Weather – Tell me what it feels like
Very few men have never looked at the sky admiring its beautiful creations with clouds of different shapes. Weather truly affects our lives, our mood, our well-being, our environment, and life conditions. But when talking of “weather” most of us mean a lot more than the current state of the atmosphere. Weather is a merger of impressions we’re collecting with all our senses. We can literally feel the weather on our skin and we react emotionally on the expectations and surprises it brings.
There is a special branch of science and business focusing on the atmosphere. It is called meteorology. As the word “meteorology” itself might sound a little dull to most of us I’d hereby like to defend its position as a famous (media) profession, shortly clarify its real purpose, and suggest what meteorology should occupy itself with besides the weather.
Why is that weather forecasts are usually treated as a special kind of information separated from the rest of the natural world? How come that when reading or watching a weather forecast there is always so much talk about the weather without mentioning its actual impacts on the environment and on us as beings? The reason is that someone invented the profession “meteorologist” and defined the knowledge a meteorologist should acquire in order to become a meteorologist and particular issues, tasks that are typically treated by, and phenomena that are analyzed by a meteorologist. In the wakes of the smartphone revolution the weather apps adopted the tradition of reporting and predicting the weather, and weather only, and while doing so they inherited some small flows created by the meteorologists when formulating the first weather reports, shaping the weather language, setting the foundation of today’s weather services.
For instance, in media and the million weather applications that have been created to serve you, you never hear of forecasts predicting the actual amounts of water on the ground. Instead you are told how many millimeters or inches are expected to fall from the sky. But what happens next? What is the actual outcome of the weather event, the rain hitting the ground surface? That is probably what you’d really like to know. You are interested to know how wet it’s going to get and how fast it is going to dry up. Or, you might be wondering how “hot” it will feel aside from the meteorologist or the app telling you the exact amount of degrees the thermometer is expected to reach on a specific day at a specific time.
Some progress has been made. Take for instance the widely used term “wind chill”. Wind chill is the cooling effect resulting from the wind chilling the human skin as it breaks down the thin layer of air continuously forming on the top of our skin heated by our body temperature. Because our body temperature is usually higher than the air temperature, we experience an imaginary reduction of the air temperature, the higher the wind speed the larger the effect. It simply “feels” a little chillier than the actual air temperature.
However, there are many other factors that substantially impact what the temperature feels like, one very important effect being represented by the source of all heat on the Earth – the Sun. The following comparison might illustrate the large difference between real air temperature and our (human) perception of air temperature. In winter, the Sun shines less brightly because the Sun emits less energy per area unit from where it is positioned relative to the horizon, namely a bit lower than during summertime. This can be described as less number of Sun rays being distributed over the spot where you are standing. During the summer, the Sun light will become more concentrated, the Sun will emit more energy per area unit, because it is positioned higher up on the sky, resulting in more energy hitting a particular surface, especially during the mid-day hours. This effect will effect your skin as well as you are standing and absorbing the rays emitted by the Sun at the particular spot where where you are standing. The perception of air temperature will be different in summer compared to winter and you will “feel” hotter standing unsheltered exposed to the Sun. This effect will perhaps not be notable during winter considering the generally lower temperatures and usually also (but not always) more clouds and stronger winds. However, try comparing what the Sun feels like on a hot day in June to a late summer equally hot August day, or a chilly December day to an equally cold day in early March. The difference should, if not striking, at least be evident!
One important reason is that meteorology measures, calculates, reports, and predicts, air temperature for a spot that is not exposed to Sun. As human beings, of course, we prefer knowing what the temperature feels like, independent of season and independent on the amount of clouds shading the Sun rays touching our skin. Air temperature is just a number, but what we feel is real.
Drawing from this, weather services should focus on providing weather information that is much more processed and adjusted to users actual needs. Weather service providers should explore the many opportunities to adjust content to a particular user, create new variables meeting special demands and needs issued by different lifestyles and activities, explore human perception of weather and how weather information can be fully personalized and individualized. ShareWeather has taken several steps in this direction towards more adjusted content, based on studying users perception of weather and weather information, and by creation new variables and algorithms handling new variables. We invite you to join us on this journey as a user of our services, or by participating as a partner or competitor on the market.
