World Views: Global Implications of Sandy, Kelvin Droegemeier on International Effects of Weather (Nov 02, 2012)

On the weather's effect on the aviation industry

Up until about 20-25 years ago, we were seeing airplanes crash in so-called wind shear, and there hasn’t been a wind shear related accident for many, many years now because we really had a concerted attack to understand the impact of wind shear on airplanes, and figure out how to correct it, how to observe it, how to help pilots deal with it. So one issue is safety of flight. Another one though, that’s really fascinating that you wouldn’t necessarily think about, is the economics of operating an airline, of diverting an airplane from its destination to another location, but here’s one that will surprise you. If there’s a possibility of weather happening, airplanes will carry more fuel. They’ll put more fuel on board in case they have to divert. Well, since the airplane is heavier, it costs more fuel to carry that fuel to have the possibility of diversion. If you sort-of hedge your bets, and say, “Well, we’re not really sure, let’s just put additional fuel on,” you do that over thousands of flights per day over hundreds of days, all of a sudden you’re spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on fuel. You’re not even burning the fuel, just carrying extra fuel that you never use. So there’s an economic dimension of this that we’ve worked on with various airlines to look at how we can, with better weather forecasting, improve the efficiency of operation.

On transplanting U.S. technology to the rest of the world

We can’t necessarily transplant what we have here in the U.S., and just make it work somewhere else. We might be able to do that from an infrastructure point of view, but in terms of a communications point of view, and certainly societal response point of view, it’s basically impossible. So actually one of the things we’ve been doing here is working with other countries, especially Third World and emerging nations, looking at putting in turnkey systems, because they basically have nothing now. So we talk to them, and work with them in terms of scoping out what they need for their particular problems and challenges, but interestingly enough, it’s really the societal dimensions that are really the most important. You look at why 550 people died last year in tornadoes in this country; we have the most advanced technology on the planet, yet we lost so many lives. The reason is that we’re not completely understanding this problem from a holistic point of view of social behavioral human dimensions, in addition to the technology.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

SUZETTE GRILLOT, HOST: So we’re in the studio today with Kelvin Droegemeier, Vice President for Research at the University of Oklahoma, and meteorologist.  Welcome to the show, Kelvin.

KELVIN DROEGEMEIER: Thanks Suzette, great to be here.

GRILLOT: Very generally, to begin with, what is it about weather that should be interesting to us, or concerning to us?

DROEGEMEIER: Well, I think the thing about weather – everybody has their own personal story to tell.  “When I was growing up, there was a storm that came and destroyed part of our home,” or “I was on an airline flight and I got delayed two days,” or something like that, or “A hurricane impacted my community, and my folks told me the story,” so really, weather is a very personal phenomenon.  But as you say, it’s global, because people are global.  But oftentimes, we think of weather more to our own individual experiences rather than as global phenomena, affecting things like economies.  In fact, water availability is now becoming a very important issue, where really wars and strife are happening because of water.  And water of course relates to weather, and climate patterns, and agriculture, and food production, and sanitation, and all those kinds of things, and ultimately, really is tied back to what happens in the atmosphere above us.

GRILLOT: Well, I mean, it just seems so complicated to me, being able to predict something in a very local way, a very large thing like the atmosphere and the globe, and being able to say, “This is going to happen in your town, or your state.”  I mean, we’ve kind of narrowed it down, to where we can say this certain swath of area is going to experience weather events, but being able to really isolate those and predict them in a much more local manner, is this something we’re heading toward?  Are we going to be able to someday say, “Watch out, Bangladesh, you’re about to have a very isolated incident in a certain location,” and be able to communicate that information then to those who might be affected?

DROEGEMEIER: Right.  Well, there are two parts to your question.  The first part involves predicting very high-impact local weather.  And that’s something actually here at OU that we have pioneered over the past 20-30 years, and that is to say two hours from now, perhaps, that a very dangerous thunderstorm is going to come down Lindsey Street, with a 90 percent probability of this certain characteristics, certain hail size, intensity of precipitation.  They give you that information an hour and a half in advance.  So what we’re really headed toward is a concept called “warn-on-forecast,” where we’re actually thinking of the ability, someday, to provide warnings of very hazardous weather, perhaps even tornadoes, even before the storm is present in the sky.  So that’s something that we are certainly moving toward.  We’ve demonstrated that capability.  Right now, you tend to hear a 30 percent chance of rain this afternoon, a front will come in at 4 o’clock, 80 percent chance of showers, some storms may be severe, fairly general things.  We want to get much more precise and very local, down to the point of, as you say, individual towns, and so on.  But the other part of your question, about communication, is extremely important, because envision how people react now to a Tornado Warning, which is probably 15-17 minutes in advance of the event.  Now we’re saying, “You know what?  We might be able to provide a warning an hour in advance.”  Think of how that changes the whole perception of risk when people are in harm’s way, and they say, “Gee, I don’t see a storm out there, but I know that 90 percent chance of an hour from now, my home is going to get hit by a tornado.” It changes the whole behavior of people, so there’s a whole human social dimension aspect of studying the atmosphere that we traditionally have not really looked at.  It’s all been the physical science side, the modeling.  But now we’re looking at how to properly communicate information to the public, and how the public responds as individuals, as families, small communities, large communities, and even nations.  We don’t really understand that very well, but it’s very important to the problem.

