Date	Time	Title	Speaker	Affiliation
14 Feb	10am	EOF's of SST	Wasyl Drosdowsdy	BMRC
21 Feb	10am	The insignificance of significance testing	Neville Nicholls	BMRC
21 Feb (Wed)	11:30am	The NAVOCEANO ocean data and product system	John Kindle, Gerry Leone	Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Oceanographic Office
28 Feb	10am	Southern Hemisphere Ozone and UV during Spring 2000	Lilia Deschamps	BMRC
7 Mar	No Seminar: BMRC Planning Meeting
8 Mar (Thurs)	10am	Putting the Atmosphere on TV: Weather, climate and change	Bob Henson	UCAR/NCAR
14 Mar	10am	Your PC: Its care and feeding	Alex Kariko	BMRC
21 Mar	10am	Advanced Sounders - GIFTS	John LeMarshall	BMRC
28 Mar	10am	Performance of an explicit microphysics scheme in the LAPS model	Richard Dare	BMRC
4 Apr	10am	Short time-scale rainfall analysis	Xudong Sun	BMRC
11 Apr	10am	Polar vortex evolution	Greg Roff	BMRC
18 Apr	10am	Mesoscale modelling challenges in the Melbourne region: an air quality perspective	Kevin Tory	BMRC
25 Apr	No seminar: ANZAC Day
2 May	10am	Benford's Law and background fields in data assimilation	Bob Seaman	BMRC
9 May	10am	The Intensification and Recurvature of Tropical Cyclone Tracy	Noel Davidson	BMRC
17 May (Thurs)	10am	The Antarctic Circumpolar Wave and Australian rainfall: What a load of hooey!	John McBride	BMRC
23 May	10am	No seminar
30 May	10am	Impacts of land-surface processes on the AGCM seasonal predictions	Huqiang Zhang	BMRC
1 June (Fri)	2 pm	STEPS: A new statistical ensemble prediction system for tropical cyclones	Harry C. Weber	University of Munich
6 June	10am	Statistical-dynamical seasonal prediction	Aurore Voldoire	BMRC/Meteo-France
13 June	10am	The Science of Climate Change	Karoly, McAvaney, Pittock	AMOS seminar (video)
19 June (Tues)	10am	The ECMWF Ensemble Prediction System	Roberto Buizza	ECMWF
20 June	10am	Evaluating feedbacks in climate models	Rob Colman	BMRC
26 June (Tues)	10am	Singular vectors and dynamic meteorology	Roberto Buizza	ECMWF
27 June	10am	The Relative Importance of Complexity of Land Surface Scheme in a warmer world: Analysis of Variance	Vincent Gravier	BMRC
3 July (Tues)	10am	Some key issues in ensemble prediction: simulation of model uncertainties, resolution and size	Roberto Buizza	ECMWF
4 July	10am	Big, Bad Thunderstorms. When Do They Form? What Do They Look Like?	Harald Richter	BMRC
11 July	10am	Edwards-Slingo Radiation code: comparison with observations and performance in GASP model	Zhian Sun	BMRC
18 July	10am	The BoM Medium-Range Ensemble Prediction System	Michael Naughton	BMRC
19 July (Thurs)	11am	Marine Remote Sensing	Susanne Lehner, Andreas Niedermeier	German Aerospace Centre
25 July	10am	Modelling of Ocean Surges	Mikhail Entel	BMRC
27 July (Fri)	2pm	Thinking like a Planet: Climatology, Information Infrastructures, and the Construction of Global Space	Paul N. Edwards	University of Michigan
1 August	10am	Let's be radical: Use all the observations!	Peter Steinle	BMRC
2 August (Thur)	2:30pm	Information Management, corporate memory, metadata and workflows	Mary Voice and NCC Staff	NCC
8 August	10am	Scatterometer assimilation	Jeff Kepert	BMRC
10 August (Fri)	11am	Evaluating GCM cloud parametrizations - Are we doing the best we can?	Christian Jakob	ECMWF
15 August	10am	Electronic Library Services	Andrew Hollis	National Meteorological Library
22 August	10am	The idealised neutral, barotropic planetary boundary layer	Dale Hess	BMRC
29 August	10am	Indonesian rainfall variability: impacts of ENSO and local air-sea interaction	Harry Hendon	BMRC
5 September	10am	WMO Virtual Laboratory for Satellite Meteorology	Jeff Wilson	BMTC
12 September	10am	EOF analysis of the Madden Julian Oscillation	Matt Wheeler	BMRC
19 September	10am	Oceanographic Data Collection on the RV Franklin	Lisa Cowen	BMRC
26 September	10am	Influence of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on frequency of extreme temperatures in Australia	Blair Trewin	NCC
3 October	10am	A knowledge-based system to generate internet weather forecasts	Harvey Stern	VRO
10 October	10am	SA rainfall variability and trends	Lynda Chambers	BMRC
11 October (Thurs)	10am	Vampir and VampirTrace: A Practical Introduction	Joerg Henrichs	NEC
17 October	10am	Development of the LAPS ensemble prediction system	Kamal Puri	BMRC
24 October	10am	ARM: What's in it for us?	Peter May	BMRC
31 October	10am	The new coupled model seasonal forecasting system: Preliminary results	Oscar Alves	BMRC
7 November	10am	The GATE way to validation and the missing cloud	Lawrie Rikus	BMRC
14 November	No Seminar: BMRC Workshop
21 November	10am	Analysing the Bureau's Weather Forecast Process (Link to Presentation)	John Bally	BMRC
22 November (Thur)	2pm	The Monsoon under Future Climate Scenarios	Jerry Meehl	NCAR
28 November	10am	Linux: Introduction and how to install	Asri Sulaiman	BMRC
4 December (Tues)	2pm	Remote Sensing, Land Surface Modelling and Data Assimilation	Jeff Walker	University of Melbourne

