Across the Sky

As summer begins, Kate Marvel from Project Drawdown talks with the team about the solutions already in place to help slow climate change and why the things that worry her the most have nothing to do with the physical science.

We want to hear from you!

Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode! You can also email questions to [email protected].

About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thunderstorm season is in full swing across the country and with it comes the threat of lightning. Unfortunately, there’s lots of bad information floating around about this weather hazard. The Lee Weather Team is here to help!

This week, the meteorologists debunk the top five lightning myths and share their advice on the best ways to stay safe during a thunderstorm. They also debut a new segment on the podcast, answering your weather questions. It’s an “electric” episode you don’t want to miss!

We want to hear from you!

Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode! You can also email questions to [email protected].

About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Across the Sky, our National We Enterprise Weather podcast. I'm Matt Holiner, covering weather for all of the Midwest websites and apps from Chicago. And I'm joined by my fellow meteorologist Joe Martucci in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Sean Sublette in Richmond, Virginia. Our fourth co-host of the show, Kirsten Lang, is still on maternity leave.

But if you follow her on social media, it looks like she's doing just fine now, spending time with the new baby. Now, technically, it's not astronomical or official summer yet, but it is June and meteorological summer has begun. And that means it's thunderstorm season and it's the lightning in those thunderstorms that we want to focus on. For this episode.

We're going to talk lightning safety. Share some lightning stories. But the main thing we're here to do is bust some lightning myths. Now, there are quite a few out there, but we've narrowed it down to five that seem to be the most common. So without further ado, here's our top five lightning myths. And that number five, when it gets real hot, a special kind of lightning with no thunder occurs called heat.

Lightning. Oh, boy. Guys, which one of you wants to tackle this or I'll jump all over. All right, guys. John, you sound more enthusiastic about this. I want you to take it. I totally am. Because I'm an old man. Because I remember this. Because I remember in the seventies being a kid here in Virginia and seeing the flashes out in the in the distance.

And, you know, my parents are all that heat. Lightning. Oh, what does that mean? Oh, it's just heat. Lightning. And, you know, they didn't know. So it's okay for people to not know. But now we do know what's going on. I mean, that, you know, it's 45, 50 years ago. It's just thunderstorm that's too far away to hear the to hear the thunder.

I mean, obviously, you're going to see lightning from a much longer distance at night because there's no other light around. The sun's not out. So you could see the flash from lightning from dozens and dozens of miles away. I think I've told this story before. There was one time I got out of a baseball game, and when I was working Lynchburg, I saw Flash on the eastern horizon.

I'm like said a thunderstorm. And I checked my radar. I'm like, yeah, it was a thunderstorm 110 miles away. I clearly you're not going to hear that thunder. But yeah, I think it's one of these things that people are like they expect to hear thunder if they see lightning. And for them, it's really tough to to imagine one without the other.

But yeah, it's just it's just a thunderstorm, those too far away. And that happens most often during the summer. A lot of times like I'm coming back from work, I'm on this road called the Garden State Parkway, which I knows about. Oh yeah, very nice road. I spend many, many miles on it, but when you're by the office, it actually gets very flat because you have a river running through.

There's a lot of marsh land. You got some of a barrier island. So you're east the west, you have Pine Barrens. So it's it's very flat there as well. And I've seen, you know, lightning like way in the distance. And I'm like, where the heck is that lightning coming from? Like, I don't remember seeing any storms nearby. And there's a couple of times where, like I checked, you know, when I got back home and I'm looking on radar scope, a great weather app.

999 if you guys are interacting, those are lightning in a lightning in like near Philadelphia. And that's like 60 miles away. So you can see lightning for a long distance. Granted, the ground is flat and, you know, you can you have the world to see around you. But, you know, the thunder won't always come there. And especially if you're looking out over the ocean, I mean, you can't get much more flat and calm than the ocean there.

So a lot of times if you're out at sea, you know, you could see mile, you could see lightning for, you know, tens and tens of miles away. And it's one of my most favorite things to do when I have been at the beach and looking offshore and to see thunderstorms out over the Gulf Stream current ocean current, they're just at night and they're just putting on a show, you know, you're 60 miles away from them and you could see the outlines of the clouds, sit down on the porch and just watch those things for, you know, half an hour until the beer is gone.

You know, I mean, it's just a great show out there. And. Yeah, so, yeah, that that's my story. I think people just associate heat, lightning, this idea of heat, lightning, because it often does happen the summer when it's hot outside in the evening, it's very muggy and humid and they just see lightning, but they don't hear thunder. And so this whole concept is like, well, maybe it's just because it's hot and just lightning spontaneously occurrence.

I know there is a real thunderstorm. It's not just lightning in the sky. It may not be raining where you are. You may not hear the thunder. The light is just traveling farther in the sound, but there's a real thunderstorm. Somebody is getting some rain. It's just not you. Okay. Moving on to our number four lightning myth. Water and metal attract lightning.

Now, attract is the key word here. Now, it is true that water and metal and duct, electricity and therefore lightning, but they don't attract lightning on their own. And I think what people get confused is that when we're talking lightning safety, we tell people to get out of the water, get that metal golf club out of your hand.

And we say that because if lightning strikes the water, you're in or strikes the golf club, you're holding it. We'll travel through the water and metal and strike you. But it's actually not the water or metal that's making it more like lead that you'll get struck. What lightning is really attracted to are tall, pointy objects. So when the lightning is coming out of a cloud, it wants to connect with something as soon as possible.

So it typically goes the tallest object around. Now, if you're standing on a golf course with your club raised in the air, there's a good chance you'll be the tallest object around. And that raises your chances of getting struck. So the biggest thing when it comes to lightning safety is don't be or be near the tallest object. Our guys do have anything to add here?

No, I like how you said a track is that. That's definitely the key word there. But I think you hit it spot on there. You know, you definitely don't want to be in water or near metal when there's a thunderstorm, but it's not necessarily increasing your your chances of getting struck. But it will. Yeah, it's just not a good place to be.

Don't be in the pool when there's a thunderstorm. Is the short story with it. Yeah. And that's the other thing if you're out on a lake, lake is flat and you're on a boat, you're the only thing sticking up. So you're also closer to the to the electricity that's coming down out of the sky. Yeah. So it isn't so much it isn't so much the, the conductivity attracting the lightning.

But once the lightning gets there, it's very conductive. Yeah, I know. Another lot of lightning strike victims are people that are fishing out a lake. And you've got that fishing rod in your hand and you're Hold it up in the air. And if you're on a flat lake and they're not many trees around, suddenly guess why you're the tallest object holding that fishing rod in the air.

And so that's where the lightning is going to go. But, you know, I think because of all the you know, we hear about all the lightning strikes that occur near bodies of water, but oftentimes just because you're the tallest object, you're in a flat area and you're the tallest object. And certainly water does conduct electricity. And if you're standing in the lake and say lightning strikes in the middle of the lake, which could happen, that lightning can travel to the sides of the lake.

So you don't want to be in water, but it's not the water attracting the lightning. I think that's where the confusion comes of are the metal attracting lightning? They conduct electricity. They don't necessarily attract it. Okay. So moving right along, our number three, lightning, this lightning never strikes the same place twice. So if your house has been struck by lightning or you've been struck by lightning, it's never going to happen again.

No, no, no. Martucci should take this one first because you're closer to New York and there's a place in New York that I think about immediately. Yeah, The Empire State Building sometimes strikes the same place in, like an hour. The value of what happens, I think with this, it's a matter of the earth is a very big place and lightning is a fairly small phenomenon, and the chances of it hitting the same place twice are low.

However, if you have a lightning rod like the Empire State Building or some other places, it will attract more lightning. Now, I do have a story though, with this. In high school we actually had a meteorology class. You guys are have you guys have a meteorology class in high school? Not at high school, no. It was combined with oceanography.

I think what was the other thing was like it was a combine and they threw meteorology and with a couple of other subject and geology I think it was w o or weather and earth science class, weather, geology and oceanography I think. Okay, yeah, okay. Well we had our own semester of meteorology and astronomy too, and our professor alerts claims that he got struck by lightning twice in his life.

So he says that one time he was like working on a sink or something at his house and lightning hit the house and they like, travel through. And he briefly got struck by lightning. And then another time I can't remember, most of us kind of believed it because and I'll answer that very nice guy. I've talked to them a couple of times, but he has that like mad professor, you know, nutty professor, kind of love to terms.

They're like, Oh, maybe he's on something there. And his hair is like, you know, up and all over the place. But no, it's similar to tornadoes to, you know, tornadoes can be big, right? It can be a mile wide, but a mile is very small when it comes to the size of the earth. And as a result, you know, it's hard for a tornado to really hit the same place twice as well.

It's kind of the same concept here. So can it happen? Sure, it could happen. But unless you're at somewhere with a lightning rod, the chances of it actually hitting the same place twice are very low. But another good example is right here in Chicago, the Willis Tower. It gets struck dozens of times a year. It's the tallest building in Chicago.

So guess where the lightning likes to strike the the tallest building as a it's a good target for it. So, yeah, it happens in dozens of times the Willis Tower in Chicago in the other skyscrapers. But oftentimes it's the Willis Tower because it's a Dallas. Okay. Well, on that note, I'm going to take a short break, but don't go anywhere because we still have two more lightning myths to discuss.

So stick around. More across the sky right after this.

Welcome back, everyone, to the Across the Sky podcast will release new episodes every Monday on all our leads news app websites, but also on all podcast platforms. So wherever you like the browser podcasts, you can find us there and subscribe and give us a rating. We sure appreciate it. Okay. We are counting down the top five lightning myths and our number two, lightning myth is one that can definitely be dangerous if you believe it.

If it's not raining, you're safe from lightning. Now, a lot of times people hear thunder or see lightning and they're in the middle of something. And if it's not raining yet, they try and squeeze in a little bit more of that activity. Boy, that's not a good idea, I guess. I know. And it's actually ties into your point number five here about heat like that, because you can not you can have lightning without the rain, as we just said so.

Exactly. It ties in very nicely with our our fifth myth here. I'll toss it over to Shaw because I know he had something to say, too. Yeah. I remember earlier on, about a year or so ago, we had our our pal Christopher Gorski, who was with Bisola talking about this, and I think he posted very recently on Twitter the correlation between rainfall and and lightning injuries and you see that most most lightning injuries or fatalities happen when it's not raining because, you know, one people it's not raining yet.

So they do want to be outside a little bit longer. So if there's a big thunderstorm and it's pouring down rain, you're not running around outside anyway. So and then sometimes people will go outside too early. Rain is done now. I guess it's over. But it but it's not so. And the most of the most of the injuries and fatalities happen Wednesday.

Streaming people are going or trying to get one more thing in or they don't think it's that close or they left too early after the storm they think is over. But we we always remind people lightning can easily strike ten miles away from the center of the storm. So as as the rhyme goes, when thunder roars, go indoors.

Sounds a little cheesy, but that's kind of it. Once once you hear the thunder, just just go inside. I try to tell people not to be dramatic, just thunder. Time to go inside. So just go inside, you know? And then the question I get is, well, how long do I have to wait? How long do I have to stay inside?

And the rule of thumb is, well, keep listening for that thunder and then wait 30 minutes after the last rumble of thunder, and then it's safe to go back out and resume the activity. So that's why it takes a while. But you do have to be patient, and that is to ensure your safety. So wait 30 minutes after the last rumble of thunder and then it's safe to go back outside.

Is that still I I'm actually curious, is that still taking a 30 minute rule? Yeah, that's totally still the thing. I mean, I've heard some arguments about now you're probably okay after 15 and that that's probably true depending on how fast the particular storm is moving away. But I think the catch. All right now is 30 minutes is safest.

Yeah. Has a lot to do with how quickly the storm is moving. You know, some of these storms just roar, you know, and that's thing it's not really getting that far away for you. Now. You've got a big squall line long, a cold front. Thunderstorms are going to clear the area a lot faster. And so, you know, 30 minutes is probably maybe a little bit too much, especially for, you know, you get in the southeast and those little pop up storms that just kind of want to hang out in one spot and just linger and feed off all that humidity.

So it's really out of abundance. Caution just we want to avoid those those lightning strikes that do occur ten, 15 miles from the storm. Those bolts, alga, blue, as they're called, but sometimes cause of a thunderstorm has already been ongoing. It's not out of the blue anymore. It's just like, when is this thing going to end? Is this storm ever going to end?

Because I know there are some storms that just go on and on and on. Ashley in the thick of summer when humidity is really, I think, just wildfire smoke or have having here just goes on and on and on and on. This week, it's rare that I went away to Italy. There was smoke when I left. I come back, there's smoke.

It's a bad scene. And that's another discussion for another time. I think maybe a future podcast episode. I think that is that is correct, yes. Yeah, absolutely. But for now, we still have one more myth for you. Our number one lightning myth. Rubber tires or rubber shoes if you save from lightning. And guys, I have a good story about this one.

So I'm study on a plane in Oklahoma City waiting to take off and the pilot comes on the speaker and he says, well, folks, we've been delayed due to thunderstorms in the area. So we're going to be on the ground a little bit longer. But don't worry, we're sitting on rubber tires. We don't have anything to worry about.

Okay, guys, let me tell you, when I heard that, I mean, it took everything in my body, everything in my body to stop myself from standing up and said, no, stop spreading weather myths. I mean, guys, I'm assuming you've dealt with this one, too, now, so you're safe because you're in a Faraday cage. Has nothing to do with the damn tires.

The lightning hits the plane, it's going to arc around the plane and the and the exterior and the fuselage, and you're fine inside. It's not going to. Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't just storm the cockpit mad after that kind of stuff. I was just like, Oh, it was just boiling up. And you're like, No, stop, please. So what do people believe that one?

I really do. Now, I'm actually surprised that the it took everything in your body to stop you from standing up and go there because you must had a pretty big seat on the plane for you to actually, like, want to, like, get up and get out of the plane and then start moving down. You must have been flying first class.

You fly in first class for this one. Oh, no, I am not a first class person at all. You mean those economies, right? Yeah, I laugh. I would laugh when you were talking about the Rubber Soul is how you shoot. Because the rubber soul, like your shoes are so small compared to the power of the the lightning. You have no shot.

Unfortunately, the the even even the most pumped up Jordans aren't going to save you on that one. But yes, as Shawn said, it's going to go around the plane or around, you know, your your car. It's not going to be about that because that's the other thing is it will it will hit the car and go around the car.

You may never be able to drive the car again. Right. But as long as you're not hanging out of the window, you're going to be okay. Again, the car is going to be a mess. Some of the stuff might melt, the tires might get messed up, but the tires aren't saving you. The fact that you're in kind of a safety cage where the lightning will hit the metal and kind of follow the metal and not jump into the cab where you are is what keeps you say, Yeah, yeah.

So to be clear, motorcycle not safe, not a safe place to take shelter now doesn't it? Just get on your motorcycle or get on your bicycle and say, Oh, I've got the rubber tires, I'm good to go. But also there's one thing that I think often gets overlooked. We always say, you know, a safe place to be if you can't get inside a building is to get in your car and you'll be safe as long as you're not touching anything metal in the car and the windows are rolled up.

Well, that's not true of it's a convertible or a soft top vehicle because suddenly you don't have that metal roof anymore and that lightning bolt can come right through that soft top. So I used to have a Jeep Wrangler, and I always got nervous when I was driving in a thunderstorm because I'm like, This is not safe. I need to come through this roof.

Fortunately, never happened. But convertibles soft top's not safe. You have to get in a vehicle with a hard top. That is important. You know, Matt, you've had some pretty cool cars because, don't you? A mustang right now, too. No, no, no, no. It's a Camaro. I come in. I'm sorry. I didn't mean. Let us be clear to shortchange you whatsoever by there.

But things are pretty good, but not as good. A whole Chevy versus Ford thing coming back. Oh, my heavens. I thought I was Chevy guy, too. I just thought my Camaro. I was Chevy Trailblazer. But you're pretty cool now. You're pretty cool. You must be a really cool guy in high school, going from Wrangler to the to the Camaro.

Only cool cars here. And I was there one day. There may be kids, and the coolness is going to have to be downgraded, but not yet. Dang it. Well, what was your first car, Joe? What was your first car? Was my first. I had a 1991 Toyota Camry. That's 1008. In 2008, you got to start somewhere. I got voted.

Sorry. Know over what got voted what I got voted. Third worst car in the parking lot in high school. Well, what was your first car mat? I know the Jeep Wrangler was my first. Okay. The jeep was. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so on this car, Sean, I've got all y'all B So my first car was given to me by my grandfather.

Same here, same here. Just for everybody's. For his 1977 brown Buick Regal. Wow. After having it for ten years, he gave it to me in 1987. And people I went to college with Remember what that car looks like or look like. And I drove it until it would drive no more. Well, so make yourself you had Sean and you're like, Oh, wow.

That's a really good question. So after that, after that, I bought an I used Oldsmobile. Oh, man, you're like the RV. You were like the at time I did. Oh, absolutely. It was the classic you hear it called Oldsmobile because it was so huge. But when that finally died, I got my first new car in 1994, Chevy Cavalier.

