Michigan Today - September 2007

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Science is about doing: The adventures of Prof. Perry Samson

by Lynne Raughley

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U-M students in Greenland

Perry Samson likes to say that science is a contact sport.

Professor Samson, Associate Chair of U-M's Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, is a meteorologist. He can tell you how tornados form (roughly, warm, moist air is lifted by heavier cold or dry air, producing "supercell" thunderstorms) or why global climate change will result in more, and more intense, hurricanes (hurricanes derive their power from the ocean—the warmer the water the hurricane travels over, the more potential for hurricane formation and growth).

He can also explain, by drawing a simple bell curve, one of the most significant—and under-reported—threats of climate change: heat waves. Samson says an increase of only one degree in global temperature will put at risk vulnerable populations. One degree difference may not seem like much. "The mean temperature will be be, say, 49 degrees instead of 48," Samson says. But weather as experienced by people isn't about mean temperatures. Weather is in part experienced as cold snaps and heat waves, and a mean temperature increase of one degree means that those heat waves become more likely. And it's the very old, the very young, and the very poor—those who aren't mobile, or don't have air conditioning—who suffer the most.

Already, heat is the number one weather-related cause of death. In an average year, heat kills more people than floods, tornados and hurricanes combined. The death toll from Hurricane Katrina is 1,836. That's horrifying, and it doesn't take into account the loss of the city itself. But the heatwave that baked Europe in the summer of 2003 is believed to have resulted in some 35,000 deaths. As global temperatures continue to climb, "heat will have the biggest impact," Samson says.

Samson can tell you plenty about the weather, but really, he'd much rather show you: "Science is about doing." As he says, it's a contact sport. A lucky few of his students, mostly juniors and seniors majoring in Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences, get to do fieldwork. Last spring, some went out with the joint University of Michigan/Texas Tech University storm chasing team, following tornados across the southern plains; others went to Greenland to take atmospheric and space weather measurements.

But Samson can't take a large survey course out into the field. Field work for the his big lectures is necessarily limited to going outside to observe cloud formations. And so, since the mid-'90s, Samson has been seeking ways to make science more real—a contact sport—for students who won't get the opportunity to do field work.

University of Michigan Professor Perry Samson

It started when he set up technology that enables students to view images on pocket PCs during lectures. But the students wanted to take notes, too. "They told me, 'We have laptops, you know'" he says, laughing. These days the students in his Extreme Weather class can respond to and ask questions via their computers, even as Samson is lecturing, which makes the large survey course far more interactive than it once was. "Students were afraid to ask questions aloud, in front of all the others," Samson says. "They didn't want to look stupid." Now, though, students can ask questions anonymously via computer. Their questions pop up even as he lectures, as if in a radio call-in show, and Samson can address them immediately. Samson is continuing to develop these tools and others, making lecture slides, podcasts, and Web resources available to students outside of class time.

Samson also uses the Web to impart his passion for the science of weather to an audience beyond his students. He created an online weather tournament called the Weather Dance (weatherdance.org), an analog to the NCAA basketball tournament, in which competitors vie to better predict which competing team's campus will be hotter or cooler on scheduled game days. He also designed a system that uses Google Earth to enable users to "fly" the paths of all tornados recorded in the US from 1950 to 2005 (http://climate.engin.umich.edu/tornadopaths/). Samson wants to enhance this system to allow people to upload photos, and share their own tornado experiences. That's a useful tool, indeed, for those who agree that science is a contact sport but who might prefer to do their tornado chasing from a distance.

Click to see slideshow.

 

 

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Lynne Raughley

"Faculty at Work" writer Lynne Raughley lives in Ann Arbor Michigan with her husband and their three-year-old son.