 Good afternoon. My name is Ray Tsuchiyama. I'm your guest host for JFIDEL today. And this is Research in Manoa, a series about how research is changing our lives in Hawaii and globally. We have two guests today. We have to my left, Dr. Kevin Hamilton. And also Dr. Toshi Sakazaki. And they're both going to be talking about our theme for today, which is a poetic letter from the sky, weather influenced by the upper atmosphere. And I've been part of trying to raise the consciousness of research in Manoa since the 1980s of the publication of the Hawaii High Tech Journal. And I am honored today to really delve into a topic that is very scientific and with all kinds of ramifications about weather and climate. So I'm going to turn first to Dr. Kevin Hamilton, who is the retired director professor of the International Pacific Research Center IPRC at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Can you tell us something about your background and your leadership and what's the center all about? It's great to be here with you, Ray. And the IPRC is a climate research center. And it was set up almost 20 years ago as a joint collaboration between Japan, particularly the Japan Agency for Marine and Earth Science and Technology, JAMSTEC, sort of the equivalent in Japan of our NOAA. And the University of Hawaii. And Japan has given us probably more than $40 million in the intervening 20 years to help our research. And basically we're focusing on climate issues, particularly those most relevant to the Asia-Pacific region. And we're, again, had many exchanges of Japanese investigators who come and spend some time in Hawaii, such as Dr. Sakazaki, as we'll see today. And our, basically it's been very good for us because we've been able to provide a lot of sort of manpower, brainpower, and be able to collaborate, of course, with the brilliant scientists at JAMSTEC and also their fantastic resources. So they have computers we couldn't dream of having in Hawaii and also research boats and so on. So it's been a very productive, very successful collaboration. And I think of your investigation research and whether it takes a lot of computer power. Yes, so probably our main expertise is computer modeling. And so we have locally our own computers, but we use a lot of output from the computers at JAMSTEC and now RECAN in Japan. So Japan, in terms of sort of functional, scientific computing, Japan has kept the edge for the last 15 years and we've been able to sort of glom on to these fantastic computers. So IPRC is not only a scientific research center but an example of international collaboration? Absolutely. It's totally international. It was conceived by a Japanese colleague over 20 years ago. And again, the Japanese have put in probably a little more money than the American government at this point over the entire history of the center. So studying the weather is very critical. But what ways? I mean, your PhD, your dissertation was on the effect of winds, the upper atmosphere. I think we're going to be talking about the impact of rainfall in, again, the upper atmosphere and how it impacts the lower atmosphere and in particular maybe about a better understanding of weather events like cyclones and hurricanes and thunderstorms and so forth. Why study the weather? Okay, so I mean, I guess the ultimate practical benefit of understanding weather and climate is to be able to forecast either short term or long term. And so some of what we do is focused on dynamics of tropical cyclones so the interest there is on short term predictions of very important events. But a lot of what we also do is longer time scale variability so particularly involving the ocean, so El Mino and other even longer time scale variations of the ocean atmosphere system has got a lot of attention from our scientists and our collaborations. So again, the idea there is it will eventually be able to improve seasonal forecasting and longer period forecasting. Fantastic. So this is a prelude into our slides. I think Dr. Sakazaki and yourself can comment more on this particular project. Can we start the slides with number one? What is this all about? Okay, so it's a little bit complicated. I'll let Takatoshi talk in a second. But basically you're seeing the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere and the troposphere separated around 10 miles up, let's say. And basically up in the upper atmosphere there are processes that generate mechanical waves that come down and you see they interact in the tropics with rainfall or so we think. So maybe Takatoshi can say a little more. Yes, so our talk is about the daily cycle of the rainfall. The daily cycle means that we feel that at certain time of the day there is some much more rainfall and at certain time of the day there is a minimum rainfall during the day. So we are studying such a kind of daily cycle of the rainfall. And what we found is that such daily cycle of rainfall is influenced by the disturbance which comes from upper atmosphere, so called the stratosphere region above 15 kilometers in this slide. So that was the discovery. That was the insight to your research. Yes. So you can see as you go along the equator there sort of stretched out the equator there are two complete cycles. So two highs and two lows. And so the