Real Change News | Storm Front

May 20, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 24

Feature

Storm Front

Meteorologist Cliff Mass on the weird, wild atmosphere of the Seattle area. And with a passion for sound math education, he’s not just talking about the weather.

Photo by: Adam Hyla , Editor

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Like most people, we in the Pacific Northwest like to talk about what’s going on outside. It’s more than a way to pass the time; discussing the weather allows for a basic picture of current conditions inside ourselves: how our individual temperaments and life histories inform our view of the skies above.

The moist and moderate climate of western Washington and Oregon seems to some like a gray monotony. Does it get you down? Maybe you’re from a place like New England or the Midwest, where seasons change with a bang, not a whimper. We’re gloomy, damp, gray and overcast until sometime in April, or maybe May, when nature kicks out a kettle-drum crescendo of pink blossoms and red tulips. On a sunny spring day there’s nowhere better to be than Seattle.

In a city so young, the weather is a focal point for pride and consternation to be embraced or despised in place of a cultural artifact. That’s perhaps why Cliff Mass enjoys such popularity.
Mass, a professor in the department of Atmospheric Sciences at UW, is a regular on NPR affiliate KUOW 94.9 FM; he leads his listeners in dishing the week’s outlook. And from his place of influence he’s rained down criticism on the state of math and science education, undertaking a fight with the Seattle School Board over teaching math in the city’s troubled public schools. On May 6, the board voted 4-3 to install a curriculum Mass despises.

Apart from campaigns with the school board and preparing for drastic cuts to his academic program, Mass gets time to read from and sign his book, “The Weather of the Pacific Northwest” (University of Washington Press) on May 22 at the University Village Barnes and Noble.

I want to start off with the question of how weird you think the weather has been this year. It seems like it took a really long time for the spring to come around.

This has been a very cold winter and spring. It has been unusually cold, and staying cold. Month after month has been below normal. So it is an unusual year. It has been a cold year, and basically it’s a continuation of the year before. Last year, last spring was very cold.

Is there any reason for this?

Well, it depends what you mean by reason. We know the weather pattern that’s associated with it — we can call that a reason — but if there’s a deeper reason, that I can’t tell you.

Do you see weather related evidence of climate change?

Here? Not much here. This is the area that you’d expect global warming to happen last and weakest. We’re going to see it, but so far it really hasn’t been very significant here. And it makes a lot of sense. Land will warm up more than the oceans, and it turns out the eastern oceans warm up less than the western oceans, and we’re downstream of an eastern ocean. In fact, over the last 30 years the eastern Pacific has actually cooled down.

If you look at the temperatures of the air coming in, they haven’t changed in the last 30 years. And you look at the snow pack: It hasn’t changed in the last 30 years. It’s going to happen, but it’s going to be slow here.

The glaciers have decreased.

They have. The main snow pack hasn’t, but the glaciers have decreased, and the question is why.

One reason is we’re seeing a very long time change. It used to be a lot colder in the 1800s, the little Ice Age. And the glaciers are still catching up to that. And the summertime temperatures are warming up and the glaciers are sensitive to that. That might be the only hint of global warming here right now.

But you certainly do believe global warming is happening worldwide.

Yes, definitely, and in fact I’m working on research on this quite actively, and trying to find the local implications of global warming. Basically we’re applying the weather forecasting models that we perfected for the region, and we’re running them 50-100 years out. And the bottom line is that it’s exponential: The warming here is going to start slow, then it’s going to increase dramatically at the end of the century. It’s going to happen here, but we are fortunate to be downstream of the ocean.

The sort of things that have been predicted elsewhere like catastrophic droughts will happen to us?

No, the global climate models do not suggest that the annual precipitation will change much here, even 100 years from now. When you warm the planet there’s more evaporation of the oceans, which means overall the planet will get wetter. There are a lot of fallacies floating around, like the storms are going to get stronger and we’re going to get more floods, and there’s really no basis for any of that.

You were involved in a recent study saying most people don’t understand the meaning of the saying “20 percent chance of rain.” You were basically testing what I think of as weather literacy.

I guess you can call it that. It’s a project that we have on probabilistic weather predictions. A lot of people misinterpret that information. They think it’s going to rain 20 percent of the time, or over 20 percent of the area.

What does that lead you to think about how meteorologists describe their work? Should they describe their forecasts differently?

We’re going to have to find ways of communicating more effectively. What makes this important — and the reason [psychologist Susan Joslyn] is involved in this — is the whole technology of forecasting is going toward probabilities, not just in precipitation by everything else.

It’s not accurate, it’s not scientific, to say, “The temperature four days from now is going to be 63 degrees.” You watch one of these TV guys, and you’ll see the five-day forecast and the 10-day forecast and they’ll have one number, right? Well that’s nonsense.

