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2014 AMS Annual Meeting

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22nd Conference on Probability and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences

Call for Papers

The theme for the 2014 AMS Annual Meeting is “Extreme Weather—Climate and the Built Environment: New perspectives, opportunities, and tools”. Herein, we broadly define weather and climate extreme events to include, but not be limited to, severe storms, tornados, tropical cyclones, floods, winter storms, drought, temperature extremes, derechos, aircraft turbulence, wildfires, extreme solar activity, and ocean-land responses (e.g. storm surges, landslides, debris flows). Our society is a “built environment,” increasingly connected by cyber, energy, water, transportation, health, social, and other infrastructures—one that interacts with the natural environment through ecosystem functions supplied by wetlands, barrier islands, etc. The sustainability of this built environment and stewardship of our natural ecosystems are clearly related to quality of life. The theme is designed to explore the aforementioned “focal point” combining scientific inquiry, technological advances, societal implications, and public awareness through the lens of past, current, and future extreme weather and climate events.

Under the auspices of the proposed theme, traditional topics related to advances in observations, modeling, and applications can be explored. Additionally, the theme also allows for exploration of an array of topics including effective strategies for communication, social and policy theory, adaptation, mitigation, intervention, emergency response, and public behavior or perceptions. Further, the timelines of the topic and its broad accessibility to the scientific, stakeholder, and public communities should make it particularly appealing to many segments of our traditional AMS community as well as non-traditional communities. The theme is most relevant to the NOAA goal and the National Weather Service vision for “A Weather-Ready Nation – a society that is prepared for and responds to weather related events.”

The 22nd Conference on Probability and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences solicits abstracts on applications of probability and statistics in atmospheric sciences, including weather, climate, and hydrology.  Specific topics of interest include:

  • Methods for extreme value analysis, prediction, and evaluation
  • Statistical model development, statistical forecasting approaches, and ensemble forecasting methods
  • Statistical downscaling of forecasts and projections for application to the built environment (e.g. turbine level)
  • Evaluation of weather, climate, and hydrology forecasts and impacts on the built environment
  • Statistical and probabilistic methods in climate analysis and prediction
  • Uncertainty quantification

Several joint sessions have been organized during the conference, including:

  • Weather Analysis and Forecasting

This session focuses on the applications of ensemble forecasts and probabilistic techniques, hosted jointly with the 26th Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting / 22nd Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction.

  • Hydrology

This session is hosted jointly with the 28th Conference on Hydrology and will focus on the next generation, integrated metrics for water cycle modeling from a hydrological and land surface modeling perspective. We invite contributions to this session that lead towards the definition and refinement of standardized measures of model performance for the land surface and hydrologic community.

  • Education

This session focuses on multi-disciplinary approaches and perspectives to research on precipitation forecasting and precipitation extremes, including both floods and drought.  Focus questions to include:  (1) How accurate are forecasts of precipitation, including extreme events; (2) How are these forecasts perceived, understood and re-interpreted by consumers of this information; (3) How can we best educate these consumers about extreme precipitation events; (4) How can universities promote learning environments that foster innovative thinking across disciplinary boundaries in order to take precipitation predictions and the public's use of these products to "the next level"

  • Artificial and Computational Intelligence
  • Climate Variability and Change

In addition, the conference will include a special named symposium in honor of Dr. Edward Epstein, organized by Bob Glahn and Dick Hallgren.

For additional information please contact the program chairs, Barbara Brown ([email protected]), Brian Etherton ([email protected]), and Scott Sellars ([email protected]).

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