Market crash

 (sources here, here and here)

At the start of this week we had a farewell dinner with our house hosts Trudy and Ian. He is a financial adviser and we we were talking about communicating risk to his customers. I can see parallels between giving investment advice and being a forecaster. Good predictions of rivers can be like money in the bank to some users. But what happens when the market crashes?

At first I thought there must be that sinking feeling, an initial denial as to what's happening. There's that sense that there has to be an "undo" button, "please let this not be happening". Then there's the gut churning realization that the money is gone and not coming back. It seems unfair. I shouldn't be going through this.

Do we really deserve this?

 Ian may have seen it in a different way. Of course we deserve this. Everyone knew the risks, even the risk of extreme events. This should come as no surprise. Ian said he wasn't a financial adviser, he was a risk manager. What is the risk? What is your objective? How much risk are you willing to accept?

The stock market or river levels?

He said the worst part of his job is getting a call from his mother, asking how things are going (when everybody knows things aren't going well). My mother used to call me and ask if I was responsible for the flood in this region or that. Honestly, it wasn't my fault, this kind of thing just happens.

Funny names for snow measurement sites

Western US river forecasters depend heavily on data coming from measurement sites in the mountains. SNOTEL is the main snow monitoring network run by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the same agency that also makes forecasts (along with the National Weather Service). 

Nearly every day I used this data, even if I only got to visit about two dozen sites. They're often named after some local feature, like a nearby mountain or lake. I always imagined that Magic Mountain in Idaho was covered in gumdrops or Thunderhead in Colorado was home to the Old Spice Guy. Some of the sites sounded like where you'd be assigned to do fieldwork if you made your boss angry. 

Saddle mountain, Oregon is in the middle of a clear-cut forest. Not the most pleasant place to be.

Here's my countdown of the most depressing sounding snow measurement sites in the Western US

10 Slumgullion, Colorado
9 Vacas Locas, New Mexico - translates to "Crazy cows" from Spanish. I have to think there's a good story there.
8 Toe Jam, Nevada
7 Hardscrabble, Utah
6 Sucker Creek, Wyoming
5 Rough and tumble, Colorado

4 Bloody dick, Montana - named for an englishman who lived there in the 1860s that cursed like a sailor
3 Dismal swamp, California

2 Disaster peak, Nevada

1 Calamity, Washington

Black swans

Earlier this week I had a chance to catch up with Andy Wood (right) and Martyn Clark (middle) while they were in Melbourne for a CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology science conference. Andy was a driving force behind an advanced streamflow forecasting system for the Western US and is now a hydrologist at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. Martyn is a research scientist and a developer of one of New Zealand's river forecast systems. Andy and Martyn had never seen a koala so we took a day trip down to Phillip Island. I warned them that the koala is Australia's most boring marsupial but we'd probably get more entertainment from the kangaroos.

Cute, yes. 

At the wildlife park we came across some black swans and their chicks. For a very long time people assumed that black swans didn't exist because historical records had only ever reported finding white swans. Much to everyone's surprise, black swans were eventually discovered by explorers in Western Australia (on the recently mentioned Swan river, funnily enough). 


Now, the phrase "black swan" (popularized by a recent book) has come to mean a surprise with a major impact that seems obvious in retrospect. For example, housing prices could never go down because they've always gone up. I suppose smoking is safe because I've never met someone who got cancer. It's safe to build by the river because no one has ever seen a flood that high (at least in our lifetimes). 

The discovery of a "black swan" is outside the realm of normal human experience, but once it happens, it's confronting. There's no more denying that is could happen, because it did happen. There's no un-ringing that bell.

In river forecasting, it sometimes seems like there's a limit to how wet things could get, the record highs cluster around a certain level. It can be like how new Olympic records can only shave a few tenths of a second off of previous times because things are already so fast. But when I started forecasting, southern Utah had a year that blew the doors off all the previous records... There was more snowpack than anyone could have imagined was possible. The question then was how much runoff there'd be? That's a story for another day, however.

In the end, we did get more fun out of the kangaroos. The park had bags of feed and the kangaroos would eat out of our hands. One mugged me and tore open the corner of my bag with his teeth. We thought this one had a face like one of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons.

Disappearing waterfall

Speaking of waterfalls, here's a picture of me at Silverband falls in the Grampians, mountains to the Northwest of Melbourne, Australia. The water falls disappear into a rock base. They reappear about 50 meters away, even when the flow is relatively high.   