There’s tremendous uncertainty in that information, and we actually are gaining the ability to predict the uncertainty. So what we should be saying is: On day five there’s an 80 percent chance that the temperatures will be between 64 and 68. So we need to give everything in terms of probabilities. That’s the only honest way to communicate weather.

What if people don’t understand?

Well, that’s why we have [Susan Joslyn]; she’s exploring how people understand uncertainty. So we first have to determine how people interpret things and then we have to find the most effective way to communicate it. People in the advertising business know about that. They’ll say 20 percent off, not 80 percent full price.

As a professor of meteorology do you find the weather forecasts on the news and TV all that helpful?

I don’t need them but I may watch them to see the satellite picture or the radar picture if I’m at home or something and don’t want to turn my computer on.

You must find them entertaining.

Some meteorologists have a real good idea of what they’re talking about and actually have real degrees. Then there’s some of the weekend people, who don’t know what they’re saying. They point to the wrong thing on the satellite pictures — things like that. A lot of people don’t have degrees at all, they’re just communicators.

Who would you recommend people watch?

Certain people I like: Jeff Renner. I like MJ McDermott on Q13; she has a degree. I like Steve Poole. We actually have pretty good weather people in this town. We’re lucky.

What did you think about the weather when you got to Seattle?

Well, I liked it so much I studied it for the rest of my life. [Laughs.] I came here for graduate school. And I really was intrigued by the local weather features.

Like what?

Like the Puget Sound convergence zone. The air goes around the Olympics and converges in the North Sound and you get these clouds, precipitation in North Seattle, Edmonds or Lynwood, or sometimes as far north as Everett.

What’s your favorite local weather phenomenon?

The convergence zone is probably my first one. But I’ve studied dozens of them. I mean they’re all interesting. My book’s full of them.

I was really fascinated to read how
our mountains have so much to do with this.

Oh yeah. They have everything to do with it. It’s the oceans and the mountains, that’s what dominates our weather. Everything else is a detail.

What’s the weirdest weather event in the Northwest?

We can have very extreme weather here. It can be very mild and then things can happen. We can get big windstorms that are equivalent to Category 2 or 3 hurricanes. We have tornadoes here occasionally. We have these extreme weather events where it’s really localized. Like Enumclaw can have 110 mph winds and it can be calm here. That’s probably the most interesting: how extreme the weather can be and how local the extremes can be.

I really enjoyed, and didn’t know about, the controversy with Seattle’s math textbooks, until I saw the post on your blog. What’s the issue there? Why would three school board members be so in favor of it?

The trouble is it was recommended by this stacked committee, led by someone who doesn’t even have a math degree, with no mathematicians.

Could this be called the new math?

It’s called Reform Math, Discovery Math, Constructivist Math. The basic tenet of this — and it’s completely unproven — was that the only way kids can learn a math principle is by discovering it themselves. You discover things, you write long essays. Some of these math books have no equations in them.

It’s most harmful for the kids they’re trying to help. That’s the great irony of it. If you’re wealthy, no problem: You send your kid to Kumon [a math and reading learning program] or something.

And these math textbooks, they’re self-contained. In the old days, if the teacher was no good the kid could take the book home and get their parents to read it and try to figure out what’s going on. With these math books, you can’t do that.

It would just be a tragedy if we lost another generation of students. It’s very personal to me because I see them coming in here. I teach [Introduction to Atmospheric Sciences] and give a diagnostic exam to these students, and they can’t do fifth grade math. I’ve had students in here crying because they really want to be meteorologists, but they can’t. Their math is so bad they can’t fix it.

How are the UW budget cuts going to affect the next generation of meteorologists?

There’s going to be a lot less people getting in here. And we’re the only Atmospheric Sciences department in the region, so some of them, if they don’t get in here, they’re not going to go into Atmospheric Sciences. Another issue is teaching assistants. In [the introductory class] I’ve 240 students, generally. In the past we’ve had three TAs, and I need every one of them. If I don’t know the student personally I want the TA to know the student and be able to help them one-on-one, and have more than just multiple choice homework questions. We need these TAs. A month ago they told me I’d have only one.

And they’re probably going to take away my telephone. It turns out the department pays $20,000-$30,000 a year for all the telephones in the department. And each of these rooms has a telephone. That’s a lot of money. So if you have a choice of having a TA for one course, or people having their telephones, you pick the TA, and most people have their cell phones. No office phones.

I think the University is going to change now. Tuition is going to go up. But I think the mix of students is going to change too. We’ll need more out-of-state students. [The state is] kind of casting us loose, and we can become like the University of Michigan: more out-of-state students, high tuition, high-aid model. That’s what’s going to happen probably.

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Comments

Hi ,

I just want to know something. I lived in oregon my whole life and never seen weather like yesterdays . I need to know,“How normal are tornadoes in Oregon”. It just seem wierd to me.

Carmen

carmen huertos-martinez | submitted on 06/05/2009, 2:50pm

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