The Last Night on the Road

It is 10:08 pm in Phnom Penh on 28 November 2012. I’m in a hotel whose name I don’t know and whose rate is $7 per night. The bar across the street advertises “no knifes, no guns, no hand grenades”. I wonder how often hand grenades are found during pat-downs.

Tomorrow I make one last visit to the Mekong River Forecasting Center before flying to Kuala Lumpur and then back to Melbourne. That will then be the end of 475 days (16 months) of traveling around the world to more than two dozen countries.

Today is the annual Water Festival (Bon Om Touk) celebrating the annual reversal of the direction of flow of the Tonlé Sap River. That bafflingly complex system deserves its own series of “hydrologic oddities” posts. During part of the year the Mekong flows North up this tributary to quadruple the size of a large inland lake. Then when the Mekong river is low, the lake drains South back towards the mainstem and to the ocean.

It seems too that tomorrow my inland lake of travel experiences will stop filling and the entire system will be momentarily still.

My bags are packed and the contents of my luggage have only gotten more impractical through time. There are a few shirts, a few pants, a fat wad of foreign currency, a cannonball’s worth of overseas coins, bags of computer cables, a stack of hard drives, medicines in five languages (none of them English) and hundreds of pages of notebooks, reports and interview notes.

This blog has only been updated through February. I underestimated the difficulty of trying to travel and write at the same time. The blog doesn’t include the visits to

Egypt: to see the world’s oldest streamgage and to see the sand dunes

Vienna: to speak at Europe’s largest meeting of Earth Scientists

France: to go to the Paris river forecasting center and to be a visiting scientist at IRSTEA, studying how to model extreme floods

Luxembourg: to go to a workshop on how to read a landscape and use that to build better computer models of its river

Scotland: to visit Mike Cranston’s group at the SEPA forecasting center and to get out into an experimental catchment in the highlands

Northern Ireland: to try (and fail) at a pilgrimage to Galway, the Mecca for hydrologists… A visit to some natural wonders would have to suffice

England: to go to the UK Flood Forecasting Centre, to talk to the developer of that country’s forecasting system, to study at ECMWF (in time to witness the landfall of Hurricane Sandy), to hobnob with the Royal Society’s elite at a forecasting uncertainty workshop

Italy: to find the source of the European Flood Awareness System (one of the most modern river forecasting systems in the world) and to give a guest lecture in a risk management course

and finally Cambodia: to shadow Australian hydrologists Terry Malone and Alex Minett during their visit to the Mekong River Commission’s Flood Forecasting Center

When passing through the Malpensa airport in Milan there was a plaque on the floor “Tuttu i passi che ho fatto nella mia vita mi hanno portato qui, ora.”

The translation is “Every step I have taken in my life has led me here, now.”

Come Friday when I land home Australia, the pause will end and the direction of flow will change.

ECMWF Awarded Noble Prize in Prediction

From a recent story in USA Today about Hurricane Sandy and the performance of the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts:

AccuWeather's Mike Smith, author of Warnings: The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather [said] "… the bottom line is that forecasters nailed this storm days ahead of its arrival. The people behind Europe's model should receive a Nobel Prize in physics, this was that powerful a moment in weather science."

There is no precedent for a meteorologist winning the true Nobel Prize (except perhaps the 2007 prize for IPCC and Al Gore).

So today I awarded the staff of ECMWF their own “Noble [sic] Prize in Prediction” for the production of exceptional Numerical Weather Predictions during Hurricane Sandy. It was my last day as a visiting scientist there.  

The head of the research department Erland Källén (a Swede, right) graciously received the trophy (bottom center) on behalf of the employees (back).

On behalf of the operational departments, Erik Andersson (another Swede) and David Richardson (English, but still a nice person) accepted Pop-Tart prizes (bottom) and a mélange of home made cookies (back left).

During past disasters retailers report massive sales spikes in Pop-Tarts and have taken to pre-staging them based on the forecasts:

The experts mined the [past sales] data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products - and not just the usual flashlights. "We didn't know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane," Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. "And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer." Thanks to those insights, trucks filled with toaster pastries and six-packs were soon speeding down Interstate 95 toward Wal-Marts in the path of Frances.

The monetary prize (a 5 pound itunes gift card) was donated to charity, partly to avoid the inevitable conflicts of dividing it 250 ways among the staff. Others are encouraged to donate to the Red Cross a show of support for those impacted by the national tragedy.

USA Today has a few more stories lauding the European Weather Centre’s forecasts:

Several days before Sandy came ashore in New Jersey on Monday night, forecasters were warning of a superstorm that would make a highly unusual left turn into the coastline. Anyone who didn't know a big storm was coming wasn't paying attention. This was a triumph of modern meteorology that undoubtedly saved many lives. In the era of satellites, supercomputers and instant communications, "surprise" hurricanes, such as the one that killed hundreds of people in New York and New England in 1938, are largely a thing of the past.

But before Americans get smug about their superior scientific sophistication, there is this to consider: Of the two main computer weather-forecasting models, the American and the European, the European was by far the better performer on Sandy. In the middle of last week, the British-based European model, known as the ECMWF, was already showing an unusually powerful storm moving up from the Bahamas and slamming into the mid-Atlantic coast.

Other good reads include Forecasters Absolutely Nailed This One, and Mike Smith’s own This Was Their Finest Hour (part 1 and part 2). Speaking of institutional competence…

A few days ago the Daily Show had a piece praising the effectiveness of preparations for and response to the storm.

The New York Times reports that the subways are operating again only a week after the disaster.

It has been less than two weeks since the most devastating storm in the New York City subway system’s 108-year history. Seven tunnels beneath the East River flooded. Entire platforms were submerged. Underground equipment, some of it decades old, was destroyed.

