Innovation as Climate Action: Advances in Weather Forecasting

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) invites you to view a briefing on federal policies and programs supporting innovation in weather forecasting, an essential capability to help communities prepare for and adapt to extreme weather.

Weather forecasts rely on a wide array of technologies both on-the-ground and in space: satellites to observe the atmosphere, land, and oceans; powerful computers to run forecasting models; and decision-support tools to interpret and convert forecasts into actionable information. Innovation across these areas can improve the accuracy and actionability of weather forecasts, saving crucial response time.

During this briefing, experts discussed the policies and programs that guide public-private partnerships, emerging weather forecasting technologies, and new business models enabling the government to more effectively tap into private-sector innovation across the weather forecasting value chain.

Highlights

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Some of the most important tools to protect against disaster are weather prediction capacities. Successful forecasts are enabled by teamwork between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and private companies. Since computing power has decentralized, the computational and analytical part of the weather enterprise has disseminated out to many more players. This is fostering innovation. Anybody from a graduate student to a startup company can access public domain data and think about creating new products, new services, new insights. The Department of Defense (DOD) relies on high-precision weather forecasting. Accurate weather forecasts can give a strategic advantage. 2021 was the third-costliest year from an extreme weather disaster perspective. The vulnerabilities associated with extreme weather are directly related to the income and wealth gap. Some groups have more economic resilience to withstand weather disasters. The federal government can support expanded public and private partnerships by graduating commercial data pilot programs to programs of record, supporting joint venture programs, allowing a wider range of flexible contracting vehicles, addressing inequities in current weather monitoring systems, and facilitating more opportunities for federal agency staff to interact with private sector companies.

 

Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee

• Some of the most important tools to protect against disaster are weather prediction capacities. Successful forecasts are enabled by teamwork between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and private companies.
• The bipartisan Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act (P.L.115-25), sponsored by Rep. Lucas, was signed into law in 2017, sparking a concerted effort to get private industry involved in federally-funded weather forecasting.
• Combining the unique capacities of private companies with NOAA’s world-leading Earth- and space-based technologies is improving weather forecasting.
• As a result, Americans can depend on ever-improving life-saving weather prediction resources. NOAA has continued to receive annual increases in appropriations dedicated to commercial data buys.

 

Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; Former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator; Former

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astronaut

• In the 1990s, the weather enterprise was still government-centric. The role of the private sector at that time was quite restricted, and how it should evolve was an active policy question.
• Partnerships between the federal government and the private sector have since blossomed. The commercial enterprise is much larger and more diversified. This advancement has been propelled by consistent bipartisan support from Congress.
• Today, the weather enterprise is open to many more players.
  • Since computing power has decentralized, the computational and analytical part of weather work has disseminated out to many more players. This is fostering innovation. Anybody from a graduate student to a startup company can access public domain data and think about creating new products, new services, new insights.
• NOAA is the country’s environmental intelligence agency. Environmental intelligence is timely information that is about a specific region or topic and is actionable for decision makers. In the case of weather forecasting, it gives us foresight days to a week in advance, so we can plan, prepare, anticipate, preserve, and protect lives and property, and sustain the vibrancy of our economy.
• Today’s smaller satellites and sensors produce more frequent, less latent, and more timely raw data. This data, augmented by artificial intelligence and machine learning and displayed on tailored user interfaces, shortens the link from the observation to the user that needs that insight.

 

Dr. Tim Gallaudet, U.S. Navy (ret.), CEO, Ocean STL Consulting; Former NOAA Acting Administrator; Former Chief Oceanographer of the Navy

• Climate change is a national security issue. Accurate weather forecasts can give a strategic advantage.
• Climate impacts are affecting all Department of Defense (DOD) missions, from the tactical to the strategic level. The DOD has recognized this and released a climate adaptation plan. One of the key elements in this plan is addressing base resilience.
  • Tyndall Air Force Base suffered $4.7 billion of damage due to Hurricane Michael in 2018. At Offutt Air Force Base, the headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command [responsible for nuclear deterrence and DOD's information grid], a runway was underwater after the Missouri River flooding in 2019. About three times per year, floods near Norfolk Naval Base [the world's largest naval station] keep thousands of sailors from getting to the base.
• New U.S. DOD warfighting concepts indicate that the military is going to be increasingly dependent on high-precision weather information. These concepts include:
  • distributing the force across a wider area,
  • technologies like unmanned systems,
  • joint all-domain operations, and
  • information warfare or environmental intelligence.

