Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Student Concern for Future of Operational Forecasting

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Very recently, I got the following note from a student. While such e-mails arrive on occasion, this one (in bold) was uniquely thoughtful and thought-provoking, as you’ll see in my somewhat long-winded response, reproduced below it in italics. This represents a strong concern I’ve heard from several undergrad and grad students over this decade, and it’s likely just smoke from a larger fire of worry out there in student-land. So I’m addressing it here for a broader audience, using that correspondence.

This entire package has become a second supplementary BLOG entry here to the original post (read first). [Here was the first supplemental entry, from 2018 (read second).]

    I’m writing you as a junior mathematics student who has (for most of my life) had an absolute fascination with weather, particularly severe convection, and the forecast process. I enjoy forecasting severe weather as a hobby and pastime and am considering graduate school in meteorology. My question is: What do you view as the future of the role of humans in the forecast process? What I’ve gathered from several sources, including your blog (which I enjoy reading a lot, by the way), is that humans will likely always play a role in the process, especially in short term and high impact forecasts. Do you think this is an accurate view, especially in light of initiatives like NWS Evolve? I would hate to pursue this field professionally only to find out in 5–10 years that the job I want doesn’t exist, or doesn’t exist in the form that I would want to work in.

Thanks for writing.  My personal thoughts outlined on that BLOG entry (which of course don’t necessarily represent my employer) are still valid in the era of “NWS Evolve“.  The direction clearly is more toward automating single-variable forecasts like temperature, wind, and so forth, especially days out, and converting more and more forecaster time to short-fused, targeted, higher-impact priorities like warnings and watches, and to what’s called “Decision Support Services”.  That’s basically bureaucratic lingo for communicating with power users of forecasts:  emergency managers (local, state, FEMA), media, law enforcement, other government agencies at all levels, and direct-to-public engagement (such as social media and online briefings).

Understanding of meteorology still will be as important as ever.  It has to be.  You cannot fully and effectively communicate what you don’t understand.  Some people with highly polished speaking or writing skills, but deficient in understanding, can skate by for awhile with audiences of less expertise.  They look and sound like they know more than they do.  However, eventually they will make a mistake based on that lack of knowledge, and lose credibility for preventable reasons having nothing to do with normal forecast error.  In what we do, credibility is everything.  Do everything you can to earn and keep it!

That’s why your undergrad math and graduate meteorology degree(s) won’t be useless, but MUST be supplemented with good communications skills—written and verbal.  I can tell from the quality of your e-mail that you’re off to a good start on the written side.  Keep it up!  Enhancement of writing skills (even if already good, like yours) is a necessary and career-long process.  Take advantage of opportunities for public speaking and accepting critiques of that, too. The higher-impact the forecast, the more communications skills matter. 

I know it’s an overused cliche, but it’s true in this science:  it also helps nowadays to learn to code.  Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s when the NWS forecaster depended more completely on applications of science theory, I didn’t have to.  You will.  Fortunately any good degree program will include that as part of the curriculum, and I hope you’re already taking advantage of both required and elective programming opportunities.

Communication also is increasingly important on the forecast floor, as the process is more cooperative and multi-person in nature than ever.  [I’m trying to avoid the bureaucratic buzzword, “collaborative”.  :-)]  I lean heavily on my colleagues with good coding skills in my research and forecasting, through the tools they develop.  I depend on them in live situations, for specific meteorological experiences I still haven’t seen.  In turn they learn from my decades of experience, conceptual understanding, attention to analytic detail, and deep immersion in the science.  Anymore, forecasting on an island on shift is a dying concept.  Nobody can know everything, and consistent excellence depends on input of others who also have expertise.

I cannot promise the job (especially at a local-office level) won’t evolve out of a form that you would want to work in.  Maybe it will.  Maybe it won’t.  Science conceivably could be de-prioritized or centralized, orphaning the local level to one of weather communicator only, or consolidating scientifically based forecasting in fewer and fewer physical places.  If that happens, I don’t know how long it would take—it’s largely at the whim of higher-level managerial policy and priorities. 