It is time to transform the weather forecasts from their currently very aged and traditional shape to a new exciting type of service that will actually tell the user what the weather will feel and look like!
Climate change – to be(lieve) or not to be(lieve)
Climate change, representing one of the most discussed topics today, affects all of us in some way or other. Even to those who doubt the human interference and impact on climate, climate change is still an issue of direct impact on our daily lives because of its constant presence in the background, causing debate and, even though possibly slight, feeling of inconvenience.
During the last couple of days the east coast of North America experienced a heat wave, either a physical proof of natural weather variability, or the more unpleasant alternative of possible evidence of climate change. I assume that this weather event will affect many minds, probably even cause some change of opinion, and definitely raise some concerns. In this blog post I will describe why.
The reason behind this is human nature. Our human minds are simply constructed in such a way that they tend to conserve an opinion based on previous experiences. In this way we establish a set of hypotheses explaining the world surrounding us. Our mind will collect and selectively welcome new facts supporting the established hypothesis. It takes some kind of proof and new experience in order to switch an established opinion. I went through some literature on this subject when working on my doctoral thesis and, ironically enough, studying car drivers’ behavior (and car driving is assumed to contribute to climate change), ranging from accident frequency to perception of news. In short, drivers are very hard to convince that they are taking a risk while for instance driving fast, driving while using mobile devices, or driving during severe weather, simply because most haven’t yet had any accidents! Second, their perception of news predicting bad weather and their own observations of weather is also strongly affected by previous experiences. So, if you hit the road in early spring, regardless of a severe weather alert predicting snow your brain will still expect fair weather conditions with no risk of hazards. If, additionally, you happen to be living in a warm climate zone city traveling in a foreign country up north in a mountain area, your will be playing a dangerous game. The danger lays in the fact that your brain is unable to expect something you’ve never previously observed in person. Your hypothesis simply won’t match the hazardous reality.
While my claim is based on some established research in psychology, it is surprising to see how well this theory works on the climate change debate and us humans. Just think of all the headlines spreading fear and horror you’ve read on climate change. Did these stories make you think of climate change as a real possibility? Probably not. That is, not until you experienced an extreme weather event yourself. Because belief requires some real experience.
If you have been living in one place your entire life and observed the sky and weather show performing every day live on the stage of the place where you live, more or less active and probably mostly passive, the weather is a part of the daily scenery completing the picture of your life. There is more common weather, and there are some more rare phenomena, all of which you are treating as “normal”. This is what is usually meant by weather and weather variability.
However, on one particular day in your life you might experience something out of range, something extraordinary, unexpected, perhaps even unbelievable. You suddenly feel the unexpected on your skin. Perhaps wet, cold, heat. Maybe mixed with pain. Or by contrast very joyful and pleasant. Maybe threatening and dangerous. Maybe not. The unexpected scenario evolving just before your eyes. This event will forever stay conserved in your mind, and it will become a story to tell your grandchildren. This is what we call an extreme weather event.
Now, if you experienced something threatening associated with this weather event, you might start thinking about the possibility that this is the thing you were reading about in the papers. This is climate change. This is not normal anymore, this represents a change. And just as climate change represents a modification of what can categorized as “normal weather”, your mind will also switch into this new mode accepting the hypothesis that climate change is true. Eventually, you might almost forget about this event and switch back to normal, all depending on the nature of the event, its impact on your life, further knowledge you’ve gained and information you’ve collected on the topic. The event will most certainly have some impact.
Climate change can be proved first when we have experienced several events, and when this happens to many people worldwide. Then we will be ready to act and make transforming changes of our way of life, consumption, production, transportation. The problem is that we are waiting for real evidence in order to comprehend and understand, within the tiniest areas of our human brains, what is happening.
It is my strong belief that one should always be careful when it comes to news carriers predicting disasters and announcing the end of our our existence. However, climate change does not represent fresh news today. I used to belong to the group of strong believers who started raising their voices in the early 90’s simply because I was forced to touch upon the subject while studying Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Stockholm University. The information and knowledge I had to consume to get my exam in Meteorology thought me that there were some discoveries made on the topic that had just raised a concern and a warning finger. To me and my peers it was obvious that the climate is such a fragile system, just as any other system on the planet preserving the current appearance of the Earth, so fragile and complex that science has just begun unveiling its true nature and secret mechanisms.
