The Crier

The Weather Dance

A University professor is helping sports and science meet

Jeremy Davidson · Sport · Mar 19, 2007

The Big Dance kicked off last Thursday, and although your bracket might look like it was hit by a tornado by now, the relatively warm weather has probably helped you to forget about it. Perhaps the only thing less predictable than the tournament outcome is Michigan’s atmospheric shifts. But what if someone figured out a way for you to track the weather, and follow the Big Dance? Someone did.

Perry Samson, a professor of atmospheric, oceanic, and space sciences at the University, has created a spin-off game called the Weather Dance, which tests competitors’ weather forecasting skills. To score points, contestants have to guess which campus will be warmer or colder on game day.

Samson said he was inspired to create this project because of his interests in both sports and meteorology. He’s been pleased with the result so far. “It’s not easy to forecast what the weather is going to be for a certain town days in advance,” he said.

The objective of the game changes each round. For example, in the first round, dubbed “The Warmer 64,” the warmer campus advances. In the second round, or “The Cooler 32,” the colder campus advances. Each right answer gets one point.

But what if someone figured out a way for you to track the weather, and follow the Big Dance? Someone did.

Samson started the online version of the game three years ago, as an activity for his course “Extreme Weather.”

The temperatures used to determine the winner are those measured by the nearest National Weather Service site, as corroborated by a graduate student at the University in the department of AOSS.

Last year, Samson opened the tournament up to participants across the country. A total of 720 people competed for the grand prize — a chance to go storm chasing with a group of researchers from the University of Michigan and Texas Tech.

This year the tournament has drawn 1656 participants, including 200 K-12 teachers from across the country. Contestants are competing for several prizes this year. The chance to go storm chasing is only open to K-12 teachers, but the top eight contestants will receive umbrellas, and the next 16 will receive a copy of the book “Extreme Weather,” a meteorology textbook.

This year the tournament has drawn 1656 participants, including 200 K-12 teachers from across the country.

“One of our interests is to somehow make our resources valuable and available to the K-12 community,” Samson said. “We wanted to make a prize that captures their interest, and that seems to have worked.”

Contestants are allowed to compete in either the men’s or women’s tournament, although the majority of the contestants (1200) have chosen the men’s tournament.

This is not Samson’s first internet pet project. About a decade ago, Samson founded a service called Weather Underground, with the goal of providing weather forecasting information simply over the internet. Today it is one of the best resources available on the internet for weather forecasting.