The normal venue is the BMRC conference room (Floor 13).

`Traditionally,' seminars are at 10 am on Wednesdays with duration of 30 to 50 minutes + questions. Dates and times other than the usual Wednesday morning are shown in bold print.

Emphasis is on work in progress. Partly because of this, the schedule is susceptible to change.
To receive this information via email, simply send an email to majordomo@bom.gov.au containing the single line in the body of the message: subscribe bmrc_seminars

Videotapes of several seminars that have been given during the year are available for loan from the National Meteorological Library. These are indicated by a camera icon next to the seminar date. In addition, a list of seminars held in the library can be found on the catalogue by entering Series: BMRC, Format: Video. If you would like to have a talk videotaped please contact the seminar coordinator.

If you would like to know more details of coordinating seminars (if, for example, you are hosting a visitor who will be giving a seminar and the regular seminar coordinator is not available), have a look at the document, "Instructions for BMRC Seminar Coordinator"

The seminar coordinator for 2001 was Diana Greenslade. For 2002, it is Matthew Wheeler, m.wheeler@bom.gov.au

ABSTRACTS

Cohen, J., 1994. The Earth is round (p<.05). American Psychologist, 49, 997-1003.
Gill, J., 1999. The insignificance of null hypothesis significance testing. Political Res. Quart., 52, 647-674.
Hunter, J. E., 1997. Needed: A ban on the significance test. Psychological Science, 8, 3-7.
Maltz, M. D., 1994. Deviating from the mean: The declining significance of significance. J. Res. Crime and Delinquency, 31, 434-463.
Nicholls, N., 2001. The insignificance of significance testing. Bull. Amer. Meteorol. Soc., (accepted - tentatively timetabled for April issue).
Rozeboom, W. W., 1960. The fallacy of the null-hypothesis significance test. Psychological Bulletin, 57, 416-428.

The first of these expected to provide operational data is the polar orbiting Advanced InfraRed Sounder (AIRS) instrument in early 2002 on NASA's EOS PM platform. Two proposals from the Bureau, related to AIRS, were accepted after NASA's Announcement of Opportunity at the inception of the EOS program. A short description of the Bureau's activity related to AIRS will be presented, including plans for data reception, calibration and validation, and data assimilation.

The first geostationary advanced sounder will be the Geostationary Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (GIFTS). This instrument will be launched in 2004 and Australia will play a key role in this mission. The GIFTS is expected to spend the first 18 months after launch off the East and West coasts of the USA and subsequently move to the Indian Ocean. The Bureau of Meteorology will then be responsible for data reception, product generation and subsequent distribution of the data to weather services and global NWP centres. The observation program is anticipated to extend into 2012.

The characteristics of the GIFTS will be described and the expected benefits from its deployment will be noted. It should be noted that this instrument of effectively 3000 channels can produce 16,384 temperature soundings, every 10 seconds at 4 km resolution, with an accuracy of about 1 K. In recent years, aircraft-borne instruments with similar characteristics to the GIFTS have been flown and examples of the application of the data from some of these instruments will be shown.