Here's another angle from someone else's blog

(source)

Weird rivers: upward flowing waterfall

I'm always on the lookout for hydrologic oddities. Here's a great example from the BBC, with video

Waterfalls flow upwards in extreme wind

Winds battering southern Australia over the last 24 hours have been so strong that spray from waterfalls south of Sydney has billowed up into the air. Nearly a month's worth of rain has fallen on the city in 24 hours, and wind speeds have reached 120km/h (75mph). The extreme weather has meant a rough ride on the city's ferries, and a high surf warning has been issued with waves expected to reach 5m (16ft).


(source)

Watermark: The simulation builds its own momentum

We're rounding out our week over coverage of Exercise Watermark, the UK flood simulation. The occasion was the follow-up conference with participants. Already there's materials on the web about it, including slides from many of the key presentations. Kristy Chandler from Capita Symonds checked in and had this to say about the conference:

“About 250 people from various government departments attended to provide feedback on the exercise and the recently published interim report. The feedback received to date is positive - with people appreciating the opportunity to actively feed in to the evaluation process. And the feedback received will be very valuable in finalising the post-exercise report. Richard Benyon MP gave a very good presentation, as did Rod Stafford on behalf of the consultants. My company (Capita Symonds / VectorCommand) also sponsored a post-conference dinner which was a lot of fun, and included an awards ceremony. Awards were given to a number of individuals who performed well during the planning of the exercise or as players – all very well-deserved!”

We’ll finish off this week with one last question about Kristy's favorite moment during the Exercise Watermark.

In a flood command center (source)

Tom Pagano: What was the most exciting, or interesting, or insightful moment for you?

Kristy Chandler: We had certain people that were participating on different days. On the second day, the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (where all the ministers sit and talk to the prime minister) was so concerned about the news that there might be a coastal flood event happening, they started requesting all this information from other people. Those were experts that weren’t actually meant to be participating on that day, but the experts came in and started responding without their briefing, just purely in reaction to the requests from this cabinet office because they’re important.

The whole exercise became alive, even without us “stimulating” it by sending them “injects” [points when new pieces of information were revealed]. We thought, “Wow, this is amazing”. All you need to do is just stimulate a group – and this was a very large group of people – for it to become alive and gain its own momentum. I was impressed by that.

But it’s scary because you only need, with a big group of people, a couple of little things and the interaction between them all can turn it into something much bigger. It happens in life all the time. People end up doing something based on a couple little bits of information to start with and get spooked. But in this case it was positive and made the exercise exciting, very “real life”, and part of why everyone has said it’s such a success.

Watermark: Practical advice for surviving a flood

Dealing with disasters can be a useful analogy for dealing with life. We try and prevent bad things, but some problems are inevitable. We need to know how to handle when problems do happen. Today we talk about risk management and Kristy has some good advice on what to do if a flood does hit.

(source)

Kristy Chandler: I think [risk management] is relevant to all aspects of our lives. The biggest lesson for individuals and communities is to make sure that they do their own risk assessment, and have their own plan in place. And that’s something that’s really being encouraged at the moment in the U.K. because there are just so many [people at risk].  There’s five million properties currently expected to be at risk of different types of flooding, and there’s no way that all of them can be defended and all floods prevented.  There’s a drive for individuals and communities to be aware if they are at risk and come up with their own flood plans.

It’s just being prepared, really. Aware and prepared- that can go to all kinds of aspects of life, doesn’t it? It can be having a fire alarm in your house in case of a fire or insurance if your house was to burn down.  Be aware of the risk and then do something to manage if it was to occur. We’re encouraging community members to have a little flood pack in their cupboard, and if they were to be flooded, they would grab the pack. It might have a blanket and first aid kit in it, and a can of beans, a map showing them where they’re supposed to go. For that kind of thing, we’re really good at fire but we’re just getting there on flooding.

Tom Pagano: That’s an interesting idea, that not all disasters are preventable. You could try to protect yourself but something is always going to slip through, no matter how hard you try.  You could live in a house with iron bars and bullet proof glass but it’s expensive. Besides, you’re not really living a comfortable life in a Kevlar house.

Maybe not the best place for entertaining guests (source)

Original caption: This reinforced concrete safe house is designed to allow someone to control the new hurricane protection gates at the mouth of the 17th Street Canal, even during a hurricane. If it looks like a storm is going to be strong enough to destroy the safe house, the people inside can escape out the back and then the gates can be remotely controlled. Read more

. 