Okay, cool. So, yeah, it was my first new car. Nice, natural improvement. You know, all those cars will keep you safe from from lightning. That's true. Up and down the road. Convertibles. So, yes, they all kept me safe. Is your Camaro a hardtop? Yes, I did. I did not get the. Because I remember remembering my lightning safety. I said I'm not going to go through the anxiety of having a soft top anymore.

It's going to be top. And I'm going to say safe and fun. If Matt can do it, you guys can do it, too. Exactly. You got your next car. And with that, there you have it. That's our top five lightning mitts. Now, we're going to take another quick break, but stick around because we've got a new segment we're debuting on Across the Sky Listener.

Questions. And our first one is an interesting one, so don't go anywhere. More across the sky coming right up.

Welcome back, everyone. And before we wind things down today, we're going to review something new here on across the sky. Now all three of us get questions on social media and email from viewers asking questions about the weather. And since some of the same questions keep popping up, we said why not make this into something for the podcast?

So that's what we've done. And Joe, you've got the first question this week, right? Yeah, I do. It's the first question this week. It's from my Twitter buddy, Glen Donahue. Now, he was asking this morning a New Jersey perspective, but we're going to expand this nationwide. He want to know how come we don't ever have a temperature from the beach?

How come the temperatures from he's saying homeowner now I'll fill in what he means. He's saying that the major weather recording site in my corner of New Jersey is inland at Atlantic City or National Airport. He wants to know how come we don't get a major reporting site on the beach like, you know, Atlantic City or Ocean City or Cape May?

So that's a very good question because this can actually be parlayed. It's really anywhere in the country here. It doesn't have to be in New Jersey. You can be in Virginia where Sean is. You can be, you know, in even in Illinois where Matt is, because it really goes to show or I'll kind of give you a little bit inner workings on how these stations come about.

So official reporting stations are typically in the weather world, we call them F six stations are typically located at airports or other major reporting sites. So, for example, New York City Central Park is also one of these sites. You know, it's not an airport. However, there's only so many of these in the world because they need to meet a certain standard and criteria.

In some cases, these are observers with human input. There's human observers that are actually there as well, and they're just not everywhere. So when it comes to beach in inland areas, you have to really look and make sure that the temperature, you know, what you're getting your temperature from is from this area that's representative of your climate. If you're in a microclimate region, anywhere along the water can be one of those.

Sometimes those numbers are misleading, like in Chicago, right? I think we have O'Hare and Midway. They're both inland. They're not on the lakeshore. So you could be, you know, 62 degrees right on the lakeshore. But you go inland a couple of miles to O'Hare and you're at 79 and the official Chicago temperature is 79 degrees. You know, when you break record highs and record lows and record rainfall, it comes from these major reporting stations that may or may not be representative of where you are.

And your phone app might not tell you that. But we will we will tell you that here at all of our Lee Enterprises publications, others. I'll flip it over to you, Sean, because I know you know, you got Virginia, you got the shoreline there. I'm sure there's probably something like that going on in Virginia. Yeah. As you alluded to, a lot of this goes back to how the equipment, you know, where it has to meet a certain standard.

And there are a lot of places in the last 20 years that have plopped up, you know, weather stations, but no one can can vouch for their accuracy or how consistent a record is. You know, so for a lot of these places where we do, quote unquote, the official temperature, there is a climate record of that site that goes back dozens and dozens of years, some places even more than a hundred years, like Central Park in New York City, for example.

So that's why we will look at those, because they have to have a very long term record of temperature, humidity, you know, and all we did, all those types of things. But, you know, in the last ten or 15, 20 years, a lot of the a lot of the technology has increased dramatically so that weather sensors are more accurate than than they have been.

And I've got one in my backyard, and it's wonderfully accurate in terms of the temperature and humidity. But, you know, we got a lot of trees and it doesn't do the wind very well. And that's the other thing you have to think about when you're looking at some of these other, you know, weather observations, are they cited properly?

Again, I wouldn't look at the data I have in my backyard about wind at all. But, you know, at an airport, for example, it's pretty wide open. So you get a very representative sample of what the wind is like. So I think that a lot of that is it goes back to siting. It goes back to to the equipment.

It goes back to how long the period of record is. And the reason that they're at airports anyway is because, well, it's very important when you're flying a plane and you want to put that thing down to know what the weather is doing. Exactly. And everything is, too. They also have a lot of open land around you. I think you need 100.

Is it 100 foot radius without trees? Now, I know that was Fishel. I don't remember offhand. I don't remember air. We could really do a whole podcast episode about how to properly set up my own weather station because there could be a lot of people do it, but there are mistakes made along the way that can have a really big impact on the kind of temperatures and getting on the wind speeds that are being registered.

There is definitely some some instructions to follow to set up accurate weather station. And so that's that's the issue is getting good quality data and there actually is a pretty involved process. So that's why they're not even more weather stations that are considered official. And we don't have more observations because they get accurate information. It does have to be set up in a certain way and in a certain location.

So yeah, yeah. This is a great first question for us. Now, Joe, I think this one came in via Twitter, but we do have a more fun way for people to get in touch with us now, right? We do. We do. Before we get there, I just want to clarify one thing on the one specific point. I don't want to describe it with the National Weather Service as done in New Jersey with this, because Atlantic City now, they do break out records for Atlantic City and Atlantic City International Airport, even though the airport is inland in the in the Atlantic cities on the coast.

They just started doing that about two years ago. But before that, you did it. You had this kind of convoluted system of where the records were coming from. So that issue has been resolved locally here for us in New Jersey. But in other places, you may still have you know, you might not have a reporting station there or you may have some kind of system where it's not accurately shown records for those coastal and inland locations.

But, yes, we do have a phone line for you to call in and ask your questions here. We will be listening to we'll be answering them in the weeks and years ahead. The phone number is 6092727099 again at 6092727099. So call leave your name where you're coming from. Give you your weather questions you can last know about the podcast to maybe if we're feeling a little wonky will answer some of weather question content too but we're going to keep it mostly the weather here on the voice mail.

We appreciate any and all voice mails about your weather or climate questions. We'll definitely try to answer them during the show. So thanks a lot in advance for for giving us the ring and for sticking with us here at the Across the Sky podcast. We've done well with our numbers here. And, you know, we've only been around for about 14 months.

And yeah, we're happy with our progress and listenership and expanding into new regions and other ways to listen to us. We have a YouTube channel as well. You can look up across the sky for that too, if you want to listen on YouTube. So we're giving you more options to interact with us. Yeah, we'll be sure to put that phone number in the show notes as well.

Just a note. Yeah, exactly. Another way, what I start hearing from the audience a little bit more, another way for you to interact with the show, you know, and besides calling in with questions, if there's a certain weather topic you'd like to hear us talk about on a future episode, all about that too. We'll be sure to cover it.

Now, before we wrap up, Sean, what do we have coming up next week? Yeah, next week we are very happy. We're getting closer to the start of summer and then summer heat and then more and more discussion about about climate change. Of course when we get into the summer because it tends to be hotter. So next week we've got a very special guest, climate scientist Kate Marvel, part of Project Drawdown.

Dr. Marvel I worked for about seven or eight years at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban DC. She's a very well-respected climate scientist. She's done a lot of outreach. She's got a TED talk. And so we're going to talk about Project Drawdown and their drawdown roadmap, which is something they've recently released. And and we're not going to get too deep into the weeds, but they're this drawdown.

Library highlights 93 science based solutions to stop climate change. We will tackle all 93 of them, but it is very, very detailed. And the science, science based solutions they put together. So we're going to talk to her about the roadmap next week, right ahead of the first day of summer. That's right. That'll be our episode. Also the day after Father's Day, June 19th and up with looking forward to that one.

Well, that's going to do it for this week's episode of Across the Sky on behalf of Lee Enterprises and my fellow meteorologist Joe Martucci in Atlantic City, John Sublette in Richmond and myself, Matt Holiner in Chicago. Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll catch you again soon.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Weather can have a big impact on specific wagers for sports bettors. How does the time of day affect NASCAR races? What about wind direction and speed for golf and football? Does the thinner air of the Rocky Mountains really impact baseball games at Coors Field?

Mike Szvetitz from Front Page Bets joins the show and discusses how weather changes the game  — football, baseball, golf, auto racing, and more.

We want to hear from you!

Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode!

About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hello, once again, everybody, I’m meteorologist Sean Sublette. And welcome to Across the Sky, our national Lee Enterprises weather podcast. Lee Enterprises has print and digital operations in 77 locations across the country, including in my home base in Richmond, Virginia. I'm joined by my meteorologist colleagues from across the sky, Matt Holiner in Chicago and Joe Martucci in Atlantic City at the Jersey Shore.

Our colleague Kirsten Lang taking some time off in Tulsa to be with family, for a few weeks. Gentlemen, we've got a really good interview today. Our pal here in Richmond, Mike Szvetitz , who runs Front Page Betts. And we're going to talk about weather and gaming. The weather and gaming industry. I think most of us kind of know about about the football situation, but there are other aspects out there as well.

Joe, you are an AC man. So so talk a little bit about what you know there.

Well, you know, we're in the actually the capital of sports gaming. Fun fact, Sean, New Jersey actually has more sports gaming revenue than Nevada. And it might sound crazy, but the difference is in Nevada. And this might have changed recently by not sure. You can only bet in Nevada if you sign up for an account at the casino in New Jersey, you don't have to go to a casino.

You just sign up on your phone wherever you are. Does it matter if you're in Cape May or in Sussex County? So we we are very ingrained in sports betting here. And New Jersey, of course, do so responsibly. I do some myself. I did pretty good with our March Madness, you know, biting I talk about is dodgeball is March Madness picks should followed mine I had UConn wedding the sign out a future bet on UConn.

But it'll be a it's a it's a good episode Mike makes a good guy too and we're happy to have him leading the charge over at front page bets.

And what was interesting for me is that we didn't limited to just baseball, football because that's what you kind of think about in the sports. You know, we do get a lot of interest in the betting world, but it was interesting to think about all the different sports that are impacted by weather. And we covered them all. I think I think we got through all we talked about golf, we talked about NASCAR, we talked about horse racing.

And you.

First, it doesn't hit you.

But then you realize, man, weather has.

Such an impact on so many different sports and betting, therefore. So this is a really fun episode.

Yeah. So we're going to talk to Mike's event. It's about all those things here. I was really fascinated by the NASCAR stuff, the horse racing stuff, tennis, golf, all of that. That's up ahead with our conversation with Mike's that it's general manager and content director of Front Page Bets here at the Enterprises.

Our guest this week is Mike Stead, its general manager and content director of front page Vets here at Lee Enterprises. That's our sports and betting portal, Educate, inform and of course, entertain sports fans from across the country, especially in this blossoming sports betting enterprise that is out there. Mike, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

MAN Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Awesome beer.

So I think intuitively we understand that there is always going to be some kind of weather impact on a game, right? I know football comes to mind at first, but can you talk a little bit about some of the nuances that that aren't obvious to the to the casual observer? Could you speak to baseball first since that one might be even less obvious?

Yeah, I think, you know, anytime you're playing outdoors, you know, you always got to take the weather in effect, as you guys you know, as you guys know, I mean, some of the most popular are and the most popular content on any of our websites here in the enterprises or even in your local TV market is the weather.

When you know with what's going to do today our apps everybody's got the weather app. So then when you put sports into it, you're always are you know is it going to rain. How cool for just for the fan perspective right. Is it going to rain? How cold, How warm? You know, what time's the game? What what's going on with all that stuff.

So it's so important. And then when you come in from a competitive perspective, from players to, you know, coaching in the way you game, the way you scheme and then, you know, and then what we do in sports betting, if you are going to place a bet, if you're if you're looking to wager on a game legally and now it's legal, it's legal across, you know, sports betting is legal and more than 30 states across the country, including Washington, D.C. So, you know, if you place a legal ban, you're looking and all that kind of stuff, you want to know, how can I get the best advantage?

Right. So where is where is the best advantage? How can I how can I maximize what I know versus what what intangibles are out there in sports? We all know you can't predict. That's why, you know, sports, even even, you know, the underdogs have their day. But in sports betting particularly and in competition, you want to be able to control or at least know about everything that you can and can't control the weather.

But if you know going in, how this is going to affect whether if you mentioned baseball, whether it's going to affect the ball fly at the pitching, you know, just kind of how cold or warm it is, all that stuff takes into account. Now, baseball is a little bit different. Football probably is has the most impact. The weather has the most impact, and football, just because you're putting the ball in the air a lot, kicking game planning, how hot, how cold, all has an affect on everybody across across the board.

Baseball. It's a little bit different because there's not so much margin going on. There's not you know, you pitch, you hit, you catch. And and I think and I'm not trying to simplify baseball and saying it's less complicated, but I think the impacts on weather are fewer at a baseball game than they would be less than a football game.

So but there are some things that do happen that can control that. But it's not so much almost who's going to win or lose because of the weather. It's more on the proposition bet, more of a player bet. How is this pitcher going to perform in the heat? How's this pitcher going to perform when it's raining? How's this batter going to perform at Coors Field in Colorado with thinner altitude versus in Miami, where it's really humid and moist?

All the time? How is all that going to play an effect in the proposition bets? And those you know, for anybody who doesn't know what a prop bet is, it's a it's a proposition of a player or a team will do X win or lose. That's that's not a prop. And that's just the MONEYLINE or against the spread over under.

You know how many points they'll score you know over this or 100 that. But a prop bet is, let's say, you know, Aaron Judge will hit two home runs tonight, plus or minus. You know, the odds are and if it's minus, you know, 100, that means for every hundred dollars, you bet you get that back. So -100, basically, you have to bet 100 to just stay even to get it to get 100 back.

If it's plus. So if it's minus anything in the minus means it's pretty good. That probably going to happen. The odds are that it will happen. Anything in the plus means it's not as likely to happen. So, you know, and that's why you see a lot of these proposition bets at 1.5 instead of two home runs, it's 1.5.

So you can't you get two homeruns you pushed. If you bet it's at 1.5 you over one, which is two obviously, or under which is, you know, one or less. So you look at those kind of bets in baseball and how the weather's going to affect you all right. So we're playing in Wrigley Field. The wind's blowing out.

It's a day game. You're going to have a better, you know, opportunity to hit home runs versus if you're playing, let's say it at old Candlestick Park in San Francisco will wind swirls and you never know which way it's going to go. So all of that comes into effect, but it's not so much who will win or lose.

Yes. And that that all depends. If you got a guy that hits five home runs, chances are that teams can win. But more for the proposition bet more for the player, individual bet, how they're going to perform in the weather and in that time in space. So we can talk a lot more about individual things like that. But overall, I think that's kind of how weather will affect baseball in particular.

And, you know, obviously any outdoor sport, an indoor be that as it may, you know how much does the weather affect the indoor. Well there's there's been times where at hockey games weather has affected the ice and you know I remember what the Philly the fliers and I think it was the islanders back in the eighties in a playoff game it was so warm that the condensation was coming up from from from the ice.

And it was almost like the fog bubble inside, you know, And, you know, times I remember even in Richmond, Virginia, there was a basketball game played at the old Richmond Coliseum right up the road from where we're at, from where I'm at, I'm at. And they had the ice underneath. They did clear the ice and the ice was too much condensation on the floor.

They had to stop the game. I think it was Michigan and UVA. This was back in the in the eighties or nineties where they had to they couldn't play the game because the floor so slippery because the ice was coming coming up through the floorboards. So it happens on indoor events, just less likely, more so than outdoor. Hey, Mike, it's Joe here.

And on behalf of everyone, stay in New Jersey. We just want to say you're welcome for having sports betting across the country. Here we were. You guys are the ones who really broke it open. Appreciate it. But. But do questions for a year. Yo, out of all the sports mess that are place, do we have a percentage or a number?

How much is placed on baseball? And then my second question is talking about the weather. Right. And I have to imagine oddsmakers are factoring in this weather into play. But I see you know, I've seen a host of Twitter accounts that show where the value is in comparison to what the lines you know, what the lines are placed.

As anecdotally, you know, you'd have to talk to a sportsbook to give you the breakdown of how much in every book is different right now since especially since mobile betting legalized where you don't have to go to Atlantic City anymore, you don't have to go to Vegas to place a legal bet. You could do it. You know, you could take your phone out.

If you're in a legal state and and download an app, whether it's DraftKings, FanDuel, Caesars, MGM, you know, whatever it is. Even certain states have certain ones Bet365, which is legal in New Jersey and Virginia and Colorado, but nowhere else. So anyway, depending on where you are, you could sit from the comfort of your own home on your phone and place a bet which has increased betting across all sports.

You know, we do know anecdotally, at least from doing this the last year, there's more. NFL is the most popular sport to bet. You know the Super Bowl and opening and opening weekend of the NFL are the two most bet days of the calendar year across the board. Now, baseball's a little bit more, I think more maybe more people per capita bet football, but baseball has a lot of you know, I guess it's almost more consistent betting.

You know, you got guys that are betting and ladies who are betting on baseball prop bets. You know, every day you got 262 games a year. So probably, you know, pound for pound, that's probably more bets. But I think the popularity of football, college football, NFL, just because it's I think it's a little bit more mainstream for a lot of people to bet and and and it's more popular.

