Straight Talk:
Future for SOOs and WCMs

By General D.L. Johnson
NWS Director

An employee recently wrote to me expressing concern about Science and Operations Officer (SOO) and Warning Coordination Meteorologist (WCM) positions and how the lives of individuals holding these positions may be impacted by future changes in our concept of operations. The employee asked for "brutal straight talk" from upper management about this issue so employees can "know where they stand" as soon as possible.

The brutally straight response regarding organizational changes, including WFO management positions, is that no decisions have been made. We are working to look at several different operations concepts for the future, and none of them are close to the level of detail that folks are asking for and we'd all like to see.

I've said it before: if we don't take charge of our future as an organization, others will decide our future for us. I welcome everyone's ideas and appreciate the question. Like any excellent organization, we're always looking for ways to do the job smarter, and we're willing to change the status quo to get there even though contemplating such changes is difficult and a bit unsettling. We have a responsibility to the American taxpayer to stay relevant to their needs, improve services, and increase efficiencies. And scientific advances – especially improvement in information technology – offer us opportunities to conduct much of our business in different ways to give the taxpayers more bang for the buck.

Future operations concepts must be driven by our shared commitment to mission delivery. In regard to SOO and WCM positions, I see functions such as managing technology infusion, facilitating professional development training, and interacting with our customers and partners as growing in importance to our mission, not shrinking.

I know there are lots of NWS people who share the concerns of the person who raised this question. I promise to provide specifics when we have them. Understand that this is a long and difficult road – we'll need all the brains and energy of our employees to chart our future.

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Kentucky Company Prepares Cooperative Observer Data for the Web

By Bonnie Terrizzi
WFO Jackson, KY

The NWS mission to collect climate data for the United States depends largely on the network of volunteer Cooperative Observers. The Cooperative Observer (COOP) program consist of dedicated people across the country who volunteer their time in collecting the maximum and minimum temperatures, 24-hour precipitation, and other specialized data, such as soil temperature and evaporation pan data. The need for climate data is endless – used by farmers, builders, utilities, manufacturing, shipping, and even Wall Street – but all the data is useless unless it can be accessed.

The data recorded every day includes the 24-hour maximum and minimum temperatures, the current 7 a.m. temperature, 24-hour precipitation and current weather. Some stations also report evaporative data, wind speed and direction, 4- and 6-inch soil temperatures, and other specialized data that is sometimes requested. The amount of data is incredible. Without a way to access it, it is also useless.

Bob Ocassio and Margie Napier process a Fisher Porter Rain Gauge tapes using a unique machine – the Micron, which reads the holes punched in the Fisher Porter rain gauge tape.

So after the data is collected, what happens? How is it converted from the vast amount of raw data into meaningful forms that can be used by people seeking information?

A government contractor, Image Entry, a division of Source Corp., located in London, KY, processes the raw COOP data into a web-based format before the data finds its way to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, NC, for archiving. Most of the data coming into Image Entry is hand written by the COOP observers, so each hand written submission must be manually transcribed into the computer format.

At the end of each month, Image Entry has over 8,500 hand-written reports from the COOP network and data tapes from more than 2,200 Fisher Porter rain gauges, the most common form of mechanical rain gauge used by the NWS since the early 1960s. The electromechanical system punches the narrow tape chart every 15 minutes, which translates into 4 punches each hour, 96 per day, and nearly 3,000 readings to make up a typical month's data.

The holes punched into the tape shows the accumulated weight of what has been collected in the rain gage. At the end of each month, the cooperative observer sends a month's worth of tape for evaluation. Each tape must be read and the data entered and quality controlled for errors.

Each month Image Entry employees processes about 700 marine reports from land-based coastal stations, and around 3,000 ship reports. Ship reports contain latitude and longitude information as well as all pertinent numbers that make up weather data. These marine reports help to track the ocean currents and temperatures, as well as conditions at the ocean surface.

Jeff Carico and David Stamper, the climate focal point for southeast Kentucky and the COOP Program manager from WFO Jackson, KY, toured the facilities at Image Entry and came away amazed at what actually happens with all the data gathered each day across the United States and Canada.

Image Entry has been processing the Nation's COOP data since August 2000. Over those past five years, they've scanned half a million COOP forms, and processed more than 100,000 Fisher Porter tapes, and entered the data by hand into the required web format. The numbers boggle the mind, but thanks to their dedication, Image Entry has played a leading role in giving scientists a clear picture of the country's climate, and in assisting the NWS to fulfill its mission.

"Since I only check a couple dozen B91s a month, I can't imagine going through thousands." said Carico. "Not to mention all the Fischer-Porter tapes that the people at Image Entry check. I have a lot of admiration for the great job that they do."

Debbie Combs, one of the employees that process the nation's climate data is also a Cooperative Weather Observer. "This is not just a job that we do," she said. "We are working with history."

Other divisions of Source Corp handle more NOAA and NWS data. Two other offices handle cooperative historical data, updating weather records from earlier decades into the web-based format. A third office of Image Entry located in Jenkins, KY, handles cooperative dive data from undersea observations.

