El Nino Showers Fame on JPL Scientist
Bill Patzert never intended to be a celebrity. He chose the quiet life of an oceanographer, a career path that grew out of a passion for the sea years ago aboard his father’s fishing boat.
But a half-century later, Patzert’s office door is plastered with newspaper clippings about his research. He chats on the network news, and requests for interviews are growing faster than the waves he sometimes tries to surf.
Blame his unlikely fame on El Nino--as well as La Nina and the Topex-Poseidon satellite whose data he uses to bridge the gap between esoteric ocean surface temperatures and something everyone cares about: climate and weather.
“A lot of people are interested in this stuff because there’s nothing that affects us more,” he said in his office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “It’s everybody’s favorite topic after sex and money.”
All the attention has had a price. By not waiting to publish his work in a scientific journal, he is sometimes criticized for jumping the gun.
“I’m always tortured by this-- whether I should keep my mouth shut and go through the process,” he said. “That means I would be right after the fact. Or is this interesting information that should be available to everybody as soon as possible?”
His observations are based on measurements from the Topex satellite, a project he has worked on since arriving at JPL in 1983. Its instruments measure ocean height, information that translates into sea surface temperature, a major factor in climate.
The debate--and attention--swelled in January when Patzert announced that the Pacific may be undergoing a dramatic flip-flop in temperature, a natural phenomenon that could lead to more La Ninas and fewer El Ninos over the next 20 to 30 years.
The implications of a transition in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation could be a wetter Pacific Northwest, a drier Southwest and punishing winters on the East Coast. Other scientists had been aware of it, but they were waiting for more evidence.
“It’s only with the benefit of hindsight where we can look back over a record of about a decade that we can recognize shifts in the PDO,” said John Wallace, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist.
Patzert said he agonized over whether to go public, but ultimately decided people should know.
“You know who pays me? The American taxpayer,” he said. “And I think every once in a while they deserve an explanation. And you can’t do it in the same way you would in a peer review journal.”
Instead of computer models, Patzert bases his observations on how historic changes in ocean temperatures affected the weather in the past.
But nobody said he was wrong.
“Certainly Bill’s personality is to be a little more confrontational and to be on top of things,” said Ants Leetmaa, who heads the U.S. Climate Prediction Center. “Bill also recognizes he has to be cognizant of what the rest of the field is thinking about. I don’t think he’s totally out there by himself.”
Patzert, 58, was born in New York City and lived for 10 years on Long Island, where his father was a fishing boat captain. He later studied math and physics as an undergraduate at Purdue University.
“One winter the pipes in our apartment froze, and when I got home there was about 6 inches of slush in the apartment,” he said. “I went to the library and saw this coffee table book on surfing in Hawaii.”
He did his graduate work--and a lot of surfing--in Hawaii, where he also found a mentor who was pioneering El Nino research. After earning a PhD in oceanography, he joined the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego. There, he and his colleagues issued their first El Nino prediction in 1974.
It never happened.
“I never use the word prediction,” he said, pointing out that the effects of El Nino are predictable but not the phenomenon itself. “We definitely learned our lesson.”
Patzert joined JPL in 1983 as the NASA center best known for its interplanetary spacecraft was revving up a program focused on Earth observations.
Almost immediately, Patzert started working on Topex-Poseidon, a joint U.S.-French project developed and operated at the lab. But it wasn’t until the 1997-98 El Nino that he fell into the job as unofficial spokesman for the mission that employs about 40 controllers and dozens of other scientists around the world.
“Some people say I have a short attention span,” he said. “The bottom line is that I guess I’m a communicator.”
At first he wrote captions to accompany JPL’s now-familiar colorful images depicting Pacific Ocean temperatures. A white band in the equatorial ocean was El Nino, he explained. Later it was replaced by the purple bands of La Nina.
He still avoids the words “prediction” and “forecast,” but sometimes makes exceptions. Last spring he predicted a “bummer summer” for Southern California, one in which the “June gloom” would persist through the season.
Other researchers scoffed. But Patzert nailed the forecast: The low clouds of late spring and early summer remained through much of the season.
“This was an incident when we weren’t on top of things a little bit,” Leetmaa said.
Though the statements are supposed to be alerts, not predictions, Patzert often talks about what ocean and climate conditions generally mean for weather patterns.
“Why do the media go for this? That’s a good question,” he said. “Everybody likes the weather. What has happened is that they could actually explain it. Four years ago, they just told you how bad it was.”