You know baseball used to be America's pastime. I'm in the I'm in the camp where now football's America's pastime. But, you know, we will get into that that debate. But I think, you know, if you're betting on 162 games and you have 32, you know, NFL t excuse me, Major League Baseball teams or wherever we're at now, you know, you're going to have more bets per year, per game, Per season in baseball.

But again, I think you're seeing more prop bets, more bets on strikeouts with this pitcher strikeout X number of players with this player hit X number of home runs rather than are the Phillies going to be, you know, the Mets tonight just because that money line and the run line is you know, it's it's it's negligible and you're you know, the value that you'll get by betting the Phillies to win is probably not as if you parlayed you know, how many home runs is Bryce Harper going to hit versus you know, how many strikeouts you know, Max.

Charles Gosh, I'm sure anyway, I'm I'm not sure that goodness, I get like seven names popped into my head at one time. This is hard. This is. But yeah, so Scherzer strikes out X and Harper hits X, you're going to you can parlays those together and make more because the odds of both of those happening at the same time are less than if the Phillies would win.

So all of that to be said. I think you know the the I guess the percentage of bets are what you also like to bet. Do you like to bet? Are you are you a better who just wants to, you know, watch the game and bet you know who's going to win because you get right then you've got a lot of like I think you know emotional ties to that.

If you're a fan, you want your team to win. You might place place more bets on them to win versus how this player's going to do. So. It also depends on on what you like. Are you going to go are you going to live back to which the the influx of live betting. Now you can say on your phone and bet the next inning, third inning, how many outs, how many hits, how many strikeouts for both is this?

You know, who's going to score first? What's a halftime score going to be in golf? Probably one of my favorite things to do, sit on the couch on a Sunday and just go home for a whole like, all right, is Jon Rahm going to beat Max Homa on this whole today? You know, and and, you know, taking all that into consideration and, you know, it's a it's a pretty, pretty enjoyable way to watch sport, especially if you're not that big of a fan of that sport.

I find myself watching more NBA basketball because of individual bets like that than I would if I was just, you know, a casual fan. And Joe, your second question, it escapes me because I talk to my so I completely forgot what that second question is. You kind of intertwine both on him. I was, I guess, my guy. You're fired.

I was really kind of wondering, do we have a dollar amount and how much you actually bet on baseball across the country? I don't know. I would know. It's it's pretty significant, I'm sure. Yeah. Mike, you mentioned golf, and that's what I kind of want to talk about. You know, baseball, football, cause they lots of attention, lots of bets going there.

But the betting in golf and maybe other outdoor sports like tennis, What can you say about that? And weather's influence? Do you see weather impacting any bets on golf, tennis, other outdoor sports besides baseball and football? Yeah, I mean, I think tennis I think it's a little bit it's harder or something like that. That's smaller space, more confined the way the arenas are.

And obviously rain is probably win not so much, maybe a little bit in tennis, but I think I think golf probably is the sport that is most affected by weather. Just on rain versus no. Right. Because now you're talking about with a ball run out on a wet fairway. If I hit the ball, will it stop at plug greens?

Green's green speed is a huge deal. You know, if it's colder, the ball's not going to fly, you know, obviously saying that kind of thing with baseball, anytime a ball is in the air for a long period of time, more weather can affect that. You guys know that better than you know. I mean, you guys are that you guys are the meteorologist here.

I'm just I just know when I hit a ball high in the air like I was doing yesterday on the golf course and it's 30 mile an hour wind, if I'm hitting it into the wind, is not going as far as I'm hitting it with the wind. Right. So you have to be a genius to figure that out.

We saw it in the Masters, too, with the rain. How will the scores be affected at a course that everybody knows? But it's really hard and then it rains, it's colder. How does that affect it versus if you're playing, let's say, the U.S. Open on Father's Day weekend somewhere in southern states where it's nicer, a little bit more humid, the ball travels a little bit further.

So it all takes into account. But again, it depends on what kind of bet you want to make. If you want to do a player bet, proposition bet, or if you want to bet overall on a MONEYLINE, who will win or will lose that all that all into consideration. And Joe, you had mentioned, you know, Twitter accounts and everything like that and taking in, how does this affect I think that was part of your second question.

There's so much data that goes into it and so much research that goes into this buy by bettors, by people who make the bets, by people who set the lines, by the oddsmakers that go into this. Again, you know, and baseball, as you guys know, has stats like what a left handed batter does on Wednesdays during day games in January or June, I guess whatever you make, you throw it out there.

There's a stat for it there. Now, if you're going to bet a lot of I'd bet five or ten bucks maybe I don't dig into that. But if I'm betting five or $10,000, which some people do now, I want to know where am I? You know what? What's the affected? Okay, This is a day game on a Wednesday.

How again, educating yourself to be able to place the best bet that you can to maximize your potential of winning. Man It's all about the stats, Mike. That's that's for sure. Now, I want to go back to two prop bets for a minute. How these things you have, these prop bets that are happening almost instantaneously, right? Like the next inning, the next hole to the best of your knowledge, when you have these types of bearish short term bets like this is bet the next 15, 30 minutes and the weather sometimes, you know, change is really, really fast.

I mean, we all know that especially in the summertime, in the spring, it could be fine for ten or 15 minutes and then boom, you got a gusty wind and a shower that kicks in for an hour or whatever. But, you know, if those rapidly changing weather conditions are incorporated in some of these prop bets, in these different sportsbooks.

So, for example, if I don't know, I'm a meteorologist and I know there's a really good chance a squall line is coming through in the seventh inning and that game is going to be canceled. Do you think the oddsmakers know those things as well? I mean, do you have any inkling about that yet? I'm sure they do. You know, they they've got people who are a lot smarter who do this, have been doing this a long time.

And they take a lot of information. And they where they get the information is places like us. Right. So they come to Richmond dot com or the president Lantern City and they say okay what what is Martucci saying today about this weather. Okay so if I'm making an odds, if I'm making a bet, I'm say, okay, what is what is Martucci saying about X?

Okay, I'm taking that. Then we're going to say, okay, what is Michael Phillips at Richmond? You know, Richmond Times-Dispatch. What is he writing about this? Let me take all this information because where else are they going to get it? They don't want boots on the ground. So they're reading our information. They're taking all that. They're talking to sources, talking to players, talking to people, not players, but people, you know, as much as they can figure out.

And then that's what's educating the lines that they said. And then people are also reading up and saying, okay, how is that going to affect this bet or this situation? I think you got a lot of that happening pregame going in now. I will. What you get in the game sometimes you don't have enough time to to really research a lot of that.

Now if you know if you have an insight or if you're paying attention, you know, and you have the ability to check something real quick and make a bet, you know, you're going to you're going to get that. But I think live betting is all kind of about the feel, a feel of the game, how the game's going, the feel about like, okay, it is the wind is blowing.

Now we've seen a lot of we've seen, you know, this player every time he gets up, he said that he said, no, you know, it's foul, just barely down the right field line, you know. And so you've seen how the games go in. You're seeing all that and you've taken that in consideration in your life. Bet. Are you just have a gut feel or you are you're chase it right.

You lost a big bet in the first inning. Now you're chasing the rest of the game, but trying to make your money back. Right. So you've got a lot of different scenarios happening at the same time. The reason golf is for me kind of fascinating is because you're playing the same course over four days. So by Sunday, I have a pretty good idea of how, let's say Jon Rahm has played the second hole, right?

I know he's birdied it three of the last four rounds. I know that, you know, the teams are back now. The wind's blowing downhill. If you watch a golf broadcast, it's all about the wind, all about the direction, all about where the holes cut, all about where the tee boxes are. So now I've got three days of data that I can say just as a novice, just as somebody who's not doing any research on that crunching numbers.

And I have a spreadsheet that I'm a abacus out on my protractor, right? I'm just there watching the game, watching the match, and now I can say, Oh, I bet he's going to do this. But if I'm more in-depth in that I've already done my research going into that now I can make more of a feel better of how things are going by for the novice.

And that's what really what and again, we're not we're not advocating betting as much as we are saying people are doing it. Lots of people are doing it. Lots of money is being spent doing so. If you are going to do it, here's how we can educate you to make the best bet or to at least inform yourself enough to where you feel comfortable maybe stepping out there if you don't want to.

Hey, that's fine too, because you can read our stuff and talk about it at the water cooler. You can get on the podcast with your friends to talk about it. You can go have a beer and say, Oh, guess what severity would you know? It's some of my favorite. Not favorite. Some of the most funny things are is last year when we first started doing this, you know, we launched Super Bowl week of last year and then March Madness was right around the corner.

So I filled out my bracket, you know, and I posted online and I everybody. So I was I was hanging out to dinner on a Friday, the Friday night of the week of the first round of the tournament. And a buddy of mine comes up and he's like, Man, I thought you knew what you're talking about. I didn't have time to fill in my bracket, so I just copied yours, have filled it out.

You suck. And, you know, and it. And I did it. It was terrible. But he, you know, so it's kind of like you've got you've got people who pay attention to this and they're like, oh, this event is really nobody's talking about though he does it. I keep track of every winner lost and I have then a football season I pick against the field, against the spread and straight out MONEYLINE and you know and so if you go by my picks some weeks, you're happy with me, some weeks you're not.

But again, I try to do as much research and educate myself as best possible to provide that, just like you guys do. Right. You're not waking up one day going, Oh, man, it's cloudy. It is probably going around you guys, you know, you guys are doing your research. You have all the tools at your disposal. You know, you've been around the game.

I've been around college and professional sports for more than 20 years. So, you know, you mean you kind of get that feel into it and just like, you know, fans, you know, you want some people only bet on the team that they know. Some people that only bet on their team because they're like, I watched this team long enough to know what's going to happen.

Yeah, exactly. You really want to have as much information at your disposal as possible. We'll get more into that on the second side of this break to stay with us. We'll be right back with Mike that it's general manager and content director front page BET's your lead enterprises on the Across the Sky podcast. We'll be right back. And we're back on the Across the Sky podcast.

Our guests this week, Mike Sweat, its general manager and content director across the hall as we're over it, front page that's here at the Enterprise IT that's our sports and sports betting portal educate, inform and entertain sports fans and the blossoming sports gambling and gaming enterprise. Mike We talked a lot about sports with golf balls, baseball basketballs, footballs.

Well, what about auto racing, right? I got to think NASCAR racing is specifically track temperatures, things like that. Do we see much of an impact in the weather impact, knowing how that's going to play out with specific drivers or specific tracks? Any information on that? Yeah, I think, you know, anytime you're talking about 45, 43 vehicles going very, very fast in close proximity to each other, any little change in weather track temperature, tire wedge adjustment, you know, tire pressure is going to affect something massive, right?

You get that big speed, that many things happening at one time, one little degree, £1 a wedge, one half a pound of of of torque here, whatever it is, it could have a big impact. We see it a lot, especially at the super speedways like Talladega was two weeks ago. You get the fastest track in NASCAR, two and 5.2 and a half, 2.55 mile track.

Right. And the the the drafting and the amount of speed that they can garner up when they're in line with each other, nose to tail. And if you watch it, I mean, they are touching each other going 200 miles an hour. So everything is, you know, you got to take into consideration for an outcome there for safety reasons.

One, But then also what car is doing the best in that condition because some cars really run well. One, they're by themselves. Some of them run better in a pack, some of them run better in front, back side left, high line, low line. So all that kind of stuff take into consideration. We talked about the weather, obviously. Are they going to even race?

We saw Dover was postponed, you know, the Dover and they said the mastermind was supposed to be Sunday afternoon. He got postponed to Monday. So will they race? They won't race if it's wet, if it's raining, too much danger. They're talking about wet, wet racing conditions with tires and stuff. That's still we have not seen that. And I think if you ask any driver, they don't want to take any more chances out there.

Safety hazards, all that kind of stuff. So if it's rain, if it's cloudy, sunny, the track temperature warm up. A lot of things happen when a track goes from day to night and we don't see it in too many races. Charlotte is probably one of the only tracks on Memorial Day weekend that we see. The race starts in the days a 600 mile race, the longest race that they have on the NASCAR circuit, starts in the daytime track.

Temperatures are usually a little bit hotter. They're rolling and then it goes to night. Track cools off. You see the track changes to almost two different races at Charlotte from night and day. We saw it even at Richmond. Richmond races used to race at night. Not the best racing cooler track temperatures. Tires would get eaten up a little bit more, kind of somebody would get out front, stay out there, better racing in the day, hotter track temperatures, tires, you know, matter a lot more.

So you have you have that. So when are you racing? Are you racing the day? Are you racing at night? Are you racing day into night? We see the Darlington and as well Labor Day, you see a lot of those track temperatures, the early spring races, you know, it's cold out there. How does that affect, you know, in the fall?

How does it affect running, you know, a race, you know, in 90 degree, 90 degree heat? And then what? The track temperature is probably 120 inside the car. You know, it's even hotter than that, you see. How does that affect the driver? So there's so much in NASCAR Now when it comes to betting, it's hard to really gauge that unless you're super into it, unless you really geek out.

But you can tell talk. Well, I bet you see how a driver or car is doing at a certain track. You go in and saying, this driver's got a lot of success there. Maybe the car's not running real well in the corners. You know, somewhere like Bristol, where you have to have a better turning car into the corner, a smaller track versus a superspeedway like Daytona or Talladega, where you don't have to have much turn.

You just have to find the right line and hold it steady. So all out of that comes into play. But you could see that more live than you do pre pre-race going into that because you want to see how that car is going to perform, especially when there's, you know, 40 other cars around it. And Mike, sticking with the racing theme, let's talk about horse racing a little bit because I imagine there's some similarities here, but also some important differences about whether in horse race.

Yeah, I mean, you know, track surface like, you know, are they running like they get the Kentucky Derby, the run on dirt and mud, Where they running grass are they running on, you know, what kind of dirt, what kind of sand? You know, all of that plays into a fact. If it's raining muddy vision, how do the horses run?

Do they like to get wet or is it hot? How do the horses fare in the heat and when you're talking about again on it's not like the horse can tell you, like, yeah, I feel great today, right? You could tell by how it how just like a car you can't tell how it's going to run until you kind of get out there.

Maybe you hear something, you feel something. That's why the jockey is so important. I think in horse racing, we got the Kentucky Derby coming up on Saturday. What's the weather going to be like that for that? How is that going to play even the wind like running into a headwind? How is that going to affect, you know, also, you know, you want to get on the pole too early, you get on the rail, you're in trouble too late.

You you've got to make up a lot of ground coming, you know, coming across the field. So all of that plays, plays it into effect. And, you know, you talk about the Kentucky Derby coming, one of the most fun days, one of the most bet days as well, because even if you're not a horse racing fan, you're there.

You're like, I'm, you know, throw. And if you bet last year on the longshot to win the Kentucky Derby at 80 to 1 odds. You know nobody did that on purpose by the way they were just doing a up ten bucks on the long shot. But nobody who knew what they were doing actually bet you know, the long shot.

And so I think I think you've you have you kind of have again, what bets are you going to make? And then are we going to have some fun? You know, you want to watch the Kentucky Derby, you want to watch a sporting event. It's a little bit more interesting or a lot more interesting if you've got money on it.

Right. If you're not bet on it, you know who has it doesn't matter. You throw a couple of bucks down, now you're vested. You want to know, all right, this better win. We do. And so but you look at you also got to look at the history, right? We talked about the dad of horse racing, especially. How do they run?

How do they run at this mile? How they run? You know, do they have any other races that we could, you know, look at? What about the jockey? What about, you know, the track conditions, some race better on grass, those kind of things, too. So you're looking at all that information as you go. But, you know, horse but horse racing, you can't bet live post time you're in and whatever.

You bet. That's what. You bet. Hey, Mike, talk to us. This is no bother, per se, but tell us about the difference between betting and horse racing. I think it's called parimutuel betting as well. So what you see when you are, you know, betting on baseball or football, you know, you could bet on a horse to win. You can bet on a horse to win place to show which is first, second or third.

You can bet trifecta boxes. Where are super factors? You can bet. All right. These three horses are going to finish in the top three somewhere, right? You can bet exact that this horse is going to finish exactly in this position. Right. So and the more you add to that bet, the worse the odds are going to get. So the more payout you could have.

So, you know, you in. It's more fun to bet horse racing, in my opinion at the track. Right. The buzz everything's going around you're you know you might have a mint julep or two and you're feeling great. You get to the window and you're like, All right, here we go. Six horse in the seventh race, you know, whatever, whatever.

And then you got the, you know, the person behind the counter. If he screwed up, they look at you like you can't make that bet. So that's really kind of intimidating. So you got to know what you're talking about. You got to get in there. But it it's really fun. My brothers and I took my dad two years ago to Kentucky for a bourbon trail tour.

Right. We somehow ended up at Churchill Downs on a Friday, you know, matinee race. We somehow found our way to the ticket line and with a few drinks in our hand and had a really good time. Now, had my brothers ever bet on horse racing prior to that? No, because they'd never been to our they had it. They never went in.

But since we were there like, oh man, we got a bet. We got we're here, right? So you get caught up in that kind of thing. And I think that's where you start. Talk about the popularity, Sean. You mentioned if you know, the blossoming sports betting world, people are finding out that, you know, if you do it responsibly, you make you make wise choices.

