2014 AMS Summer Meeting, Twitter's Ugly Secret
I was pleased to attend the American Meteorological Society's Summer Community Meeting at the scenic Nittany Lion Inn here in State College, Pennsylvania, in August. You can see tweets and photos about the event on Twitter at #amsscm2014. There was a lot of great research information presented, and I was able to finally meet in person with people who, heretofore, were only known through their tiny Twitter icons ("selfies" below - WRAL Chief Meteorologist Greg Fishel and WGAL Chief Meteorologist Joe Calhoun).
Arguably the most important news presented at the conference: The U.S. is testing a new, higher-resolution version of the GFS computer model, which will (finally) give the European (ECMWF) model a run for its money. The proof? Running data from 2011, the new version correctly predicted that Hurricane Sandy would swing west into the U.S. coast this time (as the European did then).
This is huge news and it'll be great to have a new, better GFS model this winter.
AccuWeather's leader Dr. Joel N. Myers gave a brilliant but "sobering" futurist speech on the data, business, education and technology. Some quotes from a newspaper article:
At the last minute, I was asked to speak on a panel discussion "The Impact of Ubiquitous Data Availability and Social Media" with Rick Smith, a dear Twitter friend and fellow Social Media guru at the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma. I didn't have time to prepare any slides, the panel wasn't recorded, and I didn't take any notes, but what I said was along these lines:
One thing that I didn't say at AMS (I decided it was too risky without anything to back it up) was that I knew in my heart that Twitter accounts weren't reaching any more people than Facebook Pages were -- Facebook was just the first to release the stats. Regardless of Facebook's non-chronological ordering of posts (which yes, causes confusion for weather news), fans just have too many friends and pages they are following to keep up. This is as true on Twitter as it is for Facebook, and, sure enough, Twitter released their Analytics worldwide this week and organic reach is as low, or lower than, Facebook's. Because of the undeserved media hype, Facebook has fallen out of fashion among famous social meteorologists who believe Twitter is a better solution. Once they realize that it's not, they may have burned their bridges.
Other neat things that I learned from the other presentations:
New types of weather radar are being considered for deployment in the next 10 years -- one solution involves deploying thousands of cheaper, smaller X-Band radars which will better-detect atmospheric rotation near the ground (tornadoes).
It's an idea already proven in the Dallas / Fort Worth market, and is community-funded.
And finally, the Navy is using weather data to create a "Piracy Index" for the Middle Eastern waters, based on sea and wind currents:
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