Seattlest Interview: Cliff Mass, Meteorologist Extraordinaire
UW atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass became a local internet celebrity seemingly overnight during last year's Snowmageddon, when he was forecasting weather in circles around all the other so-called weathermen. In addition to his blog, he's got a book, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, that came out last fall. His next lecture, "The Secrets of Northwest Weather Prediction," is tomorrow night at Town Hall (7:30 p.m.). Tickets are $5.
What inspired you to write a book for a general audience?
Well, a number of reasons. A number of us have been doing research for decades, so we’ve reached a stage where we’ve gained a basic understanding of the weather of the region. I’ve been doing the KUOW radio show for a long time, and it became clear to me that there’s a large number of people very interested in knowing about local weather, so I wrote the book.
So what tips do you have for someone who’s interested in being an amateur meteorologist?
Buy the book [laughs]. No, I think people interested in weather now have the option to get on the web and access all kinds of data. That really has changed things; you can get on the web and look at the radar, look at the satellite pictures, look at the surface observations. It’s all available to you now. Also you can buy a weather station to take your own observations. They’re very reasonably priced, and for $200-300, you can get a very nice weather station that you can hook up to a computer and plot [data] out. The world is much easier now if you’re interested in weather.
Have you been surprised by the response to your blog?
I was a little taken aback by that. It was meant to be an informal little blog that would fill in between KUOW shows, and so I started posting my analysis of the weather, while trying to educate people at the same time, and it really took off during the snow period [last year]. At one point we had 55,000 hits in a day, with 35,000 unique visitors. I was really surprised by that, but it just shows the strong interest in weather in the community.
Since the snow last December, do you think that the city has learned its lesson on how to prepare for something like that?
Well, it’s not just the city, it’s Metro and other agencies. Clearly there was a major failure during that snowstorm, and everybody but the Mayor seemed to pick up on that.
More on Snowmageddon, the need for coastal weather radar, and global warming after the jump.
Right, he gave them a B.
Yeah, he gave them a B, and that was ridiculous. People in the city were really put in danger in a way they didn’t have to be, and we were just so lucky there weren’t any major tragedies. If that bus had gone over onto I-5, it would have been a very different story, and many people would’ve died. So anyway, I hope the city has learned its lesson, and I hope that Metro has learned its lesson, and we’ll find out with the next [snow] event. But we’re clearly not ready for a serious catastrophe in this city.
I’m from Chicago, so I looked at how things during the storm were dealt with--or not dealt with--and I ended up feeling like in any other city, heads would’ve rolled.
There’s a history of mayors in cities across the country losing their office because of bad snow [for example], and snow is a big issue even here in Seattle. There was Charlie Chong, a councilman who made a big deal about not having snow plows in the city. The city had a chance to pick them up cheap, but didn’t and Bellevue got them instead. So this was a big political issue, even ten years ago, after the ’96 snows.
Do you think it’s possible to put a dollar amount on how much weather disasters cost us? It seems like it’s getting more and more expensive.
Clearly the numbers are huge for hurricanes, they can be tens of billions of dollars. Even that snow we had, I think one could easily estimate that the cost to the city was in the tens of millions of dollars in terms of lost productivity, and injury and damage.
You’ve been agitating for a coastal radar system for years now. What do you think is holding that up? It seems like a no-brainer.
Yeah, it’s very obvious that we need it. Here in the stormiest part of the continental United States, and we’re the only place that the coast doesn’t have weather radar. It’s absurd. It’s been held up for a number of reasons over the years. The National Weather Service was, in fact, against it. They’ve since dropped that opposition, but they felt that we don’t have big thunderstorms and tornadoes here, so we didn’t need weather radar on the coast. It was just a terrible error, but they have backed off that, and now the only issue is money. I was hoping that some of the stimulus money could be used [for that purpose], but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.
What other projects are you working on, besides all the events associated with the book?
I always have projects. I have a major project right now with the UW statistics department to create a new kind of forecasting, statistical forecasting, forecasting weather probabilities. So rather than saying, "The temperature is going to be 34F or 65F three days from now" when there’s a lot of uncertainty built into that forecast, we’re developing a technology to figure out just how uncertain that kind of forecast is and give people that information instead. So we can say that there’s a probability of 50% that the temperature will be between 64F and 68F. We’re gaining the ability to do that now, and the question is: can we provide that information in a way that people can access it and use it? So we’re also working with the psychology department here to evaluate how people use information with uncertainty. That’s a big project. And we have another project trying to predict the local climate here over the next 50 to 100 years.
How subject do you think Seattle will be to climate change compared to other regions in the country?
Probably less, because we’re downstream of the ocean. The oceans don’t warm up as quickly as the continents, so we’ll probably see global warming in a milder way here--slower and smaller--but we will feel the effects all the same.