You don't get yourself into trouble. You set a limit. All those things. It's fun, You know, it's enjoyable, it's populated. The sports have gotten more popular because of it. I think you're seeing a lot more. You can't watch a sport now without seeing a DraftKings ad or FanDuel ad, and obviously their marketing to that, to that, to those constituents.

But they're also because people people are finding like, hey, this is fun and the sports are growing and more people are being evolved in and I think, you know, as long as you do it responsibly and make sure that you set yourself limit, it's fun to do. That's why when I go to a horse track, I carry the cash that I'm going to spend.

I leave my wallet in the car because I know, like if I especially if I lose it now, I start chasing. I'm like, Oh man, I got my money back. It's just like you go to the tables of Vegas or Lake City. John Are you, you know, I've been down to the Borgata. You've been sitting there. You know, I get around, I get around and, you know, I'll just say it, You know, you're there.

You bet. Long enough. The house is always going to win. So you got to make sure you're setting yourself in position to at least, you know, maximize your losses. Yeah. You know, the one thing I remember when I first went to go was to a casino in Atlantic City when I was 21 years old. Back in the day, I still remember the signs all over the place and and I forget which casino it was, but it was the sign was there.

Said bet with your head not over it. Yeah, that. That is what you always have to remember. Get. Don't bet any more than you think you can lose or you plan to lose. A few times I've been to casino, whether it was in Vegas or in a see, this is exactly right. You take this amount of money this is it.

After that, the party's over. Go home, spend it wisely, risk it wisely. Else you get into a lot of trouble really fast. I'm like, Shawn, real quick. Just a just a plug for that, though. You know, now, these sports betting mobile apps, they have these parameters on there. They have these you know, it's almost like a it's almost like a child lock.

Like if you gave your kid a cell phone, you could lock it down. You can set parameters where you could set a bet limit per day, a number of bets per day. You go in there, you set that stuff. So when you're at your limit, it will let you do any more. And you can't you can't bypass that unless you have the code.

But if you're doing it right, have somebody accountability partner, somebody set that up for you. So there are there are these things that I take into account where you can't get in over your head. And so that's why I think it's so regulated. Sports betting is so regulated, especially in New Jersey. Joe You guys got some of the the strictest rules, which I think are really valuable to have because you've been doing it for so long, you know, the pitfalls.

But again, you want people to do it responsibly. So the more you regulate it and you could talk about whether it's alcohol or marijuana or anything, regulation is going to really help police some of the stuff where people are doing it anyway. Might as well, if you're going to do it legally, do it responsibly. So it's one of those things, too, where we're Sean to you know, to your point, if you're mobile betting, there are those there are those safety.

You know, features on there to help you, you know, really, really be responsible. Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to to focus in on as we wrap it up for somebody who just is entering this this space, they're curious. They want to get involved, but they're going in kind of they're putting their proverbial toes in the water. Well, as we as we close out, what is some of your suggestion?

What are some of the ways they should approach this carefully, tactfully, so it doesn't get out of hand in a hurry? Yeah, I think I think what we just talked about. Right. No, no, your limit. Right. If you are if you are if you struggle with an addictive personality, I think you got to know going in that like you need to make sure that you have some guardrails right for anything.

Right. Like, you know, don't drink. You drive right. Just stupid. Not stupid, but just baseline rules of like, you know, don't be dumb. Right? And so I think there's you got that. But I think also, you know know what? You know what you're doing right? If you are if you don't know about a lot about a sport, maybe watch it, figure it out.

Try to educate yourself as best as possible before you put before you put money down on it. And I think, you know, it's just being responsible, educating yourself, making sure that you're not that. And also don't do it in the dark. Make sure people know, you know, don't try not to hide things. You know, things that are in the light tend to stay in the light and tend to have a lot more of a of a better outcome where people can ask you about it and those type of things and and seek help if you find yourself, you know, in a position in chasing is one of the things we kind of joke about.

But you know, if you lose early, you know, it's probably best not to chase, right? You go to it, you go to the casino. You bet. Place a bet. You take your money in there, you lose it in the first 5 minutes. You know that that that's a that's a tough that's a tough pillar for a lot of us to swallow.

Hey, I'm in Vegas for the next three days. I lost all my money in the first 45 minutes. Well, you didn't have a plan. Have a plan going there saying, here's the deal. It's kind of like I tell my kids right before you go out, already know what you're going to do if you find yourself in a situation, right.

You got to have a plan. You got to make sure that you're you have an exit plan, you have a plan to talk to. And if you do, what happens if you win, right? That not just lose, but what happens if you win? And you got to know when you know, Kenny Rogers was alive, You got no one to hold him.

No one to fault him. Because if you stay long enough, you're going to you're going to lose. And so I think that's why you just got to be be smart, talk about it, educate yourself. You know, listen, stuff like this, this is the again, there's plenty of podcast, there's plenty of information out there about about sports betting, but also about how to make sure that you're doing it responsibly.

So so just do that, you know, and and don't don't, don't. And the other thing I'll say is don't take my March Madness picks. So many other thing what you said there have a plan that is something that is very good for all kind of risk. Right. Well, because all risk is gambling. There is risk in the world, whether it's weather risk, whether it's sports gaming risk.

There is risk. Have a plan B ready for whatever is out there and so that you are prepared when it does hit, whether it's good or bad. Mike, for we wrap up, where could people find out more about front page bets? All right, front page, Pets.com, all one word, front page, Pets.com. You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.

That front page bets. You know, it's just we've been doing this a little bit more than a year here. Lee Enterprises would grow an audience for having a lot of fun with it. You know, we're getting really good feedback and so I'm excited about it set about, you know, educating, informing people, having fun too, as well. Doing podcasts like this, doing videos that we do, you know, it's really fun.

And sports just must be fun, right? And especially, you know, when you take the weather in consideration, there's a lot of times that weather is is not fun. And it's it's you know, there's there's a lot of things that can go wrong. Same thing in sports betting. But, you know, we're here to educate and we're here to inform you guys.

And so just like these fine meteorologists that that are on with me, you guys, you know, I check out shorts. You know, I live in Richmond. I check out Shaun every morning as weather video. What I what do I need to do? And so I just I really appreciate you guys having us on in front page BET.com and on social from page bats and you know we hope to see you guys soon.

Thanks Mike so much. So much good information for those getting into this space, understanding this space, because it can be overwhelming. So thanks so much. We will talk to you again soon, Mike, Our guys, thanks a lot. So I learned a lot from that interview, that discussion with Mike. You know, I had not thought about that much with tennis and golf.

As we said at the outset, the classic baseball and football immediately come to mind. But I really had not thought about those those immediate bets during a golf tournament, guys. Yeah. So in other words, interesting. I actually really like the NASCAR, what with the difference in the track between a day and night. Am I like a big NASCAR fan?

But I didn't I didn't realize the impact that the day and night time timing had on, you know, the track conditions and how you bet for it as a result. So I thought that was pretty cool. I tell you what, I'm not a big sports better. I did it once when I went to the Kentucky Derby, I had to place a bet being at the Kentucky Derby.

I've also done it a couple of times when I've been to Vegas, just because, you know you're in Vegas and got a bet. Let's do some sports betting. College football, that was kind of fun. But every time I've done it, I have I've not well, I've won, but I placed multiple bets and that's where I've I fail and I lose money.

So I am not a big sports bettor. And boy, after listening to Mike, I'm more intimidated now, thinking about all the different things and all the ways whether it could impact the outcome. I'm like, now that I'm making the right choice and not engaged on it, that's sports betting on a regular basis. It would not end well for me.

Yeah, as you said, got to be very careful. This stuff has gotten so big so fast. If you don't go into this very carefully and very deliberately, it can take hold of you and go go very bad. So his his recommendations are certainly, certainly well taken as I'm like you. I mean, I used to be much more of a big sports head when I was in my twenties and very early thirties, but I just don't pay as much attention as I used to.

So the temptation is there for me. I you know, I do the occasional football wagering, but but this is not that is not that big. Certainly not as big as it is. Jersey there. Mr. Martucci Hey, listen, man, I'm going to grill I have a group chat with like nine of us today, and there's a lot of sports betting talk, and I think it's just a different Yeah, we're just used to it, you know, with Atlantic City here for so long, it's just.

It's just a different way of life. But I have to ask you, Sean, what is what what determines very early thirties? And I'm wondering if I'm exiting that that scope of very early thirties, I'm going to say 32 after 32. You're not in your early thirties anymore, you toward the mid-thirties. Okay. All right. So I got another year because I'm 31 now.

You know, the other thing, like I'm like sport is you also don't have children, at least not yet. And that will take up a lot of time if you and Seany decide to go in that direction. Yes. That also takes up a lot of time that I used to use a lot of brain cells I used to use to pay attention to sports.

I had to start paying attention to to two small, small children. Right. So that's another big thing, right? I do that, you know, one thing, too, and I forgot to ask him whether impacting the hot dog eating contest on 4th of July, that makes dinosaurs shaking his head at me. I'm telling you, there's a difference. And I think I'm going to reach out to majorly eating.

I think we're going to do a podcast on that. We're going to see. But there's something there because you can bet on the hot dog eating contest, too. You know, there are lines out there. That's nasty. I'm sorry. That's nothing nasty. I can't watch that stuff. I can't I mean, if they all want to do it, knock that stuff out there.

But that might be a lucky one. As to what they do to that, though, the pods you get the pod bones in the one is that me? And I'd rather do almost anything else a nap. It's just off and that's enjoyable at all. I go, Oh man, I mean, no. My gosh. So okay, let's wrap this up as I don't want to I don't want to get into that any.

We've got some cool things coming up in the pipeline. Tropical cyclones in the Mediterranean Sea. We don't think a lot about hurricane formations, tropical type formations and the Mediterranean. We'd be talking about that in the coming weeks. And also we've got a guest in the pipeline from Penn State who has been studying for ever. So we're going to talk about hail in the weeks to come.

So lots of good stuff coming up there in the next coming a few weeks here on the Across the Sky podcast. But for now, with my colleagues in Atlantic City, Joe Martucci, Matt Holiner in Chicago, our meteorologist Sean Sublette at the Richmond Times Dispatch in Richmond, Virginia. Thanks for joining us on the Across the Sky podcast.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The new director of the National Hurricane Center, Mike Brennan, joined the weather team this week for an in-depth discussion on all things hurricanes. From the biggest concerns, the latest forecast and communication improvements, to the impact of climate change, it's everything you need to know as hurricane season 2023 gets underway.

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Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode!

About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hello, once again, everybody. I'm meteorologist Sean Sublette. And welcome to Across the Sky, our National Lee Enterprises weather podcast. Lee Enterprises has print and digital news operations in 77 locations across the country, including in my home base in Richmond, Virginia. I'm joined this week by my colleague Matt Holiner in Chicago. And both Joe Martucci and Kirsten Lang are taking some time away from the office.

Matt, we've got a great yes. This week, National Hurricane Center director Mike Brennan, we're going to talk all about not just what's upcoming this hurricane season. We talk about trends. We talk about communications. Man, there's a lot of stuff to get to today. Yeah, we really did cover a lot of them because we were so happy to actually get him on the podcast.

I mean, this time of year he's doing so many interviews in preparation of hurricane season. So we're like, Yes, we got him. And so for the short amount of time that we had him, the 30 minutes, we throw as many questions as we could at him and really did cover everything. And, you know, he just took over the job recently in April.

So, you know, it's a bit of a learning curve for him. But he has been with the hurricane center for years and it has been working with him. And you can tell that he's he's just filling right into the role and got all of our questions answered. So it was a fantastic episode. Absolutely. So let's get right at it with National Hurricane Center director Michael Brennan.

And we welcome Mike Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center in South Florida. Shortly after getting his Ph.D. at NC State and his time at the NOAA's Weather Prediction Center in suburban D.C. He began as senior hurricane specialist at NHC in 28 and was selected as Hurricane Center director earlier on this year. Dr. Brennan, thank you for joining us and congratulations.

Thanks, Sean. Great to be with you. Now, before we talk about the upcoming hurricane season, step back a little bit. Tell us what got you excited and into the weather in the first place. Yeah, I think like most meteorologist, pretty well bitten with the weather bug at a pretty early age. Something I've always been interested in. I grew up in southwest Virginia, a place with lots of interesting weather, you know, all four seasons at winter weather.

It was pretty interested in that, you know, very flash flood prone area, heavy rainfall, remnants of hurricanes, severe weather. So it was a pretty interesting place to grow up. You know, I think one pretty formative moment was a 19 November, 1985, the flood of record in the Roanoke Valley in southwest Virginia. Still, the flood of record, the remnants of a tropical storm that made landfall on the Gulf Coast came up.

It rained very heavily for several days, had five or six inches of rain on, I think it was November 5th or sixth that year. And the whole hydro system sort of went into flood and my grandmother lost her home in that event. So it was pretty, pretty impressionable. I was about eight at the time. So, you know, and I think as I got older, I sort of dawned on me that I could actually make it.

Yeah, there's a there's a career to have in meteorology if you want to want to do that. I think probably by the time I was 11 or 12, I sort of recognized that and just decided to pursue it from there. Well, we're glad to have you and very happy that you're there at the Hurricane Center. Looking forward to this coming year, whatever it may bring.

Can you talk a little bit about what kind of changes have any regarding public and experimental products? I might be coming out of the Hurricane Hurricane Center for for this season? Sure. Yeah. Probably the most notable one is our tropical weather outlook, which is sort of our flagship situational awareness product that we issue every 6 hours to talk about systems that could go on to become tropical depressions or tropical storms in the Atlantic.

The period that we cover in that product is now extended out for seven days under the future. It's been five days for for many years we've been experimenting with seven day Genesis forecasts for the last three or four seasons. And they're they're pretty reliable, which means that if over the long term, if we say a system has a 70% chance of development, about 70% of those systems go on to develop so that they're statistically reliable.

And so this year we pushed that time window out to seven days. So to give people just a little more heads up, a little better situational awareness that, hey, this is a system, the Hurricane Center is watching, that what could go on and become a tropical depression or tropical storm during the next week. Not every system is going to be in the outlook seven days in advance, though.

We still have systems that are difficult to forecast formation, especially when you get out of the deep tropics. But for those systems are more competent and we hope to be giving people more lead time this year going back to those outlooks than once something gets developed into the Atlantic Basin, Gulf or the Caribbean. Talk about how track and intensity forecast have improved over the last 20 years because most of the metrics I've seen show that the track intensity, the track forecasts have just become stellar.

But we still have some work to do with intensity forecast. How is that kind of gone last last 20 years or so? Yeah, if you go back and look, say, since the year 2000, our track forecast errors, say for example, at three days or about 65% lower than they were at that time. So you can see our three day track forecast error is now below 100 miles, which, you know, if you would've told somebody that it was more like 250 miles back in 2000.

So that's been a tremendous improvement there. And we have for many decades, we've seen the track forecast steadily improving all the way from the 1980s and nineties up till today. And we still continue to see that improving. On the intensity side, that's the story for many years was that the tracks are getting better, but the intensity forecasts are not.

But that's really not true anymore. We've started to see significant improvements in our intensity forecast here. And if you look just at our three day intensity error now compared to 2000, it's about 50%. It's about half of what it was then. We're down below ten, about ten knots. Used to be around 20 knots. So we're making progress there.

That's pretty much new in the last 10 to 15 years. And we're also making progress in rapid intensity events where we cut our 24 hour forecast error in half for rapidly intensifying systems just in the last like four or five years. And Mike, with the tropical weather outlooks going out to seven days, I think that raises the question, are we at the point where we're going to expand the forecast cones when we have an active storm out to seven days?

Is that happening this year? Are there any plans in the future? Not this year, but it's something we've been experimenting with. We've been making six and seven day track and intensity forecasts in-house for the better part of the last four or five years in evaluating them, trying to see when we're going to be ready to make those public.

You know, on average, the average errors are pretty good. They're they're pretty close to what the average five dayers were or better than the average five dayers, where we reduce the five day forecast back and I think 2003. But the challenge with seven days is you get about 10% of those cases where the errors are really, really big.

And you know, you think of a system where you it's forecast to recur, but it doesn't recurve or you can end up with errors of six or 700 miles a day, seven. So we want to try to be very careful about introducing those forecast and even more careful about how we convey them in a graphical way. I'm not sure we want to just extend the current cone out to seven days.

You know, maybe we do something different. So we're working with the social science community on sort of what the cone graphic might become in the next few years, and that'll probably be part of how we go on and convey the six and seven day forecast information at that time. Yeah, Mike, I know there's been a little bit of a buzz to have more of a dynamic statistical cone, if you will.

In other words, you know, there's always been, well, this is what our average era is. So this is where the cone is. Yeah. But that that doesn't always work the best. How how is that discussion going along? Yeah, you could tell us about that. I think that's part of a broader discussion we want to have about, you know, what's driving our probabilistic products, not just the cone, but the probabilistic storm surge information and the probabilistic information about tropical storm and hurricane force winds.

Right now, you're right, they all use basically historical errors over the past five years or so. You know, what are the typical errors at day one, two, three, four or five in terms of track intensity, How much does the size of the storm vary? We want to start moving towards incorporating real time uncertainty information from ensembles into those into those products.