solar heating as the sun moves from east to west it generates this downward propagated wave and has a particular strength around 12 hours. So in fact if you have a barometer anywhere in the tropics I'd just use your phone these days of course and plot out the pressure every hour you'll see the pressure in Hawaii almost every day peaks at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. And that's a consequence of this mechanical wave. And this has been known for a long time but what we wondered is whether we could actually find proof that it's affecting the daily cycle of rainfall. It's relatively small downward propagating wind variation. So we used our fancy computer simulation models what Takatoshi did and basically showed that to some extent this daily cycle when you get more rain on average than other times a day is affected all over the tropics by this downward propagating wave. So maybe we can talk about the next slide. So slide two please go ahead. So this first this is an example of the daily cycle of rainfall and this is an observation around the Indonesia region which have a very large amount of rainfall climatologically and this line plot shows that again a daily cycle and we see in this figure we see two maxima during a day and two minima during the day. So our question is how can this be explained by the upper atmosphere. So could you go to the next slide. So here super post is our numerical simulation results and in this case it did not include the effects from upper atmosphere so in this case daily cycle is almost one maxima and one minima. It did not capture the observed features well. So what could you go to the next slide. When we include the effects of the upper atmosphere I mean the waves from the upper atmosphere we can actually capture in this case two maxima and two minima. So the results become good better. So this means that the disturbance from the upper atmosphere has a significant impact on the daily cycle of the rainfall. And I just want to mention this data this line of course is based on a huge amount of data am I correct. How can you tell us how big is it. I mean it's not a small amount of numbers it's a very large amount of data am I correct. Yes so the blue curve there showed the observations that's put together from several years of satellite data. And the satellite data itself is different ways the satellite looks at the earth. So there's actually active radar so it's kind of like the weather radar looking down as it goes by and also infrared and microwave flux is measured. So every hour that satellite will go every 90 minutes it will go around the world and produces millions and millions of numbers. So over several years you're talking about billions and gigabytes and terabytes of data. So basically people like Takatoshi go to the internet and grab all this data and make sense of it. And at the end of the curve are we through the more slides? That's a different topic. So the basis or the work the research is really on this making sense out of complex data and then giving insights to a correlation of what's happening in our upper atmosphere that's correlated to some event that's actual rainfall or massive or light that's a proven case right now. So from our perspective an abstract sense is very interesting we're able to get this effect from the very thin upper atmosphere. So again if you look at the background behind this you can see this is actually just a picture taken from these national space stations and it just points at a camera at the edge of the earth just when the sun had gone down and you can see sort of two bands a reddish-orange-ish one that's the lower atmosphere and then above you see the blue band that's the stratosphere. So stratosphere is very clean so both regions are being illuminated by white light from the sun coming just below the horizon. And the stratosphere is very clean so you're getting scattering just from individual air molecules on the blue and violet. So again you could probably of course this beautiful space age we see these beautiful pictures if you went to a tall mountain maybe even Mauna Kea and you looked at the right moment the right time you might be able to see a similar kind of view of the atmosphere but basically the blue stuff the stratosphere is very maybe 10 or 15% of the total mass. So an abstract point of view is very exciting we've been able to pretty clearly demonstrate this effect. It's also interesting because of course when more rain falls during the day on average it's a very common everybody's experience it's a little bit different everywhere in the world but everybody if you ask them say oh yeah it rains more at night or during the day and so we haven't a part of the explanation for this it's important in the tropics everywhere so it's kind of nice from that point of view and then finally it's very important from again a slightly abstract but sort of once you peel a few layers of the onion it's actually very practical and that's understanding the interaction between the sort of large scale wind field and individual thunderstorms and convection elements so again when you see a tropical cyclone form there's sort of an interaction between the winds bringing more moisture in producing more convection and over a few hours you'll actually