Matthew Lazzara

Your research focuses on observing the weather and climate of Antarctica. What led you to become interested in this topic?

I never thought about Antarctica, initially. I've always wanted to be a meteorologist, probably since I was three years old. Then, as I went and got my undergraduate degree, what to do with it was the challenge because there are a lot of disciplines within meteorology. Do I want to study tornadoes or hurricanes or mid-latitude storms? There are so many choices. Many years ago, I was asked to give a presentation for the Ignite Series, with the theme of “my odd job”. The video clip of this talk is a nice introduction to my interest in Antarctic meteorology.

I ended up getting a job here at the University of Wisconsin in 1991. I worked in the Man computer Interactive Data Access System (McIDAS) group, which is an interactive processing software system that's used very ubiquitously in the weather community, especially in the 1990s. While I was working on that project, this gentleman, Professor Charles Stearns, who was running this automatic weather station program had a project called the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center, and was looking for someone who had the skill set that I had. I didn't really think much about it, but then I was able to do some work on a part-of-my-job basis, and I got a taste of what it was like to work in the Antarctic community.

I first deployed to Antarctica in 1995 and was really taken with lots of aspects of working in the Antarctic. I enjoyed working with the people, I enjoyed working on the international stage with the international community. I was amazed at how we all got on, regardless of how things are going in the mid-latitudes.

I first deployed to Antarctica in 1995 and was really taken with lots of aspects of working in the Antarctic. I enjoyed working with the people, I enjoyed working on the international stage with the international community. I was amazed at how we all got on, regardless of how things are going in the mid-latitudes. Even to this day, ever since I've entered this community, we all are very collaborative and sharing. It's lovely to be in a space where we're all very happy to share data. There's far more collaboration and I see very little competition, which was so welcoming. And it's a pretty place, it was a fun experience. So, I became more interested in Antarctic research.

While I was working on my Master’s degree and doing this Antarctic work on a part-time basis, I eventually got asked, in about 1999, “Hey, how would you like to get your union card?”. This meant, “Do you want to get your PhD and pursue this as a formal career path?”. I was very excited about this work from the observational standpoint. That was my skill area, as I was spending a lot of time looking at observations in the interactive-processing work I was doing. So, I agreed and said, “Yeah, I'd like to. I'd like to do that”.

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And now you are the principal investigator of the US Antarctic Automatic Weather Station (AWS), which provides autonomous and automatic weather monitoring at various locations across Antarctica. Can you explain why it is important to observe weather in a region where people don’t live?

Yeah, why do we do that? I always get asked, why study Antarctica at all? I usually give two reasons.

If we're going to get people around this part of the world to do their science, we have to do it safely. We need to understand what the weather is like before we put them out there in it.

One: there are people going there to do other sciences. Meteorology is one of the smaller sciences within the United States Antarctic Program. Organisms and Ecosystems is the number one program, followed by Geology or Glaciology. If we're going to get people around this part of the world to do their science, we have to do it safely. We need to understand what the weather is like before we put them out there in it. It's too dangerous, you're too far away from having help to have weather-related problems taking place. So, that is a paramount thing. Without observations, we cannot make good forecasts, we can't have a good understanding of the weather processes that take place there. That's why we've been doing things like deploying automatic weather stations – we currently have 57 – or making satellite composites at the University of Wisconsin. We're really interested in finding out, how does the weather in Antarctica work? My predecessor who worked on the AWS program, Dr. Stearns – the one who invited me into this group – one of his interests was to learn about how stuff works. The weather stations have been used to do that.

There are other reasons, too. The world is all connected and Antarctica is part of the entire Earth system. Antarctica is like a big ice cube that acts like a thermostat for the whole planet. If we don't collect weather data from that part of the planet, we're going to have a hard time understanding how weather systems behave everywhere else. If you want to have a very complete view of the Earth, you must have the ability to observe weather in Antarctica. And it’s more than just forecasting. It’s this broader view of global climate implications.

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...the only way we're going to capture year-round observations throughout most of the interior is with an automatic weather station. They're really critical in being able to have a consistent dataset throughout time.

These long-term datasets are certainly valuable to the whole research community. Why are autonomous weather stations in particular so useful?

We don't have many permanent staffed stations in the interior of Antarctica. Today, there are two, maybe three year-round staffed weather stations. There’s South Pole, and the French and Italians have Concordia Station. That's it. So, the only way we're going to capture year-round observations throughout most of the interior is with an automatic weather station. They're really critical in being able to have a consistent dataset throughout time. I know it has its limits, but, boy, it's really priceless to have the base measurements that we do. I know it seems very vanilla, but vanilla is really popular and really valuable.

Absolutely. Do you want to speak at all about the challenges associated with having a non-staffed weather station?