Kristy Chandler: It’s part of the risk-based approach. You can never completely eliminate flood risk because it can always rain more than you expect, and more than you design for.  So you design for something that’s appropriate to the level of consequences. In an area that’s, say, farmland, you may not defend it to a level that’s very high, but a hospital you may want to put extra measures in to make sure it doesn’t flood.

There’s always – even if you do put defenses in– the risk that those defenses will breach.  So, quite often, we’re putting emergency plans in place to respond to flooding if primary defenses fail. That’s another [issue] for flood risk management.

Tom Pagano:  I saw something about this for the Tsunami in Japan. They have natural flood barriers of trees on the shore. The barrier is good for breaking up a medium-sized tsunami. But for something that’s overwhelming, then those trees just become projectiles. Then you have trees rammed into buildings. I’ve seen some astonishing photos.

Japan tsunami damage (source)

Kristy Chandler: The legislation in the U.K. requires you to assess the risk behind defenses.  So even if there is a flood defense against a Tsunami, you need to assess the risk if that was to fail or over-top, and put measures in place to make sure that people would still be safe.

Tom Pagano: Do you have any practical advice for if you’re ever in a flood? Someone asked me the other day if I knew what to do if I had warning of a meter of water in my living room. I’m not sure I know the answer to that… and I’m a hydrologist!

Kristy Chandler: You don’t want ever want to walk through flood water.  One of the very dangerous things is that manhole covers lift, and if you’re swimming or walking through flood water, you can get sucked into the sewer… Obviously, that’s going to be the end for you because there’s no oxygen. [Walking through a flood is] the thing you just don’t want to do. 

If you’ve got a double story house, then you might want to go to the top floor. In Queensland recently they camped on the roof. You would probably want to evacuate the area if you don’t have a double story house, before the flood water hits. And if you can’t evacuate in time, go for the highest point and call someone, if you can.  Try and get some kind of a message to people to come and rescue you.

Not the kind of thing you want to see on the news (source).

Tom: I might add that you should be very cautious about driving through water. You’re never completely sure what’s under the surface and even 6 inches of water can cause problems. If you stall when the exhaust is under water, the car won’t restart until it is towed or pushed out of the water. In Arizona they had what was called the “stupid motorist law”. If you drive into water and get in trouble, you have to pay for the cost of being rescued. The irony, of course, is that whenever there’s a flood, the standard image on the evening news is of cars driving through water. For more driving advice during floods, go to http://www.smartdriving.co.uk/Driving/Driving_emergencies/Floods.htm

Watermark: So “code white” doesn’t mean “smoke break”?

Today we’re discussing the essentials of good communication in a disaster situation. We’re also talking about having to make decisions based on limited information and in a hurry.

 (source)

Tom Pagano:              I imagine there was a lot of communication that you did with the emergency managers, and then they had to communicate a lot with each other. Do you have any ideas for what makes a good, clear, effective message when you’re communicating?

Kristy Chandler:           One of the really important things to do is to have a generic email address that’s not Joe.Blow@fire.com. It’s better to have emergency@fire.com so that it’s a dedicated emergency line that people communicate to in any kind of situation. It should be on a highly secure system that’s been assessed for all kinds of risk. You should make sure it’s capable of receiving attachments of different sizes and doesn’t screen out because it’s got a firewall that’s too high. 

                                    There needs to be a secondary system in place if that was to go down. There should be another way of doing that communication, and that that needs to not only be in your plan, but it’s communicated to all of the people that may wish to contact you.

Tom Pagano:              And then the actual message itself?

Kristy Chandler:           Well, it’s difficult because there’s codes that all emergency responders use. Sticking to the published/industry standard codes is useful because in different areas they will have their own codes that they like to use. If you stick to a published standard then that’s useful, and using as much plain language as possible.

The fifth keyboard is being used as a foot pedal (source) 

This is much like how they say “code blue” in hospitals as shorthand for when someone in cardiac arrest and is in need of care, urgently. Frustratingly, different hospitals have different codes. “Code black” means severe weather in Chicago, someone’s being attacked in Australia or there’s a bomb threat in Wyoming.  Imagine if you shouted “code white” and the local nurses clamored for the rubber hoses and the visiting nurses went for a smoke break. Clearly everyone wants to be using the same standard, but it can be tricky getting people to give up what they know to learn something new.

