Next, journalist andrew blum on his book the weather machine where he first the Technology Used to develop daily weather reports. From politics and prose bookstore in washington dc this runs one hour. Good evening everybody. Im the coowner of politics and prose along with my wife in on behalf of everyone here, welcome. Thank you for coming. Congratulations on here braving the weather to get your weather. What a great day to have a book about the weather, isnt it if you have been following the weather and who doesnt these days you will have noticed, at least two things. First, that it is getting weirder and wilder with bigger storms, hotter and more freezing temperatures, greater extremes then seemingly of all times of the year. Second, forecasters are Getting Better at predicting what is about to hit us. They still dont get it right one 100 of the time, of course, but their accuracy is definitely improved and so has the timeliness of their reports. In fact, these days we are aware not only of one weather model but of multiple ones simulating the future state of the atmosphere. There is a north american model and a european model, global one and a number of others and they are forecasting not just todays weather or tomorrows but whether over the next ten days and beyond. Andrew blum got interested in the stuff and was not satisfied with past explanation that attributed the advances in weather science simply to faster supercomputers and better satellites and andrew is a journalist with a knack for making complex systems accessible as he did in his previous book, it was a primer on the physical inner structure of the internet and he saw in Weather Forecast a similar type of story. His new book the weather machine is an engaging look at what goes on behind the scenes of the International Collaborative effort that it takes to give us the daily weather reports. Andrew recounts how forecasting has evolved from the scattered stations to the uns World Neurological Organization and introduces readers to the science, satellites and supercomputers that make up the world current forecast system. Andrew will be in conversation here this evening with one of washingtons own expert forecasters. He is the weather editor of the Washington Post and chief meteorologist of the capital weather game. Jason himself has been bested by the weather since growing up in the dc region. As a High School Student he interned with bob ryan who at least some of you, no doubt, will recall four years was the chief meteorologist for the local nbc affiliate and jason went on to study Atmospheric Science in college and graduate school and worked as a Climate Change analyst at the epa and the teen years ago established capital weather. Com the first professional weather blog on the internet. Washington post absorbed the block in 2008 and jason and his gang are now essential reading for anyone who wants weather in the dc area. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming andrew and jason. [applause] hello. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for that great introduction. I was here will not here but on connecticut avenue and wanted to come back. Im glad i have the chance with this new book. I was a little nervous on the train this morning when washington was washing away. [laughter] jason had a busy day and i was particularly pleased jason agreed to we met when i was first starting this project several years ago and i went to the meeting of the American Society which that year was in atlanta and sort of knew i wanted to write about this topic and trying to figure out what the shape might be and having all of America World meteorologist in one plate place is a great starting point to figure out how to get together. What i did not realize was that there was a weather Journalism Community and the second i was there was warmly embraced and invited out to dinner with someone about 25 people about the American Weather press corps of which jason i think hes the dean. [laughter] but it was a big help for me starting off. Its been great to come full circle and have jason here tonight to do that. We will talk about half an hour and open it up for questions. I will pass it off to you. Sounds great. Pleasure to be here tonight. Funny story, the person i ever took it over was with andrew from the American Meteorologist Society annual meeting in atlanta to the airport. That was back in 2014 yeah, i would not say the year but yeah. [laughter] so, five years ago. As preparation for this event i did have to read the book but i have to say it was a joy. I frequently found myself smiling and sometimes you are watching a great concert or a great singer and the smile comes across your face because you are moved by the how powerful the performance is and the writing is elegant with lots of excellent narratives and anecdotes so definitely earns my highest recommendation. Anyways, lets get started with the q a. Lets begin with the motivation for the book and what made you sit down and decide that you want to write about the history of Weather Forecasting . A few different threads if we had time to go into tonight. My background is mostly writing about architecture and writing about places and you cant write about places without thinking about the weather. But weather turns out is hard to write about especially if youre not a meteorologist or a scientist its very lucy in the words of the way and theres this constant challenge between the banal and did you forget your umbrella and i just properly for the day and the catastrophics so i think that termination to be a meteorologist and write about the weather and be dealing with weather especially in any daily basis to be able to switch registers from cherry to the catastrophic is one of the Biggest Challenges and that challenge me for a while but