GRILLOT: So that last thing that you just said, Kelvin, I really want to pick up on, and that is this notion of communication and response.  Not just communicating to the public, but their response, and whether we’re talking about here, locally, the United States, or around the world.  Weather tends to be a spectator event, or sport, right?  People actually go out and chase weather, or they stand and they watch some unusual, let’s say, wave patterns on a beach in Southeast Asia, and then there’s a tsunami.  So these things tend to fascinate us to the extent that we don’t necessarily respond in the way that would be a way to save one’s life….

DROEGEMEIER: Right.

GRILLOT: …It’s something that you really kind of gawk at.  I remember standing on the front porch of my house as a young girl, with my parents, watching the tornadoes coming at us before we run and take shelter.  So how can we change that to where people really understand that these are violent events, and that you really have to be conscious of the violent response, and of course act accordingly.

DROEGEMEIER: Right.  That’s a great question, and I think at the root of the answer is we have to collaborate and engage with social scientists, behavior scientists, and study how people actually behave and react, and you’re right.  We have tended to focus in the past on communicating information like the cone of uncertainty of a hurricane looking to make landfall.  We’re used to seeing those on TV.  So it turns out if you get social scientists to actually do surveys in the scholarly methodology of social science, it turns out a lot of folks when they’re asked a question they really don’t understand what that means.  Well then when they respond, and they respond in a way that seems odd to a meteorologist, it turns out we’re conveying information that makes sense to a meteorologist, but not to the general public.  So we really have to, in some sense, climb inside the heads of people that really understand not only what the interpretation of the information is, but once they have it, as you say, how they’re going to respond.  They’re sort-of awestruck by the atmosphere.  The atmosphere’s an incredible thing.  It’s beautiful to those who live in it, study it, we just love it.  But on the other hand, sometimes people can get caught off-guard.  So I think that’s the part of the challenge of weather prediction and forecasting and so on.  It really is, in my mind, one of the most exciting opportunities and avenues and horizons today.  It is a true integrative approach to studying the atmosphere.  We get social, behavioral scientists, and economists working together with hydrologists to study where the water goes on the ground, below ground, and atmospheric scientists all working together, sharing each other’s information and ideas.  Where the social scientists really know how to study human behavior, meteorologists don’t.  Sometimes they think they do, but in reality they don’t.  I think we’ve awakened to that reality in the past several years, and here at OU we’re doing some very innovative things in the social sciences aspects of weather and climate.

GRILLOT: Well, there’s certainly a lot of room for additional knowledge, and the building of knowledge in this area.  One of the things I know you’ve worked on is the industry response, and how, for example, the aviation field responds to weather instances.  Clearly airplanes are affected by what’s going on in the atmosphere, and I’m not going to claim to know anything about how airplanes fly.  They’re really a mystery to me.  As is the atmosphere, but let’s bring these two things together that are kind of a mystery to everyone.  How is it that we can help the industry respond to something that it’s dealing with every day?  Weather – planes are flying in and around, all around the world, at all times, in and around atmospheric activities.  So how is it that you work with them to manage this?  It clearly has an impact on global issues, in the sense that it does affect when we get on a plane, and travel around the world, weather is a factor.  How are you working with them to have an impact on this?