Tom Pagano:              Is there negotiation that goes on between [emergency mangers?] Is it just, “I’ve detected something.  I’d like to pass it on to the people that need to know”, or is it [more like “we should be putting more people down in district X”]?

Kristy Chandler:           Negotiation does happen in these cross-agency meetings. They do that face to face, and it really depends on peoples’ personalities…

Tom Pagano:              I wonder about how you keep personality out of this? Sure, there are good things about having intuition and charisma… but then there’s the other side of it.

Kristy Chandler:           [Laughing] I don’t think there’s any Hollywood movie that hasn’t had some charismatic, gutsy, yelling-at-his-boss hero in an emergency situation.

Tom Pagano:              “We need to get those helicopters in the air right now!”

Kristy Chandler:           Whether or not the gutsy rebel hero is the one that would actually be beneficial or whether that’s just a Hollywood myth is something that’s interesting to look into.

But one of the things that we’ve noticed in this exercise is that during normal operational work, the people in these roles and doing these jobs (the ministers and their support staff) can operate in a risk adverse way - to avoid a bad political situation.  

In emergency situations these people are expected to just switch and turn into Rambo and become people who can take risks. They have to make decisions with potentially limited information. And it’s a challenge. Some people just aren’t used to switching within the time scales that are required. The behavior and dynamics of these things is very, very interesting…

A flagrant violation of parlimentary procedure (source)

Tom Pagano:              Which would you say you were…[more of a planner or a doer]? Have you changed through going through these exercises?

Kristy Chandler:           I personally am a very detailed planner who is very willing to then change the plan. [Laughing] I like to know that I’ve thought about things and that I’m not doing anything too ridiculous. But I’m very adaptable and willing to change that plan if things aren’t going well. 

Thanks Kristy! Take a code white and we’ll see you again soon. 

Watermark: Behind the scenes of a mock disaster

I asked Kristy Chandler about her favorite waterway and she didn’t hesitate in saying the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia. She grew up there before moving to the UK in 2003. I can see the influence of both continents- She has a cultured confidence that seems typical of the English. She also has that cheerful warmth that comes from heavy doses of sunshine during certain formative stages of development.

The Swan River 

She’s now an environmental engineer for Capita Symonds. She deals with all aspects of flooding – hydrological assessment and hydraulic modeling and risk assessment, and the application of those technical things to different areas. More recently she’s been looking at emergency planning. She flew to Melbourne to give several presentations about her work and we talked in a meeting room overlooking the Yarra River and the Polly Woodside, an 1880s sailing ship. I asked if the Swan River was small enough to jump across and said it would be better to catch the ferry.

So, here’s the first part of our conversation where we talk about Exercise Watermark and what it was like to be a part of a country-wide disaster simulation.

Kristy Chandler

Tom Pagano:              There’s a project that you’re involved with that you gave a talk about at this conference…what was [Exercise Watermark]?

Kristy Chandler:           People will probably be familiar with fire drills; essentially it was a flood drill. We hosted a mock flood event so that people could test how they would react and respond to that flooding if it was a real flood. It went from the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) [top level organizational response and reaction] all the way through to where the public were involved….We hosted a four day very widespread severe flooding exercise…50 organizations participated, and 10,000 people were involved.

…It started with the summer 2007 flood events and a post flood review that recommended that one of these exercises were held.  The U.K.’s government department’s responsible for flooding (the Environment Agency), were in charge of running it, and they needed some help for such a large scale event.  They hired a group of us consultants to provide that specialist expertise plus the software that was required to run the exercise. We’d plan it and deliver it, and are now reviewing it.

Tom Pagano:              Ok.  You developed all kinds of scripts of what would happen at different times… Put us in the place of one of the [flood exercise] participants…

Kristy Chandler:           They would have received a briefing pack a few weeks before to say that something is going to happen on the day. It included some general principles about the conduct of play during the day.  But everything else was a secret. 

                                    What we tried to do was to make it as realistic as possible so that they could go to work in the morning, sit down at their desk, grab their cup of tea, and then it would just start as it would in a normal event. It’s called a “command post exercise”, meaning that participants sit at their normal desk and receive bits of information in the normal way that they would receive it. 

                                    They would get a phone call (if they normally would) or they would get an email, and we produced television scripts so that they could watch the news three times a day to see the events unfolding.  And then they would use all those little segments of information to piece together the actual situation and then react to that. That’s how they would do that in reality.

