WEBVTT FILE

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[sound of rushing wind]

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Narrator: It was just four years after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik …

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News reel: Today a new moon is in the sky, a 23-inch metal sphere

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placed in orbit by a Russian rocket … Narrator: and the space race was

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ramping up into full gear. The first weather satellite,

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launched on Apr. 1, 1960, TIROS-1,

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enabled us to see weather – at least in the form of cloud cover –

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across the globe. For the first time – we could see

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today’s weather from space, which provided clues about what tomorrow had in store.

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With each passing year, we

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we gain more confidence in our weather forecasts,

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compulsively checking out the hourly forecast before heading out the door,

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or scanning weather radar in real time,

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or eyeing the 10-day outlook for next weekend’s plans.

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Our ability to predict the weather, though still imperfect,

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would astound our recent ancestors.

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But not that long ago, weather forecasts were much, much murkier,

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and recent improvements have made revolutionary contributions

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to not just picnics and daily commutes, but farming,

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worldwide economics, construction projects, military strategy,

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and travel by air and sea.

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We talked to pioneers in the field, who in some cases

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have lived the lion’s share of the history of modern weather forecasting.

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Out of that, we want to share five things, mostly from the US satellite era,

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that changed forecasting forever.

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But first we’ll start a little further back into the past …

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Uccellini: Throughout the history of what is now the National Weather Service,

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threats to life has been one of the main drivers

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for us to even exist.

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The initial organization that started weather services

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in the United States was the Signal Corps which took on

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the responsibilities to observe weather and be able to provide

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indications of what could happen

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that afternoon or the next day.

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Narrator: After the Civil War, the Great Lakes were a main highway for commerce,

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and ships frequently sank in surprise storms.

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Uccellini: Telegraph lines made it possible to get weather information in real time

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time that could all be brought together to provide indications of squalls passing over the lakes.

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So that's the creation of the Signal Corps.

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Then you move forward in time, in 1888, for example,

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there were two major blizzards that affected the United States.

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Narrator: These blizzards were barely forecast,

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and hundreds of people lost their lives.

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Uccellini: There was a general push to get the weather services of the military signal corps

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into a civilian agency. And that was probably the last straw

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for many of those who really wanted this to happen and it became much more emphatic.

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Narrator: Then the weather disasters of the 1900s -

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like the surprise Long Island Express Hurricane in 1938

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and a major tornado outbreak in 1974 –

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spurred interest in new technologies,

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like Doppler radar, that could give a local or regional view of developing weather.

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But it was really the view from on high

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that brought the world’s weather forecasts together.

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[sound of applause.] Not many people know that during John F. Kennedy’s

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famous speech to Congress in 1961,

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he not only set this audacious goal:

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Kennedy: First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal,

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before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon

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and returning him safely to the Earth.

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Narrator: He also called out for the development of nuclear rocket, and a worldwide system

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of communications satellites, and …

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Kennedy: Fourth, an additional 75 million dollars – of which 53 million dollars is for the Weather Bureau –

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will help give us at the earliest possible time a satellite system

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for world-wide weather observation.

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Narrator: TIROS-1 and 2 had already launched before the Kennedy speech,

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but a long series of TIROS satellites followed after,

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which were then complemented by the Nimbus program – a set of satellites

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designed not just to take pictures, but to actually measure aspects

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of the atmosphere from hundreds of miles away –

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including temperature, wind speed, and water vapor.

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Scientific progress is often slow, building incrementally.

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But sometimes science makes giant leaps,

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literally overnight. For the field of weather forecasting

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this happened one night in 1969,

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just three months before the first humans landed on the moon.

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It was the night the team behind the NIMBUS 3 satellite

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received their first global set of data.

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Smith: We stayed up all night and plotted these data on a map. 

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Hand plotted them when we got the computer.

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Just reams of paper with numbers on them, latitude, longitude, temperature values,

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altitude and things. It was pretty exciting

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because it looked very real, just like a real weather map. But this just came from the satellite.

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Nothing else, just the satellite data.

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Narrator: When morning came, they brought their weather map to the director of operations

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of the National Meteorological Center. 

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Smith: He says, “Oh my God,” he said, “we've been taking flak from the airlines this morning because we

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mis-forecast where the jet stream was going to be.

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And our flights to Asia, were not making

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their destination … because of the strong headwinds and so on

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that we didn't forecast.” And he says,

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“Your satellite data shows it. Shows right where it is."

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Narrator: The TIROS and Nimbus satellites and other

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low-orbit satellites that followed, circle round the Earth,

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getting different views all the time. But now let’s talk about the view

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from ten times higher up.

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Mandt: The geostationary program has primarily been a visual imagery program

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basically flying above the equator at the same rate

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as the Earth spins. So to a person on the Earth, it appears that it's stationary,

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and what that allows you to do is see the Earth from the same vantage points

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continuously. So you could basically take movies. So you can update

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the picture every 30 seconds, if you want.

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When you loop those, you get a sense of the motion of the weather.

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Uccellini: We forget the days where the TV folks

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who were talking about a storm being out in the Atlantic couldn't even show where it was,

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just that the Hurricane Center is tracking it. Papers have been written about how

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the geostationary satellite was probably the most important

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observing system with its ground processing in the history

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of advancing the Hurricane Center because

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it gave them the situational awareness of where that storm was,

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where it was going, and the intensity changes

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as it was moving in real time.

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It was just an amazing eye-opening experience for the Hurricane Center.

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Narrator: So geostationary satellites give us, literally,

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the big picture. But from a data standpoint, it’s usually been

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the low orbit satellites, usually in a polar orbit,

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that are the workhorses of the weather fleet.

