SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY Spring 2004
DEPARTMENT OF GEOSCIENCES
Meteorology 485/785
Consulting Meteorology
Credit: 2 units Room/time: TH607 MW 0910-1000
Prerequisites: Consent of instructor,
and Metr 200/201 or equivalent
Instructor
John P. Monteverdi
Office: TH613; Office Phone: Ext 87728
Office Hours TTh 11-Noon; F 9-10
Purpose of the Course
Private consulting meteorology is rapidly emerging as a major source of income for meteorologists. Meteorologists are often employed by larger firms involved in meteorological, environmental, geoscience, ecological or engineering consulting. In such a situation, the meteorologist is considered a full-time employee. Representative tasks include constructing climatologies for environmental impact reports, climatological station site assessment, air quality assessments and forecasting.
Far more frequently, however, meteorologists contract themselves as "free lance" consultants to supplement the income which they receive full-time from some other facet of the profession. In such a case, the meteorologist himself or herself has the responsibility for fulfilling all aspects of the contract, including the research and secretarial responsibilities normally foisted off to assistants or interns in larger firms. Also, it is up to the meteorologist engaged in such activity to make sure that professional and ethical standards are upheld since no "boss" or superior is in a position to oversee the activity.
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has long realized that the free-lanced services of meteorologists would be required by all sorts of individuals and concerns. (For example, the instructor has been contracted at one time or another to produce nowcasts for a winery and a contruction firm, to "type" weather patterns for a cloud-seeding experiment, to produce forecasts for windsurfers, to produce a climatological-site appraisal for a client who wished to purchase a property in Tiburon, to provide rainfall depth and wind gust return period information to engineering and hydrological consulting firms and to provide forensic synoptic, climatological, wind, rainfall and hydrometeorological information to law firms involved in litigation). Since "the going rates" for this activity are quite high, and since the free lancer has little or none of the overhead suffered by the large consulting firms, there is much economic temptation for charlatans and fly-by-nighters to engage in free-lance consulting. The certified consulting meteorologist (CCM) program of the AMS is meant to protect the public and the profession from such individuals.
The single most-frequent user of consulting meteorologists is the legal profession which often contracts professionals for expert witness testimony. Calls to the National Weather Service Forecast Office (WSFO) in Monterey by legal firms have gotten so frequent that a list of available consulting meteorologists is now kept by the phone. These firms will pay typically from $100 to $175 per hour for consultants with limited experience, to far in excess of $200 for those with courtroom/deposition experience.
Most contracts with such legal firms have to do with litigation associated with weather-related damage, such as that produced by floods and, less frequently, by wind. Other cases may have to do with personal injury or damage related to frost and freeze occurrences. Oftentimes, the consultant is asked to infer conditions at a location far removed from an official observing site. In addition, the meteorologist is also frequently asked to help the attorneys in the case by dispelling misconceptions (such as "it only rains at night"; "the storms are locked over the mountains"; "it was much foggier in San Francisco in the earlier twentieth century than now"). In such cases, the jury verdict, and hundreds of millions of dollars, may hinge on the opinions of the meteorologist.
Since such consulting is becoming more wide-spread, the instructor would like to provide the students in this course with an overview of the sorts of things that, in his experience, are required in fulfilling a consulting contract. In addition, since the CCM certificate is becoming so important, we also seek to guide the students to a "pretend" CCM. The outcomes for the course center on giving students background in important facets of setting up a consulting practice and can therefore be summarized as follows:
1. Basic Business Procedures/Home Office/Advertising
2. Steps in Obtaining the CCM Certification
3. Production of Consulting Reports
Since an applicant for the CCM is required to submit a consulting report as part of his or her examination, the tasks implicit in 3 above is also a part of 2. Also, to accomplish the tasks implicit in 2 above, the student will need to know something about ethics, setting of rates etc.
Also, students will be required to develop business cards and stationary (often a requirement of the IRSÕs definition of the setting up of a ÒHome Office.Ó Students are welcome to use MS Word to do this, or to find shareware (examples provided) that performs this function.
Logistics
Weekly lab work will be assigned to provide the students with the components of the CCM examination as described above. Lectures will gvbe designed to provide the students with the information necessary to complete a consulting contract in the hydrometeorological (graduate students) or forensic area. The report produced will be submitted as part of the student's CCM application. This report will concern itself with a real case chosen by the instructors. The case will involve a proxy deposition and courtroom testimony.
Requirements:
The students will complete part of the CCM exam package and the analytical/tabular portions of the consulting report as homeworks in the first portion of the semester. No explicit grade weighting is given to the homeworks. However, since the homeworks in sum total will make upa good portion of the CCM examination and the consulting report, they enter most prominently into the final grade.
Grading
CCM Take-home questions: 20%
CCM Essay: 5%
CCM Oral Exam: 10%
CCM Written Exam 5%
Deposition Questions: 5%
Trial Questions: 5%
Consulting Report: 50%
Textbooks
Biech, Elaine, 2001: The ConsultantÕs Quick Start Guide, Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 243pp.