Emergency response command center (source)

Tom Pagano:              In every disaster movie you see a command center… How realistic is that, people with clipboards running around? What is a realistic scene at an emergency control center?

Kristy Chandler:           It depends on where they are. In the U.K. there’s command centers all over the place. When they’re responding or interacting with people on the ground, that’s when they’re running around with the clipboards. [Laughing]

When the situation gets a bit higher, it becomes a meeting room, probably like in the movies. There’s a meeting room with a big table and all the chiefs of different organizations are sitting around it, discussing what their next moves are and what they’re going to do. And so we gave them the information and a scenario that was severe enough to actually make those centers and those meetings start up.

Tom Pagano:              What would be a severe enough situation to activate [the command centers]?

Kristy Chandler:           The U.K. is probably quite similar to Australia. You need two regions being affected by an emergency.  We ended up having 14 regions that were affected at various times during the exercise. If two or more regions need help, it needs to be coordinated by a tier above that.  It can escalate up all the way to the prime minister.

Tom Pagano:              Did you get to meet “the big guy”?

Not "the big guy", but pretty close when it comes to flooding. (more)

Kristy Chandler:           [Laughing] No, but we had plenty of minister [politician] participation.  One of the good things was that they were very enthusiastic and had a lot of fun playing. They came out of the day saying really positive things about their experience and how they enjoyed participating. There was a bit of a buzz, actually… There’s a kind of adrenaline that you get in these emergency situations.  That was good to know that they felt involved and engaged enough that they got that kind of buzz – you know, electricity.

Tom Pagano:              For someone who’s never been in that situation, how would you describe that adrenaline, or that feeling, that buzz?... Is it the sense of not knowing? Or the confidence that you have when there’s something to do and you know how to do it? Did you have your own sense of anticipation organizing this and not knowing how it was going to turn out?

Kristy Chandler:           Yes, I was one of the staff members at exercise control.  There was one central command center where we issued all the bits of information from and monitored how things were going.  And if things weren’t going quite right, we did some on-the-spot additional bits of information to get it back on track.

…Essentially we set up our own command center. Every morning you got the ten minute warning and your stomach turned slightly. You take a deep breath and then get going and there’s people running around… We had quite a lot of planning and testing.  And on the big day, yeah, it was a bit nervous! [Laughing] Butterflies, that’s how I’d describe it.

Tom Pagano:              Yeah. “Uh oh, cappuccino machine is down, what do we do?” [Laughing]

Kristy Chandler:           More like what if “our whole IT system is down!” But thankfully due to all of our testing and planning that did not happen.

Exercise watermark week

Flood drills in the UK (from RNLI) 

In March, about 10,000 people participated in a 4-day realtime flood simulation in the UK called Exercise Watermark. The Cabinet Office Briefing Room (something like the bunker in the basement of the White House) was activated, helicopters were flying, mock-fatalities were strewn about. It was the UK's biggest yet emergency response exercise. It was done on recommendation of the report that reviewed the UK's flood response during 2007. 

You can see the big board from here (source)

At last week's IUGG meeting I had a chance to catch up with Kristy Chandler from Capita Symonds’ Flood Risk and Water Environment team. Her company coordinated the exercise, helping to write the script, manage the simulation command center and so on. We talked about what it's like to be a fly on the wall during a flood response, how people cope with the pressure and what's the best way to survive a flood. 

Today is the first day of a followup conference in London to review how it all went. There's been a few interim reports released. Stay tuned, we'll be discussing the exercise and seeing how the conference is going!

The Most Polluted River in the World

So... We have a first destination. Indonesia. World's fourth most populated country. Get some scuba diving under our belts and go see the most polluted river in the world, the Citarum, east of Jakarta.

At a recent conference someone said "If you're looking to go on hydrologic tourism, you shouldn't miss the most polluted river in the world." I thought, it may be dirty, but surely there's some dribble of uranium coming out of an abandoned mine that's worse. It can't be so bad that it would cause instant death to anyone coming near the banks? Did it catch on fire like some other rivers?

Cuyahoga River catching fire, 1952

Well, there have been some awful things done to rivers. The Citarum River was a floating mat of waste. You would guess there was water by the boats of people floating through it. Washing their children and restaurants' dishes in it, it provides 80% of the water for 14 million people.

Citarum River 

The government got a loan for $500 million in 2008 to fix the river up so it may be less of an issue now. 

