{"id":33630,"date":"2021-01-19T00:05:09","date_gmt":"2021-01-19T08:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_features&p=33630"},"modified":"2021-01-26T08:43:36","modified_gmt":"2021-01-26T16:43:36","slug":"the-pandemic-is-undermining-weather-monitoring","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/the-pandemic-is-undermining-weather-monitoring\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pandemic Is Undermining Weather Monitoring"},"content":{"rendered":"

One after another, the sensors went dark. In normal times, technicians tasked with maintaining the small network of meteorological instruments scattered off the coasts of Great Britain and Ireland could have traveled to fix or replace the defunct devices. But the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic meant they could only watch in vain as the technology failed, leaving weather forecasters without a handful of important data, including atmospheric pressure measurements. At the start of 2020, this regional network had 12 locations providing data. Because of kaput sensors, that number now stands at just seven.<\/p>\n

Emma Steventon, marine networks manager at the United Kingdom\u2019s Meteorological Office in Exeter, knew she had to come up with a plan. In June, she and her team sent eight drifting buoys to the port of Liverpool where they were loaded onto a ship and subsequently dropped into the Atlantic Ocean off Ireland\u2019s southwest coast. The spherical buoys, encased in cardboard packaging that breaks down in seawater, soon separated and drifted off into the distance. \u201cThis was something new that we\u2019ve not done before,\u201d she says. The buoys, she anticipated, would provide a short-term fix, filling the data gap left by failing sensors. \u201cWe were expecting them to be picked up by the currents and be washed ashore within a few months.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the team was in luck. To date, all bar one of the buoys continue to supply data from the desired region. Though not a like-for-like replacement for the failed sensors, the buoys are picking up some of the shortfall in the flow of meteorological information to Steventon\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

This gaggle of instrumentation sloshing around in the North Atlantic represents just a tiny slice of a gigantic system. Globally, many thousands of buoys, floats, ship-based sensors, and human observers supply weather forecasters with precious data about the conditions at sea.<\/p>\n

This vast data-gathering operation is a collection of several networks. The Data Buoy Cooperation Panel, for example, looks after drifting buoys such as those used by Steventon and her colleagues. Then there\u2019s the Voluntary Observing Ship (VOS) program, in which either human officers or automated weather stations on ships record and transmit data for variables such as temperature and wind speed.<\/p>\n

In the Ship of Opportunity Programme (SOOP), scientists travel on a commercial vessel such as a container ship and take atmospheric and oceanographic measurements as they traverse the ocean. Yet another network is Argo, a sensor array that uses thousands of floating high-tech devices able to automatically submerge themselves in the water to retrieve measurements at various depths\u2014from the surface to thousands of meters below.<\/p>\n

\"Argo<\/a>

An Argo float, seen in the foreground, is a battery-powered device that automatically measures and transmits information about the environment. The floats are capable of sinking themselves to record the conditions in the water as well as at the ocean\u2019s surface. Photo courtesy of the Argo Program<\/p><\/div>\n

The data flowing from these and various other networks amounts to many millions of observations every year. Much of the data is continually transmitted to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and ultimately, it influences the models used by national forecasters to predict the weather.<\/p>\n

The COVID-19 pandemic is playing havoc with several of these networks. Some ships fitted with instruments that automatically record and transmit temperature and pressure are stuck in port, unable to make their usual observations from wide open parts of the ocean where monitoring is less frequent and, therefore, most needed. Instruments on ships must also be calibrated or replaced with precalibrated devices to ensure their readings remain accurate. But in many cases, the technicians who visit ships to do this work have been barred from doing so.<\/p>\n

\"Cmdr.<\/a>

Ships began routinely recording meteorological observations under the Voluntary Observing Ship program in the 1800s. The program arose from an effort by US Navy lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury to better understand where it was safe to sail and at what time of year. In 1853, Maury set in motion the first international meteorological conference<\/a> in Brussels, Belgium. The conference led to the creation of new standards for mariners to observe and share weather data. The effort meant that captains had better chances of finding the safest sea routes with the most favorable winds. Photo by PJF Military Collection\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n

The number of Argo devices in operation has fallen by 10 percent, too. \u201cUltimately, their power gives up,\u201d explains Emma Heslop, an oceanographer with the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) who has watched as floats\u2019 batteries have steadily died. The sharp drop in the number of research vessels at sea means scientists have not been replacing the floats at the usual rate of about 60 per month, she says.<\/p>\n

Worse still, some data-gathering efforts have ceased almost entirely. Justine Parks manages a program to measure subsurface ocean temperatures for Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. As contributors to SOOP, Parks and fellow scientists travel aboard commercial ships traversing the Pacific Ocean, deploying hundreds of disposable sensors as they go. As the probes sink on their one-way journey to the seafloor, they transmit temperature readings along a thin, hairlike wire.<\/p>\n

Typically, Parks and her colleagues would complete 20 crossings every year. But they\u2019ve only managed one since last February, because shipping companies have restricted who can board their vessels. \u201cIt\u2019s catastrophic,\u201d says Parks. \u201cI didn\u2019t grasp that it was going to be so long in the beginning. You know, we were really holding out hope for summer and resuming a lot of our activities.\u201d That never happened.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just marine observations that have dwindled. Aircraft are a further key source of meteorological data. But with international air travel sharply curtailed, data from flights has fallen significantly. One analysis published in July<\/a> suggested that this caused temperature forecasts between March and May 2020 to be off by 0.5 to 1\u00a0\u00b0C in some regions.<\/p>\n

So far, there is no hard evidence that COVID-19 disruptions to VOS, SOOP, Argo, and all the other observing programs have adversely affected weather forecasts, says Darin Figurskey, the operations branch chief at the Ocean Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, part of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But with the pandemic likely to drag on for many more months, the worry for some is that noticeable errors will start to appear.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe longer that we\u2019re forced to go without being able to maintain these networks and sensors likely to fail, then yes, I\u2019d imagine that we would start to see wider impacts coming in to the numerical weather prediction and impacting forecasts,\u201d says Steventon.<\/p>\n