So, what happens if that system is put out of balance? How far can we push it? Is the process reversible, will we be able to go back to normal? These are some questions everyone, not just a Meteorology student, should ask themselves. However, for the majority, who naturally doesn’t choose Meteorology for a profession, climate change is a complex matter that cannot be easily explained without forcing loads of information and knowledge on people.
The problem of climate change lays in the human nature. Whoever you are, once presented the unpleasant facts, you will be asked to join a the group of believers, doubters, those who reject, or those who silently accept waiting for a coming extinction. You will take sides and you will chose sides based on your previous experiences.
It is not until you experience, with your own body and senses, through someone near you, or by thoroughly studying the subject, that you will switch to a new opinion perhaps contradicting your current belief.
How it all started – Share weather and the spacial resolution
You might wander what “share weather” stands for. Here is a story about the beginning of “shareweather” and what triggered the work and research on shareweather, namely the problem of spatial resolution within meteorology.
It all begun just before the real rise of social media back in 2006. I myself, the founder of ShareWeather, was applying for funding for my research work, at the time mainly focusing on weather forecasting and creating algorithms that could improve the local weather forecasts, my area of interest being road condition forecasting. I was struggling with the limitations in numerical weather prediction models (so-called NWP), in particular regarding their spatial resolution. Basically, the spatial resolution refers to the number of points in space, that is, the number of points allover the globe, for which these NWPs are calculating the weather. Or, more correctly, the spacial resolution is a number describing how densely these points are distributed over the Earth’s surface. Because it is simply impossible to cover all points on the Earth’s surface, NWPs provide a weather forecast for a set of chosen points. The distance between those points is 10-40 km, or 5-20 miles. In other words, not very dense, hardly reliable, and sometimes extremely inconvenient! Just imagine a mountain peak and the problem appears rather clear and the solution unreachable. Anyhow, I had just taken note that the Internet was about to explode in terms of information bursting out from all corners of the digitized world as ordinary people started exchanging increasing volumes of information with others. Until then, the Internet had solely been used for publication of different materials and for people, most of the time two individuals at a time, communicating over e-mail. Now, this fact was about to change forever as new social media platforms were popping up with thousands of people joining every day. We were standing before a revolution of some kind.
You probably already have a pretty good idea regarding the meaning of the words “share” and “weather” and I’ll assure you it’s a good start as you are about to comprehend the meaning of the “share weather” concept and enter the fascinating world of weather and ShareWeather.
I remembered the many useful weather reports and real-time weather observations I had received from different individuals and professionals through my career working as a meteorologist during the 90’s until the present day. I received weather reports from pilots flying aircrafts through the lowest cloud layer and how accurately they were able to tell us meteorologists at what height level (or flight level as aviation specialists call it) the actual cloud base started at a particular time. Talking about useful input! The numerical models spitted out their forecast as usual and they would sometimes not only give us the wrong numbers, but completely miss out that there were clouds on the sky this morning.
Because machines and models are just our creations. Machines and models are not as skilled as people for performance of some tasks. In some respect, a human eye is much of a better instrument than any computer.
Another example on how people were sharing weather information were all the interesting telephone calls one could receive working as a meteorologist. Late in the evening some troubled old cute lady or gentleman would report what they had identified on the nightsky. A road administrator would provide feed-back on the ice and frost forecasts they had received, confirming the accuracy of the predictions or giving new input that could be used for the next forecast round during the coming hours.
Thinking of all these examples it was clear to me that the power of individuals sharing weather information should not be underestimated. It is immense. And sharing weather information was something that could become extremely useful. I added a couple of lines on the subject to my research application and hoped that someone out there scrutinizing my proposal would realize its value and real potential.
Thankfully, six months later I was about to start my research on “share weather”. Shortly after I registered the domain shareweather.com and I started this journey. About five years later I presented my doctoral thesis on this subject, and ever since I’ve been working on developing the concept of “share weather”, developing services and programming applications aimed to serve the purpose of “share weather”.
