by Bob Henson
WAS*IS founders Eve Gruntfest and Julie Demuth. (Photo
by Carlye Calvin.) |
When she was completing her master’s degree in meteorology
at Colorado State University, Julie Demuth knew she wanted to do
some sort of applications-based work. She didn’t, however,
envision herself helping lead the charge for a new way of studying
weather and its impacts. Demuth is now the co- organizer of a series
of workshops aimed at giving participants the tools and peer support
they need to carry out truly interdisciplinary weather research.
“The next great leap in meteorology arguably could be the
comprehensive incorporation of social sciences,” says Demuth.
More than 100 invited participants from a variety of backgrounds—meteorology
as well as anthropology, economics, sociology, and other fields—have
taken part in several workshops over the last two years under the
banner of WAS*IS (Weather and Society* Integrated Studies). The first
WAS*IS took place in Boulder in November 2005, with a week-long follow-up
the next winter. Subsequent WAS*IS sessions have been held in Boulder
and Norman, Oklahoma, with the first overseas WAS*IS taking place
near Melbourne, Australia, this past January and February. Applicants
are being sought through 2 April for the next WAS*IS, to be held
this July in Boulder (see WAS*IS
Summer 2007).
Michael Tarrant (Emergency Management
Australia) discusses the devastating bush fires of Ash
Wednesday 1983 on a WAS*IS field trip near Melbourne
in February. (Photo by Katherine Tarrant.) |
The WAS*IS founders see the workshops as a way to “empower
people who are passionate about investigating societal impacts of
weather but who don’t know how or where to start,” says
Demuth. Because there are few formal paths for such work within traditional settings,
WAS*IS aims to build a community of like-minded scholars who call
on each other for mentorship and support as well as for research
collaboration.
“My dream was to have 20 brilliant, creative, culture-changing
people,” says Eve Gruntfest, who teamed with Demuth to launch
WAS*IS. Gruntfest, a geographer at the University of Colorado
in Colorado Springs, made a name for herself early in her career
by analyzing how individuals and groups responded to the disastrous
1976 flash flood that killed nearly 150 people in Colorado’s
Big Thompson Canyon. Her work led to the “Climb to Safety” signs
in Colorado canyons that encourage motorists to leave their cars
if a flood is imminent.
While on sabbatical from UCCS, Gruntfest began a year-long visit
at NCAR’s Institute for the Study of Society and Environment
(ISSE). She found herself pondering how to cultivate a new generation
of interdisciplinary researchers. “My whole career has
been as a social scientist in a world of physical scientists and
engineers,” says Gruntfest. Though she’s enjoyed the
work—“it’s just been grand,” she says—she’s
also experienced the frustration of being tacked onto studies as
a token social scientist.
“When I would give talks, there would always be a few people
who would come up to me and say, ‘I want to do this work,
too.’ I found myself thinking that if these people had a little
training in social science—and more importantly, if they knew
about each other—they could do so much more than I ever did.”
Gruntfest and Demuth teamed up in 2005 in the Societal Impacts
Program (SIP), a joint effort between ISSE and NCAR’s Research
Applications Laboratory. Gradually, WAS*IS began to take shape, drawing
on input from SIP director Jeff Lazo, Rebecca Morss (NCAR), John
Gaynor (NOAA), and other principal investigators. The first WAS*IS
was conceived as a single event, but interest in additional workshops
was high enough to draw support from a variety of sources, primarily
SIP, NOAA’s U.S. Weather Research Program, and UOP’s
Visiting Scientist Programs.
Close interaction during the workshops is an essential
part of WAS*IS. Participants are required to attend each day’s
sessions as well as evening dinners and other special events. “Bringing
people together to develop relationships and learn and brainstorm
together is invaluable,” says Demuth.
The workshops include a crash course in social science techniques
(although “you can’t really learn social science in eight
days,” acknowledges Gruntfest), as well as a few sessions on
key meteorological concepts and ample time for discussion and small-group
projects. Participants also learn about several real-world examples
of work that integrates weather and society.
The quirky acronym for the workshop series is now an adjective
as well as a noun: Gruntfest and Demuth as well as participants refer
to “WAS*IS-y” perspectives. Ironically, the acronym violates
one of the cardinal rules of the workshop itself. “We don’t
allow people to use acronyms,” explains Demuth, “because
they can inhibit communication when you have a group of people from
diverse backgrounds.” However, says Gruntfest, “I realized
at NCAR that we’d be invisible if we didn’t have an acronym.
The workshop is about culture change, going from what was to what
is, so the acronym WAS*IS seemed to fit.”
The enthusiasm of WAS*IS participants comes through on the project’s
Web site, which includes biographies, presentations, projects, testimonials,
and other materials from each of the workshops thus far. “I
expect the knowledge and contacts gained from WAS*IS to pay rich
dividends in the coming years,” writes one participant. “To
state plainly, I would not be doing this research without WAS*IS.”
An article summarizing the project is being submitted for the Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society, and the AMS annual meeting
in San Antonio this past January included a full day of talks related
to WAS*IS. However, says Gruntfest. “I think it’ll take
many years to see the full impact of WAS*IS.”
A
sampler of projects by WAS*IS graduates
Tanja Fransen, a warning coordination
meteorologist with the NWS in Glasgow, Montana, teamed
with Olga Wilhelmi (ISSE) to examine the demographic
and geographic characteristics of deaths and injuries related
to winter weather in Colorado and Montana over the last
decade. In their preliminary analysis, they found that
the 57 deaths and 54 injuries in Colorado (1994–2005)
occurred mainly among young males, perhaps due to high-risk
recreational activities. The Montana casualties (15
deaths and 11 injuries from 1996 to 2005) were more evenly
split by gender, with less of a trend toward younger victims.
Alan Stewart, an associate professor
of counseling and human development at the University of
Georgia, has used WAS*IS as a springboard to expand his research
on how weather affects people. Stewart has developed a 53-item
Weather Salience Questionnaire and tested it on more than
2,000 Georgia undergraduates. The tool evaluates seven dimensions
of weather experience, such as one’s attachment to
certain weather conditions and the need to seek weather information
from multiple sources. The early findings show a bell-curve
distribution of weather salience among the people polled.
Stewart is now in the midst of a nationwide expansion of
the survey.
Randy Peppler, the associate director of
the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies
in Norman, is embarking on a mid-career doctorate in geography
at the University of Oklahoma. For his dissertation, Peppler
plans to examine how Native Americans have observed and regarded
weather over time, including traditional indigenous means
as well as more contemporary observing practices. One potential
topic is to see whether any particular tribe’s forced
relocation during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s wrought
a change in that tribe’s way of thinking about nature
as embodied in weather and climate. |
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