WEATHER 



voirs of the sea and give in- 

 formation on the ocean currents. 



2. "Air-sea interaction" should be 

 more than a catch phrase. It 

 is a subject which must occupy 

 the efforts of the best young 

 men in geophysics today. 

 Equally important is meteorolo- 

 gist-oceanographer interaction. 

 These men must not be steered 

 only into narrow avenues 

 where they lose sight of the 

 big problems that lie at the 

 heart of long-range prediction. 

 Special seminars and inclusion 

 into academic curricula of large- 

 scale air-sea problems on long 

 time-scales (months, seasons, 

 and decades) are necessary de- 

 spite the imprecise knowledge 

 relative to short-period phe- 

 nomena and short-range nu- 

 merical weather prediction. 



3. Special attempts are needed to 

 bring meteorologists and ocean- 

 ographers together more fre- 



quently in universities and 

 laboratories where they can 

 analyze oceanographic and me- 

 teorological data in real time, 

 conduct joint discussions of 

 what went on and is going on, 

 and try to predict what will go 

 on in subsequent months. This 

 will involve computers and 

 much research, but the research 

 effort will be sparked by the 

 satisfaction of seeing one's pre- 

 dictions verified. This type of 

 stimulus has been largely miss- 

 ing in the oceanographic com- 

 munity, where oceanographers 

 have had to work on restricted 

 problems mainly with data 

 months or years old or with 

 series of observations embrac- 

 ing a small area. 



These same observations and pro- 

 cedures, and their exploitation, will 

 assist in most of ocean-air inquiry, 

 whether iterative or non-iterative 

 methods are employed. The ultimate 

 long-range prediction scheme will 

 probably be a combination of all 



three facets - 

 and synoptic. 



physi 



c aj 





Whether science will be able to 

 achieve appreciable skill in long- 

 range weather prediction should be 

 known in the next ten to twenty 

 years, providing enough trained 

 people are efficiently employed and 

 adequate data, as suggested by the 

 WWW and GARP programs, become 

 available. If, however, an unbalanced 

 program is embarked upon, with little 

 or no use made of statistics and 

 synoptics, it is unlikely that good, 

 practical long-range forecasts will be 

 achieved. Considering the rate of 

 progress already achieved despite the 

 complexity of the problem, the small 

 number of scientists who have at- 

 tacked it, and the inadequacy of data 

 and tools in the pre-computer age, 

 the outlook is optimistic, particularly 

 in view of the WWW and GARP 

 programs. General forecasts for pe- 

 riods up to a year in advance are 

 quite within reach; even the general 

 character of the coming decade's 

 weather may be foretold in advance. 



Short-Term Forecasting, Including Forecasting 

 for Low-Altitude Aviation 



Substantial progress has been made 

 during the past two or three decades 

 in the nonclassical, exotic areas of 

 the atmospheric sciences and their 

 applications. From a state of almost 

 no knowledge of the characteristics 

 of the atmosphere between 10 and 

 30 kilometers, rawinsonde networks 

 and high-flying, instrumented air- 

 craft have enabled us to produce 

 excellent analyses and prognoses over 

 most of the northern hemisphere. 

 Rocketsonde programs are greatly 

 expanding our knowledge of the at- 

 mosphere from 30 to 100 kilometers. 

 Meteorological satellites promise to 

 enable the meteorologist to expand 

 his charts to cover the globe. Fur- 

 thermore, the speed and capacity of 

 the electronic computer make it pos- 

 sible for his charts to be prepared in 



time for practical use. The machines 

 produce upper-air wind and tempera- 

 ture fields that are as accurate as those 

 of an experienced meteorologist. 



These and similar advances have 

 great practical value. For example, 

 sophisticated climatic techniques per- 

 mit introduction of the weather fac- 

 tor into construction planning and 

 other operations. Twenty years ago, 

 Fawbush and Miller, in Oklahoma, 

 began what is now a successful na- 

 tional program of advising the public 

 of threatening weather such as tor- 

 nadoes and hailstorms. Weather- 

 modification programs at military air- 

 fields near Spokane and Anchorage 

 have all but eliminated air-traffic de- 

 lays due to wintertime supercooled 

 fog at those locations. 



Air-pollution research and opera- 

 tions promise to benefit planning for 

 industrial and residential areas, warn- 

 ing the public of impending high 

 pollution levels, and locating pollu- 

 tion sources. Simulations of at- 

 mospheric circulation features and 

 weather-modification efforts are be- 

 ginning to enable atmospheric sci- 

 entists to assess, quickly and rela- 

 tively economically, the effects of 

 deliberate or inadvertent modifica- 

 tions in the structure or dynamics of 

 meteorological features through a 

 wide range of scales. 



Progress has also been great with 

 respect to sheer volume of output 

 in both the classical and exotic areas 

 of the atmospheric sciences, thanks 

 both to the electronic computer and 



101 



