Charlie Phillips

This explanation is a little above my pay grade, but I got some interesting tidbits out of it. Thanks!

It has been a long winter… in fact, it has been the coldest winter in a generation! Check out Cliff’s latest blog on it.

http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-coldest-winter-in-generation-for.html

WONDERFUL post Charlie!!! I agree wholeheartedly with your “investment economics” view of weather services.

Of course, for the past 20-plus years Republican Party ideology has been dominated by the capitalism-always-good-government-always-bad mentality. Rather than seeing the two spheres as complementary to each other, as most trained economists do. There are things that central governments totally stink at doing, and there are some things where government blows the private competition away. The American public needs to understand this basic fact of economic science.

When it comes to weather forecasting…we have two real weak spots in the PNW. One is the lack of an Oregon coast radar. The other is the Columbia Basin winter inversion mechanism. Particularly for Portland, both of these come into play in potential snow/ice storms. The models kept trying to push the cold air out of the Columbia Basin during December through mid-February, but time and time again the stubborn low-level airmass and high pressure ran circles around the forecasts.

Better modeling of the relationship between sun angle, airmass temps and inversions east of the Cascades will go a long way toward improving our forecasting between October and March.

Hey Karl, thanks so much for the compliments! I’m not a trained economist, but my understanding of capitalism is that it works great when there is competition. When things turn anti-competitive, wealth inequality skyrockets, prices go up, and capitalism fails to function properly. That’s why government has the authority to break up monopolies.

We need something like the National Weather Service to provide “official” warnings people can trust. If the Weather Channel issues a tornado warning based on doppler radar signatures but Accuweather doesn’t, who are you going to trust? Competition doesn’t work here – it could cost lives.

What’s really frustrating is even the GOVERNMENT seems to be playing this “competition game” with our tax dollars. Just look at the Department of Defense… the Navy (NOGAPS) and Air Force (previously WRF, now UKMET) operated in separate spheres, with little collaboration. The NOGAPS is an inferior model compared to the GFS, and the fact that the Air Force ditched an American model for a British one is just plain depressing. These organizations are acting like private enterprises with trade secrets… the only difference is we are funding them in doing so. I could go on and on… there are way too many hurricane models, and I believe we should decommission the NAM. Bottom line: it makes far more sense to have one excellent model than a than a few good ones and a ton of mediocre ones.

At the Pacific Northwest Weather Workshop, Cliff Mass actually talked about the tendency for the WRF to overmix, especially in Portland during Columbia River Gorge outflow events. This was because like most models, the model layers of the WRF contour terrain, and the mixing in the model physics was occurring on these sloped layers, resulting in more vertical mixing. There was an option to have purely horizontal mixing in the WRF, but there was a bug in this and it didn’t run. It was FINALLY fixed earlier this winter, and when the UW implemented this feature, the tendency to overmix cool Gorge flow in the Portland Metro area was MUCH less. The current WRF from the UW now uses the horizontal mixing option.

Thanks Joel. Yes, climate change will bring an increase in the severity and/or frequency of many types of severe weather, particularly heat waves (and fires), hurricanes, floods, and droughts. Weather disasters cost the US tens of billions of dollars of damage each year… funds dedicated to better models, forecasts and subsequent preparation could pay off with a single storm!

Thanks Sara! And yeah, get those term papers done! 🙂