DROEGEMEIER: There are several ways weather impacts, say aviation.  One of course is safety of flight, which is really the foremost thing.  Up until about 20-25 years ago, we were seeing airplanes crash in so-called wind shear, and there hasn’t been a wind shear related accident for many, many years now because we really had a concerted attack to understand the impact of wind shear on airplanes, and figure out how to correct it, how to observe it, how to help pilots deal with it.  So one issue is safety of flight.  Another one though, that’s really fascinating that you wouldn’t necessarily think about, is the economics of operating an airline, of diverting an airplane from its destination to another location, but here’s one that will surprise you.  If there’s a possibility of weather happening, airplanes will carry more fuel.  They’ll put more fuel on board in case they have to divert.  Well, since the airplane is heavier, it costs more fuel to carry that fuel to have the possibility of diversion.  If you sort-of hedge your bets, and say, “Well, we’re not really sure, let’s just put additional fuel on,” you do that over thousands of flights per day over hundreds of days, all of a sudden you’re spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on fuel.  You’re not even burning the fuel, just carrying extra fuel that you never use.  So there’s an economic dimension of this that we’ve worked on with various airlines to look at how we can, with better weather forecasting, improve the efficiency of operation.  And this is certainly true for other modes of commerce.  For example, surface transportation, where you’re moving goods and services across the country, and just in time-delivery of fruits and things like that, where a day or two delay means potentially losing the whole shipment.  When you aggregate that over very, very large numbers of companies over many hundreds of thousands of shipments and so on, it’s huge.  Even ships carrying grain on the seas.  If the water temperature is not right, and you mis-forecast it, the grain will start to germinate, and all of a sudden the whole cargo is absolutely lost.  So you try to forecast ship routes to where the water temperature is right, but also its efficiency for fuel burn, and moving in the right direction, the wind, and so on.  So it’s really interesting.  In fact, even some companies will plan their sales and issuing flyers and sale coupons based on the weather.  For example, if there’s a front coming through three days from now, they know it’s going to get cold.  They may say, “Well, we’re not going to have a sale because we know people are going to be buying coats and jackets,” and they actually use the weather for strategic advantage.  The military has been doing that for a long time as well.  So there are some really fascinating dimensions with the private sector, and the money issues and the amount of money on the table is absolutely astronomical.

GRILLOT: Well, it’s interesting to hear all the ways in which weather affects our lives, and we don’t even know it.  Some other ways in which weather affects our economy, you mentioned briefly food prices, for example.  The drought, or floods of course have an impact on food prices, but oil prices, right?  We have an incident like we did not too long ago in the Gulf.  Hurricanes, for example, that have an impact on oil rigs in the Gulf, or that have an impact on refineries on the coast.   What are we to make of how weather affects the economy in this way?  And what can we do to mitigate that?  Obviously prediction, and being able to shut these things down, and minimize that, but is there really any way we can weather-proof our economy?

DROEGEMEIER: Yeah, that’s a really great question, and sort-of the term en vogue right now is “weather-ready nation” which is something the National Weather Service coined, that we at OU, and our NOAA colleagues, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are really heavily involved with, and it’s not so much weather-proofing, but being ready for weather.  Now, there are some things you can mitigate loss, by moving out of harm’s way, but ultimately in the built environment, if stuff gets destroyed, there’s not a whole lot you can really do about it.  But you can, in terms of things like climate change, be thinking about how sea levels might change over a period of time.  Building in zones that are not going to be prone to flooding in case of a hurricane, building dykes and things like that, and berms that would prevent flooding.  But ultimately, you have to try to be resilient.  I think resiliency, whether you’re talking about whether climate change is really the key thing, and certainly in Oklahoma we’re looking at potential shifts in climate that could cause changes in our growing season, even in the crops that we produce.  Changes in precipitation patterns.  Of course, then there’s the insects that come and, oh my gosh, there is so much there in terms of disease, the spread of disease.  Say a prevalence of mosquitoes, West Nile Virus – the complexity of this is really mind-boggling.  But ultimately it’s related back to the atmosphere, and all these related factors, as you say, whether it’s destruction in the Gulf that then has an effect on oil production, which has an effect on the economy, the effect on the economy affects a hundred zillion other things.  Everything is connected.

GRILLOT: So, one last thing.  So we’re talking about technology and prediction, and you mentioned all the wonderful ability we have here in the United States in particular, and in the developed world.  What about the rest of the world?  Where weather is just as problematic, so what about them?  How do we help them be able to predict these things, and more or less “weather-proof,” to the extent that we can, their economy, their society, their ways of life?

DROEGEMEIER: Yeah, that’s an incredibly important question, and one that’s difficult and involves truly understanding other societies and other cultures.  We can’t necessarily transplant what we have here in the U.S., and just make it work somewhere else.  We might be able to do that from an infrastructure point of view, but in terms of a communications point of view, and certainly societal response point of view, it’s basically impossible.  So actually one of the things we’ve been doing here is working with other countries, especially Third World and emerging nations, looking at putting in turnkey systems, because they basically have nothing now.  So we talk to them, and work with them in terms of scoping out what they need for their particular problems and challenges, but interestingly enough, it’s really the societal dimensions that are really the most important.   You look at why 550 people died last year in tornadoes in this country; we have the most advanced technology on the planet, yet we lost so many lives.  The reason is that we’re not completely understanding this problem from a holistic point of view of social behavioral human dimensions, in addition to the technology.  We’re certainly moving in that direction very, very quickly.  But I think it goes to show you what kinds of challenges you have, even if we put in all the great technology.

GRILLOT: Well, Kelvin Droegemeier, Vice President at the University of Oklahoma, thank you for joining us on World Views.

DROEGEMEIER: Thank you Suzette, I appreciate the opportunity.

Copyright © 2012 KGOU Radio. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to KGOU Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only. Any other use requires KGOU's prior permission.

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