Generalizations: Lessons from Charley

By General D.L. Johnson
NWS Director

I'm sure you join me in extending sympathy to everyone whose lives were forever changed by Hurricane Charley. Many more lives would have been lost without your efforts. Thank you everyone who worked to keep America safe. We did our job and did it well -- our warnings for the Florida West Coast were timely and consistent throughout the event. For this storm, emergency managers were challenged to find a safe place for people when a safe place was very hard to find -- especially on the peninsula of Florida. Our past investments in technology have paid off -- we could see the storm change course from the satellites and weather radars, but the predictive models just

aren't there yet. It takes considerable skill and expertise by our Hurricane Specialists to forecast such large scale events when even "minor" deviations can impact so many people. I think it was a gutsy call to forecast an increase from level I to level III when the Hurricane Center did--with the information they had at the time. We were fortunate the rapid increase in intensity -- a rate that is perhaps unprecedented -- occurred during daylight hours when we could get the word out to the most people. This storm reminds us just how important emergency managers and the media really are to the weather team. There's a lot of work to do and they help us do it. Clearly, not everyone understands uncertainty and the science has not evolved where we can be pinpoint certain. There's an opportunity here, to beef up our outreach activities and help the team educate our citizens so they can be informed and safe.

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NSIP 2005 Now Available on Internet

The 2005 issue of the NWS Service Improvement Plan (NSIP 05) has been posted, and is now available to the public at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/nsip.php. The print version of this publication will also be distributed to NWS partners, and the NWS regional offices, and at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA, on January 9-13, 2005.

"NSIP 05 describes specific product and service changes, milestones, and regional initiatives that are planned for Fiscal Year 2005. In addition, our readers can find four color graphic illustrations of new and experimental NWS products, tools, and information on public education campaigns," said Greg Mandt, the Director of the Office of Climate, Water, and Weather Services. "NSIP 05 is intended to help the public and private sectors, and our academic partners, customers, and employees anticipate changes in NWS products and services. We've also included Internet links and contact people in the text, to make it easy for readers to locate additional information."

For the first time, Space Weather Services and Health Weather Services are featured NSIP service areas.

Adding Space Weather Services to NSIP reflects the October 1, 2004, transfer of the Space Environment Center (SEC) to the NWS. Scientists are still learning about how much space weather affects U.S. critical services. The unusual solar flare activity in the fall of 2003 demonstrated how vulnerable our aviation, power, and communications systems are to this sort of interference. Solar activity affected the health and safety of people who fly commercial and spacecrafts over the polar regions. The flairs also can damage our satellite and communications systems. Health Weather Services is the second section to debut in NSIP 05. The Health Weather Services section reflects NWS efforts to mitigate adverse impacts on public health from weather phenomena such as air pollution, temperature extremes, ultraviolet radiation, and hazardous material releases.

"Health weather issues effect all of us, and all of our families," said Mandt, "In NSIP 05, we made our first effort to highlight the steps that NWS is taking to work with the public, homeland security, and the medical community, to reduce the human costs associated with weather."

First printed in 2004, NSIP documents planned NWS service changes. The NSIP is written in alignment with both the NWS Strategic Plan, and the NWS Science and Technology Infusion Plan (STIP). These public NWS documents parallel the NOAA Strategic Plan.

Comments on NSIP 05 are welcome. To submit comments, please select the comments button on the NSIP page, or send comments directly to leroy.spayd@noaa.gov.

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Working Together To Save Lives:
Forecaster Assists in Alaskan Ice Rescue

On July 29, 2004, Emergency Managers from Alaska's North Slope Borough (NSB) were conducting a search and rescue operation in the Beaufort Sea for four missing seal hunters. When their efforts to find the missing hunters failed, they contacted Russ Page, Sea Ice Forecaster for the Weather Forecast Office in Anchorage, AK. His many years of sea ice pattern recognition and weather forecasting along the north coast of Alaska gave Page the expertise needed to pinpoint the location of the hunters.

When Pat Patterson, Disaster Assistance Coordinator for the NSB Search and Rescue, first contacted Page, NSB believed the hunters would have made it across the sea onto the sea ice located at the mouth of Harrison Bay. But Page didn't think so. Through his analysis of the sea surface temperatures and wind fields, Page estimated the winds to be 25 knots with seas near six feet. This indicated the party would be pushed to the southwest.

"I contacted Pat," states Page, "and told him that with the rough seas I didn't think the hunters had made it to the ice. It was my belief that they either perished or were pushed into the southwest corner of Harrison Bay."

Page was able to support his recommendation of where to search for the hunters by using satellite imagery from Bill Pichel's Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) site at NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). The imagery allowed Page to show the ice and, more importantly, the rough seas which would have pushed the hunters into Harrison Bay.

Two hours later Page received a call from Patterson letting him know that the hunters had been found exactly where Page had first placed them - in the southwest corner of Harrison Bay.

If you ask Page, the work he did that day was no different than what he does every day. To him, what made the work possible was the ability for both he and the North Slope Borough to access the satellite imagery from NESDIS simultaneously. "That's what made this work," says Page. "Without those SAR images, I would not have been able to show them the roughness of the seas that drove the hunters off their course."  

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When the NWS received an urgent request from the State Department's U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to provide a dam break analysis for officials in India, members of the Office of Hydrologic Development (OHD) jumped to the task.

"A lake in China is steadily rising and in danger of bursting its 60 meter high natural dam apparently formed by a recent landslide," said OHD Director Gary Carter. This lake is located in Tibet on a tributary of the Sutlej River which flows into a heavily populated flood plain in India.

On August 18, 2004, the NWS distributed its forecasts for various dam failure scenarios to the USAID Mission in India and to Indian Emergency preparedness and Response Officials in the Ministry of Home Affairs. "The forecasts indicated a worst case for an instantaneous dam failure of a 100 plus foot high wave of water being released from the dam," said Carter.

He explained that as the time of dam failure increases, the impacts diminish rapidly. For a time of failure greater than three hours, the peak flow is less than 20 percent of the flow for an instantaneous failure. A second dam 60 miles downstream in India is being drained to capture potential flow from the dam in China.

"We are uncertain if this second dam is designed or built to handle these possible flow levels," Carter said. "There is a third dam 150 miles further downstream which appears to have sufficient capacity to contain any of the possible China dam failure releases."

"OHD's quick response to this life threatening situation is a true example of international cooperation and collaboration," said Curt Barrett of the NWS Office of International Affairs. "It's also a real life example of the Weather Service helping to save lives across the globe."  

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Also On the Web: Ron Lam, Above and Beyond

Michelle Mead, Field Diversity Coordinator for Western Region, forwarded a link to a story about Ron Lam, meteorologist from the NWS Sacramento, CA, office. The profile ran in "Above and Beyond," a Sacramento Bee column about people who have "gone above and beyond, giving of himself or herself in some remarkable way." Mead says that the story "is very inspirational ... and will hopefully charge some people up to make more of an outreach effort in their local forecast areas, as well as overcoming obstacles in their lives. Click here to read the August 8, 2004, profile.

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