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Mandt: So the polar orbiting satellites compliment the geostationary 
So the polar orbiting satellites compliment the geostationary …

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are basically flying at little over 500 miles up. And when you're at that altitude

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you can sense what's in the atmosphere

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to a lot higher resolution. And for weather forecasting,

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you really want to understand the state of the atmosphere,

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primarily temperature and water vapor, and winds.

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Twice a day, each satellite is giving a really detailed measurement of the atmosphere

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and its state, which is the beginning then to understand

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what is the state of the global atmosphere to then project

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it forward to produce a weather forecast.

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Narrator: The early Nimbus satellites began our legacy of low-orbit data collection,

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but one of the biggest leaps came from our ability to measure

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literally thousands of different frequencies of energy, representing

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an all-weather profile of the atmosphere.

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[engine noise] For NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Ed Kim,

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that all-weather view is never far from his mind.

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Kim: I have a vested interest in

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in helping improve weather forecasts.

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The hobby of, of flying and the work of improving weather sensors

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is a nice combination. They really go hand in hand.

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When you're flying around and looking at clouds or looking at weather patterns as you're flying in an airplane,

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it's hard not to think about … what a microwave sensor

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would see when it's trying to look through that cloud over there to the right.


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So everybody's probably familiar with radio transmissions.

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You have a transmitter, you have a receiver, maybe when you were kids you played with walkie-talkies

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or you listen to the radio in your car, there's a transmitter somewhere and the receiver is in your car.

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Microwaves sounders are just the same thing.

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They're just different radio frequencies. So, you might ask well,

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what is the receiver receiving? It's actually receiving natural signals

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that are emitted by the gases in the atmosphere itself.

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All natural objects …

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Everything emits a very tiny amount of microwave energy.

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And those microwave frequencies happen to allow you to

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detect the condition of the atmosphere. And so …

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then you can construct the vertical temperature,

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we call it a profile, a vertical temperature structure of the atmosphere.

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The primary reason that you have both

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the microwave and the infrared is that

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the microwave sensors, in general, for the most part can, see through clouds.

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Just the fact that you could see through the clouds and still figure out the structure of the atmosphere was a gigantic leap forward.

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Combined the microwave data and the infrared data

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provide that really critical vertical

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structure information of the atmosphere to the weather forecasters.

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Essentially the most critical information

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they need for weather forecasts.

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Narrator: So we have a non-stop visual recon of the planet from geostationary satellites,

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and highly detailed atmospheric measurements from polar orbiters.

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But … all that data coming down

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wouldn’t mean much without the quantum leaps in computing power

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we’ve seen over this time period, and the massive amounts of work

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that have gone into creating computer models of weather and our atmosphere.

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One of the pioneers in this field

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is Eugenia Kalnay, who after escaping

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a brutal crackdown on academia in Argentina,

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became the first woman to graduate from MIT in meteorology,

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and has possibly the most often cited paper in all of the Earth sciences.

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One of her major fields of study has been the ensemble forecast –

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basically comparing bits of forecast model information

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against each other to figure out what’s working and what’s not.

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Kalnay: This method allows you to determine

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whether each observation is good or bad.

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If it helps the forecast or it makes it worse.

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And I realized that we could do that with

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every observation and determine whether it was

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beneficial or detrimental, we could take away

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the detrimental observations and only use the beneficial ones.

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And that improved the forecast quite a lot –

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substantially.

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Not not just a little bit that you cannot see,

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but for eight days, the forecast is better.

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So that I feel, I feel

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very happy about that result.

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Narrator: Before the ensemble, she says, the National Weather Service

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would calculate a forecast for 15 days, but only show

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three days to the public. But in the 1980s, we made a major leap.

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Kalnay: That was the first time that the human forecasters

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there make a forecast for five days because

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they show that all the ensemble forecast were similar.

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The TV meteorologists immediately,

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some, the most advanced of them,

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immediately realized that they could give

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forecast much longer than three days.

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Narrator: So now we have the data, and we have the computers and the models to run on them –

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but that still doesn’t do us any good if we can’t get the data down from the satellites,

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processed, and then out to the people who need it.

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Mandt: We're sitting here at the NSOF building. It's really the operations center

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for all of our NOAA satellites. So, behind me you can see the floor

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where not only do we fly the geostationary satellites, the polar orbiting satellites,

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including JPSS-1 which is now called NOAA-20.

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The primary purpose of this building then is to fly

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the satellites and then take the data from those satellites and process it

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and be able to put out the products for the nation.

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The data that flows from all of the satellites produces a lot of the products

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that are used in the weather forecasting that everybody sort of uses

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every day and may not really understand where it's coming from.

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But this is the heart and soul of what the nation gets for weather forecasting.

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The nice thing about working in this business is we know it's helping people, it's helping people over the world.

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And all the countries of the world collaborate very well together

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in sharing this data because it's all of mutual benefit.

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Narrator: But getting those forecasts out is still not the end of the line.

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In emergency weather situations, the right people have to get the right information to make critical decisions.

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Uccellini: Well, one of the new areas

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that the Weather Service is fully engaged in

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is the idea that making a forecast and a warning

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is not good enough.

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And there's a whole range of decision makers, there's organized decision makers, government agencies

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at the federal, state, and local levels, all work together to save lives and property.

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And then you've got individuals, everybody with a cell phone now

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is a decision maker. They can download all this stuff

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and decide whether they're going to evacuate or not, right?

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So we're into human factors now. We're into social science. So this combination of physical and social science

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science is really a big deal for us in … how we meet the needs

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of the emergency management community.

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If we all want to get down to societal benefits, this is what we've got to do.

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We've embarked on this over the last six, seven, eight years

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and it's starting, it’s starting to work.

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The part of the mission to protect life and property is really the driver,

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it's what brings people to work every day

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and we’re certainly dedicated to that mission.