U.S. Navy Weather and Ocean Prediction: A Conversation with Rear Admiral John Okon

The U.S. Navy plays a huge role in global environmental monitoring and prediction, ranging from taking observations in the world's oceans and monitoring Arctic sea ice, to running highly sophisticated numerical models of the atmosphere and ocean.  If anything ever happened to the National Weather Service's weather prediction models, the U.S. Navy stands ready as an immediate backup.

The crucial role of Navy meteorology and oceanography was a reason I jumped at the offer of interviewing Navy Rear Admiral John Okon, who holds the role of Oceanographer of the Navy, putting him in charge of the vast Navy environmental enterprise.    Admiral Okon was going to come to Seattle for Seafair/Fleet Week, but COVID-19 cancelled those plans.

But even with Seafair cancelled,  Admiral Okon still wanted to reach out to Northwest residents and so he agreed to this interview, in which we discussed a number of weather and ocean issues over roughly twenty minutes.  Please check out the video below if you would like to learn about the U.S. Navy's role in environmental prediction and even the potential jobs in working on these tasks. 

Just a little background about Admiral Okon.  He received a B.S. in meteorology and oceanography from the N.Y Maritime College, followed by a master's degree in meteorology and physical meteorology from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, with his adviser being Dr. Wendell Nuss, a graduate of the UW.  So he has a strong UW Husky connection.

Later he served as meteorologist and oceanographer aboard two aircraft carriers, followed by a series of increasingly responsible command posts including running the Navy's modeling center in Monterey, followed by taking on the key post of Navy oceanographer.

My conversation with him ranged from high-tech ocean observing systems (e.g., like the seagliders that can stay underwater for months) to the challenges of cybersecurity of weather modeling systems.

More information on U.S. Navy meteorology and oceanography can be found here.

Benign Wildfire Year in Washington State

Everyone needs some good news this year and in this blog I am going to give it to you.  

We are half-way through the Washington State wildfire season and so far the area burned is far below normal.  We have not had any major fires.

And the latest forecasts suggest that this happy situation will continue.

To illustrate, here is the burned acreage on lands protected by the the Department of Natural Resources (excludes some Federal lands) from January 1 through July 31st.  This year there has only been 678 acres burned, the second lowest during the past decade.  And most of this is just grass fires.

Now some media folks and a few (less than honest) politicians have been saying that this has been a worse than normal fire year so far.  Let me show you how they are "stretching" the truth.  

Here is a plot of the number of fires counted by DNR.   So far we have had 558, which is more than normal.

But this increase has been mainly due to small fires ignited by folks, homebound by COVID, doing a lot of clean up and trash fires, plus a bevy of "recreational" fires.

Currently, there are only two major fires going on, and both are nearly contained (see map below)

We are now in the warmest time of the year for our region, and the most threatening for wildfire.  Fortunately, the forecast models are pretty emphatic that we are going into a much cooler/wetter pattern.

The latest Climate Prediction Center 6-10 day forecast shows below normal temperatures:

And the latest international ensemble (IMME) precipitation forecast for August, September, and October indicates normal conditions over most of the State (and wetter over the NW portion).  The forecast is pretty much the same for August.

Consider the latest UW WRF  7-day precipitation forecast, which brings some rain to the western and northern parts of the State, plus more rain in southern BC (which keeps down the fires there).

Another favorable point is that State's streamflow is near normal, something good for our fishy friends (green colors are in the normal range).

The bottom line is that at this point there is no reason to expect an above-normal wildfire and wildfire smoke season.  In fact, good reason to expect less wildfires and smoke than normal.  One issue to take off your worry list.