The damage was the worst that the system had ever seen. And yet, the subways have come back — quicker than almost anyone could have imagined. Less than three days after the storm hit, partial subway service was restored. Most major lines were back within a week. Repairs came so quickly in some cases that the authority was ready before Consolidated Edison had restored power.

“Some of what they’re doing borders on the edge of magic,” said Gene Russianoff, the staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group that is frequently critical of the authority.

The forecasts lead to the protection of critical infrastructure and this is partly responsible for the rapid recovery compared to other disasters.

Sealing up air vents in the subway

More protections of subways

Battening boats

Removing underground electronics and pumps

Hurricane Sandy Photos and Recovery Stories

Closed due to the apocalypse.(Ocean City)

This aerial photo shows burned-out homes in the Breezy Point section of the Queens borough New York after a fire on Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012. The tiny beachfront neighborhood told to evacuate before Sandy hit New York burned down as it was inundated by floodwaters, transforming a quaint corner of the Rockaways into smoke-filled debris.

Photo: The day after Hurricane Sandy struck New York City sand and muck covers a car in Coney Island in Brooklyn, Tuesday, October 30, 2012. (Charles Eckert/Weather.com)

Photo: A firefighter who lived in one of the approximately 100 houses destroyed by a fire that resulted from Hurricane Sandy, searches for his wifes wedding ring, in the Breezy Point section of Queens, Tuesday, October 30, 2012. (Charles Eckert/ Weather.com)

Photo: Waves wash over a roller coaster from a Seaside Heights, N.J. amusement park that fell in the Atlantic Ocean during superstorm Sandy on Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

Photo: Kim Johnson on Tuesday surveys the destruction around her flooded apartment in Atlantic City, New Jersey—one of several southern New Jersey coastal communities that bore the brunt of Hurricane Sandy's storm surge Monday night. Rivers of seawater gushed down city streets, swamped buildings, and destroyed a section of the city's iconic boardwalk.

 

Photo: "We saw the glow and we couldn’t do a thing," deputy fire chief Lou Satriano told the Wall Street Journal's Metropolis blog. Satriano added that roads were also swamped and the burning homes themselves were standing in several feet of water—all of which gave the blaze time to spread. "It was a domino effect. Houses just caught and caught and caught fire."

A woman sifts through her mother's damaged home for items to save in Breezy Point, Queens.

Lost photos found.

A church cross stands amid wreckage on the coast of Long Branch, New Jersey.

A dog named Shaggy is handed from a National Guard truck to National Guard personnel in Hoboken, New Jersey.

A photograph floats just below the surface of a flooded street in Massapequa, New York.

A Virgin Mary is all that remains from a home that was destroyed in Breezy Point, Queens.

Flood protection examples: From sad…

… to serious.

Want to know the real way to defend yourself against floods? Read the Army Corps of Engineers flood fight handbook.

Read about the massive pumps that are de-watering New York (at Wired and Wall Street Journal)

Finally, there’s a chronicle of someone’s experience during the days of the flood:

As New York sleeps, Sandy speeds up. Morning forecasts presage an ocean-going, full-scale, "life-threatening" weather demon. Lower Manhattan's pavements clear to let it pass. In certain parts, you can cross entire blocks without encountering more than a handful of people. In case you think you've misread that last sentence, that's whole blocks. …

About half an hour later, with the wind and the rain beating against the windows, the lights go out. Via phone message, word comes of an explosion down by 14th Street. A transformer has blown as floodwaters from the East River sweep into Manhattan….

After dark on Tuesday, there are two New Yorks: the one with power and the one without any power or mobile phone signal and, in parts, without water….

Uptown, the world suddenly comes back to life. It's as if nothing has ever happened. The storm debris has been cleared away; shops are open; restaurants are serving hot food.

After the Storm (Hurricane Sandy)

Here’s a brief review of some news items about Hurricane Sandy…

The Daily Mail has four giant stories with lots of photos and videos. They will keep you reading for an hour. They cover

1. The misery of living without power

Damage at Rockaway Beach

Police provided cellphone charging stations. I’ve been at some airport power points that look like this.

2. The ecstasy of having your power turned back on

3. The next storm that’s approaching the area and the damage done to the shore

4. The struggle to get gasoline

There are frenzies over supplies of gasoline which at one point were declared free (10 gallons per customer, 11,000 gallons total). It was later clarified that emergency services/first responders (even off duty) would have first priority.

Now there are long lines for transport into Manhattan

Some coverage of Atlantic City, picked from USA Today’s general page on Hurricane Sandy

John Paxton, a lifelong resident of Atlantic City, said: "This is the first time I have been down to see it. It is devastating, it looks like a bombed-out area. It is the first time I've seen mass destruction like this." Like many, the 75-year-old ignored evacuation warnings. He showed us how three feet of flood water had even left the food drawers in the bottom of his fridge filled with foul water. His home of 57 years is now caked in mud and sludge. He said: "When I saw the road outside had become a river, there was nothing else to do. I went to bed."

New York Times documents life in public housing after the storm.

Opened fire hydrants became community wells. Sleep-and-wake cycles were timed to sunsets and sunrises. People huddled for warmth around lighted gas stoves as if they were roaring fires. Darkness became menacing, a thing to be feared….

A few residents shrugged off the hardship, acknowledging that they had been told to evacuate and now were paying the price. “It’s just an inconvenience. Half the world does not have electricity,” said Ralph Lopez, 73… “I grew up in a cold-water flat with no heat at all. And this is just for a week. So boohoo.”"

From a gallery of children after the storm at Buzzfeed

“Kate Traina, 14, looks over the rumble of her grandparents house in Staten Island, N.Y., Friday, Nov. 2, 2012.”

“At her family's 6th floor apartment in the Red Hook housing project on November 3, 2012 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.”