 

Dr. Marshall Shepherd, Director of Atmospheric Sciences Program, University of Georgia; Former American Meteorological Society President; Elected to National Academy of Engineering

• 2021 was the third-costliest year from an extreme weather disaster perspective.
• The vulnerabilities associated with extreme weather are directly related to the income and wealth gap. Some groups have more economic resilience to withstand weather disasters. Many people do not have the means to evacuate.
• The climate change narrative is ineffective. Opportunities to improve this communication include:
  • Climate extremes are becoming more extreme, and people feel these extremes more than they feel an “average increase.”
  • We measure temperature in Fahrenheit in the United States, so we should communicate about climate change in Fahrenheit, not in Celsius—1.5°C is about 3°F.
  • We need to be telling stories of how climate change is affecting people directly, like in health care, the economy, national security, agricultural productivity, infrastructure; these are the things that matter to Americans.
• We need an Operation Warp Speed on climate change.
• We must be careful about drawing cause and effect relationships between climate change and specific extreme weather events. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a report on what can be attributed to climate change, Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change.
• The zip code is still the most potent predictor of an individual's health and wellbeing. Individuals who physically live on the "wrong side of the tracks" are subject to elevated health threats and more than their fair share of preventable disease.
• The weather-climate gap is a disproportionate sensitivity of certain communities to extreme weather events and a delay in their ability to recover.
  • People of color and low-income communities are disproportionately exposed to the heat island effect [in which urban areas with less shade and tree cover experience higher temperatures].
  • Gaps in the National Weather Service radar network coverage correspond to areas with significant Black populations (in many underserved areas more than 50 percent of the population is Black).
  • Spanish-speaking residents and citizens may not get extreme weather warnings in the intended manner due to translation issues.
• Being proactive with resilience has been shown to have about a 10-to-one return on reducing losses from catastrophic events.

 

Thomas Cavett, Director of Business Operations for Space, Tomorrow.io

• Weather intelligence can bring actionable decision-making tools to governments, businesses, and individuals to improve climate security and the ability to address extreme weather.
• In 2021, the United States saw $145 billion in damages from winter storms, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events.
• In the past, forecasting was primarily done by government agencies due to its expense. Private industry mainly repackaged that data and made few contributions to the underlying technology.
• The weather and climate tech industry is experiencing a paradigm shift. Private industry and companies are leveraging the decades of work from the government and academia and collaborating with the government to drive solutions across the entire value chain.
• A key piece in this change is the orders of magnitude reduction of costs not only for launch capabilities but also for hardware and technology that improves remote sensing capabilities.
• Cloud computing allows companies to run large-scale weather prediction systems that are containerized and easily reconfigurable, so they can be more adaptable to the changes needed.
• Access to datasets and open-source weather models drives scientific collaboration.
• State-of-the-art satellites for space-based radar observations revisit a point only about every three days, making them not operationally relevant for weather models. Tomorrow.io has developed a radar system that can see multiple important geophysical characteristics with a revisit rate of every hour for the entire globe. This can provide valuable insight to numerical weather prediction model accuracy for aviation, shipping, agriculture, farmers, renewable energy production, and just better awareness of and prediction of extreme weather events and their impact.
• This also works to address data gaps. High-income countries and communities have greater data and forecast quality. The infrastructure that collects precipitation data is heavily concentrated in the developed world. Gaps across the world are important since forecasting is based on global data.
• To expand public and private partnerships, commercial data pilot programs should be graduated to programs of record, joint venture programs should be supported, and the government should be less prescriptive to the private sector.

 

Q&A

 

Q: How can government policies better promote industry innovation in weather and climate analysis? What is needed to unleash the next wave of advancements in weather forecasting?

Sullivan:

• NOAA could reach out in different ways to the private sector if Congress authorized NOAA to use a wider array of more flexible contracting vehicles.
• A program for personnel exchange to bring private sector personnel into NOAA for a while could inject fresh thinking into the agency itself.
• Greater flexibility for NOAA experts to work in the private sector would create opportunities for NOAA staff to get a better understanding of what the corporate need really is.
• NOAA tends to get major technology upgrades in the wake of a major disaster. A more regular plan that spans several years agreed upon by Congress and NOAA would better help forecasting and prevent destruction.
• There are many restrictions on federal employees attending conferences, but they are often mind-melding places where federal agency staff can meet people from companies and really understand what those prospects for cooperation are.

Gallaudet:

• Modify the Weather Act to allow federal agencies to work more with the private sector. Agencies would also benefit from Other Transaction Authority, which would provide greater flexibility in contracting arrangements.

Shepherd:

• Twenty-five years ago, there was a palpable tension between the private and public sectors. The American Meteorological Society was an integrating factor that brought these parties together.

