[sound of rushing wind]
Narrator: It was just four years after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik …
News reel: Today a new moon is in the sky, a 23-inch metal sphere
placed in orbit by a Russian rocket … Narrator: and the space race was
ramping up into full gear. The first weather satellite,
launched on Apr. 1, 1960, TIROS-1,
enabled us to see weather – at least in the form of cloud cover –
across the globe. For the first time – we could see
today’s weather from space, which provided clues about what tomorrow had in store.
With each passing year, we
we gain more confidence in our weather forecasts,
compulsively checking out the hourly forecast before heading out the door,
or scanning weather radar in real time,
or eyeing the 10-day outlook for next weekend’s plans.
Our ability to predict the weather, though still imperfect,
would astound our recent ancestors.
But not that long ago, weather forecasts were much, much murkier,
and recent improvements have made revolutionary contributions
to not just picnics and daily commutes, but farming,
worldwide economics, construction projects, military strategy,
and travel by air and sea.
We talked to pioneers in the field, who in some cases
have lived the lion’s share of the history of modern weather forecasting.
Out of that, we want to share five things, mostly from the US satellite era,
that changed forecasting forever.
But first we’ll start a little further back into the past …
Uccellini: Throughout the history of what is now the National Weather Service,
threats to life has been one of the main drivers
for us to even exist.
The initial organization that started weather services
in the United States was the Signal Corps which took on
the responsibilities to observe weather and be able to provide
indications of what could happen
that afternoon or the next day.
Narrator: After the Civil War, the Great Lakes were a main highway for commerce,
and ships frequently sank in surprise storms.
Uccellini: Telegraph lines made it possible to get weather information in real time
time that could all be brought together to provide indications of squalls passing over the lakes.
So that's the creation of the Signal Corps.
Then you move forward in time, in 1888, for example,
there were two major blizzards that affected the United States.
Narrator: These blizzards were barely forecast,
and hundreds of people lost their lives.
Uccellini: There was a general push to get the weather services of the military signal corps
into a civilian agency. And that was probably the last straw
for many of those who really wanted this to happen and it became much more emphatic.
Narrator: Then the weather disasters of the 1900s -
like the surprise Long Island Express Hurricane in 1938
and a major tornado outbreak in 1974 –
spurred interest in new technologies,
like Doppler radar, that could give a local or regional view of developing weather.
But it was really the view from on high
that brought the world’s weather forecasts together.
[sound of applause.] Not many people know that during John F. Kennedy’s
famous speech to Congress in 1961,
he not only set this audacious goal:
Kennedy: First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal,
before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to the Earth.
Narrator: He also called out for the development of nuclear rocket, and a worldwide system
of communications satellites, and …
Kennedy: Fourth, an additional 75 million dollars – of which 53 million dollars is for the Weather Bureau –
will help give us at the earliest possible time a satellite system
for world-wide weather observation.
Narrator: TIROS-1 and 2 had already launched before the Kennedy speech,
but a long series of TIROS satellites followed after,
which were then complemented by the Nimbus program – a set of satellites
designed not just to take pictures, but to actually measure aspects
of the atmosphere from hundreds of miles away –
including temperature, wind speed, and water vapor.
Scientific progress is often slow, building incrementally.
But sometimes science makes giant leaps,
literally overnight. For the field of weather forecasting
this happened one night in 1969,
just three months before the first humans landed on the moon.
It was the night the team behind the NIMBUS 3 satellite
received their first global set of data.
Smith: We stayed up all night and plotted these data on a map.
Hand plotted them when we got the computer.
Just reams of paper with numbers on them, latitude, longitude, temperature values,
altitude and things. It was pretty exciting
because it looked very real, just like a real weather map. But this just came from the satellite.
Nothing else, just the satellite data.
Narrator: When morning came, they brought their weather map to the director of operations
of the National Meteorological Center.
Smith: He says, “Oh my God,” he said, “we've been taking flak from the airlines this morning because we
mis-forecast where the jet stream was going to be.
And our flights to Asia, were not making
their destination … because of the strong headwinds and so on
that we didn't forecast.” And he says,
“Your satellite data shows it. Shows right where it is."
Narrator: The TIROS and Nimbus satellites and other
low-orbit satellites that followed, circle round the Earth,
getting different views all the time. But now let’s talk about the view
from ten times higher up.
Mandt: The geostationary program has primarily been a visual imagery program
basically flying above the equator at the same rate
as the Earth spins. So to a person on the Earth, it appears that it's stationary,
and what that allows you to do is see the Earth from the same vantage points
continuously. So you could basically take movies. So you can update
the picture every 30 seconds, if you want.
When you loop those, you get a sense of the motion of the weather.
Uccellini: We forget the days where the TV folks
who were talking about a storm being out in the Atlantic couldn't even show where it was,
just that the Hurricane Center is tracking it. Papers have been written about how
the geostationary satellite was probably the most important
observing system with its ground processing in the history
of advancing the Hurricane Center because
it gave them the situational awareness of where that storm was,
where it was going, and the intensity changes
as it was moving in real time.
It was just an amazing eye-opening experience for the Hurricane Center.
Narrator: So geostationary satellites give us, literally,
the big picture. But from a data standpoint, it’s usually been
the low orbit satellites, usually in a polar orbit,
that are the workhorses of the weather fleet.