So that's that's a goal that we want to try to work toward. I think it'll probably come first for track because that's where we have the most reliable ensembles. Now we can use global ensembles from the European that GFS that can can start to capture the uncertainty in the track forecast. They're not perfect, but we probably have and we have information we could extract from them getting to the intensity and the structure.

Information is going to take more time. We're going to have to have a, you know, a bigger and right now we don't really have a dynamical model hurricane ensemble that really can, you know, capture the uncertainty and the structure and the intensity of the storms. That's something we need to work towards. But my guess is it will be a gradual process over the next several years, maybe 5 to 10 years, where we start to phase in more dynamical uncertainty, information into those types of products there to be able to convey, you know, what the uncertainty is of this particular forecast case.

And Mike, I know a lot of people are familiar with the National Hurricane Center, at least hearing the name, but I don't think they know a lot of the details about the hurricane Center. So how many people work at the National Hurricane Center? And then does the staffing change based on during hurricane season and outside of hurricane season?

And then if you have multiple storms in the Atlantic and Pacific, does your staffing change even within hurricane season? Yeah, well, certainly the staffing changes on a given shift depending on the levels of activity. But we have about 50 federal employees that work at the hurricane Center. We also have some contractor support. We also have folks from FEMA and from the Air Force that work in the building with us to help coordinate emergency management messaging on the femicide and also help coordinate all the aircraft reconnaissance tasking from the Air Force and Noah, from our Air Force employees that work in the building.

So we also have a year round operational Marine forecast branch called Taffy, the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch, which issues high seas forecasts, Marine forecast and warnings year round 24 seven Inside and outside of hurricane season. And then we have the hurricane forecast operations that pretty much are running from May 15th to November 30th. But you're right, the level of staffing, especially on the hurricane operations side, is pretty variable because it's it's sort of a activity dependent workload.

You know, sometimes we have quiet periods where there's no storms. There might be one storm. We typically have two people scheduled for every shift, regardless of activity. But then we can supplement that staffing when we do get the three or four storms or we get to a big, you know, land threatening storm internationally or in the United States, the workload goes up a fair bit because there's more data to look at from aircraft.

There's more coordination to do in terms of international coordination for watches and warnings, internal coordination with the National Weather Service for U.S. threats. So, you know, sometimes we have it can get really, really busy. We have a storm surge unit that activates when we have storm surge threats for the U.S. and internationally as well. So they sort of have an operational piece.

So it's not, you know, for a big U.S. landfall threat, we might have five, six, seven people out on the ops for, you know, doing all the different parts of the job which go from data analysis, somebody doing the forecast, doing the coordination, doing the messaging and getting the word out to everybody. So back to that point about what you do during the course of the hurricane season, I think when I was still an undergrad in I believe it was Bob Sheets was the director at the time, once told me that you're actually busier outside of hurricane season than during hurricane season.

Is that still the case and why? I think we're as busy, at least, you know, because the off season is is where we do all of our outreach, all of our training for emergency managers, for meteorologists. We have go to hurricane conferences. It's sort of where we do the the yearly run up to the hurricane season. Some of it's just reminding people we have a hurricane awareness tour where we take hurricane hunter aircraft out to different parts of the country.

You know, it's it's interesting. This has sort of been the first year where we've gotten fully back into our in-person outreach and training post-COVID. But we still are keeping a lot of the virtual stuff we did during COVID. So we're adding on more and more outreach that we, you know, really wouldn't been able to handle before because there's only so many people to go around.

There's only so many weeks, there's only so much travel. But when you have an ability to do virtual outreach, that sort of really expands your your reach and your scale. So we have you know, it's you know, we have outreach that's going to go all the way into even into early parts of the hurricane season. Now, the the the effort to reeducate people, remind people of the threats is constant.

We have people moving to hurricane prone areas every year from areas where they don't have hurricanes. Other hurricane prone areas haven't had significant impacts in a long time. But people forget pretty quickly what the what the risk might be. So there's a continual education effort to that that we undertake in the off season. It's not just that, though.

We're doing the post analysis from all the storms from last year, writing up all the tropical cyclone reports, working with the modeling community to improve our forecast models that go into effect for the next year. So there's always a continual focus on improving the products and services that is heavily, you know, heavily skewed toward the off season or the outside hurricane season time.

And then sticking with the staffing theme, you know, one of the buzzy things that just keeps getting brought up and brought up in so many different aspects of society these days is artificial intelligence. So I'm curious, is the Hurricane Center currently using any artificial intelligence? Are there plans to implement it in the future? We're starting to dabble in it a little bit.

We have some some intensity models that are using things like neural networks to try and, you know, pull in different sources of information and come up with different ways to create consensus forecast for tropical cyclone intensity. But I think, you know, that's an area where we're going to have to move going forward into the future simply because the human forecasters ability to absorb information in the time that you have to do the forecast is somewhat limited.

And as observations continue to increase and especially model output, you know, you could imagine five, ten years from now we're going to have orders of magnitude more models for forecasters to look at. You're going to have to have some sort of tools that are going to be able to synthesize that information, give you different clusters of solutions to look at, figure out how the human is going to interact with all that data going forward.

So I think I could certainly be a part of that as we move into the future. I imagine that's a tool unlike any tool that could be used very well, and sometimes it could be used not so well. So we'll we'll see how that goes. I'm going to take a little bit of a break, then we'll be right back with more with National Hurricane Center Director Mike Brennan on the Across the Sky podcast.

And we're back with National Hurricane Center Director Mike Brennan on the Across the Sky podcast. And we're getting into hurricane season on the 1st of June, and there's a lot of buzz, as there always is, about what kind of the season we're going to have. Now without getting too specific, You know, Mike, in general, when we have a positive insight or an El Nino that tends to inhibit tropical cyclone, a hurricane formation, that's that's kind of a baseline.

Yeah. But what other kinds of things are out there in terms of clues to what kind of a season we may have in the Atlantic basin? Yeah, and you're right, El Nino and La Nina are two of the biggest is one of one of the biggest factors we see and sort of modulating overall activity in the Atlantic, especially in the deep tropics.

But there are a lot of other factors. The Atlantic basin is very warm this year, which would normally be indicative of a potentially busier season. We've been in this active area for many years now, going all the way back to the mid 1990s, and we don't see any signs that that active era has come to an end, certainly based on the last few years of activity.

So what we're likely to see this year is just competing factors. Yeah, we don't know how El Nino is going to evolve, how quickly it's going to strengthen, you know, does it does it come on quicker? Does it come on slower or how strong is it going to be? How does that interplay with these other factors in the Atlantic basin in terms of seas and other factors that might be more favorable for an active season?

So I would emphasize that, you know, we don't know what the season is going to look like, but we've had plenty of hurricane impacts in the United States and El Nino years and otherwise less active years. We've had major hurricane landfalls, the biggest killer in the last ten years, and tropical storms and hurricanes in this country, as is rainfall, flooding, which has very little to do with how strong storms are.

So even if you get weaker systems that don't go on to develop or even become a hurricane, you can still have significant rainfall, flooding impacts. So again, we try to keep people focused on the hazards. And, you know, we always say that it only takes one storm affecting you to make it a bad season where you are. And that's the message we put out there, regardless of what any seasonal forecast might say.

And best that we can, we try to re-emphasize that message as well. Yeah, only, you know, I think run from wind, hide from water. I believe it's something along those lines the other way around the run from the water. I hide from the wind. That's it. That's kept me. Thank you very much. But yeah, the water really is is the long term threat.

Regarding the outlooks, as you said, it only takes one. So a lot of people have asked, you know, what's what's the value in doing these outlooks? Yeah, I kind of say, well, it's a good exercise and in understanding the right and I imagine there there are other, you know, partners, if you will, that benefit like insurance companies. But who who else may benefit from doing these types of outlooks?

Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, there certainly it's a valid scientific effort because, you know, the more you understand about how the basin scale activity works on a season, you know, that may lead to better understanding of how things work on an individual storm scale. And then certainly, you know, utility in trying to predict these larger longer term seasonal the sub seasonal trends.

Yeah, there should be a tremendous amount of interest and overall hurricane activity in the basin from insurance companies to the maritime shipping industry. There's so much commerce that moves around on the waters that, you know, are affected by potentially all hurricanes, whether or not they, you know, ever make it to land or not. So, you know, in just general situational awareness, you know, there is benefit in saying, hey, hurricane season is about to start.

Here's what here's what we're looking at for this season. It's again, it serves as a really good reminder and sort of a big messaging boost to say, hey, hurricane season is coming, here's the outlook, here's how you can use the outlook, here's how you should use the outlook. You have to get into the details, use it the right way.

I mean, looking beyond the outlook, is there something in particular from a preparation standpoint that is concerning for you and this season in particular? Oh, every season you're you're worried about people being complacent. I think again, we've seen a tremendous migration of people in this country moving around the last few years. During COVID, after COVID, we've seen a lot of people moving to hurricane prone states from other places that may or may not be hurricane experience, may not know what the risk is.

I mean, I think that's that's always my biggest concern is that you go into hurricane season and people don't know what the risk is, especially if you live in a storm surge prone area. If you don't know, you live in a storm surge area and you might be asked to leave your home, then your whole preparation plan doesn't work.

You know, you have to know now if you're going to be asked to potentially leave your home in advance of a storm. So you can make that plan. Now, figure out where you're going to go, how you're going to get there, what you're going to take with you, all those types of things that you need to figure out now.

And I think just again, the complacency and the focus on potentially too much focus on how strong the storm is from a wind perspective now, you know, we think we can have tremendous storm surge events from so-called weaker hurricanes that they're big and slow moving, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, but also in other places. The rainfall threat, as I mentioned, has almost nothing to do with how strong a storm is from the wind perspective.

And those are the hazards that that really are the deadliest. And what we want to try to hit on as hard as we can. Yeah. Have you noticed any other kinds of long term trends in tropical cyclones slash hurricane development? And, you know, there's a little of the research I've seen that shows that, you know, they're holding their strength that farther north, their latitudes, perhaps that their their forward speed is beginning to slow down in the mean, which also lends itself to heavier rain and flooding.

Right. Do you see some of those trends even operationally? Or what could you speak to to those longer term trends? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in a warming climate, I think we're most concerned about increasing risk from the water hazards we know that with sea level rise, we're going to see more storm surge, worse storm surge and storm surge in addition, occurring and moving into places where it hasn't been experienced previously.

And you think the sort of the best consensus now is that by the year 2100, in some places, storm surge in a nation will be 2 to 3 feet higher than it is now. So you're going to have an increasing risk from surge, which puts more people in evacuation zones, which means you have potentially more people you have to move out ahead of a storm.

And the other thing we're seeing is the heavier rainfall. We're already seeing that in hurricanes and in non hurricane, extreme rainfall events are getting worse. They're getting more frequent. We know a warming atmosphere holds more moisture. And it really has to do with how hot, how fast that rain falls in a given area and what the previous, you know, soil moisture conditions are, how that runoff, you know, plays into effect.

And we know that that's going to be driving an increasing risk of rainfall, flooding as well. And again, rainfall, flooding is sort of the equal opportunity hazard. It can happen. And everywhere, you know, not just landfall locations, but hundreds of miles away, days after landfall and topography and urban areas. So that risk is is somewhat concerning. The other longer term trends are really less certain in terms of changes in storm intensity.

You know, how that will evolve in a in a in a changing climate. So we're trying to keep the focus on those those particular water hazards where we are more confident in how those trends are going to play out. And Mike, as you look ahead at the next five, ten, 15 years, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing the National Hurricane Center looking forward?

Well, I mean, I think we've got a few things. We've got an increasing risk and we have, you know, increasing population in hurricane prone areas so that even as our forecast are improving and they are the pace of growth, the number of people that we have to move, the amount of infrastructure along in hurricane prone areas is also increasing maybe even faster than the forecast or increasing.

So so we're in a race, you know, against population trends and exposure. That is that is that we're trying to keep up with. I think a lot of it is is again, messaging how do we get through to people about what the hazards are, How do we get people to take action? Because in many cases, the forecasts are good enough now with enough lead time for people to try to generally take protective action.

But we see that there are people you know, we know from social science, there are groups of people that are really hard to get to move. And, you know, when we see that play out in every event, you know, one of the great ironies is that the forecast information is so much better now, but people's but the way people consume information is so much more complex.

We don't know what messages they're getting or they're getting conflicting messages from a variety of sources. So we have to stay active in that space in whatever emerging communication trends and communication platforms that come up. And we can't leave the old ones behind either. People still watch local television, people are on social media, people are on Twitter, Facebook, other platforms.

We have to meet them where they are and we have to keep expanding into those new areas so that we can keep our voice out there and help sort of the hurricane community, you know, have everybody focused on the same message. And and I think those are some of the challenges we face going forward. Yeah, communication is such a huge part of the story.

And before we wrap up, just stepping back a little bit, you know, I think for many meteorologists, I know we have a lot to listen to this podcast. I think a lot would say that perhaps their dream job is to be the director of the National Hurricane Center. So was this your dream job and how can you describe the experience that you've had over the last while taking over this role?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a job I've been interested in for a while. So, you know, I'm not sure I ever thought I would get here. You know, when you start your career, you have no ideas about where it might go. And but, you know, things things worked out well for me. And I was in the right, you know, a lot of it just being having the right experiences and having being in the right place at the right time to to take advantage of opportunities.

But yeah, I mean, I'm just so excited to step into this role. There's so many things that, you know, I'm so proud of the staff that I lead at the hurricane Center. We've got just got immensely talented people that work there, and they're so dedicated. I think, you know, I think the National Weather Service in general has the best mission in all of government to protect lives and property.

It doesn't get any clearer or any more motivating than that. And I you know, the Hurricane Center has such a huge piece of that when it comes to tropical storms and hurricanes. And we've seen that play out. So many times over the last few years. And, you know, we learned lessons. Things aren't perfect. You know, there are challenges.

But I think we've seen our role make a difference so many times in these multiple landfalling events in the last few years. You know, it's just a reminder of how important the work we do is. And that's really motivating and inspiring and carries us forward into into the upcoming season. Yeah, no question about that, especially in this day and age with information all over the place.

You know, the staff of the hurricane of the Hurricane Center has been very consistent over the years. And I know as a member of the of the weather and climate enterprise, we're very grateful for for the work that you and all the staff do there at NHC before we let we let you go because we know you're busy, are there one or two other key messages you really want to drive home to the public, not just about the hurricane season in general, but things they really need to remember when they're taking in a product from the hurricane center.

I've tried to tell people the cone is important. Yeah, but look beyond the cone cone is that everything? There's other things going on. What other kinds of messages do you want to be sure to get out there? Yeah, that's a great one. The cone is kind of like the cover of a book. It's sort of a high level overview of where the center of the storm's likely to go over the next few days.

But it's not going to tell you about your risk from storm surge or rainfall or even necessarily tropical storm or hurricane force winds. There are lots of hazards associated with hurricanes. They're complicated events and that's what makes them challenging to communicate. You have different hazards occurring in different places at different times, and the scale and scope of those hazards can evolve during a storm.

So focus on the watches and warnings. Focus on what your local emergency managers or government officials are telling you to do in terms of evacuation and preparation. Listen to your find your trusted sources of information through the media, your broadcast meteorologists, your other, your other folks and the weather enterprise that you that you trust and make sure you're connected to them.

The other thing I want to touch on is after the storm safety, we lose almost as many people do, fatalities that occur after tropical storms and hurricanes as we do during the storm itself. A lot of these are due to accidents, electrocutions, heart attacks, carbon monoxide poisonings from improper generator use, you know, power issues, heat related fatalities. So when you're asked to evacuate in advance of a storm, it's to keep you safe generally from storm surge, but it's also to help keep you out of an area that might be completely devastated for weeks after where you're not going to have emergency services, You may not have power or water or medical equipment to to take

care of yourself. And a lot of these indirect fatalities disproportionately affect older people who may have mobility or health issues that that make them less resilient in the face of the aftermath of a significant hurricane. So we want people to stay safe after the event. We don't want to lose them. And in those days and weeks after the storm, for sure.

Mike, thank you so much. Before we let you go, working people find the hurricane Center online. Get real easy. Hurricanes, dot gov. That'll get you to the National Hurricane Center. If you go to Weather.com, that'll get you to your local National Weather Service office that we partner with to get the messaging all the way from the storm scale down to your community.

So that's that's where you can start to to search for information. Thank you, Mike. Good luck this season and good luck with everything out there today as well. And take care. Thanks, John. Think about wow, that was a lot to get into. And we did it in less than half an hour, which is a small miracle. But I'm so glad he was able to touch on the communications aspect.

He was able to talk about why these hurricane outlook outlooks are important. You know, the climate impacts, the real world impacts of the storm. And, you know, and this is something I hadn't thought that much to to discuss in my external communications map. But after the storm, how many people get hurt after the storm? I you know, I guess one of the things I thought of intuitively, but but I don't talk about.

Well, yeah, you know, I think there it often does get overlooked. So it doesn't surprise me that you brought that in because, you know, we get people we so we're so focused on getting people out of the way of the storm. And then after the storm passes, a lot of people who did get out of the way are very anxious to go back home, see what the damage is.

You know, what is the state of their house, get back there. But rushing back in after a devastating landfall or a hurricane or even if it's not that big of a hurricane, technically, maybe it's just a tropical storm that was over the same area and a lot of flooding. Think of all the flooded roads that are left behind.