Oh, yeah, there are so many! The weather itself is a problem! We get to Antarctica, we plan to work on our weather stations, and then we can't get to them because of weather. That actually happens, believe it or not. And that's fine, because we want to be absolutely safe when we do our work. We will have other challenges, too, everything from minor things like icing – the stations will get iced up, and all of a sudden, you're not really measuring the air temperature anymore – all the way to the other extreme of having the weather stations completely toppled over and destroyed in the wind. There's quite a range of damage that can befall these stations.

And when this damage happens, we may not be able to get there and fix it. Here in the mid-latitudes or tropics, we can go visit a station within a few days or a week, or even a few hours. In Antarctica, I don't have that luxury. I'm waiting a year. Sometimes I'm waiting multiple years to go fix stations. Occasionally stations get buried. If you don’t go frequently enough, snow accumulates and the stations disappear. As the snow accumulates, if you don't go frequently enough, then the stations will be very short, or they will completely disappear. In my time on the project, we’ve had three disappear. It's really unfortunate when that happens, and you don't have the logistical capabilities to go and retrieve them. But that's pretty rare, and we try really hard not to have that take place. So, these are all the technical issues related to maintaining the network, everything from wind damage to total loss.

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With all those challenges, I can definitely see the value in providing access to AWS data through the Antarctic Meteorological Research and Data Center (AMRDC). Can you elaborate on the Data Center’s mission?

The AMRDC’s mission is to provide reliable and accessible Antarctic meteorological data. When Dr. Stearns ran the project, it was an FTP site. Very fancy in the 1990s, but not anymore. It doesn't even work on most systems nowadays. But back then, Dr. Stearns provided weather station data for free, long before data sharing was a requirement or an expectation in the Antarctic. He'd been doing that forever, with no restriction of any kind. And we added to that collection over the years with products that we built or that other people provided. As we collected, this eventually grew into a formal data repository that follows FAIR principles.

The collection is now over 5,000 data sets, a huge portion of which is automatic weather station data. Weather station observations have been used by many scientists in a variety of research findings over the years.

The collection is now over 5,000 data sets, a huge portion of which is automatic weather station data. Weather station observations have been used by many scientists in a variety of research findings over the years. Everything from understanding of how phenomena behave in the Antarctic – katabatic winds, the Ross Ice Shelf air stream – all the way to contributions to the data repository. Other investigators are also contributing data to us. For example, the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE), that was done many years ago, collected a variety of data, and they provided us information or links to their data. The Year of Polar Prediction, which was just concluded in the Southern Hemisphere, provided us some of their radiosonde launch data and some of the model data that was generated from that study.

All of this has shown that taking more observations in the Antarctic really helps to improve our predictive capability. And not just in Antarctica, but also the adjacent mid-latitudes. A very hot topic in the Antarctic is atmospheric rivers. And yes, they affect places in the mid-latitudes. We hear about atmospheric rivers affecting California, for example. So, there’s an example of some of the widespread application of the Antarctic weather data.

There are many sample and data repositories in the United States for various disciplines. There's the Polar Rock Repository at Ohio State University for example, and the NSF Ice Core Facility for physical samples. There are other digital ones, like the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota. We're the meteorology space, and we're really excited to play that role for the US and beyond. We're excited about the prospects of what will come out of this into the future.

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Do you have specific plans or goals for the future?

Well, the goal with a repository is that it's a forever thing, right? The datasets get a digital object identifier (DOI); we have permanency for these datasets. The intention is to have these records around forever. In the current environment, future work is going to become more reliant on existing data or datasets that are collected in ongoing fashions. We will continue to operate weather stations, at whatever rate we can. That'll be really valuable data not just for us, but for the entire community.

Beyond that, we'll see what the community drives us to do, and in collaboration with what the US Antarctic Program (USAP) can support. There are always more possibilities depending on that dynamic. When the community says, “Hey, we should do this,” and then, if the USAP’s like, “Yeah, let's support that,” we're excited about playing that role.

My research relies on sediment core repositories, so I certainly appreciate the work of all repositories.

At one time, all of us who do collect data, whether at a physical repository or a digital one, used to be in a consortium. We haven't really been formally coordinated very much as of late, but we do still keep in touch in some fashion. It's really great to see so many of them around. The sample and date repositories are really valuable.

Yes, absolutely. Moving on to your involvement with SCAR, how has your role as a member of SCAR’s Expert Group on Operational Meteorology in the Antarctic (OpMet) informed your thoughts on the importance of international collaboration in Antarctic meteorological observation?

