic and efficiency gains in modern society are the result of capitalistic business. Yes, here in the U.S., government research developed many great ideas (lots of basic science and tech research), along with some horrible ones (nuclear war and forms of eugenics) that get ignored by pro-bureaucracy socialists. Private enterprise also developed others (such as Texas Instruments with the transistor…look where that has gone!). But only capitalistic business and its incentive to profit and make jobs took them from the ivory towers and flourescent-lit labs, made them real and mass-producible and tangible and workable, and put them into your hands. Never, ever, ever forget that.

      “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

      “Social injustices are clearly greatest where you have central control.”

      “Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.”

      “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

— Milton Friedman

      “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

      “Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.”

      “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

      “When Senator Sanders cries, ‘The system is rigged!’ no one asks, ‘Just what specifically does that mean?’ or ‘What facts do you have to back that up?’ In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that.”

      “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

— Thomas Sowell