In the past, humans had demonstrated a fair degree of success in this quest, transforming heat into fire, untamed animals into friends, and tangled fields into food. The weather, however, was one thing that had eluded them. Until recently, people could hardly comprehend the causes of the weather, much less forecast it.
It is easy to forget that the numbers we receive— temperatures, wind speeds, and precipitation chances are the result of billions of equations solved on supercomputers and millennia of efforts by obsessive philosophers, adventurers, and scientists. We open our phone apps to see what we should wear, and we switch to the news to decide whether to make those outdoor plans.
At the beginning of the chapter, Dr Jagadish Shukla, the author, gives a quick introduction and writes, "As the chief scientist of the 1979 Summer Monsoon Experiment (MONEX), I kept track of the airplane's flight path, monitored the incoming data, and announced when it was time to launch another dropsonde, a small, cylindrical sensor attached to a parachute."
He further writes, "During the weeks I had been in Calcutta for MONEX, commuting with scientists from twenty-one other countries, many old friends and extended family members had made the journey from the village for a visit. It had been years since some of them had seen me; they remembered me as a barefoot kid kicking around a soccer ball made of old cloth and heaving cow dung into a bucket balanced on my head. Now I was wearing shiny shoes and a tie. I worked at NASA. My old neighbors looked as astonished by my new American life as I was. At thirty-five, I still felt very much like a boy from the village."
He states that an electrical engineer named Jerome Wiesner, who had gained notoriety at MIT for creating microwave radar, and one of his friends, Jule Charney, came up with the concept of a worldwide weather experiment. Charney was in the middle of transforming meteorology at the time. Using only a supercomputer, the principles of physics, and initial conditions—that is, the current atmospheric conditions—Charney developed weather forecasts. The weather for tomorrow and the day after is nearly determined by the beginning conditions of today.
The UN's World Meteorological Organization started preparing the Global Weather Experiment, often known as the Charney Experiment. The ambitious program took nearly two decades to plan. In that time, "virtually every country on earth invested in more or better weather-observing technology. To fill the large gaps that existed in monitoring the oceans, scientists deployed weather buoys from... Commercial ships were fitted with... Thousands of scientists and institutions were recruited to record, read, and analyze the data."
Dr Shukla observes, "By the beginning of 1979, the whole world was equipped to observe the actual weather from pole to pole, to watch in real time as the conditions of today turned into the conditions of tomorrow... and cause the weather that greets us every morning at our front doors."
The author writes, "In July 1979, about one hundred fifty of us—scientists from universities and federal agencies, students, flight crews, project managers, journalists, and archivists—gathered in a Calcutta airport hotel for the month. For two weeks we planned our field experiments, and for two more we performed intensive observations, flying our borrowed airplanes every day that an enticing monsoon depression formed.
After each day of flights, the scientists gathered in a charmless conference room and studied the map—hand-drawn back then—that the MONEX data had so far created. We'd surmise and theorize about what had happened and why, a warm-up for the long years of analysis that lay ahead."
Dr Shukla later discusses his experiences and the challenges he faces while conducting the field experiment for the Global Weather Experiment in a few pages. Subsequently, Shukla and his associates would devote months to a thorough examination of the collected data. More than a hundred publications would be written over the course of the following several years using the data that their instruments had collected from the atmosphere through scraping, sponging, and soaking. He views it as a win, but it is a subtle and gradual one, similar to most scientific triumphs.
The practice of predicting the weather was institutionalized as early as the seventh century BC. In a cave in present-day Iraq, ancient Assyrian tablets containing some of the first weather forecasts ever recorded by humans were discovered. Originally commissioned by Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian ruler, and carved into clay by astrologers and magicians, the predictions were mostly based on omens, such as the pattern of the clouds or a halo surrounding the sun. Such as, "If lightning flashes from south to east, there will be rain and floods," they warned, and "If the voice of the weather god is heard in the month of Tammuz, the crops will prosper."
The author discusses his education, marriage—which involves several rituals—and the death of his father. He also talks about his family, his fascinating childhood tales, and the socioeconomic status of the village. He did, however, enroll in ONGC's oil prospecting training course. He asserts that the term "monsoon" does not refer to "rain," "downpour," "deluge," or "torrent." Actually, wind plays a much bigger role in determining whether a monsoon occurs than water.
The word "monsoon" appears to have sprung from the Arabic word mausim, which signifies "season," regardless of how we use it in everyday speech. 60% of the world's population resides in monsoonal regions, where the yearly monsoon's arrival and severity determine the availability of drinking water, hydroelectric energy, and agricultural production. The summer monsoon in India, however, is the most well-known monsoon of all and the king of monsoons.
Returning to Dehradun, Shukla received a letter from the India Meteorological Department informing him that he had been chosen for a position at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, an organization he had never heard of. He received an opportunity to work as a junior security officer at IITM, a recently developed Institute for Monsoon Research.
While working at IITM, he was told that he had been awarded a fellowship from the United Nations Development Programme for the institute and would be traveling to Japan and the United States for the following eight months. When four men traveled from India in January 1967, their first visit was the National Weather Service in Washington, DC, where they were quite astounded by the technology on exhibit.
It appeared that the 1968 International Symposium on Numerical Weather Prediction was attended by everyone on the globe. He felt very overwhelmed by the situation, so he made an effort to keep his mind on his task, which was to give his work on vertical coupling and object to the Jule Charney paper that Dr Gambo had shown him. Shukla undoubtedly was unaware that Charney was a pioneer in numerical weather prediction because he was so new to this field.
The postman brought Dr Shukla a letter while he was in Mirdha visiting his relatives. It came from Dr Norman Philips, the chairman of MIT's meteorology department. There was a graduate school application inside. He submitted some of his writings to Banaras Hindu University when he was employed in Pune, where he received a Ph.D. He believed that his education was over, yet now he found himself back across the classroom. He received a meager stipend at MIT, but it was insignificant in comparison to the money he had made while employed there.
He writes, "Nowhere was this push and pull more pronounced than between my two advisors, Jule Charney and Edward Lorenz. Giants in the field, these men would change my thinking—and my life—forever." Later on, Dr Shukla talks about their lives, their journeys, and other things. He was apprehensive when he explained to his two mentors that he wanted to show that monthly and seasonal averages were predictable. He was thrilled when they both enthusiastically urged him to continue.
The long-term forecasting of daily weather was significantly impacted by Lorenz's discovery of chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Dr Shukla writes, "In the fifty years I have been a part of the scientific community, researchers have discovered so many amazing facets about our planet's atmosphere, climate systems, and weather patterns—that the temperature of the ocean can have a dramatic impact on societies hundreds of miles away; that the seemingly unchanging land beneath our feet plays an integral role in how much rain falls on our heads."
Finally, he mentions, "I believe that to manage and mitigate climate change, we need three things, and the good news is that we already have the first two well in hand. First, we need to understand the science. Check. Second, we need the technology that allows us to stop pumping the air full of carbon dioxide. Check. Third, we need the will to listen to the science and embrace technology. It is only on this last point that we are struck, thanks to the corporate greed that has parasitized our political system."
In addition to giving an overview of climate science, "A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory is more of a memoir of Dr Shukla's life".
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