what kind of on stuck me was i wanted to write something about the weather and what unstuck meet was Hurricane Sandy and 2012 which was the moment where i think for a lot of us the weather models revealed themselves that there was suddenly a public conversation about the american little mother and not only that but astonishing forecast in a day forecast with it was sunday afternoon that there was the first inkling for sandy which arrived to new york city following monday night and that exceeded all my understanding of what meteorologists were capable of in terms of their human ability and in terms of their own pattern recognition and manual simulation of data. Clearly, they had build systems that were astonishing and had far exceeded my understanding of how they worked. And yet these discussion of okay whether these weather models were hard to answer and there was an incredible black box and that type of complex infrastructure story was what got me going to recognize that if i could figure out how these models work and if i can understand them in a way to tell the story about them that felt meaningful and like definitely a story to be told there. I might have underestimated their complexity and did anyone here working weather models . No, no professional weather models. Okay,. [laughter] i think i mightve underestimated the complexity because theres a very small group of people in the world who work on them and improve them. They buried entry to what their parts and pieces are with significant but even but it checked the box which is so important for me perfectly banality of the system we Touch Everything today. The idea that hears this incredible complex global system we carry around in her pocket and yet its a black box was definitely a story i wanted to tell and of course you cant tell it without going back in time to some of the history and how it developed. The way i approached that. Lets talk about the history and some of those pioneering scientists in the 1800s who laid the foundation for modern day numerical weather prediction and there were scientists in england and norway any talk about in your book the early contributors and how important the work they did was to the advancements we have seen in weather protection today. Its funny, there are two weather the history of the Storm Chasers and the watching sky and this heroic stories of wind speeds and weather maps and all of that and then theres this other history of mathematicians and what i started to try to think about how to tell this other historys it felt distinct from a lot of the other historys and it very much begins with a norwegian meteorologist named [inaudible] and its kind of amazing because he occupied both histories. He came up with the idea turn of the 19th century or 20th century and in 1904 was his main paper to cap light the weather and to use the equations of physics and thermodynamics to describe the atmosphere would be next with the main insights that each day calculations could be itself an hypothesis and if you can cap light whether you prove the next date whether your technicians were right or wrong and then refine those copulations on a daily basis which is the process of improvement that got us to this credible place where we are at today. I feel like i should lay out the suitable place to say even the meteorologist love to talk about the day of decade which is to say the models and forecasts have improved by a day each decade or over the last 40 years oh five day forecast today is as good as a fourday forecast ten years ago or two day forecast 30 years ago. Not just that that rate is not diminishing but increasing and the talk of the moment is a two week forecast by 2025 and this improvement goes back to the idea that if you concatenate weather then he stays forecast is its own science experiment and you can try it again the next day. He cannot calculate whether of course and the english mathematician try to complete the weather and realize you need 64000 computers which is 64000 people who he thought could be arranged in a stadium and could each get their square of corresponding atmosphere and that square they would do the cancellations and pass them up to the front and maybe that will work to catholic the weather fast enough for useful predictions. You cant just calculate the weather but it has to be done for the weather comes or its not useful. I think that inability to calculate and the lack of observations and the lack of computer to auppercaseletter them was essentially meant the ideas from 1904 had to wait 50 years until computers and satellites began to come in and then had to wait nearly another 50 years just for the last 30 years but the weather models to be useful beyond the human scale, not just guidance but to exceed the capabilities of human meteorologist to the point that now you were not yes, theres a human check on it but you will not find meteorologists to say they dont work although i found one. Its remarkable how good the Weather Forecasting models are today. Trillions of correlations a second and its amazing. One of the critical developments in the miracle weather protection we fastforward to the 1950s and 1960s and you alluded to this already is the Weather Satellite and talk about the history of other satellites and how they played such an integral role in the development of forecast and some of the major discoveries and breakthroughs with that technology. To keep the idea with early was that for longerrange forecasts for two or three i think beyond a couple of these you need a global view. It cant just be you not just looking at the weather in north america talking about the weather globally to look at the entire global atmosphere. For globals he need a global instrument so its not satellite drive in the 60s he began to have this reversal of