You really don't want people rushing back in because it does lead to injuries. It does lead death. So, yes, it's the aftermath and the recovery from it as well. You know, the one thing that that stood out to me and I thought it was so great, you know, with the discussion about the forecasts going, the one comment he made is that the forecast cone is the cover of the book.

And I thought that was that was just a perfect way to phrase it, because the cone is not everything. Yes, it's probably the biggest thing. It's what you see the first and what everybody wants to see. But boy, there are a lot more details when you even just just glancing at the cone, there's a lot of details just on the cone.

But then it's really going beyond the cone and all the impacts that are not explained on the cone. And so really, that's why I don't want people just to think they see the cone and All right, I know what's going to happen. It's like you need to get into the details and find out all the information because you're not going to get everything from the cone.

There are a lot of details that need to be ironed out. So it's always like the cone is just part of the story. Make sure you get all the details. Yeah, I'm probably going to start to steal that line from him that it's that it's like the cover of the book. And you can't judge the entire book by the cover.

There is so much more to dig into. I think that is something we're going to see more and more as we go in the decades to come is as our forecast ability does get stronger to be able to resolve these finer structures within the hurricane. Because as you know, and we saw this with Ian last year that are one side of the hurricane, even if you're within ten or 20 miles of the eye wall is very different than the other side of the hurricane.

You know, you've got an offshore wind versus an onshore wind and the impacts are very, very different. So we have to remind people it's not a point. All the impacts are not within 20 miles. It's a beast. It is just the cover. This is just a starting point. We pay attention to all the impacts that come with storms like these, you know?

Well, you know, the other thing I think that's worth mentioning is that the 2023 hurricane season is already underway because there was a storm in January. It was just re identified. They did a post analysis, the National Hurricane Center identified a storm on January 16th that actually impacted Newfoundland and Nova Scotia with 60 mile per hour winds. Well, it turns out that was a subtropical storm.

So we've already even though it didn't get a name, it's already our first storm, the season. So we're already sitting at one storm watch already. So our first named storm is going to be Arlene. But technically when Arlene comes around, it's going to be the second storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. So it's no more about, well, when hurricane season starts.

No, it has officially begun. We've already had one storm. Yeah. And we remind people that even though hurricane season season starts on the 1st of June and goes into November, they can and do occasionally come outside of the season. But the core of the season is mid-August to mid-October. That's when you really need to to bring your awareness up to its its highest level is during that 8 to 10 week period there in late summer and early fall.

Okay. So with that, we're going to close up shop for this week. Big thanks to Michael Brennan for taking time with us, the director of the National Hurricane Center. We've got a few more things coming up in the pipeline. I know Joe's not here, but I got to plug his dog eating contest. So we've got that working. We also talked to Mike that is here in Richmond about sports betting and and especially baseball to a lesser extent football weather.

We're working on a couple of other climate e things I'm hoping that will come through more on those coming up hopefully next week or two but for right now Matt Holiner is in Chicago, meteorologist Sean Sublette in Richmond, Virginia, thanks for joining us for the Across the Sky podcast.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The number of billion dollar weather disasters in the United States has jumped in recent years. Lead Scientist on the NOAA quarterly report, Adam Smith, talks about how they arrive at those figures, what types of disasters are most expensive, and what part of the country is most vulnerable.

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About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hello, everybody. I'm meteorologist Sean Sublette and welcome to Across the Sky, our National Lee Enterprises weather podcast. Lee Enterprises has print and digital news operations in 77 locations across the country, including in my home base in Richmond, Virginia. I'm joined by my colleagues from across the sky, Matt Holiner in Chicago, Joe Martucci at the Jersey Shore. Our colleague Kirsten Lang continues to take a little time off in Tulsa for a few weeks.

Gentlemen, we've got a great guest this week. We've all heard about the billion dollar disasters report. Adam Smith from NCI. That's Noah. National Centers of Environmental Information is joining us to talk all about this, because this this is fascinating stuff. I mean, some of this can get very complex and deep into the weeds. So Adam does a really good job, I think, talking about how they come up with this data and why it's relevant.

Yeah. And most of us across the country have been hit by some billion dollar disasters since they've been tracking this year, going back to, I believe it was 1980. So it's something that probably has impacted you, whether you remember it or not. So we were happy to have Adam on in the end to drop his knowledge on us here for our podcast.

And really what caused us to reach out to Adam is when they came out with their report at the beginning of May, looking at just the for the first four months of the year, we've already had $7 billion disasters and that's the second most all time if they've started keeping records in 1980. And probably what's more remarkable is if you look at the average number of billion dollar disasters for the entire year from 1980 to 2022, it's $8 billion disasters in the entire year.

And we've already had seven in the first four months. So that is not what we want to see. But that's been the recent trend because if you look at just the last five years, 2018 to 2022, we've had $18 billion disasters on average. So in the last five years the average is 18. When you go back to 1980, the average is eight.

So there is a clear uptick in the number of billion dollar disasters. So we had to get Adam on that talk about, yeah, fortunately he was telling us so much of this was driven by a very recent uptick in tropical cyclones slash hurricanes. We also talk about the droughts. You know, there's long term drought that until this past winter has been plaguing the western United States.

So we get into all those things. We'll also talk about, you know, some of the intricacies of this and why it's sometimes the data is misinterpreted. So we'll get to all of that as we begin our conversation with Adam Smith at the National Centers for Environmental Information. And we welcome Adam Smith, visible scientist at the Climate Sciences and Services Division at the Noah National Center for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina.

He is the lead researcher for the quarterly Billion dollar Disasters Report, and he has been involved in the nexus of climate and weather risk for more than a decade. Adam, welcome and thank you for taking the time with us on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So I wanted to started at the big level because a lot of this stuff is kind of esoteric or for the home listeners, home viewers.

So take us at a top down level. Our is this kind of stuff quantified in terms of this disaster? Is this amount of money? This disaster is this amount of money? You aggregate this up. So at the bigger level, how was this done? So to do this type of analysis require is a broad array of public and private sector partners.

For example, the insurance and reinsurance industry, of course, even the catastrophe modelers also federal agencies like FEMA, USDA, the National Interagency Fire Center, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Energy Information Administration, and at the state level, of course, state agencies and management authorities, they have a lot of data pre and post disaster. And so we're looking at quantify in total direct losses across about 16 different asset classes using the combination of that public and private sector data.

So this would be insured, under-insured and uninsured damages to homes, to businesses, to government buildings like schools, the contents of all of these structures. Even time element losses such as business interruption or loss of living quarters. When you're out of your home lost, being repaired or rebuilt. But there's other assets even that the private sectors that often pay attention to as comprehensively, for example, public assets, roads, bridges, levee systems, even the Department of Defense, military bases, electrical grids are also something we look at as far as damage that's also a public private partnership and damage to to vehicles, to boats, to offshore energy platforms.

And finally, the agriculture sector, of course, is heavily impacted by heat waves, cold waves and drought. So we look at crops, livestock being calls that increase in particular with drought damage to commercial timber, often with hurricanes in the southeast and wildfire fighting suppression costs. So those are the 16 different asset classes that we have homogeneous data over space and time.

Going back many decades. That's consistently available. But it's equally important to know what we are not able to capture. So that would be things like non-market losses to environmental damage, environmental degradation, a natural capital, those type of losses, mental and physical health care related costs, which are likely substantial in the downstream ripple effects outside of a hazard region.

There's also not quantified, so you could say this is a conservative but solid baseline estimate. Another piece of the puzzle would be one of the first key transformations we make would be the reciprocal of the insurance penetration rate, which varies by asset, by region and by hazard. Because we're looking at hurricanes, severe storm events like tornado hail and high wind events, heat waves, cold waves, winter storms, wildfire drought and urban flooding and river basin flooding.

And some of those are very discrete events. And M.S., a day to day, three days like a severe storm complex or a hail storm. But some we treat more seasonal like droughts and wildfires because they're often slow onset events that get more impactful, particularly in the fall as the West dries out, as we've seen many times in recent years.

Hey, Adam, it's Matt. So looking through April of this year, there were seven confirmed $2 billion assets. But what I noticed is underneath that, you lost three more potential billion dollar disasters. And I'm just curious, what is the difference there? Why are there three additional ones that could not be confirmed yet? You have seven confirmed billion dollars of three additional ones that cannot be confirmed yet.

So what's the what does it take to become a confirmed billion dollar disaster versus these preliminary ones? Yes, that's a great question. This is this is a new feature we just added in recent months based on user feedback and requests. So that has to do with the data latency across all these different public and private data sources. We partner with the data latency, basically a fancy word for how long it takes a data to mature and stabilize.

That varies based on the size and the impact, the intensity of an event. So we like to probe. Probably one month is about the bare minimum for the smallest billion dollar disaster event, like a hailstorm in Colorado, for example, whereas hurricanes could take many months, you know, six months or more. As we've seen in Florida, often times the claims process continues and continues.

So this provides this section you're talking about the potential billion dollar disaster events. It kind of pulls back the curtain a little bit to say what events are we looking at as far as the data maturity that may be added to the list in the coming months? And correct me if I'm wrong, but if those three were confirmed, that would put us at ten through the first four months of year, which would be a new record because the current record is $8 billion disasters in 2017 and 2020, right?

That would be correct. So these are not yet confirmed, but if they were all confirmed, we would be on a record base. That's correct. I mean, I'm going to parlayed and said more of a, let's say, 30,000 feet view of this where we've been over the past couple of decades with these billion dollar disasters. And I'll note, I know you adjust for inflation so the numbers are accurate in terms of something in 2000 is the same as now.

But also furthermore, you know, where are we seeing what types of events are giving us our biggest increases and as are anything that we've seen, decreases that over time as well, a lot of these different hazards have had frequency and cost trends that are really going in the wrong direction in terms of they're getting worse for different parts of our nation.

So if you can remember, the last three hurricane season is 2020 through 2022 were quite active. I believe we had more Category four and Category five landfalling hurricanes on record in that period than most of what the record shows and heard. That and hurricanes to the point are the most costly of these extremes we measure and it makes sense are big, powerful storms.

So we have a lot of assets, a lot of population in harm's way along the Gulf Coast, in the southeast. We've also seen a lot of inland flooding events, urban planning events, more in the 20 tens decade than we had in the 1980s, nineties and 2000s combined. It implies, of course, we have more population, more exposure, but climate change is putting its thumb on the scale for some of these extremes, like heavy rainfall in the eastern U.S. As we know, the costliest flaperon equation, everyone see increase in temperature.

The water vapor increases and therefore it adds to the heavy rainfall potential, which we've seen. But of course, how we build, where we build the vulnerabilities there, the floodplains, those all go into the to the equations as well. But if we go to the West Coast, you know, we've seen four of the last six wildfire seasons have been pretty off the scale in terms of cost, really almost an order of magnitude more costly than the average wildfire season in place.

Yeah, just over the last four decades. Last year in 2022, thankfully, wasn't quite as bad in much of the West, with the exception of a few states like New Mexico and and some of the north central northwestern states. Yes. So so there's a lot of trends are going in the wrong direction. But what I like to highlight is, well, we can learn from this.

We can learn from one way wrong, what we can do better in the future because we know these extremes. We're going to continue with exposure, with vulnerability, with climate change, all in the mix. And so I think the key is to learn from them and to mitigate future damages. So looking at 2022, for example, the most costly events were a hurricane in impacted, you know, southwest Florida, but trapped across Florida.

And so it had the trifecta of impacts, a storm surge, the very high winds, but the flooding also well inland and really across Florida, many places that are not properly insured for flood insurance. And so that was in excess of 100 billion is is in the top some of the top most costly hurricanes on record. But I think that what sneaks under the radar a bit was the the drought from 2022.

It was very expansive and expensive from California to the Mississippi River. This was a $22.2 billion event, really is the most costly drought in the U.S. in a decade, dating back to 2012, which was a very impactful drought. We may still remember. So and drought also people focus on agriculture, aspects of the impacts of drought. But there's also the the the loss of hydropower in parts of the West and California in particular.

And as we know, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, they were dredging parts of the Mississippi River to help open up the flow because the low flow was reducing the commerce, the traffic up and down the river. So, yeah, all these impacts from an impact from an asset point of view and from a socioeconomic point of view are multidimensional.

And so we have to address our vulnerabilities. Yeah. Before we toss to break, I want to go back to the drought situation in the West because that is such a long evolution event. How our are you able to say, you know, well, this fits into this timeframe, You know, there's one drought or did the drought, you know, you know, we know it's a multi-year, almost multi-decade old drought or they ratification.

So how do you decide, okay, well, the drought we're going to fit into this quarter or this specific calendar year, How do you kind of get through that? For example, back in was the 2016 or 2017, there was like a flash drought that impacted North Dakota, South Dakota and maybe Montana, I believe. And it was a more bust, a smaller, isolated, but a very intense drought, you know, d3d for drought conditions, which are the most severe, but since the year 2000, what we've seen more often is just large swaths of the West with, you know, half a dozen to a dozen states that are heavily impacted throughout their growing season of their primary crops, anywhere

from D2 to D3 to D4 impacts. And a lot of the states are giving drought designations based on weather is data in the East or G-3 or higher in the West. And so we track, you know, using s and other great drought data and USDA crop insurance data. We track how the maturity of the the crop season correlates with the the drought intensity.

You know, often what we've seen is drought in Tennessee with heat in the summer and early fall will spike right when the crops are most vulnerable. And so therefore it amplifies the crop loss and the damages. Also, we see certainly for the larger area droughts and the long duration droughts, which we've seen much since year 2000. In the West, different states will struggle with wildfire cattle feed costs.

So we look at cost per ton for things like corn or hay, silage and just that the delta between that year's drought impact price increase versus the five year state cost per ton increase for those feeding commodities. So there's a lot that goes into it and drought is one of the more complex assets to to analyze for as an event.

Yeah, because everybody gets a little bit differently I'm sure. All right. So we'll take a little bit of a break. And on the other side, we'll dig a little bit deeper into the weeds about some of the pitfalls and irregularities and difficulties in quantifying this information with Adam Smith from Noah and CGI on the Across the Sky podcast.

Stay with us. And we're back on the Across the Sky podcast. Our guest is Adam Smith, the Noah National Centers of Environmental Information, talking about the billion dollar disasters, reports that that come out about every quarter. And I'm I want to talk a little bit about the methodology. So, you know, even when we adjust for inflation, it seems like growing population, that coincident increase in wealth development along the coasts, more people building on property.

How do you handle all those things in the report? Historically, inflation using CPI, you A-Z as a means for doing so is what we do, and we adjust that monthly based on the end date of an event or for drought. We use the begin date. But I think a fair question has come up in recent years about adjusting for things like housing population, other assets in harm's way, because we do know that people are moving to the south and the southeast in the west, which are really hot spots for different hazards hurricanes, severe convective storms, drought, flooding, you name it.

And so we are actually embarking barking this late summer into fall and looking at some of the different assets and trying to add some additional adjustments. We do actually normalize for things like population or state level GDP. In our mapping section, you can look at any combination of years, any combination of hazards, any individual disaster. Of the 355 separate billion dollar disasters over the last 44 years, you can look at state level analysis that does normalized by population GDP.

We just haven't taken that through all of the different pools throughout the entire site. But we're going to do more work on that front. I think one of the challenges, though, is a lot of the literature does talk about using, you know, population density or housing density as ways to normalize. I think that's a start, but I don't think that's a complete answer because we are looking at 16 different asset classes that are highly variables in terms of their spatial distribution, how much the concentration and the value of those have changed where they've happened.

So we really need to come up with a more robust strategy to deal with the normalization in a in a really comprehensive way. But we have partners at Treasury, federal agencies and academia that are also looking at similar questions. So this is an active area of research. And Adam know has been keeping track of these billion dollar disasters since 1980.

But it does raise the question of why 1980? So why is that the start point and could we look back farther than 1980? Is it possible can we try and calculate, well, how many billion dollar disasters that were in the seventies or sixties, or is there something that's preventing that? Yes, in 1980 when we started doing this work, and I think the reinsurance companies like Munich Reinsurance and Sports Reinsurance have actually looked back pre 1980.

But in the United States, looking at the public and private sector data, 1980 in terms of the beginning of a decade is really where we get the first consistent snapshot of the comprehensive homogeneous data over space and time. This was a good starting point. For example, I think the FEMA National Flood Insurance Program data really doesn't really get going until the late seventies, if I'm if I'm not mistaken.

But, you know, if you look at some really extreme events like tornado outbreaks, which we had many in the 1970s, because they were so impactful, they killed so many people, they were there historical events, you could do some analysis. I think the caveat would be pre 1980, the farther you go back in time, the larger the error bars would be in terms of the uncertainty of the data in the assumptions and the impact those assumptions would make on the analysis.

And so what got you interested in getting into these EO, registering these billion dollar disasters or even working within NCI memory? Always interested and, you know, climate and this kind of information. What what was your journey that brought you here? Yes. So I've worked at NCI since really beginning Charles in five. And this this was kind of a legacy project actually predated my time, of course.