It may or may not be the most polluted river now, but Indonesia is a hub of activity for hydrology in the Pacific, home of the World Meteorological Organization's regional office for Asia. 

How it feels to be in a rare event

Earlier this week I had a chance to interview some of the forecasters that were on duty when Brisbane went under water a couple months ago. Yesterday this conference also had a special session on engineering aspects of tsunami damage in Japan. A common theme was the sense of shock and disbelief as existing systems were overwhelmed. There's a bit of awe but also a bit of resentment. It reminded me of this quote

"[The event is not] entirely predictable, though it is possible to calculate the ranges of probability. Still, in every range there is the one in a billion chance, the blind shot that seems so improbable that we ordinarily discount it. And when it does happen, our sense of fair play is often more injured than our actual conditions." -S. Lewitt

Minot Floods

I'm rushing out the door to head to the Airport to go to give a talk at a conference in Brisbane... but there's a fascinating story of floods going on in North Dakota in the US.

On one hand, it's a bit strange to see headlines like "High runoff to blame for flooding" (as opposed to low runoff to blame for flooding?... actually, that happens, but that's another story). Evacuation sirens were blaring a couple days ago. The forecasts back been lowering as the river is coming up.

 PBS has a good video at this location:

Flood Threat Creates 'Psychological Roller Coaster' in Minot, N.D.

The final weigh in

The movers come on Friday. I boxed up my office and brought it home. The house looks like a car bomb went off.

I always seem to forget how awful packing and moving are. Making decisions is difficult and packing is a million decisions. What to do with stuff- sell, ship, store, carry or toss? Is there going to be enough time? What is the highest priority? Moving is something most people do rarely and so they only get good at it when they're done. It feels a bit like in the movies when night is falling, a zombie attack is imminent and who knows what one has to do to prepare? This is a recurring theme in forecasting, dealing with uncertain situations under a deadline... There's not many zombies, but there is a palpable sense of anticipation.

Right, so everything is getting boxed up and stored and we're moving in with a friend before leaving on a year of travel. This includes the bathroom scale. Nearly every day since moving to Australia I have weighed myself in the morning and here's the final result. Each dot is a time I weighed myself and it shows how I've plumped up (upper dots) and slimmed down (lower dots) over the last three years. Click on the graph to make it bigger.

Weight is a great metaphor for the difference between weather and climate, signal and noise. Going up or down a kilo every so often is really nothing to worry about. Maybe you can even lose or gain two kilos in a day. No big deal. This area is having a flood, that area is having a drought, it happens, it's all part of the natural variability. That said, I always come in high on New Years Day because the holidays are one non-stop meal.

However, only by taking careful measurements over a long time can one see the slow drifting of more significant changes. Maybe the average over the last few months is lower than it has ever been before. It might be a sign that something is going on if I'm setting records day after day. Similarly, one big flood doesn't mean "you're fat", but more floods than usual or a string of record-breaking floods might get you thinking about lifestyle choices.

I've since read that they discourage you from weighing yourself every day, just so it doesn't become an obsession, or put you in a foul mood when there's some random fluctuation. To me, it takes a couple seconds a day and has become a habit. Besides, it's better to know and not worry than to guess and be sensational.

Unfortunately, you're on your own when the zombies attack, I can't help you there.

What is a "seer"?

The name of this place (so far) has been "The River Seers". Where does this word seer come from? 


Seer (noun)

   1. One that sees: an inveterate seer of sights. 
   2. A clairvoyant.
   3. A prophet.


I pronounce it as one syllable but I imagine the Australians use two like how they use "be-ah" for beer. 


Little did I know that this word (seer, not beer) holds special meaning in the Mormon religion. Its founder and the heads of the church have been called "Prophets, seers and revelators" and each has a specific meaning. 


From the book of Mormon "A seer is one who sees with spiritual eyes. He perceives the meaning of that which seems obscure to others; therefore he is an interpreter and clarifier of eternal truth. The seer foresees the future from the past and the present." 


It goes on to say that a "prophet" is a teacher of known truth; a "seer" is a perceiver of hidden truth, a "revelator" is a bearer of new truth.


I think these are all great words to describe the river forecasting challenge... Find the hidden meaning in nature, interpret and clarify the signs and use the past and present to predict the future.


I particularly like the phrase "an inveterate seer of sights". It suggests an incurable yearning for the delight of travel. When I leave my job, I'll need a new title and I'm torn between that and "freelance intellectual". 


