NOAA has a number smart, dedicated scientists. I was privileged to meet many of them at the memorial service for my Father-in-Law, Katsuyuki Ooyama, or as he was familiarly known to his colleagues "Vic" a name he chose for himself once he recognized the difficulties that many of his colleagues had properly pronouncing "Katsuyuki." Vic Ooyama was an advocate computer modeling to analyze information regarding the tropical storms and develop means to forecast their intensity and track them. The models he produced are still used today as part of NOAA's hurricane tracking forecasts.
His fundamental importance to the field in which he worked can be seen not only in the research papers he produced but also in the fact that he was cited in Chris Mooney's book: Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. The last 20+ years of his life he spent at NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, a part of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML). Here is a brief description of his of his professional career from the AOML newsletter for January/February 2007 (scroll down to fifth page):
In 1973, [Ooyama] departed New York University to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Ooyama became part of a research team focused on the field program planning, execution, data quality control, and data Analysis of the Global Atmospheric Research Program’s Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE). GATE, conducted in 1974, was a massive, complex international experiment aimed at advancing the understanding of the tropical atmosphere and its role in global circulation. Ooyama worked tirelessly for several years to develop a new statistical interpolation technique to synthesize upper air sounding data collected during GATE from a wide array of observing systems. The dataset he helped create became the definitive dataset used almost universally.
Ooyama joined AOML’s Hurricane Research Division in 1980 as a senior research scientist. During his 23 years with the Division, he tackled a variety of challenges related to improving the understanding of tropical cyclones, particularly the application of advanced numerical methods to three-dimensional modeling. Ooyama published three landmark papers on numerical modeling that earned him three NOAA distinguished
authorship awards. [...]
His development of scale-controlled objective analysis methods based on b-splines became the foundation for many of the numerical applications developed at HRD, e.g., the barotropic tropical cyclone track model (VICBAR and LBAR), the hurricane spline analysis used in the hurricane wind analysis system (H*WIND), and a non-hydrostatic model used by many colleagues. Ooyama retired from federal service in 2003 but continued collaborating with colleagues and conducting research. His last published paper appeared in the January 2006 issue of the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences (Hausman et al., 63(1):87-108).
I should add that tropical cyclone track model "VICBAR" is named for him and despite its relative age is still considered a valuable tool in forecasting hurricanes and as a basis for developing new and better computer models. Vic Ooyama was little known outside the field of atmospheric and tropical cyclone research. Unlike his principal antagonist, Climate Change "Skeptic" Richard Lindzen, he didn't seek to make a name for himself outside the scientific literature.
I can tell you that more than once he criticized Lindzen as a scientist who was inflexible and stubbornly clung to outdated methodologies, despite the clear evidence that statistical models developed with the use of what were then known as "supercomputers" were valuable and offered ground breaking insights into climate and meteorological phenomena. He stated that Lindzen was a man who simply refused to acknowledge that computers and mathematical models were credible. In essence, he viewed Lindzen as a person who refused to accept any theories but his own. He also regarded him as a bully who at scientific conferences would attack other scientists who did not wholeheartedly accept Lindzen's ideas.
* * *
Which brings me to the present day. Climate deniers with an actual background in climate science such as Lindzen are rare, as we know, though their outlier views are provided a prominence by the media's current "he said, she said" method of lazy journalism in which that validity of scientific research is simply considered another "controversy" for debate without any attempt to evaluate to facts that support one side or the other.
Unfortunately, one of those pesky facts about climate is the rate at which ice in the Arctic has been degraded as temperatures rise. Indeed, despite all the intelligent scientists at NOAA, they are finding that the rapid rate of sea ice decline in the Northern Hemisphere is making it very difficult to provide accurate forecasts of sea ice formation, information critical for navigation, native populations, etc.
WASHINGTON — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is being inundated with requests for weather and ice forecasts as well as navigation information about the Arctic, but isn't able to provide all of the information that the Coast Guard, industries and native Alaskans need, NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco said on Monday. [...]
"It's a matter of insufficient observing, insufficient information to do the modeling and forecasting. So there's a huge disconnect between what is expected we will be able to deliver and what we are actually able to provide," she said. [...]
As the ice retreats, the need for information will increase, she said. She cited needs for weather and sea ice forecasts for the Navy and Coast Guard, Alaska native communities, shipping companies and the fossil fuel industry, which wants permits for exploration in Arctic Alaska next year.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/...
