Starting in the mid-1990s I became involved in management and analysis of U.S. government efforts in climate and weather modeling. This became a unique aspect of my career, and here at the end of my career, I am still asked to be involved both directly and indirectly.

Here is a collection of writings.  They still largely stand on their own, though they do demand some updates.  Many were written as blogs on Wunderground.com, and though archived and accessible, I am unable to update broken links.  Updating is a future project.

Below are, first, articles that I have written that have been reviewed. Then, there are collections of Wunderground.com blogs. Finally, there is a recent presentation on the Unified Forecast System

Formal Reviewed Documents to which I have contributed.

Is the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) the right way to build models for climate adaptation?

Here is a talk I got the opportunity to give at the 2022 Community Earth System Model Workshop (Annual Meeting).  It is a argument based on the concept of model credibility, a value of scientific adequacy, that we need to find an alternative to CMIP to develop adaptation models.

On YouTube

Introduction to the Unified Forecast System (UFS)

From 2018 – early 2022, I part of the leadership of the Unified Forecast System – the UFS.

What is the UFS?  The UFS is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth modeling system. This system includes computer code, governance rules, and the community of individuals composed of researchers, developers and users from NOAA, educational institutions, federal agencies, and the private sector. The UFS is designed to support the weather enterprise and to be the source system for NOAA’s operational numerical weather prediction applications.

More Info: https://ufscommunity.org/

This presentation was made as a guest lecture to a class on weather analysis.

Title: Student’s Introduction to the Unified Forecast System (UFS)
The talk is divided into three sections

  1. Background, which includes a short analysis of US science culture and science policy
    What is the UFS? NWP as guidance.
  2. A discussion of a use case that is intended to show how numerical forecasts are used as guidance.
  3. There is also a brief description of why we think we can do sub-seasonal forecasting.

It is about 41 minutes long, but you can listen at double speed.

You can find slides and an .mp4 in the folder at this link.

On YouTube:

Rood’s Wunderground Blog Series

Unfortunately, some of the internal links have been broken by Wunderground’s blog archival, and cannot be fixed until the blogs are re-published. The text is, however, still intact.

Fragmentation and Balance of U.S. Federal Climate Research and Applications

  • Importance of Justification: If climate and climate change are so important, then why is its funding always in peril? 
  • Buying big computers: Supercomputers are important and take on a magical role in climate and weather science. Why there really is no magic.
  • Fragmented climate: Why is the U.S. climate and weather enterprise  so fragmented? There are real structural reasons and the incentives work to keep it fragmented. Management and organization is defied.
  • Organizing the Fragments: Efforts to integrate activities do not address the power structure aligned with the existing fragmentation, and the incentive structure does not reward integration.
Scientific Organizations versus Organizations of Scientists: Series of blogs from 2011. The U.S. federal climate and weather enterprise is fragmented across many institutions and individuals. Management and organization to provide needed capacity is not straightforward. A viable approach is integration of these activities and emerging open-source and open-innovation communities offer successful governance and management practices.
  • Something New in the Past Decade: Incentives are needed to support product-driven research and building climate and weather capacity. Since 2000, we have seen the emergence of community-based approaches to complex problem solving.
  • The Scientific Organization: A focus on integrated or unified science does not come at the expense of “the science,” and does not undermine the scientific method or the integrity of “the science.” A scientific organization is one that is designed and run to honor the tenets of the scientific method.
  • A Science Organized Community: A scientific community requires the development of strategies to evaluate and validate collected, rather than individual, results.
  • Validation and the Scientific Organization: The development of an evaluation plan requires that a fundamental question be asked? What is the purpose of the model development? What is the application?

Open-Innovation Communities: Series of blogs from 2010. As we move into the rapidly climate of the next several decades, there will be hugely expanded needs for information from climate models. Needs will come from government, non-governmental organizations, business, and all aspects of planning and management. This series explores the possibility of validated, open-source climate models  that could be part of future climate models.

  • Greening of the Desert: There are potentially many people with the interest and desire to play around with the insides of a climate model.
  • Stickiness and Climate Models: The requirement to extend the use of climate information to uncountable application communities challenges the current notions of community.
  • Open Source Communities, What Are the Problems?:The need to maintain science-based evaluation is perhaps the most formidable hurdle that must be addressed, not only, towards the ambitious goal I outline of configurable models for use by non-experts, but even for broader inclusion of the expert community.
  • A Culture of Checking: Beyond the narrow world of scientists, we need to be able to point to the elements and measurements of validation in order to provide the foundation of the use of models in mitigation, adaptation, and geo-engineering.