 

Q: Where do you see the biggest impacts of climate change on the military and other federal agencies? For the military, how would advancements in weather forecasting help mission readiness?

Gallaudet:

• U.S. operational capability to remain competitive against our adversaries is going to be increasingly at risk, because weather will have a higher impact on these new warfighting concepts. The Arctic, a tough area to forecast, will see more competition.

Sullivan:

• The ability to forecast water availability is very limited. Water forecasting data needs to be available at smaller geographic and time scales (for example seasonally). This information would be helpful to the insurance industry and to resource and water managers at all levels of government.

Shepherd:

• Climate change is causing instability, immigration issues, and conflict.

Cavett:

• In the 1980s and early 1990s, the United States talked about owning the night as a strategic capability. Due to night vision technologies, the United States had a strategic advantage over our adversaries. Now, we must own the weather. Weather can inform our tactical decisions on a daily basis.

• Ground-based radar systems often do not exist where the military operates in the Middle East or Africa.

 

Q: How can advanced weather forecasting help mitigate climate and environmental injustices?

Shepherd:

• For too long, the discussion about extreme weather and climate change has been centered in a realm that was irrelevant to most Americans (e.g., discussions of trend lines and sensitivity analysis). I think people get it now on both sides of the aisle.
• Many people do not have the means to evacuate from extreme weather. We need to enable people to make decisions for their safety. Particularly with rapidly intensifying storms, weather forecasting is important for making evacuation decisions.

Cavett:

• Decades-long climate forecasts are not actionable. The day-to-day impact is what matters the most. We do not get people the right actionable suggestions about what they should do about weather events.

Sullivan:

• Observation infrastructure tends to be concentrated in areas with high concentrations of people and valuable tangible assets, but there are still people in areas without much observation infrastructure that need to be addressed.
• As insurance companies recalibrate their models to evaluate these higher risks, they may find huge swaths of property along our coasts uninsurable. This causes cascading effects like loss of property value, loss of government revenue, and loss of municipal services and support for low-income populations.

Gallaudet:

• Native Alaskans and Puerto Ricans both deserve resilience and disaster relief efforts.

 

Q: What role does the panel see for better weather forecasting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or adapt to climate change?

Cavett:

• Weather forecasting can provide actionable tools to help energy providers make decisions and scale them across a large area. Satellite constellations can provide better clarity. In coastal regions where there is currently not great observation coverage, we will have better insights for wind and solar development.

Sullivan:

• More granular wind predictions may help independent utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric in California better understand what steps they need to take to avoid wildfires. Accurate forecasting a few days ahead of time can also provide the necessary foresight to move loads around with adjacent operators.

 

Q: What are some of the terms of how public-private information sharing arrangements work in practice, and what are the benefits to the federal agencies?

Gallaudet:

• When I worked at NOAA, we negotiated with several providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to move our data storage to the cloud. In return, we helped them discover data and added value to it.
• The Joint Venture Program at NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service allows NOAA to better inform commercial satellite system design and get access to commercial space-based sensors.

Sullivan:

• The private sector has IT infrastructure that NOAA does not, so this cooperation really improves NOAA’s internal operations and makes data more accessible.

Cavett:

• Infrastructure development is one main area of mutual benefit. Private industry can build a satellite constellation at a fraction of the cost and time that the government could.

 

Q: Do you have any advice for the next generation of meteorologists, scientists, naval officers, and army personnel—the next generation of people who will take your positions?

Shepherd:

• We have to inspire students to understand that science is not the enemy.
• Science and technology are going to really be at the forefront of our ability to survive on this planet. That in itself is not only inspiration, but it is motivation as well.
• To excel in this field, develop your data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and coding background.

Sullivan:

• You are a crew member on this spaceship called Earth. You are not a passenger, and you are not a tourist. As an astronaut, it mattered a lot to me to know how my life support system worked and to be able to effectively keep it running. Our ocean, our atmosphere, our weather and climate are our life support systems. To have some command over your own path through life, you want to know how that stuff works.
• In science fields, you are going to have a chance to really make a difference, to really help others live wiser and better lives on this little spaceship of ours where we are all crew members. Study up as if you are preparing for astronaut training because that is your role on this planet.
• Double down on your weaknesses. You do not have to become the Nobel Laureate in math but become five or 10 percent better.

Gallaudet:

• Science is cool. I recommend all early-career professionals and students find the area that is the coolest to them and that they really love. If you follow that path and do what you love, you will succeed in life.

 

Compiled by S. Grace Parker and edited for clarity and length. This is not a transcript