Unlike hurricane research, NOAA hasn't budgeted for research regarding the rapid changes to the Arctic environment caused by climate change. This is likely because no one, not even the scientists who produced the best computer models regarding the effect of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions on climate were able to accurately predict just how fast the changes we are witnessing in the Arctic would occur. Even the IPCC, long the target of climate deniers who attack the the IPCC's assessments regarding the causes and consequences of climate change as radical and wildly inaccurate and politically motivated, got it wrong. Only the IPCC got it wrong because their reports were too conservative and not radical enough, it seems.
When the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was published in 2007, there was a lack of data on the Arctic, so the panel left a big source of potential sea-level-rise out of its projections for this century. [...]
New findings by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), a working group of the Arctic Council, reveal unprecedented rates of change in the Arctic Ocean, the mass of the Greenland ice sheet and the region's ice caps and glaciers over the past ten years.
The research confirms that warming in the Arctic has been occurring at twice the global average warming trend since 1980.
Surface air temperatures in the Arctic since 2005 have been higher than for any five-year period since measurements began around 1880, and summer temperatures in the region have been higher in the past few decades than at any time in the past 2,000 years.
The new research suggests we are at or near a a tipping point where melting of Greenland's ice sheet may be irreversible. If that happens, sea levels will rise faster and higher than the range of 18-59 centimeters predicted by the IPCC assessment in 2007, a mere four years ago. In fact, we are currently pumping greenhouse gases, the primary driver of climate change, into the atmosphere at the highest levels in human history:
"Emissions are now running right on the line of the worst scenario the IPCC is calculating. So in the long run this would mean a 4 degree, or even higher, increase of temperature by the end of the century."
That is four degrees on the Celsius scale, not the Fahrenheit scale. When converted into degrees of temperature rise using the Fahrenheit scale, we are talking about an average global rise of 7 degrees F. Remember that's an average for the entire planet. As we know, climate change will result on differing consequences for different regions of the world. At present the warming in the Arctic is occurring at a faster rate than anywhere else on the globe.
Unfortunately just when we need more research regarding this threat, many governments have already cut funding for climate research, such as Canada, or are threatening to do so (i.e., the United States). My guess is that if a deal is done on spending cuts necessary to obtain approval by the House of Representatives for an increase to the US Government's debt ceiling, funding for climate related research and monitoring will be slashed dramatically.
* * *
Lastly, let me point you to this blog post at Real Climate, which provides information on a recent reconstruction of sea level rise along the eastern seaboard of the United States over the past 2000 years, using sediments in salt marshes as a proxy for sea levels. The results are not encouraging:
A group of colleagues have succeeded in producing the first continuous proxy record of sea level for the past 2000 years. According to this reconstruction, 20th-Century sea-level rise on the U.S. Atlantic coast is faster than at any time in the past two millennia. [...]
The graph shows how sea level changed over the past 2000 years. There are four phases:
Stable sea level from 200 BC until 1000 AD
A 400-year rise by about 6 cm per century up to 1400 AD
Another stable period from 1400 AD up to the late 19th C
A rapid rise by about 20 cm since.
That 20 cm rise in sea levels from roughly 1880 to 2008 occurred while the average global temperature rose 0.9°F, with most of the increase occurring in the last 4 decades (i.e., 1°F since the mid 1970's). However, Arctic regions warmed much faster (e.g., Alaska's mean temperature rose Warming occurred 3.3°F in the 20th Century).
Furthermore, we know that current trends for temperatures globally and in the Arctic are trending upwards. Though there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the extent the the Greenland ice sheet will melt, the indications are ominous:
"The latest figures show very clearly that the sea level rise we can expect by 2100 will be much higher than predicted. This is connected to the fact that the Greenland ice sheet is currently melting at a very fast rate."
A significant finding, says Professor Wolfgang Lucht from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
"If a certain temperature threshold is crossed, the melting of Greenland cannot be stopped any more," Lucht says.
Are we at or near that temperature threshold now? Time will tell, but failing to fund research and devote the necessary resources to monitoring the situation in the Arctic would be sheer folly. We devoted resources to investigating tropical storms, through NOAA, NCAR and independent research funded with government grants, that have saved many lives over the last 50 years. While the threat of increasing sea levels is a longer term threat, it is ultimately far more significant and will have far-reaching consequences for the lives of our children and grandchildren that I suspect we cannot fully comprehend at present. Underfunding NOAA's ability to collect data and fund research on climate change would be a grievous error with grave consequences for our species' future existence on this planet.