Mandt: So the polar orbiting satellites compliment the geostationary So the polar orbiting satellites compliment the geostationary …
are basically flying at little over 500 miles up. And when you're at that altitude
you can sense what's in the atmosphere
to a lot higher resolution. And for weather forecasting,
you really want to understand the state of the atmosphere,
primarily temperature and water vapor, and winds.
Twice a day, each satellite is giving a really detailed measurement of the atmosphere
and its state, which is the beginning then to understand
what is the state of the global atmosphere to then project
it forward to produce a weather forecast.
Narrator: The early Nimbus satellites began our legacy of low-orbit data collection,
but one of the biggest leaps came from our ability to measure
literally thousands of different frequencies of energy, representing
an all-weather profile of the atmosphere.
[engine noise] For NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Ed Kim,
that all-weather view is never far from his mind.
Kim: I have a vested interest in
in helping improve weather forecasts.
The hobby of, of flying and the work of improving weather sensors
is a nice combination. They really go hand in hand.
When you're flying around and looking at clouds or looking at weather patterns as you're flying in an airplane,
it's hard not to think about … what a microwave sensor
would see when it's trying to look through that cloud over there to the right.
So everybody's probably familiar with radio transmissions.
You have a transmitter, you have a receiver, maybe when you were kids you played with walkie-talkies
or you listen to the radio in your car, there's a transmitter somewhere and the receiver is in your car.
Microwaves sounders are just the same thing.
They're just different radio frequencies. So, you might ask well,
what is the receiver receiving? It's actually receiving natural signals
that are emitted by the gases in the atmosphere itself.
All natural objects …
Everything emits a very tiny amount of microwave energy.
And those microwave frequencies happen to allow you to
detect the condition of the atmosphere. And so …
then you can construct the vertical temperature,
we call it a profile, a vertical temperature structure of the atmosphere.
The primary reason that you have both
the microwave and the infrared is that
the microwave sensors, in general, for the most part can, see through clouds.
Just the fact that you could see through the clouds and still figure out the structure of the atmosphere was a gigantic leap forward.
Combined the microwave data and the infrared data
provide that really critical vertical
structure information of the atmosphere to the weather forecasters.
Essentially the most critical information
they need for weather forecasts.
Narrator: So we have a non-stop visual recon of the planet from geostationary satellites,
and highly detailed atmospheric measurements from polar orbiters.
But … all that data coming down
wouldn’t mean much without the quantum leaps in computing power
we’ve seen over this time period, and the massive amounts of work
that have gone into creating computer models of weather and our atmosphere.
One of the pioneers in this field
is Eugenia Kalnay, who after escaping
a brutal crackdown on academia in Argentina,
became the first woman to graduate from MIT in meteorology,
and has possibly the most often cited paper in all of the Earth sciences.
One of her major fields of study has been the ensemble forecast –
basically comparing bits of forecast model information
against each other to figure out what’s working and what’s not.
Kalnay: This method allows you to determine
whether each observation is good or bad.
If it helps the forecast or it makes it worse.
And I realized that we could do that with
every observation and determine whether it was
beneficial or detrimental, we could take away
the detrimental observations and only use the beneficial ones.
And that improved the forecast quite a lot –
substantially.
Not not just a little bit that you cannot see,
but for eight days, the forecast is better.
So that I feel, I feel
very happy about that result.
Narrator: Before the ensemble, she says, the National Weather Service
would calculate a forecast for 15 days, but only show
three days to the public. But in the 1980s, we made a major leap.
Kalnay: That was the first time that the human forecasters
there make a forecast for five days because
they show that all the ensemble forecast were similar.
The TV meteorologists immediately,
some, the most advanced of them,
immediately realized that they could give
forecast much longer than three days.
Narrator: So now we have the data, and we have the computers and the models to run on them –
but that still doesn’t do us any good if we can’t get the data down from the satellites,
processed, and then out to the people who need it.
Mandt: We're sitting here at the NSOF building. It's really the operations center
for all of our NOAA satellites. So, behind me you can see the floor
where not only do we fly the geostationary satellites, the polar orbiting satellites,
including JPSS-1 which is now called NOAA-20.
The primary purpose of this building then is to fly
the satellites and then take the data from those satellites and process it
and be able to put out the products for the nation.
The data that flows from all of the satellites produces a lot of the products
that are used in the weather forecasting that everybody sort of uses
every day and may not really understand where it's coming from.
But this is the heart and soul of what the nation gets for weather forecasting.
The nice thing about working in this business is we know it's helping people, it's helping people over the world.
And all the countries of the world collaborate very well together
in sharing this data because it's all of mutual benefit.
Narrator: But getting those forecasts out is still not the end of the line.
In emergency weather situations, the right people have to get the right information to make critical decisions.
Uccellini: Well, one of the new areas
that the Weather Service is fully engaged in
is the idea that making a forecast and a warning
is not good enough.
And there's a whole range of decision makers, there's organized decision makers, government agencies
at the federal, state, and local levels, all work together to save lives and property.
And then you've got individuals, everybody with a cell phone now
is a decision maker. They can download all this stuff
and decide whether they're going to evacuate or not, right?
So we're into human factors now. We're into social science. So this combination of physical and social science
science is really a big deal for us in … how we meet the needs
of the emergency management community.
If we all want to get down to societal benefits, this is what we've got to do.
We've embarked on this over the last six, seven, eight years
and it's starting, it’s starting to work.
The part of the mission to protect life and property is really the driver,
it's what brings people to work every day
and we’re certainly dedicated to that mission.