The conference was judged by everyone to be an outstanding success, with over 260 participants attending (the most ever), and with sessions composed of unusually good scientific papers and presentations.
The conference was opened with an Icebreaker on the 22nd Floor of the Capitol Building. During the week, the weather cooperated and there were side trips to Pebble Hill Plantation, Thomasville, Maclay Gardens, the Supercomputer, and the most memorable -- Wakulla Springs. The conference was suspended Wednesday afternoon and approximately 180 people enjoyed the boat rides, swimming, and nature walks at the park. That evening the conference banquet was held at Angelo's Seafood Restaurant (formerly Favors) in Panacea. Everyone enjoyed the distinctly Floridian atmosphere and agreed that it was the best conference banquet ever.
The Local Arrangements Committee members were: Werner Baum (Arts Sciences), Beth Brieir (FSU Conference Center), Michael Devine (Graduate Studies and Research), Susan Fell (SCRI), Kenneth Johnson (SCRI), Robert Johnson (Graduate Studies and Research), Joseph Lannutti (SCRI), Pat Meredith (SCRI), Sharon Ray, Peter Ray (Meteorology), David Stuart (Meteorology), and Cynthia Wheatley-Lovoy (Meteorology).
A registration fee of $50.00 for this conference includes the costs of the banquet, cocktail party, continental breakfast served at the Conference Center and a copy of the proceedings. The corresponding rate for spouses is $25.00.
People all over the world would benefit from accurate forecasts of El Niño as it does have far-reaching implications for economic and government planning. Dr. Gray at Colorado State University predicts the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will decrease if an El Niño occurs. In addition, El Niño has been linked to weather in the United States and to fisheries the world over. El Niño is blamed for almost all unusual climatic occurrences on the planet Earth. Figure 1 shows the flood and drought areas typically associated with El Niño
Wyrtki realized that it was the easterly trade winds that kept the status quo. He hypothesized that if the trade winds decreased or reversed, the ocean would change through an internal sloshing called an equatorial Kelvin wave. The warm water in the west would decrease in thickness, but stay the same temperature. The thermocline in the east off Ecuador would deepen 50-100 m. As a result, two things would happen to the ocean heat budget along the equator. Some of the warm water in the west would be transported to the central Pacific. In the east, the phenomenon of equator upwelling (mixing between the ocean layers) would decrease, and the ocean would no longer be able to efficiently diffuse the heat of the sun downward. The ocean would warm 1-3 C over a large area.
In 1976, Harley Hurlburt, John Kindle and I published a paper that explained how the physics of Wyrtki's hypothesis worked. At FSU, Harley had been studying the ocean circulation off the coast of Oregon. He changed our computer code to simulate the Wyrtki idea by changing the effect of the Earth's rotation from its value at 45 N to 0 and by changing the winds from northerlies to easterlies. John Kindle calculated the currents in the upper and deeper ocean, the shape of the thermocline, and the shape of the sea surface. We forced the easterly winds for 50 days and achieved the expected status quo simulation. We relaxed the easterlies, and a giant Kelvin wave propagated eastward and toward the poles on the eastern boundary. Wyrtki was correct!
No one had ever seen an equatorial Kelvin wave. No one had ever run a field experiment to observe this phenomenon, which courses the Pacific for two to three months.
Tony Busalacchi ran the computer simulation, which took about 150 minutes on the CYBER 760. We took the output from Galapagos Island and compared it to the observed sea level changes. Bingo! The weak El Niño of 1963 and the moderate El Niño of 1965 and 1968-69 were present. We had simulated all the ups and downs of El Niño for ten years. They were all due to Kelvin waves coming in from the western Pacific. In subsequent years, we analyzed winds from 1971-79, and successfully simulated the sea level response to the El Niño of 1972 and 1976-77.
Inoue developed a forecast of a major El Niño based on the dependent data for 1961-69, but we needed to try it on an independent case. We obtained all the wind data for 1980-84 from NOAA, Ashville, NC. A new team of meteorologists headed by David Legler analyzed the wind stress for 1980-84. We ran our test on the independent 1979-84 data. It hindcast, that if we had run the wind data in realtime, we would have predicted the 1982-83 El Niño after receiving the April 1982 wind data. This would have been about six months before scientists realized it was underway. Figure 2 plots the ocean characteristics predicted by our model against those actually observed from mid-1978 through mid-1987.
We decided to try to predict the next El Niño We needed wind data from the ships in the Pacific in near-realtime. Usually, we had to wait a year to get data from NOAA, Asheville. NOAA's Climate Analysis Center in Washington, D.C. came to the rescue. They agreed to provide us with all the ship wind data transferred over the global transmission system at the beginning of each month. This was only a fraction of the data that would be available from NOAA, Asheville. Would it be enough?
Each month, we receive the data for the previous month by the 10th. We analyze the winds, run the model, and predict an estimate of the excess or deficit of warm water. If it exceeds a critical amount, we issue a private forecast to NOAA and scientific friends that a major El Niño probably will occur.
After May 1986, we issued such a forecast. An El Niño occurred in the summer of 1986. It was not a giant one like the 1982-83 El Niño However, it did contribute to the warm, wet winter of 1986-87 in the southeast U.S. It did influence the prediction of the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic in 1986 and 1987. It is contributing to the drought in Asia.
We continue to run our forecast every month. We look forward to better wind data after NASA and the U.S. Navy launch a satellite in 1991 that will have a scatterometer on board. This instrument bounces microwaves off small ocean waves and collects the small amount of back-scatter. If the scatterometer works, by 1992 we will be able to have a wind stress map every five days on a grid of 100 km in the tropical Pacific.
We continue to run the forecast and Dr. Bill Gray, CSU, calls us every May to find out our forecast so he can prepare his hurricane intensity forecast.
The first Seymour Hess Doctoral Dissertation Award was made in 1985 when Richard Pasch, currently at the University of Miami, and Heng-Yi Weng, currently at Florida State University, were joint winners.
Like many in our field, Dr. Fuelberg became interested in ``the weather'' at an early age. Fifth grade students, back in his hometown of Navasota, Texas, belonged to a paperback book club. They ordered one book each month. One time, the future Dr. Fuelberg ordered Oliver Becomes A Weatherman, and from that point on he was hooked on meteorology. He began to take daily observations using an apple crate as an instrument shelter, a hobby that he still pursues, although with somewhat better instrumentation.
Dr. Fuelberg has a long standing interest in thunderstorm development and storms' impacts on their surrounding atmosphere. Some of his early research utilized special data from the Atmospheric Variability Experiments (AVEs) and Project SESAME to explore storm-environment interactions using the methodology of energy budget analyses. Among his findings was that storm complexes, even rather small ones, alter their environmental flow fields, especially the divergent wind component, which assumes a far greater than usual influence. This conclusion is important because prognostic numerical models generally do a poor job of simulating the divergent component, perhaps contributing to forecast limitations at subsequent times.
Dr. Fuelberg's more recent research has sought a better understanding of the pre-thunderstorm environment through the use of satellite products, especially water vapor imagery and derived soundings of temperature and humidity. These satellite products are used in conjunction with all other available information. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center currently is sponsoring a portion of the research, which focuses on typical summertime convection over the southeastern United States. The project utilizes data from the Cooperative Huntsville Meteorological Experiment (COHMEX), which was conducted over northern Alabama and central Tennessee during Summer 1986. Special surface, radiosonde, satellite and other types of data were collected during the period. The research focuses on typical summertime convection over the southeastern United States, not on severe storms.
The example of COHMEX-related activities shown in Fig. 1 was prepared by Fuelberg and graduate students Ron Schudalla and Anthony Guillory. The analysis depicts satellite-derived dewpoints at 620 mb on 17 June 1986. The most interesting feature is the small southward extension of dry air over central Tennessee. It had developed during the previous 3 hours and was accompanied by surface dewpoint falls as great as 7 C in a single hour. The area along its southern fringes became quite unstable leading to rapid thunderstorm development along the Alabama-Tennessee border.
A related research effort seeks a better interpretation of the widely used 6.7 micrometer water vapor imagery available routinely from GOES and other satellites. Dr. Fuelberg and doctoral candidate Brad Muller are using model-derived soundings of temperature and humidity as input to a radiative transfer algorithm, thereby creating synthetic water vapor imagery. Various types of kinematic diagnostic tools then are employed to understand the evolution of the image features. A strength of the technique is that the imagery is completely consistent with the underlying atmospheric processes involved, not suffering from data limitations. Figure 2 shows trajectories ending at 465 mb on 0300 GMT 7 March 1982. The dashed line indicates the location of a dry image area at 1200 GMT, while the dash dot line shows its location 15 h later. The deformation and subsidence producing the narrow streak are readily apparent.
Fuelberg believes that characteristics of satellite-derived soundings have not been adequately described and that this has caused some people (even himself) to use them in inappropriate ways. To shed light on the issue, he and graduate students Jay Breidenbach and Steve Olson are about to complete extensive ground truth evaluations of soundings from the GOES VISSR Atmospheric Sounder (VAS). They are finding that the soundings are very first-guess dependent, with the profiles frequently being little better, or even no better, than the first guess provided by NMC's numerical models. Similarly, time trends of VAS retrievals are not as good as they had expected. These limitations hopefully will be improved with GOES NEXT, now planned for first launch in Fall 1990. Fuelberg is even more excited, however, about the potential of the High Resolution Interferometer Sounder (HIS) that was designed by Dr. Bill Smith at the University of Wisconsin. The instrument was flown on high altitude aircraft during COHMEX to evaluate its characteristics and consider its deployment on later satellites. In conjunction with Dr.Smith, Fuelberg and graduate student Tom Bradshaw are examining some of the HIS aircraft data and using them in diagnostic case studies.
NASA's Kennedy Space Center is the sponsor of a recently initiated project on thunderstorm related research. Since lightning is so common over central Florida during summer, and because it impacts virtually all of KSC's outdoor activities, they have a critical need for better thunderstorm forecasts. Once again, the goal of the research is to use satellite imaging and sounding technology to better understand the pre-storm environment. In particular, Fuelberg will explore why thunderstorms develop along the sea breeze front on some days and/or in some locations, but not on others. Graduate student Wayne Hoepner will spend part of the summer at KSC to work with NASA scientists and Air Force forecasters to gain first-hand information about the local conditions. The installation at KSC of some of the most technologically advanced data sources makes it a fertile region for research.
Although Fuelberg is proud to call himself a ``synoptic meteorologist'', he is quick to point out that the field has changed greatly in recent years. It is no longer just line drawing, but involves a synthesis of all types of data, employing whatever advanced mathematical and computational tools are available. He likes to tell his classes of beginning seniors that a synoptician is like a detective, looking for clues in the data that will lead to better understanding and better forecasts. It is a job that Dr. Fuelberg truly enjoys.