Weather Service Will Become User-Friendly

By Park Si-soo Staff Reporter Weather forecasting is a serious business. Inaccurate forecasts can lead not only to being the butt of cruel jokes but also to ruined crops and, in extreme cases, deaths. Kenneth Crawford Korea Meteorological Administration Last August, Kenneth Crawford, a revered American meteorologist, was invited to take over the second-to-top job at the Korea Meteorological Administration. The recruitment was made after a series of wrong forecasts that drew angry protests from the public. The appointment of the 66-year-old weather specialist, who worked as a professor at the University of Oklahoma, was made as part of the current administration's "open-door" personnel policy toward recruiting capable foreign talent. Three months in office is not long enough to assess how well he is adapting to his job or whether he will succeed in bringing changes to the agency but one thing is clear. He has his priorities in order. In an exclusive interview with The Korea Times last week, Crawford said that his top priority was to make the agency "user-friendly." The director of the American Meteorological Society said implementing the best practices for disseminating weather information to the public is just as important as forecasting weather conditions accurately. "KMA has a big problem with this," he said. "It's not modern." Comparing the KMA's Web site (www.kma.go.kr) with that of the American weather agency (www.srh.noaa.gov), he judged the Korean Web site as "too text-based." Unlike the KMA site, the U.S. site delivers the weather information for every state with simple yet easy-to-understand images and only a couple of sentences for explanations. He urged the authorities to utilize the nation's state-of-the-art infrastructure for mobile phone services to disseminate weather information on a virtually real-time basis. "If we did that, the criticism the KMA has received would be minimized. We are trying to improve our way of communicating with the public," he said. Currently, both paid and free weather services are available but they are not graphically oriented. Under the law, providing weather forecast services through mass media has been exclusively delegated to the KMA for fear of contradictory information. "KMA cannot handle the whole thing. Private companies can have exclusive domain over the KMA. We ought to provide overall data, quality images and so on," he said. He did not rule out the possibility of contradictory forecasts in the early stages, but said "It's like a conflict in the early stage of marriage." More specifically, Crawford aims to bring the KMA up three notches to sixth place in the global rankings of weather forecast capability by 2012. Korea has high expectations for the U.S. scholar with three decades of experience in the field. He was offered an annual salary which is twice that of President Lee Myung-bak, along with a personal secretary and interpreter. He also promised to get rid of all outdated working systems as well as other inefficiencies inside the KMA. "I want to serve as the change agent the KMA needs," Crawford said. "The work world has changed even in our lifetimes. If you work with practices used decades ago, you cannot be competitive. But most of KMA's parts have remained unchanged. "KMA forecasters are as qualified as American forecasters. But the KMA system is not so efficient as it needs to be," he said. "To go from a decision to a product that goes out to the public is a lot more work inside the KMA than inside the American weather agency. So some of the forecasters are acting like clerks. This creates inefficiency." Redesigning the role of human forecasters is one of his three top priorities. In a statement to legislators last week during a National Assembly inspection, he stipulated he will reassess the role of domestic forecasters and develop a simulation training program to improve the situational awareness and skill level of all forecasters. Another of Crawford's priorities is the establishment of a multi-agency radar operation center to standardize the operational procedures of the 26 weather radars scattered across the country. At present, only 12 radars are under KMA control. The other 14 are controlled by the Korean and U.S. Air Forces, the state-run Korea Aerospace Research Institute and the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs. Due to operational differences, the state weather agency has been unable to apply a common format and strategy for collecting data. "(Once established) we would be able to predict earlier than with the previous system and with greater detail," he said. He took the U.S. system as a good example, saying, "In the United States data collected from 122 radars nationwide is assessed within a minute. Considering Korea has no worse an information technology infrastructure than the U.S., it will be possible." pss@koreatimes.co.kr Who is Kenneth Crawford? Kenneth Crawford is a renowned meteorologist from the United States. Before coming to Korea, he served as a weather professor at the University of Oklahoma and director of the American Meteorological Society. He has gone through a number of lucrative positions in the U.S., Croatia and other countries. He is now the vice administrator of KMA's meteorological advancement council, whose role is mapping out mid- to long-term strategies for better weather forecast services.