Last week I joined meteorologists in Phoenix, Arizona, for the 95th annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). As you might expect, the meeting included sessions on, among other things, climate change, new technologies for monitoring weather, and the impact on society of droughts, hurricanes, floods, and other kinds of severe weather.
But what might surprise you, if you’re not an AMS member, is that the first two days of the annual meeting are devoted to conferences for students and early-career professionals.
The two conferences were enthusiastically and well attended. The first session I visited was the AMS Student Chapter Town Hall Meeting. Rather than simply hold a free-flowing discussion, the students who organized the session asked representatives from award-winning chapters to form a panel. Each representative described his or her chapter’s strengths and challenges.
For example, the Southwest Pennsylvania AMS chapter was recognized for its “continued, long-standing educational outreach, focus on member education with their first-ever research symposium, strong interaction with other local chapters, and a colloquial series to enhance the career and meteorological knowledge of their members.” Despite that success, the chapter’s representative, from California University of Pennsylvania, admitted that his biggest challenge was recruiting freshmen.
Valparaiso University’s AMS chapter is adept at running conferences. The chapter’s representative explained to the audience and to his fellow panel members that establishing clear roles is key. The chapter’s president, he said, is responsible for finding and inviting speakers, while the vice president is in charge of logistics. And if you’re having trouble recruiting freshmen, designate someone to lure them with social activities.
The next session, Extreme Weather Events, was of particular interest to me. Among the speakers was Jason Samenow, the weather editor of my hometown newspaper, the Washington Post. In an informative and entertaining talk, Samenow described how the meteorological phenomenon known as the polar vortex became a media phenomenon when a change in its usual configuration brought unusually cold weather last winter to Washington and other parts of the US.
Samenow, who is a trained meteorologist and AMS member, lamented some of the scientifically sloppy descriptions of the polar vortex that appeared in mainstream media. For him, the nadir was plumbed when string theorist Michio Kaku, appearing on CNN, described the polar vortex as a “tornado of cold air.”
Graduate student Misti Levy of Texas A&M University explains her poster on the impact of submicron aerosals on Gulf Coast hurricanes to Steve Mueller of the Tennessee Valley Authority. CREDIT: American Meteorological Society
As a writer and editor, I was gratified to see a strong emphasis on communication in both the student conference and early-career conference. In the session on extreme weather events, John Brost of the Tucson office of the National Weather Service pointed out that a meteorologist’s job doesn’t end with the creation of an accurate weather forecast.
In his talk Brost recalled a severe dust storm that struck I-10 West of Lordsburg, New Mexico, last year. Although the timing and location of the storm were both predicted, seven people died in the pileup that resulted when two trucks collided.
“Humble yourself,” Brost told the students and young professionals in the audience. “It’s not always about meteorology.” He urged them to talk to emergency responders, sociologists, and communication experts to discover how to make forecasts more helpful.
As if to convert Brost’s plea into practical advice, the student and early-career professionals conferences held a joint session that consisted of rotating group discussions. Each one centered on an aspect of communication. Participants were challenged to rewrite a weather advisory, to devise a multi-audience communication plan in the event of a damaging storm surge, and to describe a severe weather event—flash floods that follow dry periods—in a way that grabs the public’s attention.
Even if they hadn’t attended the sessions devoted to communication, the students who stood by their posters at the student conference poster session were skillful and engaging presenters. Among my favorite posters was one that had the admirably explicit but perhaps clunky title “Application of the Spatial Synoptic Classification in Evaluating Links between Heat Stress and Cardiovascular Mortality and Morbidity in Prague, Czech Republic.” Its presenter, Aleš Urban Jr of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Prague, explained how his statistical analysis had revealed that heat-related deaths are higher at the beginning, dry phase of a heatwave than they are at the wave’s typically moist conclusion.
The most impressive aspect of the two conferences was not apparent to me at first. As I moved from session to session, walking and sitting among eager, young—and well-dressed!—meteorologists, I began to notice that the people who chaired the sessions and who introduced the speakers were students or young professionals. The conferences not only were for young scientists but had been organized by them too.
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December 14, 2022 12:00 AM
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