Tom

"I am a hopeless data junkie..."

At the Delft meeting this week I've been using a handheld recorder to help take notes. It's an Olympus WS-100. It is surprising how good the quality is in a quiet environment... But if you are in a big room and there is construction going on next door, you mostly get a whomping bass sound.

When I did interviews for my Master's Thesis 10 years ago, the sound quality on cassettes was terrible. During transcription, I would have to turn my stereo up to 11 just to hear anything, but then the interviewee would lean forward and laugh. I would get startled and throw off the headphones and the cat would jump out the window.


I am still working out the best (and nicest) way of using notes from interviews. I think I can probably use my own voice at a public meeting. I have been told it's very American to self-cite (quote yourself).

So below is something I said in the closing session of the meeting this week. This was a meeting of scientists interested in hydrologic forecasting, setting up a forecasting inter-comparison/competition and we were talking about how to get more people involved with the group. It is my first try in a decade at transcribing. I put in [braces] where I tried to use a clearer word without changing the meaning. I also say the gist of what the moderator said without using his words.

Me: I would say I have three motivations [for coming to this meeting]. One is, I'm a hopeless data junkie. I'll admit it, I can never get enough. I'm always looking for data. I collect data and don't use it. It's a problem, I admit it, I'm sorry. If there was a support group [group laughter] that'd be great. If someone was to put [a dataset of old weather model forecasts on the web], I'd throw my mother from a train to get that.

Moderator says that data is available.

Me: If I come to [meetings] like this, maybe I can get [data] like that....[I also have data I can share with others].

Me: Number two [motivation] is reusable tools. [I don't want to rewrite software that others have already done]. [Making your tools available for this competition] is almost like branding, getting [me] hooked, maybe [I'll use your software] in the future.

Me: Third [motivation] is just answers to "what actually works"? We have all these techniques, nobody knows which one is better than any others or are they all pretty much the same? I have no pride in [the methods] I've created. If I come out worst, I'm happy to abandon it....

Moderator said, you're not so noble, you just enjoy being here [group laughter].

A brush with living history

The title sounds like a fifth grader's civics essay about the time president Kennedy's motorcade drove through town. Honestly, I try not to get too pie-eyed when meeting historical figures in hydrology, but last night in Delft, the Netherlands, I managed to have a one on one interview with Norman Crawford. We discussed river forecasting and modelling.


He was quite literally the first person to write a river model and put it on a computer. This was a bit over 50 years ago. He squirms at the suggestion that he's famous but Norman won the hydrologists' equivalent of a Nobel prize. Two different ones actually. "Norm" (he's very self effacing) is one of only a handful of people in history to ever win both. Descendants of his model are still used all over the world and he leads a consulting firm, Hydrocomp. I'm still compiling my notes and hope to write more but today is the birthday of my wife, Kitty.


It's been a heady two weeks in Delft. I met with scientists from Deltares (a non-profit consulting firm that makes a widely used piece of river forecasting software) and there was a workshop of scientists from all over the world. So much to catch up on!


In the meantime, there's this bit of weather news Wichita (Kansas) experiences rare 'heat burst' overnight. The temperature shot up 17 degrees F in 20 minutes.... right around midnight!

On being a forecaster, on being a scientist

I was a scientist (if you include being a student) for about fourteen years, then a forecaster for seven years, and now a scientist for the last three. I sometimes wonder during which period I learned the most?

A forecaster learns about nature as it happens. The forecaster is sent in to study the situation, make an assessment and sometimes find out how it turned out. That person is confronted by real problems when things aren't working. He or she is able to see every pine needle on a few trees. Sometimes they are so close that sap sticks to their noses.

A scientist gets the broad perspective, studying things after the fact. I've done research involving thousands of catchments, looking at 30, 60, 90 years of data at a time. I can run experiments as if I was forecasting a long time ago, automating computer programs to do what I think my new techniques would have done back in 1995. Some scientists see the forest, the next valley over, off to the horizon. Birds fly below them.

There are other scientists that do field surveys, such as going out one summer and taking a lot of measurements in one place. That place isn't random, it might be in an instrumented pasture as a satellite flies overhead or it might be in the deepest snow around at the crest of spring.

Maybe it comes down to book smarts versus street smarts, education versus experience. Obviously both are important... it seems incomplete to have much more of one than the other. And you would hope that everyone would at least keep gaining either.