That’s why you need a good backup plan (that I gambled on not having!) to operational meteorology, just in case.  The good news is:  that’s still years off, if at all, and you can and should accumulate the skills you’ll need to adapt to that and any other reasonable contingency.  But don’t abandon the dream before pursuing it, just because the job might change in unfulfilling ways.  It may not, or you could find yourself in an unforeseen opportunity that turns out to be a “blessing in disguise”.  In the meantime, I find no better calling than providing the best forecasts humanly possible to the local offices, media, storm spotters, and EMs, and through them, the taxpayers at large who depend upon us.  If you are thinking along those lines, then please, go for it, all-out.  We and the taxpayers certainly could use such talent and motivation.

Sorry for the verbosity…you got me going on a near-and-dear topic. 
🙂

I hope this helps. Good luck with your studies!

===== Roger =====

Election 2016 Part 6: State Initiatives, Final Thoughts

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In the previous and penultimate post of this six-part series on the 2016 election, I covered the more necessarily (and needed) aspect of the fallout: left-wing self-examination, with trails of hope leading to what I hope is a hill of humility for the left wing. Alas, more recent events (one tip of iceberg, and another) leave me highly skeptical such humility is prevailing over bitterness and resentment. It’s as if two wrongs (Trump’s online dishonesty and insults, followed by the left’s) do make right?

Regardless, the passage of time will reveal a lot more about both Trump and the left, and we’ve got four years to address such. In the meantime, I want to take a relatively brief, final look at the election through the lens of subnational initiatives, specifically those in Oklahoma. A few of them are most interesting and have both Okla-centric and possible regional ramifications.

State Question 792

As a social conservative and spawn of the inner city, where the problems derived from alcohol abuse were numerous, obvious and devastating in surrounding streets and households, and who has dealt directly with the destruction caused by drunk drivers, I’ve long stated that I would eliminate all alcoholic beverages with the snap of a finger, for ever and ever, if I could. Not blessed with that power, we have to decide what to do with them.

In time, government has proved to be a terrible legislator of alcoholic beverages, with Byzantine, illogical, inconsistent (in space and time) and sometimes unconstitutional rules for them. Even nationally, the vacillation has been ridiculous; witness the 18th Amendment designating Prohibition, only to be followed by the 21st Amendment’s repeal of the Prohibition. That’s embarrassing on the world stage, not to mention a massive waste of time and tax dollars, to amend then un-amend one’s own Constitution on the same subject, in short order. Get it right the first time or don’t bother!

Ultimately I realize that the responsibility for responsible consumption is up to the individual. Laws against drunken behaviors exist for a good reason and should be enforced with fierce rigor. In Texas, full-powered beverages long have been sold in grocery stores, unlike Oklahoma, and liquor stores (much to my dismay) still exist and thrive after all these decades.

When I first got to Oklahoma and learned of the horrendously complicated Blue Laws and varying regulations revolving around 3-point vs. full-strength beer, and in what sorts of stores each may be sold, and on what days at what hours, my first thoughts were: “What kind of hopeless and stupid labyrinth of rules is this? Who does it benefit? Liquor stores and their lobbyists of course — certainly not consumer choice! What does it prevent? Certainly not drunk driving, which is a notorious problem here! ” My vote:

Over three decades too late, but better late than never, voters resoundingly approved this state question, which the liquor-store industry fought against even putting before The People. The fact that The People weren’t trusted to exercise the sovereignty of The People over themselves and their government told me all I needed to know about how to vote, aside from my objections to the stupid rules themselves.

While the change did not go far enough toward simplifying liquor laws and leveling the playing field between types of businesses, it’s great progress. The worst part is the timing — not until 2018! That’s crap. It should take effect immediately. Damn the liquor stores and their hollow victimhood-whining and booze-sale-funded lobbying. They should have seen this coming and been prepared years in advance, using successful Texas counterparts as templates. Foresight, foresight, foresight…

State Question 780 and 781 (dependent on 780)

These collectively changed a variety of low-grade drug crimes to misdemeanors from felonies and redirected incarceration savings to rehab and mental-health treatments. For similar reasons as above, I hate the fact that mind-altering drugs, including pot, even exist. Their very use outside medical purposes is selfish, often destructive and expensive to society at large, and immoral; and I would make them disappear in an instant if I could. But that’s not happening, and we need to concentrate law-enforcement efforts on the supply side with education and rehab opportunity in mind to reduce demand. My vote:

Prison overcrowding is a major problem here as well, which was a motivator behind this and another part of the proposal that increases the monetary level of some property crimes needed to trigger a felony. I’m glad this passed also. The most appealing part is a surprising bit of ingenuity (for here anyway) that prison-cost savings could be claimed by privately run rehab organizations. Good move.

