NOAA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
10/15/02

Contact: Keli Tarp
(405) -366-0451
Cell (405) 203-4839
Keli.Tarp@noaa.gov

Commerce Department Awards Silver Medal to NSSL Researcher Harold Brooks

The U.S. Department of Commerce has awarded its Silver Medal to Harold Brooks of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla. for developing the first ever, highly accurate and accessible estimates of long-term threats from tornadoes, thunderstorms winds and large hail on any day anywhere in the contiguous United States.

Brooks, a research meteorologist and head of NSSL’s mesoscale applications group, was presented the award Sept. 24 by Commerce Secretary Don Evans at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. The Secretary grants the Silver Medal -- the Department's second highest honorary award -- to employees who have made contributions of exceptional value in support of overall departmental goals that serve the nation.

“Harold’s work has already provided valuable information for a range of interests, both internal and external to NOAA,” said James Kimpel, NSSL Director. “Accurate estimates of the true threats from severe weather are of use to a wide range of users, including weather forecasters, emergency management personnel, the insurance industry and the general public.”

The severe weather hazard estimates Brooks developed are available in user-friendly formats on the World Wide Web at http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/hazard.

Brooks graduated summa cum laude with honors from William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and math. He earned Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees in atmospheric sciences from Columbia University in New York, NY, in 1985 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in atmospheric sciences from the University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. He also completed Part I, Archaeological and Antropological Tripos at the University of Cambridge in England in 1980.

Brooks was the first to attempt to estimate the frequency with which thunderstorms occur at any particular location. Severe thunderstorms are rare events at any location, making the job challenging. The problem is made worse by changes over the years in the way that reports of severe weather are collected. Brooks took raw reports put onto a regularly-spaced grid by Mike Kay of the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS), and applied statistical techniques to provide estimates of the occurrence of severe thunderstorms for any location in the contiguous United States on any day of the year. The result is the annual cycle of the threat, and the variability of the annual cycle, of severe thunderstorm hazards anywhere in the country. In addition, the statistical techniques allow the total annual threat to be calculated directly from the daily numbers, so that the most susceptible regions of the U.S. can be easily identified.

Working with Daphne Zaras of CIMMS, Brooks developed applications to make interactive animations of the probability of severe thunderstorms around the country through the year. On the Web site, users can see what locations are most likely to be hit by severe thunderstorms at any particular time of year. In addition, a clickable map of the U.S. allows users to select any location in the contiguous U.S. and see what the annual cycle of severe weather is at that point.

“These developments make it easy to understand the nature of the severe weather season in different parts of the country,” Kimpel said.

In addition to the Web materials, the technique has allowed Brooks to develop objective definitions of concepts such as “Tornado Alley,” based on the occurrence and year-to-year consistency of tornadoes. An unexpected result of this effort was the discovery that tornadoes associated with large numbers of fatalities are much more likely to occur in locations that do not have strongly consistent tornado seasons, even after population density is factored into the problem.

An implication, according to Brooks, is that a consistent tornado season leads to public familiarity with the threat and an increase in appropriate responses to the threat. The resultant challenge for public safety officials and weather forecasters in other regions is to communicate accurate weather on those few days when the threat is high, and to provide education to the public about what to do in the face of the threat.

Based on the project, forecast products from the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center have been changed to provide more information. Many local National Weather Service forecast offices use the Web site to train volunteer severe weather spotters. Insurance and risk management companies have begun to explore using the techniques and the threat estimates to develop new estimates of their exposure that are less dependent on their historical client locations. In addition, meteorological consulting companies are developing applications for retail businesses that sell products to consumers who are sensitive to interruptions from severe thunderstorms.