The first river forecaster I met

I'm sure the first river forecaster I met was Dallas Reigle, the Hydrologist for Salt River Project, the main water supplier for Phoenix, Arizona. I was a fresh faced grad student at University of Arizona in the hydrology department. He came in as a guest lecturer once a year as a special treat to the students and as a favor to the department. I remember sitting at cold stone-top benches in a darkened room as he showed the choicest clips of video from the 1993 floods. 

As much as it sounded like a character in a Dickens novel about Western Water, that really was his name. Dallas Glen Reigle... I never knew his middle name until I googled him- it makes him sound like a Gran Reserve limited batch of whiskey. Actually, Dallas Glen Reigle the Second (as if one wasn't enough). And he smoked a cigar a day. 

Arizona had been bopping along for a couple decades and then when the 1993 floods hit, the hydrologists were like "We're going to need a bigger chart!!!" It was unlike anything they'd seen before, major bridges getting washed away, reservoirs raging full blast. 

You must understand that this was in the days before Youtube. Now you can see anything you could ever want on the Web. Cats making funny faces, yeah the Internet has that. Dating sites for Ayn Rand fans, there's probably a couple to pick from. Back in the 1990s, however, the best you could do was order some tapes from your local television studio. 

But this was company footage he was showing. The hydrologists flew around the watershed in a helicopter, rapidly finding where the river was getting out of control. Can you think of the last time your work said to you, "We need your help, get to the helicopter!" Dallas peppered the video's narration with his own booming drawl that Westerners would call Southern and Southerners would call Western. At one point he said that a swing in the camera angle was because someone threw up in the helicopter as it swirled over the gushing spillways. Can you think of the last time someone threw up on you in a helicopter in the name of work (that didn't involve guns and missiles)? If you can, please message me. 

Roosevelt lake from the air. Biblical flood coming in from upper left. Note construction on right. Note water seeping through the face of the dam. Bad timing for all this to come together, I reckon. 

The video wasn't all disaster porn. 1993 was also the year that they had been finishing years of improvements to the main reservoir. Lots of things still under construction got ruined. We learned about cofferdams and other technical details... What went wrong, what went well, etc. It was a classroom in an Engineering college after all. 

His sense of humor was purely and infinitely dry. He only laughed at inappropriate times. In the middle of his slides he showed a photo of a clown with a frown face. It wasn't a happy clown with a frown, it was a run-down dirty clown that looked disoriented. Dallas said "What was that? Who put that in there? gah. Next slide please".... Years later I tried the same trick with a group of 2nd graders. It had about the opposite effect that I intended, anarchy broke out and it didn't settle down until I left.  

There in that classroom, I was pie-eyed. That was it, there was no turning back, I wanted to be that guy. 

The best forecast

My interest in forecast evaluation (saying how good forecasts are) goes back to about 1998 when a ginormous El Nino was threatening California and Arizona with floods. My Masters thesis was on how water providers and emergency managers used those forecasts from September to say what might happen that coming winter.

I did long interviews with key people in Arizona. I went some strange places, particularly emergency management offices. I saw the "big board" at the state emergency center. They really do have black helicopters at the Phoenix bunker (yes, a bunker with zigzagged hallways set up for nuclear explosions).

Before the start of the winter, a late season Pacific hurricane came up the west cost and passed through Yuma and California/Arizona border. That hurricane, and the images of the raging floods during the most-recent-ginormous-El-Nino in 1983, were enough to put the fear of god in everybody. Seriously, I'd go into flood managers' offices and at reception they'd have a massive photo of roiling waves and houses washing away from 1983- you would think that would be fresh in their mind. It wasn't this picture, but this was the event:

Anyhow, you didn't want to be that guy that everybody warned but you didn't do anything and then it happened and jeepers, what do we even pay you for anyway?!?

After the event, many people were wondering, there's small and medium El Ninos going on all the time, is this kind of warning something we could use all the time? How good are the forecasts? Will they ever bite us?

Well, it turns out, to a user, "how good are they" is a very complicated question that depends on where you are, what you do, how much risk you can handle and a host of other things. But for a forecaster, interestingly, there's only a few ways to be right and a few things to strive for to be good.

In my opinion, the best writer on "the goodness of forecasts" was Allan Murphy. I never met him, but in grad school my copy of his collected works was dog-eared and tattered. I hope to weave some of his ideas into my work this year.

Tom