OCR Text |
Show 22 term- on a long- term national and global scale, the two huge things are temperature and rainfall- temperature and precipitation. You need to monitor those. And actually the world does a pretty good job of doing that. There are huge variables that come up that make a big difference. Let me give you an example: ENSO, the El Nino- Southern Oscillation. They measure the pressure between Darwin, Australia and Tahiti. As it goes back and forth the weather somehow correlates to that. There's another one called the North Atlantic Oscillation between Iceland and Lisbon, Portugal. The pressure bounces back and forth and the weather in the Atlantic and Eastern United States and Europe seems to correlate to that. There are sea surface temperatures that I think vastly affect weather conditions. There's a thing called a quasi- biennial oscillation; way up in the stratosphere every 2.2 years, the wind directions reverse. The South Africans have discovered a major correlation to their droughts and the direction of those upper winds. Then there's the sun's magnetic cycles; there's a 22- year cycle called the HALE cycle and the U. S. droughts are fairly highly correlated to that magnetic cycle on the sun. And there are probably many others. Predictions. Long- term predictions in this country come from the Climate Prediction Center. They do 90- day forecasts out for a year. You know what? They don't work very well. They work quite well in the tropics because the major input is El Nino and the Atlantic Oscillation. And that helps the tropics really well but it just leaves us gasping for more in the mid- latitudes. I would like to suggest that there are some brilliant people in this country who we haven't tapped into. Always before we turned to government or perhaps academia, but the private sector, there's some pretty smart people, and I would like to just make a proposal if it is appropriate. I would suggest that a contest be held involving academia, reliable or established private sector, and then maybe other groups as well. Maybe even some seed money, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars seed money be provided for up to twenty groups like this with a prize at the end, something- a million dollars and a 20- year patent on their technique. I think if that were to be put into effect, like the pharmaceutical industry does, I think you could get some thinking out of the box, some ideas, you would have to have a certain level of accuracy. It would have to be like 80 percent or better or there is no prize. But I think if that were to be considered, or battered around, or put together by a great committee, I think some new ideas would come forth. Thank you for your time. [ The prepared statement of Mr. Eubank follows:] |