Blog

Cinco de Mayo 2020

Today I start a bit towards developing this blog.

The purpose of this isn’t necessarily for anyone other than myself to read this but it gives ma venue and a mechanism to start writing …

And hopefully I can brain dump a little at a time on the wide variety of topics that will eventually come together as a book on weather and economics.

For the moment I am just going to list a bunch of possible topics for individual blogs which could then be built on and updated and revised into components of the book …

  • VOI – value of information – this is the basic concept of the value of environmental information with environmental meaning in a limited sense “weather.”
  • WIVC – Weather Information Value Chain – this will be a graphical conceptual model of how information is created, communicated, used, and ultimately valued. The AMS Valuation project is building this concept as well and will feed into this discussion …
  • WTP – willingness to pay – a fundamental measure of how much something is worth to someone.
  • Risk – this relates closely to uncertainty as well as decision making under uncertainty … there are more fully developed concepts of risk and what constitutes risk that I want to build on. This also pulls in the literature from Risk Analysis and the SRA.
  • NAICS – North American Industrial Classification System – I want to build on this to tie economic measurement to value of weather information. Is there a way to use existing information from existing parts of the Department of Commerce rather than doing everything from primary data collection … this seems also related to and building on the OUSSSA work.
  • Loss / damage – key concepts in the impacts of weather. Also related to work on hazard vulnerability indices
  • Discounting – basic economic concept used for aggregating benefits and costs over time but not well understood by a lot of non-economists. Also leads to discussions of functional forms and discount rates and ethics as well …
  • Sectors – helpful to have a clear concept of what a sector is and different approaches. The NAICS type approach but also when people talk about the “water sector” or the “energy sector” these don’t necessarily match with NAICS frameworks
  • Weather Enterprise – also tied to private sector meteorology
  • IDSS – Impact Based Decision Support – related today to the BAMS article we are doing page proofs for on economic value of IDSS with respect to winter storms in NYC
  • Communication – I should also tie this back to the editorial I wrote in WCAS and the reading I did for that. This also ties into Risk Analysis. Focus on risk communication.
  • Decision making – especially under uncertainty.
  • Equity – there are lots of philosophical concepts I’d like to have at least a basic graph on as they look at a much broader range of issues than the basic economic approaches or meteorology as a science framework.
  • Behavioral economics – how can this help inform communication and decision making in weather information communication and valuation
  • Emergency management – a major component of the value chain at least for severe events
  • Broadcast meteorology – major component of the WIVC with respect to communication
  • Water economics – this in my mind right now is related to the water economics webinar series recently initiated. It is related to but also very different from just weather. So how does “water” and economics tied in with weather and climate?
  • Non-market valuation – related to pubic goods and value of information when information is a public good such as weather forecasts
  • Public goods – a discussion of this concept also helps define appropriate boundaries between public and private provision of weather information.
  • More concepts! In the GOES-R report with Michael “Jammer: Jamilkowski and David Lubar, Jammer pulled in a bunch of terms into a glossary. Perhaps simply work through these terms and tying them al together along with the relevant theoretical and applied work is the basis of the book 😉

And for now I may also try to make some brief thoughts on why a topic is included:

More concepts! In the GOES-R report with Michael “Jammer: Jamilkowski and David Lubar, Jammer pulled in a bunch of terms into a glossary. Perhaps simply work through these terms and tying them al together along with the relevant theoretical and applied work is the basis of the book 😉

So with all this as a start I could also:

  • Start listing some books I’ll read as part of this effort
  • Pick individual articles of econ and weather and write summaries and perhaps some critical comments. A good place to start given the lit I’ve read recently would be the cost-loss models I’ve disliked a long time …


Anyway – this is also just a test to see if I can “post” a blog so I’ll wrap it up at this point and go move the sprinkler!