But the way it was structured, the data that went into it was it was a comprehensive it wasn't peer reviewed, it was embedded. It was it was not quite as comprehensive as it could have been. So we spent probably five years working at mini partners, developing different data relationships and understanding and writing some papers, having conferences, and then kind of made it more robust and did a reanalysis.

But I think in terms of my involvement with it, I've always been kind of a, a natural interdisciplinary thinker. I like I like thinking in that problem space, chaos and uncertainty don't really scare me as much as it might other people. And so I think it's a challenge and it's in frankly, it's just interesting. It's fun to do.

And as we've seen over the last seven years, from 2016 through 2022 and 43, these billion dollar disasters have cost over $1 trillion of damage to the United States. It took about 34, 35 years from 1980 through about 2014 to get the first trillion before we got the second trillion in the last seven years. So the point being, you know, there's a lot at stake here in terms of understanding the spatial dimensions of impact, the socioeconomic vulnerabilities and trying to bring that as just one of many different federal data tools to help people unpack and better understand the a data analysis and our tools, not the be all end all.

There's been a proliferation of different tools, like FEMA's National Risk Index is a great one, but there's there's probably half a dozen in the last two years. So we're just trying to do our part. And it's a very it's an interesting and active space to research. Now, I have another question for for people who really are not overly familiar with this.

Adam, if you could kind of enlighten folks I know everybody's under everybody can understand what insurance is, but can you talk about what reinsurance is? Because that's a term that gets tossed around a lot that I don't think gets a lot of its a lot of explanation. So something like Munich Re Would you would you reference early what what is reinsurance.

So yeah, reinsurance is effectively insurance for insurance companies. It's it's when really impactful events like a hurricane Ian hits Florida and causes tens of billions of dollars of insured loss that's so impactful. And so far on the distribution potential as a rare event that insurance companies wisely back up their investments with paying for additional insurance, which are often global bodies like Munich Reinsurance.

Willis Reinsurance. But even the public sector, like FEMA's national Flood Insurance Program, has wisely recently started investing more and more in reinsurance layers to basically backstop the federal government payouts for flood insurance. Because as we've seen with hurricanes in particular, like Harvey, like Ian, like Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the costs quickly run up into the billions in terms of just the insured flood losses alone.

But the uninsured flood losses are several times often the the insured losses from these events. And Adam, of course, looking at the big picture, we're seeing the number of billion dollar disasters going up. But I wonder if we could dive in a little bit more and talk about regionally, what are these? Are we seeing a particular region that's seeing more events than in the past and also as far as that type of event?

So are we seeing a trend in the type of events that are causing billion dollar disasters compared to the eighties and nineties and what we're seeing now? So as far as types of events go in peculiar regions that are really seeing a particular uptick. So looking at the state scale, Texas, Florida and Louisiana would be the top three states In terms of the impact, yeah, Texas is close to $400 billion of total losses from these billion dollar disasters 1980 to present.

Florida is also close to 400 billion. Louisiana is above or around 300 billion. And you can dive into all this data online. But if you were to normalize that by population or state GDP, you would see Louisiana certainly has the most acute impacts because they have a much smaller population, much more GDP, economic size than either Texas or Florida.

And you can think back to 2020. We had, I think, four or five landfalling hurricanes make landfall and in Louisiana. So it lengthens and makes more costly the cleanup effort. But we saw the same thing last year in Florida with Hurricane Ian hitting. And then four or five weeks later, Hurricane Nicole hitting the other part of Florida and some similar counties had impacts.

So this is an example of compound extremes with cascading impacts. And we're seeing that in the Gulf Coast. We're seeing that in in California with wildfire seasons lengthened due to the kind of semi persistent drought. Thankfully, that a lot of that drought's been diminished early in 2022 from absolute rivers. But anyway, we go from drought to wildfire to mud flow.

Debris flows in the mountainsides from the burn scars in California. So you get this compound linkage that amplifies the impacts in the national Climate Assessment has has targeted this as a topic and really amplified and put a spotlight on it. So, yeah, certainly certain regions of the country are have been struggling in recent years in terms of high frequency events.

And in Austin, these events hit similar areas and populations and even places like Louisiana, people are actually moving out of parts of Louisiana because I think it's just it's just too much to deal with. One thing I kind of, I guess, struggle with my head is that, you know, we're having Morty's billion dollar disasters. At the same time, I feel like there's never been more importance on messaging and emergency management here.

Can you link the two? Because we would think that we're trying to be a more weather ready nation at that. That's a NOAA initiative, but we're still seeing Morty's billion dollar disaster. Yeah, I think that one challenges, as we talked about, people are moving of course, to different parts of the country, say they retired, they went to Florida or Texas and they may be from the northeast or somewhere in the Midwest.

Well, when you move to a new place, I think it's one besides, you know, picking out where your your your location, where you want to live, you need to know your hazard. You need to know your natural born abilities, what has happened in the past. And you have so many great resources at the federal level, at the state level, academics have have published a lot of great papers looking at, you know, where the extremes and hazards are.

And it's not one hazard. Often it's different, it's multifaceted. And so educating yourself in terms of what can happen, but also educating yourself and preparing in case if you are confronted with a high risk and you can actually act on it and protect yourself, your family, your business, your home, your assets. And so it does ultimately come down to the individual.

But I think there's, you know, certainly an education process and understanding and some responsibility. And it's at all levels. And we have more than enough events in recent years to learn from and better prepare and for future extremes. Yeah, for sure. We get all kinds of weather across this country for, you know, everybody gets it a little bit differently.

And before we let you go, I anything else you want to share where people can find this information online and anything else that y'all are working on that we should look forward to. One thing I did not mention is we worked in recent last few years with FEMA and Census, and we integrated as a county level in the census tract level a lot of socioeconomic vulnerability information and you can compare that with hazard risk or information and the billion dollar disaster information for your for your area, for your region.

Yeah, just type. Billion-Dollar Disasters or weather costs in Google and it will come up. But we have many different tools and we're always trying to expand and add more nuance and depth and usefulness to the tools we we're working on developing user reports, dynamic reporting, so that can be developed and you know, like a PDF, you could just take it with you and read it separate from a web page.

But there's there's just so much to do in this space. And there, you know, it's not just us, as many different research groups across the federal government, private sector and academia who are doing very valuable and important work in this area. Excellent. And again, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast and for all the work you're doing there, Noah, and give our best to you, everybody who's working there at Noah, NCI in Asheville.

A lot to take in there, guys. But I mean, Adam has been doing this for a long time and by that he admits that there's no perfect way to do this for sure. But, you know, I think it's clear that as the as the climate has warmed, we are more at risk. There are more people, there are more things at risk, there's more property risk.

And we're going to have to continue to guard against these kinds of weather. Sometimes are cold. Climate disasters are like environmental disasters. Kind of avoid avoid the political political nonsense with this stuff. But the end result, whether it's tropical cyclone, whether it's heavy rain, whether it is locally severe storms, whether it is the drought, flooding, all those things, we are more vulnerable than we have been in the past.

And Joe, you know, you brought up the weather resignation and how I do think, you know, we're getting better at communicating and keeping people safe from these extreme weather events. But what we can't do works for, you know, is when these hurricanes are making landfall or when a tornado is tracking across ground, we can get people out of the way of the hurricane.

We can get people out of the way of tornado, but we can't get their homes out of the way of these storms even there. And there can be preparations, you know, to make it. You know, we see people put a clipboard in the windows and such. But, you know, when it it's a high level event, there's going to be destruction.

And I think, you know, especially, you know, in kind of what Adam mentioned, too, there's a little bit of a concern that people are moving to these places that have more climate disasters. I mean, just historically, Texas, Florida, anywhere along the Gulf Coast, the population has really been rising in the south. And that's typically where we have more of these billion dollar disasters and they're happening more often.

So this is what happens. We end up getting more billion dollar disasters as people move to areas that experience more extreme weather. Yeah, and he kind of answered it when I was saying about, you know, emergency management and yeah, like we said, weather ready Nation. But to your point, you know, I mean I think Florida was the had been the fastest growing state since 2020.

So a lot of those are going to the coast. Real estate is expensive in Florida. I was just in Sarasota two months ago. Prices are going up over there as well. And that ultimately outstrip the the increase in these disasters, too. And with things like rising sea levels. Yeah, you talk about hurricanes, right? I mean, yeah, if you had 12 inches more of sea level rise in 100 years, well, you know, now that that hurricane that's coming through, you know, is going to be 12 inches higher, what your storm surge and that might go in an extra block and an extra block is an extra million dollars or real estate or whatever it might be.

So it's all these incremental things. And that's you know, we talk about climate change. A lot of this is coming in incremental steps. It's not the day after tomorrow where, you know, the Statue of Liberty is frozen in time. That that's how it is shown, right? Is that what happened? The Statue of Liberty? Oh, my God. They can't see me.

But I have the little torch in my head now. But what it is, you know, it's these incremental steps. It's, you know, hey, the water's now half a block up the street. This storm now it's a full block up the street. The next storm, you know, and those kind of things add up dollar wise and help create some of these billion dollar disasters as well.

You know, and there's a lot of focus on the, you know, tornado outbreaks and the hurricanes that are often the cause of billion dollar disasters. But you know what's interesting, I mean, so far this year, it's mainly just been some regular severe thunderstorm outbreaks, you know, that have been hail. People often forget about how costly ALA is. A lot of times people can get inside and you don't frequently die from hail.

You go inside, you're fine. But the damage the hail caused that's been real costly this year and just straight line wind damage, it doesn't take a tornado. You get 60, 70, 80 mile per hour straight line winds and that does a lot of damage. So you don't need tornadoes. You don't need hurricanes at billion dollar disasters. That's really been the biggest problem so far this year.

Yeah. Once that wind gets past 55 or 60 miles an hour, that's when we really start to see more physical damage to structures and the like. Gentlemen, I think that's going to be it for this week. But as as you know, and we'll let the folks at home know we've been working on another podcast next week. We're very excited to have the new director of the National Hurricane Center joining us next week, Michael Brennan.

I will be here to talk about some of the new products that they've got working for the for the new hurricane season starts June 1st. I talk a little bit about about his role moving from my home state of Virginia through the ranks. NC State and on the way to the as director of the National Hurricane Center So very excited to have Director Brennan join us next week.

Joe, I know you've been working on a couple other things that you want to kind of ease the audiences to some things I know you've been working on. Yeah. So we'll start off with we did a collab with Front page Betts on our Lee Enterprises family, so I had my said, Son, we're talking about sports betting and the weather and then we said it last week.

It's something of a personal hero of mine, George Shea, Major League eating Commissioner, coming out to talk about the Nathan's hot dog eating contest. That's going to be our July 3rd episode. Talk about SEO Shawn. What better SEO do we have than is putting out on July 3rd a podcast about hot dog eating contest and the weather. And I'll tell you what, I've been to the hot dog eating contest before.

It is definitely weather definitely makes a difference because I love having been there and seeing it on TV all these years. Those hot and humid days, just kind of hazy, different than those nice day for it's 82 degrees on the corner surf and still well in Coney Island, New York. Thanks. Thanks for that visual. I'll try not to have nightmares about it.

I appreciate it. While I think about it, I would just do it this way. I think we're gonna take the reins on this day by. But yeah, we got a lot coming up and you know, we appreciate everyone listening and subscribing. You know, over the past year we've only been doing this for like 13 months. It feels like we've been doing it forever, but I bet we've been doing for 13 months.

So really appreciate all of you tuning in. If you know someone who likes weather, if you know someone you interesting climate, tell them about it too. You know, we'd really appreciate it. That's a labor of love, to be sure. Go ahead. Go ahead, Matt. No. Yeah, we just started last April. I can't believe it's been over a year, but we are past the year mark.

We have over 52 episodes now. So with APA, if you are, you have plenty of material to go back and listen to. If you're new to the podcast, we have plenty of episodes of scroll back in our history and I'm imagine there'll be a topic at some point. You'll scroll past. You want to click on and we'll have more and more in the weeks ahead.

So again, thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening, Thank you for subscribing and don't miss our conversation next week with National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan on the Across the Sky podcast. But for now, I'm Sean Sublette, the Matt Holiner in Chicago and at the Jersey Shore, our buddy Joe Martucci, and this hot dog eating contest that will see you next time for the Across the Sky podcast.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Lee Weather team goes across the pond to Europe for this episode for a discussion about an unusual type of storm. They look like a hurricane, have nearly the same characters of a hurricane, and now even have names like hurricanes. Called medicanes, they're the Mediterranean Sea's biggest weather beast. 

The Lee Weather team speaks to Kostas Lagouvardos, Research Director at the National Observatory of Athens.

Lagouvardos has studied medicanes since the 1990s, is the foremost authority on the storms, and became the first person to name them. Naming is now done by the Greek government, similar to how hurricanes are named in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. 

After a powerful storm, Ianos, caused death and devastation in September 2020, his research published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society sparked more interest in the topic. 

We want to hear from you!

Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode!

About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Across the Sky podcast, Lee Enterprises National Weather Podcast. We are in 77 newsrooms all across the country, all corners of the country, but we are not talking about the United States today. We are going across the pond over to Europe and the Mediterranean Sea to talk about Medicaid. Sounds like a hurricane.

All north is like a hurricane, but it's what they see in the Mediterranean Sea. We are going to chat with Dr. Kostas legal bartels research director from the National Observatory in Athens, Greece. All about it. You know, guys, I was I'll get through the Bolton the American Meteorological Society. Shout out to the American Meteorological Society. They they do wonders for the weather community.

We love being a part of it. And I saw this this piece called Eno's A Hurricane in the Mediterranean. I said, Jesus said, you know, I feel like this would be a good podcast topic because a lot of us can relate to Hurricane. We've either been in one or we've seen plenty of it, you know, on our screens, but it's a little different.

You don't expect hurricanes in the Mediterranean and there's some differences. But Kostas is going to talk to us about those differences. You know, I think I think he did a good job explaining it. But I'll turn it over to my weather friends here across the country, Sean Sublette, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Matt Hollander over in the Midwest West.

I'll start with you, Matt, here. Did you know much about medications before this topic? No, not until you brought it up. I was like. Hurricanes in the Mediterranean, that that's new to me. But this isn't a new thing. And I would been doing like, Oh, no, these have occurred before. But the difference is it really caught everybody's attention in 2020 when they had an intense well, they actually reached Category two hurricane strength most of the time was going tropical storms.

There have been a few they've been a Category one strength. But a lot of times they stay out in the water. And so they're not impacts land. They tend to be weak. But that seems to be changing and that's what we're back. And I'm on the podcast because they had one that made landfall with category due strength. Then suddenly there are big impacts and it looks like there might be a trend that way in the increasing intensity.

So we might have to start paying attention to them a little bit closer in the future. And so you seem to know about everything weather at all time. You're you're the expert here of the three of us that did you know about it? I had heard of medications. One of the things that I'm not as well versed on is, is the formation of them.

I think we all understand what a tropical cyclone is. It's deriving its energy from from warm water. Right. But there are other kind of physical restrictions going on. You know, the Mediterranean Sea is smaller than than the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The geography is different. You've got you've got islands poking in from all directions. You've got Italy jutting southward from the continent.

And the other thing that that I wasn't well versed on either was how warm does the Mediterranean get? My own mind, I thought, well, it ought to get pretty warm. Does it get as warm as the Gulf of Mexico? So we talked a little bit about that. So there are some restrictions going on here physically. So those were the things that I was was most curious about, you really addressed those?

Well, I thought I think he he did a good job with this. You know, there is a little bit of a accent here. You know, we are talking to the Coast Guard who lives in Greece. But I'll tell you what, he knows almost as much English as all of us. And he Dupuy knows a lot more English than I know Italian.

So I'll give him credit to that. But fantastic interview. We're going to dive right into it here. Here is Coast us talking all about Medicaid in the Mediterranean. And now we welcome on Dr. Kostas Legal Bartos. He is the research director for the National Observatory of Athens and the Institute for Environmental Research in Athens, Greece. It is just about noon our time here in America.

He is joining us this evening. He's got to go to dinner afterwards, but we appreciate you coming on the podcast here today, Kostas, and talking to us all about Medicaid. Thanks you for thanks for the invitation. It is an honor for me to be part of this discussion and explain what's happening right. And we're very happy to have you.

And we're happy to go international, too, as well as as we talk about this. So we talked a little bit about this in the introduction, about the medications before we had you on here. But you know, the story that you focused on and your and your research study was called and I say in or. Right, you know, is that the right way?

Yes, I've got this. So you title it this a hurricane in the Mediterranean. And yeah, this storm was strong. I mean, you know, for people who are here in the United States listening, I mean, this took place in September of 2020. Unfortunately, four people died, 1400 landslides in two days from this. And maximum sustained winds were 98 miles an hour.

To give you an idea of how strong that is, that's like a Category two hurricane. So this was immensely strong. And I want to we will get into that storm. But from my understanding, you've been studying these medications since before since the 20th century. So for over 20 years now. So what got you interested in this is this little field of medications.

What got you interested in? I the thing is that is part of the major weather events that we investigate well above to investigate all you made the case, but also severe storms. So severe thunderstorms or even heatwaves because unfortunately, the heat wave also is a it's a it's a natural disaster. Then assignment either. But then they we got to the main event when I was young and I started my work in the observatory at the time, the first satellite images of Sandy was in 1995 and they remember it was it's very it's almost 30 years ago and it was happening.