Last year I gave a talk mainly intended to raise awareness of Benford's Law. This year I shall briefly recapitulate on Benford's Law, and add a bit more that I have found out since last year. However, the main thrust of the talk will be about a quasi-inverse relation, involving Benford's Law, the Gaussian distribution, and background field errors in data assimilation. These results tend to confirm a speculation, by others, that background field errors in data assimilation typically may be better represented by a mixture of Gaussian distributions, than by a single Gaussian distribution.

Although the Tracy circulation is not well-depicted in the original analyses, forecasts using vortex specification and the NCEP analyses show remarkable skill at predicting the large scale environment and the storm's track and intensity. Verification of forecasts over Australia suggests the analyses and forecasts are of sufficient quality to allow diagnosis of the event.

Landfall at Darwin coincided with the onset of the Australian monsoon and this large scale event very much determined Tracy's behaviour. Intensification commenced just prior to recurvature and occurred during an upper tropospheric flow transition, with associated downstream trough formation, reduction in environmental wind shear and development of extended outflow channels. Discussion will focus on possible mechanisms operating during monsoon onset, and during Tracy's intensification and recurvature.

This talk is open to anyone, but has the purpose of informing Bureau of Meteorology staff of the relevant science behind the association between the wave and rainfall.

The only published journal paper on the wave-rainfall association is by W.B. White, Journal of Climate, July 2000. In the talk I shall present the results and the arguments given in this paper, and then shall give a counterview. The paper makes three fundamental errors. 1. The most serious is an inappropriate interpretation of Extended Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EEOFs). A time series is shown of the amplitudes of the EEOFs of Australian rainfall and two indices of the Antarctic Wave, with all three curves corresponding almost exactly. This figure is totally a function of selective filtering and selective choice of the phase of the EEOF pattern; 2. Simultaneous and lag-Correlations are found between independent time series, both of which have been band-pass filtered, so that both will consist of "sine-waves" of the band-pass frequency. Thus as a function of the filtering process, they will naturally correlate highly at some lag. 3. The forecast model presented in the paper is a forecast of filtered time series of rainfall, using filtered time-series of sea surface temperature as a predictor. In addition to the problem of it being based on dependent data, the author does not take into account the fact that an entire period (4-years) must pass before the filter can be applied; so the lead-times of the forecast are exaggerated by a half-period; i.e two years.

Given the fundamental nature of these errors, it is concluded there is no current justification for believing there is a connection between the Antarctic circumpolar wave and Australian rainfall.

In this talk I'll discuss the role of land-surface process in the model predictions. It falls into two parts: the first part is aimed to show some model sensitivity results from a version of the BMRC AGCM as used the 97/98 trial. In this part, I shall compare the model results from different soil moisture initialization and imposing derived soil moisture anomalies in the model integration. The second part is used to report some preliminary analysis of ten AMIP2 model results which was conducted when I was visiting ANSTO two weeks ago to collaborate scientists there on assessing the connections between land-surface parameterization and AGCM model simulations. In this part, I shall concentrate on the connection between AGCM models skill in simulating precipitation and temperature anomalies and their skill in simulating surface fluxes (latent and sensible) anomalies and if such relationship changes with different structures in land-surface schemes used.

The STEPS model has been developed and tested using all TC-advisories and model track predictions during the Atlantic Hurricane seasons 1997-2000. The track prediction quality of STEPS was found to be superior to the track guidance provided by all available models and the official forecasts issued by the National Hurricane Center.

In the first method, the skill in predicting SST anomalies is used to produce rainfall and temperature forecasts over Australia. The scheme performs well mostly over eastern Australia. With SST predictions remaining skillful at nine months lead-time, the method provides information for two to three seasons ahead.

The second method developed using atmospheric reanalysis from 1958 to 2000 is applied to atmospheric fields from the coupled model. Predictability, defined by the inter-annual correlation between observed and reconstructed series is high in particular for temperature. However, useful selected predictors for the statistical regionalisation scheme are not well represented by the coupled model on seasonal time-scale, due to the deficiencies of the model at mid-latitudes. Nevertheless, this method provides encouraging results in few occasions and has a greater scope for further developments.

Finally, results emphasis the interest of such statistical downscaling applied to dynamical seasonal forecasting which provide information with longer lead-time than the current seasonal outlook.