State Question 779

This measure would have increased some of the already highest state and local combined sales taxes in the nation another penny to THE HIGHEST IN THE NATION (see previously linked graph and compare at the 9.77% level). Why? Supposedly to fund public education. First of all, the current education-funding problems were brought about by a lack of rainy-day foresight over many years on the part of the legislators and both Democrat and Republican governors. And we’re supposed to pay the price for the shortsightedness of these dolts? Then came all the pleas to emotion and whiny sob stories designed to psychologically manipulate voters into supporting “the teachers” (when actual benefit to teachers would be minimal). My easy vote on this:

Go back and do it better, and smarter, than this knee-jerk, regressive crapola. One place to start: low-population Oklahoma has over 500 school districts for 77 counties! Ridiculous! They’re not still running the Pony Express north of here, nor do we get around on horse-drawn carriages and convey fastest messages by telegraph. There’s no good reason, in this era of instant communication and online education, to have more than 10 counties or school districts. Consolidate school districts and eliminate all that repetitive overhead and bureaucracy. Then go from there toward taxing mineral revenues at levels comparable to similarly oil-endowed, socially and fiscally conservative states like Texas and North Dakota.

Furthermore, why does anybody trust the state government to get this right, be honest and allocate such funds as stated–much less those who are most often hotly critical of state government for being untrustworthy? Remember how the state lottery was supposed to save education and ended up way oversold and offset by cuts elsewhere? Why is anyone so naive as to think this would be any different? Give a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians an inch, and they’ll take a mile.

There’s a good reason a lot of rank-and-file teachers (as opposed to their dues-collecting unions or out-of-state meddling busybodies) opposed this measure. Their own taxes, and those of their friends and loved ones, would have increased as well–and regressively in the form of a sales tax, no less.

Last Words on 2016 Election
Finally, as promised, I chose the most conservative down-ballot legislative candidates; nationally those choices won, statewide there were no senators up for election in my district, and my most-conservative state-representative candidate did not win (likely since this is a slightly left-leaning university town). So that goes.

Whatever else happens with Trump and the G.O.P. Congress, good or bad, I can take some consolidation the confidence in the most important legacy action (aside from the dealing with the national debt, which likely will be avoided): Supreme Court nominations. The more strictly Constitutionally constructionist and originalist, the better on this, since the Constitution is the first, last, and only binding legal word from the great Founders themselves on the role of Federal government.

While even Scalia and Thomas sometimes wandered too far off the literal words of the Constitution for my taste, they have represented the closest possible in the modern era to the true purpose of our highest jurists — not to interpret the Constitution, but to apply it. The two terms are not synonymous, and the Constitution’s black-and-white words are quite straightforward. Those words don’t need interpretation; they need application to problems of governance and federalism. With conservative and relatively originalist justices, we can shift the Court back off its dangerous, falsely fluid-Constitutional, trend- and fad-based, subjective, social-whim-based, interpretive leftist slant, hopefully for the remainder of my lifetime with a couple of justices roughly my age currently under consideration.

Critiquing a Critical Essay: “Friends”, Cultural Degradation, Education, and David Hopkins’ Pandering

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In the Dallas Morning News, David Hopkins wrote what initially appears to be a mildly iconoclastic essay on the cultural implications of the 1990s pop-fad TV show, Friends. I found the opinion piece (this version of it anyway) thought-provoking, even if I did not agree with some of his points.

Background: In the ’90s, I quite deliberately chose never to watch a single episode of Friends or Seinfeld, precisely because they were popular with most of my 20-something, cultural-conformist, Gen-X age peers. Same went for the ’80s when I was a teen with Cheers, Roseanne, Family Ties, etc. Same applied to when I was a pre-teen kid in the ’70s (Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, MASH, etc).

There are and were exceptions, of course. As an adolescent I loved Dukes of Hazzard as unpretentiously mindless redneck entertainment and for Daisy…Dallas because of its clearly cartoonish, self-parody character portrayals, hometown scenery and of course the women who were easy on the eyes…and Miami Vice for the tropical scenery, fast action with guns and explosions, and, naturally, hotties in bikinis. Don’t infer a lustful common denominator too deeply, however; I did not watch Baywatch when it was a hit.

Regardless, Dukes, Dallas and Vice were not that popular with most of the people in my age group, in my schools, for whom I had little or no respect. Some bug in me connected the shallow, anti-intellectual, vain, self-interested, shortsighted, superficial, materialistic behavior of the bulk of those peers, poor and rich alike, with trite chatter over their favorite situational comedies, and I wanted nothing to do with those shows or (for the most part) those peers either. It was as if they were too caught up in the here and now, the herd mentality, the illusory realms of culture and fashion and “what’s in it for me” selfishness. Even non-conformity itself became conformist: pretentious, inauthentic, and obviously image-driven…to wit: punk rock, Goth dressing and Madonna.

So it is from that perspective that I found the essay most insightful. The more I learn about most of those shows, the more glad I am not to have wasted time with them. Yet the author seems to blame “Friends” or any other shows for the cultural vacuousness and degradation, when instead they were merely reflections of them. Without a demand for such material, it wouldn’t have been broadcast! While I don’t deny that pop culture influences society (that would be foolish and dishonest), the demands for the mental opiates of self-gratification, vanity and materialism are there regardless of what pop-fads and cultural media are created to satiate them.

The premise of the show as blame aside, he rightly implores people to put down the remote, stop cluttering their minds with pop-cultural fluff, and read actual books. Hear, hear! Critical thinking seems to be a skill whose commonness curve asymptotically approaches zero.

The volume of younger society wielding analytic thought fails to touch the aught line only through two saving factors. The first is a decided minority of parents who emphasize critical assessment of the world and its messages with their children, from earliest ages. This includes the notion that not every idea being pumped into one’s mind by a teacher is a valid one. Think independently! Of course, it’s up to the kid to follow through; some do, some don’t, giving in to peer pressures and worldly cultural mores out of convenience and expediency, and yes, conformity.

The second saving grace involves the perseverance of a small cadre of intensely curious young people over an educational system that has done them great injustice, and public schooling in particular. Catering to the lowest common denominator and perpetuating the glorification of personal victimhood, our educational system deprives kids of the manifest benefits of strenuous academic rigor in favor of “feelings”, “self-esteem” and slow-creep spread of sociopolitical propagandizing in curricula.

In that sense, I fully endorse this plea of the writer, who was himself a teacher, and as such bears the credibility to say this: “The public education system is broken. Educate yourself, so you can be part of the conversation.” Moreover, don’t just educate yourself on matters of agreement. Learn deeply the other side of the issues, to understand them better, and if for no other reason, so that you can more effectively battle the arguments (a fundamental concept as old as the strategic teachings of Sun Tzu).

One bit of self-contradiction did stand out: If Hopkins advocates reading and writing instead of wasting time on shows like Friends, why was he “binge-watching” it? Ouch. An inconvenient truth, methinks…

Regardless, and refreshed at having encountered a needed essay advocating imploring critical thought and intellectual involvement, a happenstance occurrence then soiled the experience. I stumbled upon a link to another version of the essay over on medium-dot-com, this one peppered with profanities.

Those who know me personally will attest that I’m not above cussing sometimes, and even have written just a few potty words on these virtual pages. However, the fact that a non-profane version can appear in the Morning News and make all the same points just as effectively proves intrinsically that the profanity was gratuitous, done for theater only, as targeted for the audience of that medium (pun intended). That’s called pandering. Yes, pandering! It’s obvious to me that this writer infused the “medium” version with cuss words solely for the sake of appearing edgy to that presumably younger and more culturally hip audience. That sounds like something a devoted pop-culturalist would do.

As such, the writer lost my respect just as he was gaining it. For the authentic iconoclast, for the essayist who truly is secure in his own skin, what’s good for one audience should be good enough for all–no weak-spined theatrical pandering. It’s too bad that a valuable message on avoiding the herd mentality, and on thinking for oneself, had to be diluted by the sideshow rubbish and self-contradiction, all of his own (un)doing. It appears Mr. Hopkins still has much growth to do as a writer. And so he gets here what he attempts to dish out to culture.