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Forecast Office Mentoring Enthusiastic Student

The Elko, NV, Weather Forecast Office (WFO) received a call from an Elko elementary school teacher early this year who spoke of a gifted young student in a remote school of 15 children in Ruby Valley, NV.

Ruby Valley, a school so remote that teachers actually live on the campus, is a 90-minute drive from the nearest town; all students come from local ranches. The young man, Tate Wines, age 11, was referred by Gage Smith, Social Studies teacher at Northside Elementary School (Ruby Valley's Sister school in Elko, NV), as a possible NWS spotter.

Roham Abtahi HMT WFO Elko, shows Ruby Valley students various coop observer instruments. Photo by Gage Smith, Northside Elementary School, Elko, NV.

"Tate is an extremely intelligent young man with an interest in meteorology who has already managed to gather a wealth of weather knowledge," wrote Roham Abtahi, WFO Elko Hydrometeorological Technician, in an e-mail to NOAA's NWS Focus. Abtahi encouraged Smith to have Tate become a school leader in weather observing. WFO Elko will install a cooperative observing station at Ruby View Elementary this year. The installation will be of mutual benefit to the NWS in need of data in this sparse region, and the school who can greatly benefit from observing instruments and weather training, said General Forecaster Ian Morrison.

Abtahi and General Forecaster Ian Morrison went a step further and offered the school a presentation. At the presentation, Ruby Valley Elementary students participated in demonstrations of pressure, lightning, and tornadoes. The classic crushing-can experiment and "tornado in a bottle" were big hits among the students, and displayed some of the concepts behind atmospheric pressure. Morrison gathered kids in groups of "positive and negative ions" interactively explaining how lightning is generated. The children moved in between groups of "ions" seeking equilibrium and learning about basic environmental energy transfer principles. Students also examined weather instruments used by NWS weather forecast offices and by cooperative observers. Excited by the demonstrations, the children fired off questions about the weather and relayed personal experiences having to do with lightning, snowstorms, thunderstorms, and much more. The presentation created a very positive learning environment and the following week WFO Elko received a stack of 15 personal letters from the students thanking them for the fun day of weather learning.

Since the presentation, Abtahi and Morrison have continued a campaign to integrate Tate into a higher level of weather education. After a few meetings with Smith, Abtahi developed a mentoring program to have Tate periodically visit WFO Elko during the summer and work on a series of training programs of meteorology basics, offering him the opportunity to learn about weather and experience WFO operations.

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Software Engineer is NOAA Team Member of the Month

Ronald Guenther, a Senior Software Engineer at the NEXRAD Radar Operations Center in Norman, OK, is NOAA's Team Member of the Month for June. According to the award citation, Guenther is recognized for --

"Identifying and quickly fixing a problem with some of the site's radars that kept them from estimating precipitation amounts accurately. During the recent heavy rains in southern California, he realized the problem existed at other radar locations as well, particularly at mountainous sites. Upon identifying and verifying the problem, he acted quickly to not only fix the problem, but also improve the software and overall system performance.

He then further improved the radar by adding higher resolution data only recently available, collected during recent Space Shuttle missions. He not only managed to fix a critical error, he simultaneously improved the radar's resolution nine fold."

Look for a profile of Guenther in an upcoming issue of NOAA Report.

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Cost Management Question of the Month

Congratulations to Llyle Barker, Science and Operations Officer, WFO in Lincoln, IL, was the May 2005 cost management question of the month winner. The question was:

What is the FASAB, and which FASAB standard requires government organizations to implement a cost management program?

The correct answer was: FASAB is the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board and the Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards #4 requires the implementation of a cost management program for the government.

The June 2005 cost management question of the month is:

Cost management data comes from Commerce Business Systems (CBS) - the accounting system for NWS. Non-labor costs are transformed from the CBS structure to the cost management structure using a series of mappings from project and task codes in CBS to cost objects in the cost management system. What are the five types of mappings defined in the cost management system?

Hint - The answer can be found in the Cost Management Program Guide located at:

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/cfo/comptroller/documents/fy2005_cm_program_guide_v2_1.pdf

E-mail your answer to victoria.harps@noaa.gov no later than June 30, 2005.

The first correct answer wins a NOAA shirt.

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Also On the Web...
Track Tropical Storms with Updating Computer Browser

NOAA recently introduced a new way to follow specific tropical storms or hurricanes. NOAA Storm Tracker is designed to open a new and smaller browser window, which can be resized and placed anywhere on a computer desktop. NOAA Storm Tracker will contain live links to advisories, tracking maps and satellite images of a particular storm that is projected to strike the United States or other nations in a storm's path.

The new browser window also will include links to data from ocean buoys, affected airports and the latest high resolution satellite imagery of a tropical storm or hurricane. The live links in NOAA Storm Tracker will update automatically without having to "refresh" or "reload" the browser window.

Read the complete NOAA news story here.

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Employee Milestones

• Click here to see NEW APPOINTMENTS/TRANSFERS to NWS through May 31, 2005.
• Click here to see RETIREMENTS/DEPARTURES from NWS through May 31, 2005.

Snapshots

Click here for a look at photos we've received from around the NWS.