The cost of running an ensemble system depends on its resolution and membership. The choice of the operational configuration of an ensemble system (resolution, size) depend on its aims. Some users/applications would benefit more from a low-resolution, large-size ensemble, while others would benefit more from a high-resolution, small-size ensemble. These issues and the experimentation on-going at ECMWF to define the next ensemble configuration are also discussed during this talk.

The most common approach to forecasting supercellular convection is to ascertain the likelihood for the co-occurence of four key ingredients: moisture, instability, lift and shear. The presentation will illustrate the forecasting process in more detail. Special emphasis is given to "storm initiation", a particularly difficult aspect of severe thunderstorm prediction. Mesoscale model (MM5) simulations on a high-resolution (2 km) grid suggest that "initiating" surface boundaries such as the dryline of the Southern Plains show complex distortion patterns. These patterns define regions of enhanced likelihood for storm initiation.

Once deep organised convection has formed, a variety of interesting structural elements can be identified on radar and visually. I will present examples of radar-detectable elements such as hook echoes and velocity couplets, and visual elements such as rear flank downdraughts and others. Recognising elements of the overall storm structure is a valuable exercise as it allows inferences regarding the thermodynamic environment of the storm. A second benefit is an improved ability to forecast the short-term evolution of the storm including the prediction of its tornadogenesis potential.

BMRC has developed a Medium-Range Ensemble Prediction System, which has been running in research trial mode since May 2000. The BM-EPS is in the process of moving from BMRC research trial to NMOC operational trial mode, involving collaboration between BMRC, NMOC and VRO to implement the system and refine its usefulness for operational forecasting. I will describe changes to the system since my last BMRC informal seminar, and current status and plans.

Another product of collaboration during Roberto's visit has been an intercomparison of BM-EPS and EC-EPS for the period April -- June 2001. Some preliminary results comparing these two ensemble systems will be shown.

These networks originated in the 19th century with the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) and precursors. Standardization became a major concern as telegraph networks linked weather services across national borders. By the early 20th century, the IMO sponsored a Reseau Mondial (worldwide network), though the vicissitudes of world war and the interwar era slowed the expansion of data exchange systems. With the advent of computerized weather models in the 1950s, automatic digital data collection spread rapidly. The meteorological data network became the first dedicated, near-real-time, genuinely global information infrastructure. The very old value of scientific internationalism became embodied in the infrastructure by means of a common language, standards, instrumentation, etc., a process that continues into the present.

The contemporary issue of climate change is one of the few genuinely global political issues. Extending the discussion into the history of climatology, I will argue that conceptions of climate as a global (rather than regional/local) phenomenon, and with them the idea of anthropogenic climate change, were strongly tied to the historical development of the meteorological information infrastructure.

I will then speculate that this relationship applies not only to the case of climate change, but more generally to most - perhaps even all - claims regarding "global" space(s). Infrastructure, as a set of interlocked, smooth-functioning, "black-boxed" sociotechnical systems, is by definition largely invisible to its users. Ideologies of globalization invoke technological links, whether perceived or real, which are held to connect people and places that would otherwise be separated by space, time, culture, politics, and material life.

This talk will discuss how a new version of the assimilation scheme, which uses an iterative inversion, rather than a direct inversion overcomes the problem of data selection. There are however, other constraints built into the BMRC scheme which also result in spurious gradients between subvolumes. Results will show that the new scheme, freed of the constraints of constant mass-wind coupling and background variances can produce analyses, without the spurious gradients, within operational time constraints.

29 June 2000, Coroner's Report of the inquest into the deaths arising from the Thredbo landslide.

NCC staff will give an overview of their plans to pilot an information management (IM) / document management / workflow software tool in NCC. We would like to describe why and how this is being done, and hold a discussion with interested HO staff on linkages to broader Bureau issues and efforts. A metadata working group was recently established consisting of staff from both NCC and OEB. Projects to date include a collation of historical observation instructions and a metadata questionnaire for retired staff. The group also provides input to other metadata projects, such as the scanning of paper station history files and the back seeding of SitesDB. A funding bid has been placed for 2001-02 to progress these projects further. The work requires a planned information management strategy for ongoing information security

The aim of the IM pilot project is to find, evaluate and implement a software package that enhances existing methods for communication and work-flow within the National Climate Centre, based on available technology and the information requirements of the NCC.

Establishing a criteria and evaluating products such as eRoom, Lotus Discovery Server and Microsoft Share Point Portal Server has lead to the 'test bedding' of the latter.

The criteria for the evaluation is as follows: