Johnette Alter

For a time, the pandemic even changed the weather.

Weather prediction, it turns out, is partially reliant on your trip to Disney or that sales meeting in Las Vegas via a previously little-known commercial flight measurement called an aircraft sounding.

The evocative term “aircraft sounding” conjures an old technology that goes back to ancient seafarers. Still sometimes used, soundings allow sailors to gauge the depth and composition of the sea floor using just a lead weight secured to a line pre-marked with fathoms*.

Depth sounding off the coast of Norway. The anchor is hanging ready at the bow. Image: Olaus Magnus woodcutting, circa 1555, Wikicommons {{PD-US}}

Today, more than 3500 commercial aircrafts plumb the skies for more than 250 million weather observations per year, according to the National Weather Service, a massive amount of data.

Depiction of 24 hour global cycle of air traffic contributing meteorological data. Image: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Aircraft soundings, along with reports from 900 weather stations across the globe, are fed into predictive models that assist meteorologists with their forecasts. Helping us in turn to decide whether to proceed with that backyard BBQ, ball game or outdoor wedding.

Photo: "Rained Out Dinner, Great Wall" by Leo Laporte is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

But during the early days of the Covid pandemic with the precipitous drop in air traffic, the accuracy of the predictive models dropped by 50% - 75%. That’s a huge statistical shift which was anecdotally noticeable.

You may recall grousing around that time about yet another problem, unreliable weather predictions. Well, it was true.

What is a forecast ultimately but a snapshot of reality? A meteorologist uses consistent data points to assemble a prediction of future likelihoods based on the same conditions in the past. Those same points, after the fact, create a final record, or history of what was occurring that moment, hour, day and ultimately year and century. It’s not comprehensive but the snapshots become our window into the past.

Accounts of happenings in our community and world give us data points of another kind. News reports are the soundings we use to mark human history and in turn predict future possibilities.

Taken December 17, 2011 in downtown Cairo near Tahrir Square. Photo: "Two journalists and two children shelter from stone throwing militia" by alisdare1 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Journalists, like meteorologists, are taking their measurements of the daily human experience and putting the data into “models”, that is patterns of behavior, in an area of expertise or beat.

For instance, if you cover city hall long enough you begin to recognize signs of misuse of public funds or of corruption. There are repetitive characteristics of both courage and graft in the human record.

Journalists are public servants that sort through the raw data of the daily human experience and turn it into a report that helps us understand a broader narrative.

That reporting helps us navigate a complex world enabling us to, again like the weather forecast, make decisions that can harm or benefit our individual lives. Ultimately the work of journalists significantly contributes to the overall history of humankind. And it’s absolutely essential for democracy.

With so many of us asking anew, what is truth? How can we understand as a group a shared, objective human experience? My answer is quality journalism. The alternative is hearsay, propaganda, and disinformation.

Data journalism is at the forefront of a new approach to analyze human activity. Using forensics, analytics and open-source information to mine social media, GPS data, financial data and more; professional and citizen journalists are breaking news using innovative methods.

We are seeing the emergence of a new level of transparency and evidentiary corroboration that is staggering.

Belllingcat and ProPublica are at the leading edge of this kind of work. Bellingcat’s most famous contribution to date is the evidence they extracted to definitively connect Russia to the downed civilian Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in Ukraine which took the lives of 298 people. I highly recommend subscribing to their newsletter.

Makeshift memorial at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport for the victims of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 which crashed in the Ukraine on 17 July 2014. Photo: Roman Boed from The Netherlands is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Journalistic best practices and ethics over time act as a developing body of standards to regulate the quality of information gathering. Now that we are awash in data and the traditional information gatekeepers of old, a small consortium of newspapers and book publishers, are no longer controlling the narrative, we need new filters to protect the quality of our understanding of the world.

Aristotle, one of the original pioneers of the scientific method, gifted us a type of thinking on how to observe the natural world.

As described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “For Aristotle, empiricism, careful observation (but passive observation, not controlled experiment), is the starting point, though the aim is not merely recording of facts. Science (epistêmê), for Aristotle, is a body of properly arranged knowledge or learning—the empirical facts, but also their ordering and display are of crucial importance. The aims of discovery, ordering, and display of facts partly determine the methods required of successful scientific inquiry.”

Photo: "'I have a crush on the scientific method'" by afagen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

And later, Enlightenment thinkers refined the profile of those pursuing truth, “The scientist is humble in the face of nature, not beholden to dogma, obeys only his eyes, and follows the truth wherever it leads.” The character attributes of scientists and journalists closely mirror one another.

Gathering and ordering the “soundings” of human activity with a new methodology that parallels the scientific method is the next frontier in journalism. The capacity of thinking machines to help us grasp the nature of reality in aggregate, though not comprehensively, is an area where advances are due. Those advances must also come with, yet to be defined, guardrails.

We are on the threshold of a new type of journalism. Like depth soundings and weather measurements taken at a variety of locations -then put together and processed through a tested model that yields a view of the natural world that is unachievable through our individual senses - this new science of human observation will find novel truths of our combined human endeavor and may spark a revolution in philosophy that rivals the tectonic shifts born of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment.

As a resident of Springfield might put it, this new journalism will “embiggen” our understanding of humanity and truth.

*Annotation:

A fathom, derived from Old English, Norse and Saxon, means: arms, embrace, and grasp. It’s a measurement based on the anatomy of a large man with outstretched arms as if about to give you a bear hug, taken from the middle finger of one hand to the other.

This work on a map from street artist Id-iom illustrates the gesture perfectly. His description of what this man is getting up to cracks me up, “This gentleman is trying to embiggen his arms somewhat so he can be like Stretch Armstrong. But alas i d… — This work on a map from street artist Id-iom illustrates the gesture perfectly. His description of what this man is getting up to cracks me up, “This gentleman is trying to embiggen his arms somewhat so he can be like Stretch Armstrong. But alas i don't think he'll achieve it. For one he's just a normal human called Geoff from Dorking (as the map suggests) and second he's mucho crazy in the brain (in fact that probably helps when trying to grow your arms out - thinking outside the box and all that malarky). At least he's happy!” Image: "Embiggen" by id-iom is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

I like to imagine the fathom was born when one such man was describing to another how far it was to the bottom of the river with arms thrown out saying, “It’s about this far.” Used mainly to describe depth, it has been standardized over time to about six feet (yet another anatomical measurement). Reaching into the unknown to take this measurement was critical for navigating safe depths, map readings and where to park the ship (or not).

Photo: "Morning Haze" by Terry Kearney is marked with CC0 1.0

Incidentally, the word plumber originates from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. Ancient Roman pipes were made of lead. The artisans that crafted and repaired the waterworks were known as those that worked with lead. Yikes. Plumbing was a more dangerous occupation back then. The symbol for lead, Pb, makes a little more sense too with that insight.

Lead pipe to supply water to the Roman Baths in Bath, England. The pipe has a folded seam and is thought to have carried water under pressure. Photo: Andrew Dunn, CC BY-SA 2.0

So, the next time you are plumbing the depths of some gritty problem, you can visualize spreading your arms as wide as a large, weathered Norseman to size it up and find understanding as if pulled to the bottom by a lead weight.