Future geographers will use predictive tools, but require large-scale funding for climate change

The next generation of global warming scientists will need large-scale funding, and a healthy dose of data analytics and psychology, to succeed in a rapidly warming world, a climate scientist told the GeoIgnite conference Wednesday (March 2). These comments came, during the virtual conference, from J. Marshall Shepard, the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia. Shepard spent 12 years at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, working on large satellite missions such as the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and the Global Precipitation Mission (he was deputy project scientist for the latter.) During a "fireside chat," Shepard said that he was already thinking through a "geospatial perspective" during those years at NASA, seeking to find the broader causes and trends behind weather events such as floods, heat waves and hurricanes. His concern during his time at NASA was that the information being provided to the user community was less predictive (largely due to the tools available at the time) than what the community required. Today, happily, artificial intelligence and machine learning are allowing NASA and other stakeholders to work together on predicting events rather than only reacting to them, he said. But now there's a new issue: "I think we're at a point where we have pretty good technology, but now we have so much data. How do we make sense of, detect patterns, and understand the tendencies?" he asked of weather technology in the community. Humans, he acknowledged, are "limited in our capacity to analyze and mine the vast amount of data that's now coming in from satellite systems," which is where geospatial analysis can assist humans. To be sure, he said, humans will always have sensitivities over machines, such as providing analysis concerning complex phenomena such as short-term rapid intensification in hurricanes. That said, Shepard also warns his geography students that they need to be "hybrid students," competent in not only atmospheric sciences and physics, but also in data analytics, geographic information systems programming, and computer languages like Python. Cross-disciplinary understanding will be especially crucial due to the warming of our climate, which is creating storm systems becoming more powerful as they draw into more available water vapour in our atmosphere. "We get these massive dailies, just three inches per hour," he said of rainfall during some large storm events. Flooding is also accelerating, but counterintuitively it is not so much as how much is falling from the sky, but a function of land cover. "We don't get as much infiltration of soil," Shepard said, pointing to urbanization that is creating more rapid runoff. Stormwater systems built in the last century, before climate change accelerated, cannot handle the increased flow. "This is where we need the geospatial thinking of this community to help us understand how we reimagine [and] rethink the design of cities, the design of stormwater conveyance systems, and so forth," Shepard urged. Communicating global warming to the broader public comes with its own sets of complexity, Shepard noted. He urged geographers to better understand the "societal side of science," which plays into how people consume information, interpret maps and act upon the information. As such, he said new advances in weather forecasting will come more from such "marketing" and less from "the next great model, or satellite." Advances, Marshall continued, are "going to be from this convergence of atmospheric sciences and social sciences that we're now seeing. We know now, for example, that there are studies that show when we put out tornado warnings on these maps with counties … more than 50 percent of the people can't recognize what county they're in." Recognizing that inequalities do exist for communities in poverty, communities of colour, and communities with Indigenous or Native American elders are also part of the framework of building better tools. He urged more discussion on these fronts during another public panel, sometime in the near future. "We ought to find a time or venue to get more geographers and weather folks together and talk about some of these issues." Figuring out solutions to climate change will also be about large-scale "Manhattan [Project]-scale adaptation." including seawalls and drought-resistant seeding capable of helping large populations, Shepard said. "We need that level of effort on climate change, because unlike a pandemic, or hopefully a war that we're now seeing across the south of Europe, this episodic climate change is a generational thing started from this point forward."