It's about just that: collaboration and data exchange. Steve Colwell from the British Antarctic Survey runs the SCAR OpMet group and I'm a member. Steve is really good about checking on how the data exchange is going. Countries have been trading weather data since post-World War II as a part of the UN's World Weather Watch (WWW) program, which is part of the World Meteorological Organization. WWW really keeps an eye on how it’s going for the Antarctic. Are we getting our data out and is it readily available? This work is valuable because then we know it gets to national operational centers around the world who do global weather forecasting and simulations. In the US, this is the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP); in Germany, the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD); in Japan the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA), the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), etc. These are the organizations that we want to make sure we're getting our data out to. Some get the data, some less so, but we try to make it available and on these circuits. And that's kind of a fun thing, because it's a great group of us that are doing this kind of activity. We're all contributing what different contributions we can make. And that's the excitement about it and it's been fun participating with SCAR OpMet.

That’s great, and again emphasizes the value of accessible data. Can you speak to the importance of technical expertise in facilitating scientific research, based on your experience holding positions at Madison Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison?

For the weather stations, it's really important. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of time and opportunity for everyone to get to know everything about everything inside our projects. I'd love that, personally, but it's hard. We don't usually have that luxury because funding is limited, time is limited. Of course, we want to make sure we continue to meet the goals that we have for our projects, so having the opportunity to collaborate is really a win-win-win on many, many different levels.

It's great having the opportunity to collaborate with the technical community like we have here at Madison Area Technical College. It’s benefiting the students who are part of the Electrical Engineering Technology program who are participating in our projects. It's great because we're advancing the electronic capabilities that we have with our weather stations.

It's great having the opportunity to collaborate with the technical community like we have here at Madison Area Technical College. It’s benefiting the students who are part of the Electrical Engineering Technology program who are participating in our projects. It's great because we're advancing the electronic capabilities that we have with our weather stations. We’re getting a chance ask, “Okay, what could we be doing, or what should we be evolving towards?”. Ever since the International Geophysical Year in 1956-57, it was a Holy Grail attempt to make an automatic weather station in Antarctica. The military tried, the research community tried, and they never really had any success until some engineers at Stanford University figured it out. But, being engineers, they were like, “Okay, we figured it out. We want to go do something else,” or so I was told. Then the meteorology community wanted to know, “How do we get more of those?”. That's how they discovered Dr. Stearns. He was building weather stations for research projects here in Wisconsin. It was really great that they offered him the opportunity to compete to have that project late in his career, and he ended up winning NSF grant awards to start working on the weather station project here.

Those original stations were homemade. The technology is very difficult to find nowadays. For example, the chip set used was also in the Pioneer spacecraft…that's before Voyager! You can't buy that today, it's just not around. Or if you tried to get it manufactured, it would be cost-prohibitive. No one would do it. So, we're really happy to be able to partner with people who are experts in the field, like the engineers at the Madison Area Technical College. We've got longevity of usage at the university space; and experience doing the fieldwork, research, and application. It makes a great combination because we have students and staff at both institutions that bring all of their relevant expertise together in the research group to make things go to the next level.

We still use some of that homemade gear, but we also do a variety of commercial off the shelf gear that we program and wire up the way we want to, and that's worked. We now know how to do that because we understand the system down to the resistor. That's really valuable to us. That gives a good data from the field, and we spend a lot of time making sure we have as good a dataset as possible.

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What a great example of the collaboration that's necessary to successfully conduct Antarctic research. I also think the technical aspect is important to highlight because it’s typically viewed as less glamorous than the science.

Right, and it's fun to find folks who find that fun. We get to see a diversity of people who have interest in what we do. A lot are really just interested in the end product. They want to see the temperatures and the winds. But we also spend a lot of time thinking about what we provide them. How do we get the data to them? How do we distribute the data to them? How do we ensure high quality control? How do we make the measurement? Given that broad diversity in what we think about through that spectrum, we are excited when we run into people who have that interest in what most folks don't think about under the hood.

Finally, what advice would you give to early career scientists who want to get involved in Antarctic research?

Working in the Antarctic is one of passion. 

Working in the Antarctic is one of passion. I've noticed for me and a lot of the people I've run into; we have this passion and great interest in it. If you’re passionate about Antarctic research, I encourage you to keep going, keep trying, keep diversifying. I'd probably give similar advice to a person majoring in my field too, in meteorology. It's always great to have something paired with it that makes you far more skilled and marketable. A range of skillsets expands the possible places that you might actually find yourself fitting into really well.

But even when you're told no, keep trying. Don't give up. At the moment, I view that there's still room at the table to have people join in to help us learn about the environment there. At any aspect - it doesn't have to be just meteorology. There are so many other aspects and opportunities to learn and understand more about this less studied space. Of all the parts of the world, Antarctica is one of the least studied. So, it's really valuable to have new folks, new points of view, new skillsets that can be brought to the table.

Thank you for that encouraging advice, and for speaking with me about your work!