spin up a big storm so that's one time interaction something much subtler happens on global scales and we don't really understand it that well can't model it that well can we go to that topic after our break and I think this is a wonderful program and we'll be back in a couple of minutes thank you very much Hawaii is a place where you get to watch shrinks and others involved in psychology talk about the joy the sorrow the pain and the bliss of being human I am Steve Katz and I am a practicing marriage and family therapist here in Honolulu my guests are psychologists clinical social workers and others who are interested in helping people be fully alive please join us into this most human journey in consciousness and loving kindness Aloha I'm Kaui Lucas host of Hawaii is my mainland every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii I also have a blog of the same name at kauilucas.com where you can see all of my past shows join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha and we are back in our really interesting interaction we're having about the upper atmosphere and which has been a area that really needed more study and research and this is what's happening at the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa we have our guest Dr. Kevin Hamilton and also Dr. Sakazaki who is from actually we were talking before and he says he spent his time in Sapporo at the University of Hokkaido and that's where my mother's family is from Hokkaido all of the Sapporo Chitose Hakodane all of that place is a wonderful, wonderful campus and he took his Ph.D. there in a climate very much different than his native Kyoto which is in a valley and has its own microclimate as we know very humid in the summer and very cold in the very humid and cold in the winter and of course Sapporo is on a plane with lots of snow during the winter and a short intense great summer without any rainy season unlike Tokyo where I spent many years and so we're in our second half of our program and we're going to go into a next topic and we're going to talk about a longer view of weather and research and I'll leave it to either of you to focus in and whenever you want the slides let us know. Okay so just to finish up the daily rainfall again we have very subtle global scale interaction between the winds and the convection and Takatoshi's nice work on the 12 hour wave gives a very particular window into that behavior so it's forced by this upper atmospheric wave of the exact period of 12 hours so it's sort of a special case so we can try to understand the dynamics better and we can try to see how well our computer models do on this particular case so again that's sort of going to be an opening to a much broader issue of variability on days to weeks in the tropics so we're talking about more localized part one effects and so forth and now we're going to more along the term right so in the so of course down here living at the surface most of us don't know this but above our heads it's actually a very interesting phenomena going on called the quasi-benial oscillation so at low latitudes at most of the tropics the prevailing winds there go from very strong westward winds to very strong eastward winds and they switch roughly every other year not perfectly by any all and it's a very big, the winds are very strong so they're almost hurricane forced winds in each case so there's this huge jet blowing up there again it's this above 10, 15 miles of our head and so this has been a very interesting phenomenon and interestingly it was first, the first hint what was going on was actually realized by an amateur scientist in Hawaii back in the 1880s so when they had the eruption of Krakatoa it put a huge amount of aerosol into the stratosphere and it actually went all the way around the earth on this jet which we didn't realize before and a guy called Serino Bishop who was a clergyman and journalist, very interesting citizen of Hawaii in the late 19th century also a very good amateur scientist he was actually the first person to realize what they were seeing what they actually saw in Honolulu was very spectacular sunsets which came from the aerosol he was the first person to really figure out what was going on and later on he was also the first person to study and found another volcano to give different winds so he didn't have the full picture but he really quite remarkably great insights to something far far beyond where we live so anyways now with modern observations we actually see there's this jet but it actually reverses roughly every other year and more recently we appreciate that it has an effect on the seasonal mean climate particularly in northern hemisphere winter so again they're kind of large scale wave like perturbations that are generated to make our weather in the winter particularly in the higher latitude in Hawaii and those waves sort of feel the upper atmosphere is kind of a boundary and so whether there's strong westward winds or strong eastward winds there it tells how much it reflects how much the wave can propagate through a piece of glass it partly reflects so the properties of that sort of upper boundary for these waves changes depending on the sign of this oscillation so anyways so we were I've been very interested in this oscillation my