that. Its also amazes me that the satellite in this month of apollo or become apollo but they come out of the same conjoined civilian that goes into military effort that you have no satellites without the dollars spent for the missile race and you have no other satellites without the dollars spent for surveillance satellite and this scientific ideas that the military ideas are handinhand and until quite notably until kennedy theres the moonshot speech that the spring 1951 speech that we put a man on the moon before the decade is out that was bullet point number one in bullet point number two wasnt Nuclear Rockets for deep space travel and plate number three was medication a satellite and point number four was Weather Satellite. Its amazing to me that you have this basic impetus for a global view in the same speech is the moonshot speech and the most famous interceptor speech and then you have it based rooted in the idea of the International Cooperation that kennedy like the weather because it was a point of cooperation and sure enough, the thing is that speech in the later speech in the fall at the un that this annihilation speech was answer that can be proposed for togetherness for an alternative for peace was cooperation on weather observation and whether operation in control got left behind. That idea that from the very beginning it was about diplomatic cooperation between meteorologists from every country in order to make global data out of Global Infrastructure to eventually support global models and gives this route of cooperation that begins the 19th century but current incarnation was very much inspired by kennedys idea of a global vision. That is pretty or continues today and someone quietly and i think we often dont look beyond American Weather service but everything depends on this global pool of data. Absolutely. Clearly the data. So critical to todays weather models whether you talking about the weather balloon data or groundbased sensors and of course you just talked about Weather Satellites and Weather Satellites are superexpensive and cost of government billions of dollars but without them our forecasts would not be where they are. Obviously the Weather Satellite data observations from groundbased sensors, weather balloons, they beat these models and you went to two Different Centers to learn more about weather models but went to the National Center in boulder and the European Center for forecasting i did not put that in the book. Talk about your experiences and the appreciation game for these models and touched this out a little bit. And what makes these models work and what amount of intellect is required to run these models and who are the people who are doing this work and how have they been able to be so successful in improving Weather Forecaster for time . This competition between american and european model is short but whats amazing is visiting as a journalist the cleaner im looking for cleaner stories for more legible stories and its amazing to me the cleaner stories come from cleaner places. The places that have a coherent organization and has a very focused Mission Statement are much easier to describe and write about. They are often, i find, more successful because of that. With weather models the fact that we take the starting point that okay theres this weather model and its the best to see or go visit the source of that European Center which is outside of london in redding and the collaboration funded by i think its 32 yes, 32 European Countries that are contributing sending both scientists in money with this singular goal of running the best Global Weather model. They do it by combining the Research People and whether model operation people are single buildings and its amazing cafeteria has become a cliche in the tech culture but i cannot believe anyone got work done because the cafeteria was always full. They had the most beautiful coffee machines. [laughter] that constant day by day effort to consider what the model was doing and what he was spitting out and how it could be improved as a system was really tangible where it is built in not just in daily but internal wiki of comments on this is weird so why is it doing this and to codify with weekly meetings one of which i observed and wrote about and this constant sense of what is a model doing and how could he be doing it better. The key point is that when you say or talk about it is a well mother whether model of convocation meatgrinder where the present goes in and future comes out but its about an ongoing simulation of the atmosphere that every six hours or 12 hours is compared to the most recent observations the real atmosphere and correct it slightly to better match that and that duet of the simulated atmosphere clicking Forward Together with the simulated running faster time to give us what we call forecast. It makes you realize to make the forecast better means to make the simulation better. Not just in some statistical improvement based on past weather but more about actually using the equations to simulate the atmosphere in a way that is close enough to reality that it can then when its run forward forward faster than time it spits out the weather of the future. To see how eager the people at the European Center were to make sure they were getting it right which is not just to say they were getting the forecast right but to say that the simulation they were building most closely resembles the real atmosphere for all the right reasons. The actual physics maps not just getting lucky repeatedly and thats not Machine Learning and not a project problem in the way elections or other sort of baseball or other protected problems but its unique and uniquely successful. This is something we all use everything that they mostly right. Does that answer your culture question .