Reflection on “The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast” by Andrew Blum
“We shall propose further cooperative effort between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control.” -John F Kennedy
I read this book because I’ve been curious about how humans think of the world as well as our bodies and brains as functioning like a machine. This lens of viewing reality determines the types of questions we ask. I’ve also been wanting to learn more about our quest for knowledge, science, which allows us greater control of creation. Meteorology is particularly interesting in this case because it pushes us to use increasingly sophisticated and impressive instruments to go to places that humans didn’t evolve. We extend our senses into the atmosphere and do our best to squeeze as much information out of reality from every corner of Earth. This is also the case in the other direction, with the depths of the ocean, which I’d also like to learn more about.
Insofar as some scientists quest for omnipotent seeing potential in a mysterious universe, meteorology is the arch nemesis of their religion. Meteorology is a discipline that doesn’t discriminate what discipline it touches. Meteorology is the science of the relationship between the sun and everything it affects between it and the Earth. This includes the atmosphere and how it is indefinitely defined by the thermal disequilibriums inherent in the diversity of elements on the planet & universe and how it’s fueled by the energy that the Sun is pelting our planet with. This includes the gravitational forces of the moon on the ocean, the planet’s largest defining store of thermal mass. This thermal mass oscillates back and forth to the beat of the moon’s drum. Actually, how much of the ocean’s motion is defined by the moon, the sun, the other planets in the solar system, or anything else; to varying degrees reflecting the overlapping long, short, thick, and thin cake layers of our solar system?
The study of meteorology also makes me a little queezy because we are doing things to the planet to learn more about how much we’ve messed it up. We dig up rare minerals and more common minerals to transport to a location to assemble them into more extensions of human senses. Then we use more energy to throw them up into orbit where they will look back at the landscape we inhabit, sense, and feel most vividly. I was inspired that soil moisture is considered because water is a huge factor in the thermodynamic exchange or distribution of solar energy into a form life can then steward.
Vilhelm Bjerknes was the first guy to propose McCanna Stickley calculating the weather. At this time in the late 19 century, the calculations were too complex for anyone to complete in time to predict anything. Bjerknes Declared the seven variables for meteorology are density, pressure, temperature, humidity, and wind velocity. Wind velocity was considered as three variables since it was a vector. Each variable depends on another so it was the perfect obstacle for the mechanistic mind of the time. Do we consider the albedo differences and cloud seeding biota in meteorological calculations?
Napier Shaw, director of the British meteorological counsel, got a hold of Bjerknes and proposed a palace where one guy shouts out observations and 500 people in the palace calculate weather based on measuring specific sections of earth. The idea was inspired by Lewis Fry Richardson who had a unique but appropriate way of inquiring about the natural world. He seemed to be more interested in equations than their subject and perceived the world to be dead, mechanistic, and inanimate. He loved electricity and machines but he collected insects and carried a natural history diary that included observations of the weather. He would meditate to straddle the hotspot between sleep and wake state to facilitate creative thinking.
Meteorology grew with Bjerknes During world war one when they begin to use U-boats which sent readings back to the forecasting division of western Norway. The First World War had put a hiatus on international meteorology efforts. They came up with the idea that spheres of pressure represented different “fronts” reflective of the war like thinking of the time. The breakthrough was that polar air was indefinitely in dialogue with tropical air.
SMAP is a spacecraft that probes at the complex motion of water through the planet via soil moisture from space. It’s named after a Japanese boy band but also the acronym is for Soil Moisture Active Passive. Active and passive respectively refer to the its combination of radar and radiometer. Radar sends out radio waves and receives their echo; a radiometer only receives them. The combination allows for greater accuracy. Global coverage is repeated every 2 to 3 days.
Meteorological innovation and research often rides on the back of military interests and spending. The department of defense discovered that soil moisture can affect calculations of density altitude during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A helicopter had to make a crash landing due to the miscalculation. “There was no excising the genes of war from the DNA of weather satellites. We put things in space for many reasons, but we learn to put things in space for only one.”
Andrew Blum admits that in addition to getting SMAP or other techno-hubris eye balls up into orbit, “The adjacent project of observing the atmosphere would never be complete. The complexity was too great, the resolution never fine enough, the preponderance toward chaos always a nick away.”
The tax dollars put into the study of meteorology on the back of military spending is nauseating. Charles Eisenstein had a muse on the team human podcast in conversation with Douglas Rushkoff asking if grain based civilization needs to run its course before it can contract and re-calibrate itself to the human-planet predicament it created. Will we need to exhaust our curiosity in meteorological science or tax dollars before we leave it alone?Would it be worth understanding it, the way we desire to, as God/Gaia does, if we exhausted our planet in the process?
I was happy that, more than halfway through the book, Jeffrey Anderson of the national Center for atmospheric research at the Mesa Lab Pointed out to the author of the book that the prediction of the weather isn’t just a linear input of data into a machine but a simulation of the evolving dynamic living organism that is the planet. Anderson stated that data simulation is a large part of atmospheric science. Readings can remake the algorithms so that they have better chance of predicting future weather.
The lab he visited sounds amazing. It’s in Colorado where the sky is often crystal clear. The building was made to reflect the seemingly opposing forces of the human sensory experience or spiritual experience and our quest to understand it. Their efforts are in understanding the big picture. The first director of the national Center for atmospheric research was Walter Orr Roberts. He said that “No field of science — even atomic energy or medicine or space exploration — offers a greater potential for the good of all mankind as does the field of atmospheric science.” He asked the architect for the building, I. M. Pie, for a build that expressed “Both the contemplative and exciting aspects of scientific activity.” He said it should have “soul” and be “monastic, ascetic, but hospitable.” The architect camped out on the site among deer and rabbits and visited the Anasazi cliff dwellings and southwestern Colorado. He had the concrete mix with pink sand from a nearby quarry. The rock walls were hammered and to look like stone but it sounds like they also look like clouds in a sunrise or sunset.
An interesting dynamic occurring is that a two day prediction in 1975 is as certain as a five day prediction was in 2015. The goal for the “European center for medium-range weather forecast” is two weeks by 2025. As our climate is changing in a way that will be increasingly unpredictable, I wish these scientists the greatest humility as we all need to work diligently just to feed, shelter, and cloth ourselves in the coming years. How much of the resources being put into our quest for omnipotence would be more ethically used in providing for ourselves and our families. In the future I’ll write something on the ethical use of fossil fuels in the face of peak oil.
