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SuperStorm Sandy was a vivid reminder that hurricane damage is not only wind damage and that surge damage can be devastating and life threatening. In part supported by NSF, I led a collaboration with AIR-Worldwide and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study how hurricane surge risk to property might change in the future both as a result of changes to sea level and of changes to hurricane tracks and intensities.

Kyle Beatty joins 3 hurricane impact experts from Verisk Analytics in a special session at the Extreme Weather Insurance Risk Management Congress (EWRM) today in NYC “Superstorm Sandy Post Event Assessment: Assessing The Optimal Decision Making Tools For Managing Catastrophic Weather Events: Addressing Weather Prediction, Modeling Challenges, Claims Analysis And Impact Estimates.”

Justin Jones and I spoke at the AMS annual conference in Austin Texas, as well as many others from AER. Justin presented on tropospheric precursors and stratospheric warmings while I argued that predictability of the winter forecast based on the scientific current state of knowledge is limited to October.

One of the most important ways that scientists communicate the results of their research is through papers published in professional journals. One of the more influential journals in atmospheric science is the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (JGR), published by the American Geophysical Union. Over its many decades of operation, JGR has published some of the most cited and authoritative research papers in the field and, consequently, has an extremely high ranking in the ISI Journal Citation Reports ©.

Dear Colleagues: We look forward to seeing you at AMS Annual Meeting and hope you'll take a moment to stop by one of our technical presentations.

I was not planning on attending AGU this fall in San Francisco but then received two invited talks; one on climate prediction and the other on how warming of the Arctic is impacting weather in the midlatitudes. Talks are very hard to come by at AGU, with 22,000 participants, so two invited talks seemed like an opportunity not to be squandered.

AER Scientists have 35 topics/sessions accepted to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, December 3-7, 2012 in San Francisco, CA. Topics AER scientists will speak on through the week are:

Last year Texas had more severe hail events than any state in the country, causing $1.7 billion in insured losses statewide. The prevalence of hail in Texas has been the stimulus for the Texas Department of Insurance's sponsorship of the first annual War on Hail Symposium on November 27th. I'll be a panelist on the "Technology and Tools" roundtable, discussing future web-based application of weather related tools.

AER is hosting a noontime seminar by MIT Professor Susan Solomon on “Emerging Signals of Climate Changes: Where in the World will Climate Change First?" A leading atmospheric chemist, Solomon will summarize recent research showing the surprising result that an early onset of significant local warming that exceeds past variability is already emerging or will likely emerge in the next two decades in many tropical countries.

Not Your Typical Hurricane