tire actually was back to my PhD but something very strange happened last year and again I might have been the first one of the very first people to recognize this but instead of a regular sort of one year cycle we got a very unusual cycle looked to me like it was going to be very short so if we go to the next slide slide number one please there we go so you can see different years there it starts in 1998 to 2006 on the top 2008 to 2016 at the bottom at each heights this is up in the upper atmosphere you see blues and those are westward winds one goes this way the other goes this way basically if you look at any one level there's a transition roughly every other year from westward to eastward and the transition is again very fascinating as it sort of propagates downward so anyways so that's again lots to understand there but what we found is if you go to the very end of the record 2016 you see instead of the blue coming down from high up there's just a little blue there so this is unprecedented in our modern record so over 60 years and I recognize something very strange was happening and we actually wrote a paper in science with some colleagues at Oxford about this and my speculation our speculation which was backed up by some computer simulation, computer prediction models is that instead of having a real westward phase with that blue we'd have just a little tiny blip and by the time we get to this winter we'd be back to eastward so kind of skip a beat and then as a consequence we go to the next slide slide 2, slide 2 please last slide, yeah so when there's these westward winds on average you get a pattern like this in winter so warm in northern Europe warm in the lower 48 United States so last April we were informally at least making predictions in September I guess formally in the literature making predictions of a warm winter in northern Europe a warm winter in the United States and of course it's only it's not a perfect prediction it only sort of pushes the odds one way or another but of course it turned out to be an extremely warm winter in the United States and also a warm winter in northern Europe so we this is an example of how understanding the upper atmospheric winds their effects on the on the surface but also sort of being able to anticipate how they're going to evolve from the present situation gets you potentially some predictability up for a year or even more so in this case again I think there's a measure of luck that our forecast worked but we said the odds would be that there would be a warm winter in the United States a warm winter in northern Europe and has been the case so but in general another example somehow in the upper atmosphere particularly near the equator you can have a very long period fairly regular variability and to the extent that's affecting the systematic way whether in the lower atmosphere it gives you potential for predictability of a year maybe even more will this change in the future you think this is a harbinger of ah well this is very interesting why did this happen after 60 years maybe it's something that happened it's roughly 60 years it's possible it's connected with climate change so the climate in the upper atmosphere is changing and to the extent we can model this with global comprehensive models we do see a tendency for as the climate war for the oscillation to become a little bit weaker lower down a little bit more irregular but I can't say we know anyone anticipated we see this incredible hiccup you know unique over 60 years this time so it's possible it's related to the long period changes in the atmosphere that could just be a chance we have to just see as years come come along and so is this a topic for more research by a center this particular area absolutely and again so I'm involved in an international collaboration that's actually involved about 10 different institutions now trying to do a sort of global very comprehensive model so how has been your experience after a year at UH has been has it been a very positive good experience doing your research at UH? yes yes I'm now learning a lot from Kevin and by collaborating with other researchers at UH yes so I think I got good progress in this year and you have another year to go in your research when you go back to Japan or anywhere in the world what are the things that are unique to the center is there anything that's quite interesting to you how people interact with the computer use or modeling what's unique for you makes your research really flourish at the center here? yes at UH yeah I think so here there are many meteorological scientists in the IPRC that's a very good advantage for me because we can have a lot of discussion with the scientists who are who measure the particularly the tropical meteorology that's the main very important topic in climate science well thank you very much Dr. Sakasaki and Dr. Hamilton I mean we had a very interesting discussion and I think we are in a very exciting phase in meteorological and climate research and I see your IPRC is an international collaboration that's really showing the way to do science well and to make it really a jewel of the University of Hawaii thank you again this is research at Maranoa and I'm sitting in for J. Fidel my name is Retsuchi Yama thank you very much