Email Nonsense Inspired An Explanation Of Why Meteorologists Take A Lot of Math

I am not sure if it is the heat, a change in season, or Greta Thunberg, but I have noticed a significant uptick in climate trolling activity in the past couple of weeks. I received a message this week reminding me about the Sun (gee, thanks) and climate change. At least I think he was talking about the sun since he wrote it as “FIRE IN SKY.” Ironically, I have written in Forbes on why solar activity doesn’t explain climate change. This morning I noticed a message by someone claiming to have a perfect score on the SAT and that he was a Valedictorian of his high school class. I suppose the establishment of such “credentials,” which I am frankly skeptical of given his next statements, laid the foundation for his display of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. He went on to claim that human-produced carbon dioxide is not damaging the Earth and that climate science cannot predict the planet’s climate. I am assuming he means human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels not breathing. I mean he did say “human-produced.” However, what inspired this article was at the end of his message. He wrote, “I realize the math is way beyond your understanding, but maybe that should be reason enough to give you pause.”

The main lesson that comes from this rather amusing message is to do your research before sending such messages. I actually was the Valedictorian of my class at Cherokee High School in Canton, Georgia. I worked for over a decade at this “little space agency” called NASA. I also took a lot of advanced mathematics and physics during my BS, MS, and doctoral degree program in meteorology at Florida State University. I suppose the person writing the email didn’t realize that our atmosphere is a fluid and is governed by a complex set of fluid dynamics and thermodynamic equations. In fact, the American Meteorological Society (AMS), of which I served as President in 2013, lays out guidelines for meteorology or atmospheric sciences curricula. At this point, I should probably check to make sure the person that sent the message was not a President of the AMS whom I somehow missed at our past Presidents dinners. Some of the AMS guidelines for atmospheric sciences programs include (the full list is found at this link):

Because the atmospheric sciences involve application of the principles and techniques of physical science to the atmosphere, a strong background in mathematics and physics is necessary. These subjects/courses are prerequisites for the required topics in atmospheric science. While some mathematical and physics disciplinary-specific material may be incorporated into atmospheric science courses, the foundation of atmospheric science learning should be built upon a set of courses taught in their traditional departments. The prerequisite mathematics and physics course work should be consistent with that required for other physical science and engineering majors. college the student aspires to attend about appropriate course work.

The courses typically include differential and integral calculus, vector and multivariable calculus, and probability and applied statistics. The physics courses will include the fundamentals of thermodynamics and mechanics. Beyond the prerequisites, the core coursework in meteorology is a heavy dose of dynamics, radiation, atmospheric physics, wave theory, numerical weather prediction, energy exchanges, and so on. For example, the graphic below shows the governing equations underlying most weather prediction models. NOAA has a nice description of the mathematics of weather prediction, and my colleague Chris Robbins at IWeathernet.com provides even more details.

My colleague John Knox is a professor at the University of Georgia. He recently received the coveted Edward N. Lorenz Teaching Excellence Award from the American Meteorological Society (AMS). According to a university press release, it is “the organization’s highest teaching award named for the renowned meteorologist who founded modern chaos theory.” Knox, recently elected as a Fellow of the AMS, told me:

I majored in mathematics in college. The fundamental advances in meteorology are tightly intertwined with mathematics. The great names of 20th-century meteorology such as Lorenz and Jule Charney--both of them were highly trained in mathematics. Lorenz majored in math at Dartmouth and did his master's thesis in math at Harvard under the famous mathematician George Birkhoff. Then Lorenz went off to WWII as a weather forecaster. The two experiences intertwined to give the world modern chaos theory 20 years later! Charney came across a calculus book at the age of 14 and started doing the problems himself, no class needed.

Knox also pointed me to the biography of Jule Charney written by Norman Phillips for the National Academies. Phillips wrote, "His undergraduate years emphasized both mathematics and physics (although Jule later complained about the lack of theoretical physicists at UCLA), and he began to be recognized as a likely candidate for the first doctorate in mathematics from the Los Angeles campus."

Terri Smith is an alumna of the Florida State University Department of Meteorology like me. Smith is a veteran meteorologist at The Weather Channel. She told me:

To understand how the air, what we call the atmosphere, around us functions, we need to understand many variables- temperature, humidity, pressure, wind- and understand these things in a three dimensional context. of length, width and height. We use mathematical equations to quantify all those components to help produce even a basic forecast.

Smith also told me that her favorite equation is related to Precipitable Water (above). This concept is not just abstract math. It has useful applications. Precipitable water quantifies the amount of moisture in a column from the surface to the “top” of the atmosphere. Research led by my former doctoral student Amanda Schroeder, now at the National Weather Service, found that extreme precipitable water (PW) values are a good predictor of urban flooding. In a paper published in the AMS Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, we found that the majority urban of the 40 flood events analyzed from the 1970s to 2014 had PW values at or exceeding the 99% threshold of what is normally expected.

John Knox puts an exclamation on this discussion with the following historical nugget:

And so meteorology, thanks to its roots in mathematics and its pioneers who fused math and numerical analysis with the seemingly intractable nonlinear problem of numerical weather prediction, LED THE ENTIRE WORLD into the age of computer simulations of scientific problems. Meteorology was ahead of every. single. field. with the possible exception of aerodynamics.

I will end with my own theorem as I circle back to the original motivation for this article. The amount of climate trolling is directly proportional to the effectiveness of climate messages of the moment.