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Residents of the Gulf Coast states are quaking before a new television weather icon. Replacing the huge, tendriled eye of a hurricane is a massive plume and slick of oil that threatens another state’s beaches each time the wind shifts a point.
Predicting the movements of the oil slick can be as difficult as predicting the landfall and windspeed of an oncoming tropical storm. Wind direction and speed, temperature and air pressure all combine in a mixture of myriad factors. One small change today can have a major impact in a matter of hours or days. This month, Gulf Coast residents breathed a sigh of relief as Hurricane Alex — the first of what is expected to be a stormy season — narrowly missed the slick in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, that region is carefully watching winds and currents to see which way the oil is likely to travel.
At Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. (AER) in Lexington, chief scientist Ross Hoffman and a team of researchers are working on the algorithms that govern weather predictions across the U.S. and Europe. Recently, the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction — the wing of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, that provides broadcast stations with weather forecasts — adopted new standards for calculating heating rates in the atmosphere, developed at AER over the past decade. That’s important not only for forecasting temperature, but also for predicting wind speed, wind direction and storms.
“The entire weather system is governed by the heating gradient between the equator and the poles,” Hoffman said. “Determining how heat is deposited into the atmosphere by the sun and how heat is radiated into space — it’s that imbalance in heat that creates the disturbances we see as storms.”
AER’s projects, many of which are funded by government grants, include improving the algorithms predicting weather on New York Harbor, hurricane forecasting, and the atmosphere on Mars. The company employs 155.
For four decades, Massachusetts has been at the center of the effort to develop software that can predict the weather. The late MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz first captured it in a 1972 paper titled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Lorenz’s study of weather systems concluded that minor variations in the atmosphere can trigger major — and often unexpected — results. His ideas gave birth to what became known as the “butterfly effect,” and led to a scientific upheaval called chaos theory.
Weather’s chaotic nature makes a perfectly accurate forecast a near impossibility. But predicting weather is big business — not only for news broadcasters, but for energy, aviation, shipping and other industries where profits are made or lost with the clouds, sun and wind.
Headquartered in South Kingstown, R.I., Applied Science Associates Inc. makes modeling systems that draw in weather data to predict the impact of environmental accidents, including oil spills and the release of hazardous gases into the air. With 103 employees, ASA is assisting the NOAA’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment team’s efforts to collect data and assess the oil’s impact in the gulf.
While AER and ASA focus on developing predictive software, WSI Corp., of Andover develops better ways to deliver weather predictions and data to those willing to pay for it. Acquired by Landmark Communications Inc. in 2000, WSI became part of The Weather Channel Companies, which itself was sold in 2008 to a private equity consortium. WSI now employs 200, and its customers include General Electric, UPS and the Federal Aviation Administration.
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