Fascinating because it was like something was that something like as more hurricane at this moment in the middle of the Mediterranean? And it was one of the first made the game as we investigated the thing that I and then a lot of people were scientists. We do that in right and response Spain, Italy and Greece started investigating against and but now we have after this period of almost 50 years of a long track and investigating video games for many scientists in Europe and then with the running more of a grant do that that investigator that that we investigated in full and the last one because it was the big this happened was us it we

were we put a lot of in the V.A. because first of what was affected Greece and then because we we realized from the beginning of information that something might be coming next days. Got a little bit later on this one. And finally, was it the event after midday? And according to the wreckage, have so far because of the most intense with attack go to sustained winds if we begin to suffer symptoms.

Kate, were you in Greece when this was happening? What was it like actually being there? Yeah, I guess I got a question because we have three, three years ago in 2000, they have another one, similar one, which is repeated, smaller, less infamous. But it was a little bit peculiar because it affected more or less the same areas. Muscle north in Africa to Greece and then back to again south.

But this one was fine and it was very, very powerful watching for casualties in central place. And as you said, landslides flattened in many areas. Bay and wind. So storm shelters in the west of this that it's all over Italy, Italy and Greece. And so it was a good opportunity to because now have many, many tools to investigate of more satellite.

It will expand later on of the chance to cover groups up in like of a passing. This may be a very good models of many more surface observations you know that to follow the evolution of the middle game and see what what's happening and understand what's happening inside them middle the plane which is not it had a bishop note to them all.

And Kostas, to put things in perspective for our audience, what is the frequency like for these meditations? Like how often do they occur? How rare of a situation is this novel? More or less. Well, I know the two per year, the Mediterranean, most of them are the Western, but there are only two with Spain by that island, Sicilian, Corsica.

But also we have very little in Greece like are. It's very seldom the nonexistent to God awful but it being some decent other that I thought were outside groups and the Middle East and one or two per year with some of them are moving on over the water so there's not a threat for people or revolve how many islands that are so and affected and maybe things.

And then I have this shrine of sur continent of Greece that those of the islands these and if and probably the problems in this area and the but the two on one or two. But again the intensity of this all of these yeah. Not was something was never seen so far and maybe that that causes Sean here in Virginia.

So when we think about tropical cyclones here and the eastern part of North America, you know, we think about the classical hurricanes and how they can grow to such a large size, I imagine there they're going to be spatial constraints there in the Mediterranean. But are these exclusively will core tropical cyclones, are they hybrids? And the other question I have for you is a warm does the Mediterranean get during the warmest part of the summer?

Yeah. These are this mitigates their warm core shaking but they are not be finished with the hybrid games they are not interested so much BBC surface temperature of surface temperature than and it could go up up to 28 degrees but 6 to 8 but this not the the main mechanism a miserable cover up at low cold air aloft warming here of course the bottom have a flow of moisture from the sea surface towards the cyclone of condensation.

The release of Egypt will have a warm core, the yellow surface and so which they look like hurricanes, but the mechanism is not actually the same. The second one of the not the same size as diameter of the tentacle, where between one and 200 kilometers it's mean 1/10 of a big added problem besides a full develop. But for the size of the transmission, they that big enough.

But as I said before, we're not we don't have so far mindset of the end and a concrete definition of a video game. And also all the mechanism related events have worked very well to not because we don't have or the tools we need to investigate them and figure down the public have added anyhow all their plans crossing eye damage to make their measurements, the least drop zones and have on this mission.

Unfortunately, this does not exist but the Mediterranean. And so we rely on models, but also on satellite imagery which it. Yes. Oh yeah. Knows we're very lucky because you have the passage of from a US to Japan satellite the global precipitation mission Japan and have very very good snapshot 3D structure weather from the radar the ongoing satellite that will that are very very likely because you have a very good image from GPM satellite during the intense phase of of this maybe so you're really getting like you said, from satellites and you know, observational been on the ground here.

And you know, you kind of point out how crucial our hurricane hunters are and our aircraft is within the United States to track these storms. They provide, you know, a wealth of data every time they go out there. It's not cheap, but it's worth it to help, really. You know, like, you know, guys, you were kind of looking to get a full picture of the storm.

My question is, are there either government agencies or universities out there that are talking about getting some hurricane aircraft into these storms? Is that is that something is there a push for that over across the pond here in Europe, there is a great interest, but I don't think that we have an in mean we have some research airplanes in Europe.

Okay. But it's a little bit difficult to because the phenomenon is a little bit yeah that's a problem they give us or on CO2 per year they want to get it can have a good chance of group had an enemy became atoll but this is a problem but I think we have we must do it because we can also use this type of measurement also for normal low pressure system, but also that are not very powerful from meteorological bombs, that are not very dense, but also they up very high, sustained winter.

They can provoke problems in the but the the case we need data to better understand because any member of one of our work on the Pacific Oceans to provide for us the public and also to do the authorities get with the metservice. And I remember when we went to the last seven days and in the beginning was a cluster of thunderstorms on all the other on the coast of Africa and then we started the discussion according to the model, if these are going to be develop at big amid the or not, it's quite a limited similar with discussion of risk for job of a tropical depression coming from Africa.

If this we began to gain out of the after to do best and the to be honest it was inside us but in working with the preventative the day and then when we show from the satellite image digital that made the cables from this spiral of the clouds spiraling around the center of the cloud area, the middle like is more chaotic.

And then the second one, as I mentioned, which will be the path if this medication will affect Greece or not, which part? And it was then scheduled in the accused or this things because people were following forecast provided by Greek forecasters. See what we do copying the next one to this because started this municipalities were what we want in some case because something is there and it was present and like yeah of the world okay so like apocalypse issued with from Apocalypse Now the apocalypse were from for from there was up nothing is on my media but it was a based and the we have to put a plan that what will happen when they

maybe ten and make landfall to the western part of Greece south of but it will stay over the sea so there's no problem. It was a difficult situation from the forecasting point of view. And yeah, we still see challenges here in the United States with forecasting and messaging impacts. And, you know, we see these all the time. So it's a shared concern all across the globe.

It sounds like you're worried again, some more about Medicaid's here. We're going to take a quick break and we'll come back to you on the Across the Sky podcast. All right. And we are back here with the Across the Sky podcast. New episodes every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts or on your favorite newsroom's website, here we have Sean Sublette.

I'm Joe Martucci, Matt Hollander. Here we are here with Costas Overdose from the National Observatory of Athens and Greece. We were talking about medications. Matt, I know you had a question to Leah, and also I'm going to kick it over to you, buddy. What do you got? Yeah, I want to know what you know kind of goes into the preparation for these storms.

Obviously, they're not super frequent, but they do occur. So I kind of want to know what the attitude is for people who live along the Mediterranean and maybe how it's changed some now that we've had a significant one that hit in 2020. So kind of describe the the level of preparation and the attitude the folks along med during a had before and after that storm it comes to these medications.

Yes well I, I think that the I.R.A. changed the mentality of people against the were speaking about natural disasters in general because it was something we was being it because for casualties some cases become more than for casualties for now for example see years ago from supercell thunderstorm said casualties but the as you understand and this is not only the number of casualties, but also the extent of the event was covered most recent, not so big in many, many places.

So I think many people remember in loss and this big both again those and that as in as I would say as yeah a fed for the future that we discuss a little bit later on that but the risk and this kind of oh this weather is weather should be strong Nike air knows we be sampling of the future will be more frequent.

This is not true but we will discuss a little later on them. But I talk because it was a long process. You have this formation of the last one of the class and the formation of the initial stage of the meditation, and there was a that many discussions to focus this to the public, what will happened. And there were some corporations I they think that we avoid the many problems, especially in the western part of the island, because it was a preparation for this, for this because it was a September mid September, which is for still a tourist excursion of many tourists about boards on sailing boards or vacation homes.

And but they were avoided big problems and maybe a lot of casualties because we have a good preparation of this or this event. But for many people, this was admitted, Jane, and that is shameless with any pain. It gave it gave them the fear that something very bad and this fear made them more precautions and they took some precautions.

Had we avoided many casualties, mainly due to this cell room, when you have a but something very bad will happen. And as we understand, because a lot of discussion that we it's something I would be game something like American pretends like we like in the Atlantic we try to expand that this is not something different. It's violent, but it's more and it's something that I've read that show that when we have some kind of event there and as you said with the wounded, Jeff admitted, what is it that goes into the focus?

I want to ask about the name. So you had an ear nose here. How are the who is naming these storms? A We started in the observatory to give names to storms in 2017. And the mayor the name and that was given by okay, by myself and as the head of the group of well let me project that the lives of my daughter.

So we fought to the same strategy, if we name it, many names alphabetically. So we gained to I. And so again, everything. Yeah, not with Latin down and I think it was a good name that after that this is a little they gossip but they will tell you that that we're here for that. Yes. When we started giving names, some colleagues from the National Metservice, they were not very they said that is not very common in Europe.

But they are doing that. And. Yes, but but Europe. And we should know giving names for big storms is something that helps people to be more prepared to guess the problem. And but the one year ago they decided to follow this procedure and they started giving names by themselves. And that's one of its every is now giving names for storms in Greece.

But we paved the way, I think, and we started we make this initiative give names stops. And I think it's it's proven that it's good not only for us because we remember the cases, because for the general public, we're giving names, providing them with an event people pay attention to this event. This sounds a lot like winter storm naming here in America.

I don't know if you're familiar, Kostas, but the National Weather Service does not name winter storms. However, the Weather Channel does. So it's a little different. You that's where you. Yeah, it all talks about. So, you know, you're a university and it's the government. So it's a little different than a private in a public service here. But it's kind of amazing how quickly the the government took over the naming.

I don't know if it happens that for ideas of naming in the beginning, because I have some colleagues that I think do the social media good Facebook. What why are doing it that it's not in America and the we tried to pressure them but this is something good and finally they understood that and they started naming this storm this as well.

But we said, no, we're not have but what he meant because they make it go region but gave we stepped back and say okay go ahead you name the but the main idea that we have to use us flew with us on autumn storms I think the most correct got it Yeah I'm totally on board with that. So let me ask you this.

As as the awareness of the systems has has risen a bit over the past few years, and we know that that the climate is warming. What do you kind of foresee or what does the science tell us about these storms taking shape in the Mediterranean in terms of their frequency or intensity potentially in the years or even decades to come?

Before that, we have a look what's happened the last 30 years, and we see that we're coming frequency of not a month or two per year with no significant trend decreasing or increasing. This is because you have measurements. And then to compile the climate projections based on high resolution climate models. And we have some colleagues from other countries that make some publications and they show that over the next decade the frequency will not increase or decrease, but the the intensity will and we expect maybe the same number, not better, but a year of gains.

But maybe we'd be deaths at high temperature if I say surface temperature and the we see. But that's why understand that these projections, it's something that they can work up because one will do. But more powerful and more powerful. This one and this one was category four both in were three. And this would be a problem because the major parts of this minute gaze out over the sea bass.

But I spoke of many islands of the meter down in those of people living there, and especially people navigating more ships from one island to gather that these would be a problem. But the have bigger and smaller, stronger, more dense made the gains. But I believe that the using them modern technology, satellite and more sophisticated ones that would be able to provide much forecast for the path and the intensity of them into the future.

And coast us. I think I think we'll leave off with this. I have one more question for you. Have you spoken with the National Hurricane Center here in America about this topic? Have you had or even just any conversation with them? Don't know that it may be too late. It's a mistake from my side, from our side to do that.

In fact, you make last thing. I think that it's a fascinating topic and it's a great it's not good to say fascinating, but something that these people can make a lot of fun disaster. But from a broad scale point of view, something that you which is very affected and will ever things and they were happy as I said before we'll have new satellite will provide data that 20 years ago was unthinkable and so this is good for the future because I think that mainly with more towards small rural remote sensing data and and metrological models will be able to better understand the mechanism of the mitigation, therefore, but to mitigate what caused us.

Thank you so much for joining us here on an evening for you. I know you're going to dinner you so enjoy dinner, but we appreciate the information about medications. And have you ever make it over to the United States? Give us a call. We'll do something in person. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks again for the kind every patient.

Okay. We're very happy to oblige. And thank you very much. We're going to take one more break while some closing thoughts on the Across the Sky podcast.

Thanks again to Kostas for coming on. It was fantastic to never want to walk around our schedule here a little bit. Now we have a seven hour time difference between the East Coast, the U.S. and Greece. But we thank him for his knowledge. And you know, I know it was a little funny at the end where he was like, I was the one who decided to name the storms.

Yeah, he kind of that set off a trend where we're now the equivalent of the National Weather Service or the National Hurricane Center is issuing names for these storms. So a heavy hitter in the weather world, really, if you put it that way. What did you take away from this? Matt? Yeah, it would be cool if I could name a storm that that bad does so.

And he said, that's like, Oh, actually I named. I was like, oh that's, that's pretty cool. I got, I got to give credit there. But you know, the other thing that stood out to me is that, you know, in the communication realm, like people do like the names of these hurricanes and then there's a debate on if we should be naming the winter storms or not either.

But I think that might this is probably coming up in discussion because of the intensity. And that's what was interesting, because it kind of follows what we're seeing in the Atlantic, too. There's some uncertainty about the frequency. It doesn't seem like there's a steady trend and an increase in number of storms that we have had some active seasons and the elastic.

But what the climate models are telling us is that what does seem to be like is an increase in the intensity. And that's why they had the first one ever make it to Category two strength before. And really that's what really matters, because if these things are weak, then it's not a big deal. But when they're tense, that's when the impacts go up.

So if there's an increase in intensity, even if the frequency doesn't go up, that means there's the bigger potential for impact. So it's definitely going to be something that I think people are going to be keeping our closer eye on as we move ahead in the future. Yeah, I agree with that. Most of the most of it is is intensity more than frequency, right.

If you think back to to the basic thermodynamics of it all, you know, you are going to have warmer water and so you are going to have more fuel for we're not just any tropical cyclone, but do you think Extratropical or these hybrid storms sometimes are called subtropical storms. They're still getting energy from warm water. So I do think there's something to be said for that.

And they're going to put down heavier rain and you've got some pretty some pretty steep terrain there and the islands and right around it in the Mediterranean. So, you know, flooding, flash flooding, mudslides, those things are still going to have to be to be dealt with in the years and decades to come. Yeah, I think he said it was about, you know, every I think what do you say how in terms of frequency bout or a year is that what he said.

Well, I think he said maybe a couple a year, but you know, two, three, four That's that's still not a lot. No. Like in the south, like here in the Atlantic basin we're typically looking at at least ten or 15 of something every year. Yeah, right. Exactly. And there's multiple countries is expanding to beyond Mediterranean. So it's not that often that one country is seeing, you know, just Medicaid come on through here.

But, you know, thanks again to Kostas. We went international with this one and we'll try to bring some more people around the globe to you on the across the sky podcast. So coming up, the hits keep on coming here. So next week we have Adam Smith from NOAA's National Centers of Environmental Information to talk about weather disasters, billion dollar weather disasters to be exact.

We have a big fish for the 29th episode. We have the director of the National Hurricane Center. We also have might that is from front page bats that's in collaboration with us at Lee Enterprises. Talk about sports betting and baseball as well. And then I am super, super, super excited for this one. Now, this one's not going to be able to third, but we have Jorge Jay from Major League eating the Nathan's hot dog eating contest, a personal hero of mine in some ways, the biggest hype man on planet Earth.

We're going to have him come on to talk about the hot dog eating contest and the weather. So we really try to bring you everything weather related on the Across the Sky podcast. I think we might be the most diverse weather podcast out there in terms of guests, I don't know, Sean, and maybe you agree with me or not, if we're talking about Major League eating, yeah, we've reached a new level.

That's what it's going to be an interesting one. We add some kind of level. There's some kind of level we've reached there, but I'm not exactly sure how I would describe that level. Right. We'll leave that. We'll leave that to you. The list we will leave that to the listeners to decide what level you have aspired to or sought to.

When we talk about a hot dog eating contest, that that's right. And as we go into July where we believe here's the link. We'll be back with us to from paternity leave as we as we welcome her back. And she's doing very well with her two new baby as well. So I want to wrap up on that note and we will be back with you next Monday with Adam Smith.

Take care, everybody.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It might not rain or snow in space, but our solar system is pretty active.

Auroras are inspiring, but the conditions that cause them can impact our planet and technology. NASA Ambassador Tony Rice discusses space weather, and how bursts of solar energy can impact aviation, agriculture, and the electric grid.

About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hello, everyone. I'm meteorologist Sean Sublette and welcome to Across the Sky, our National Lee Enterprises weather podcast. Lee Enterprises has print and digital operations in 77 locations across the country, including my home base in Richmond, Virginia. I'm joined this week by my meteorologist colleagues from across the sky, Matt Holiner in Chicago and Joe Martucci in Atlantic City and all across the Jersey Shore.

Our colleague Kirsten Lang is taking us through a few weeks off to be with family and fellows. We've got a fabulous guest this week, our buddy Tony Rice, a Nassau ambassador. We go to him for all things about astronomy. We've had all the Aurora talk recently, so we're going to get into that and all things space, weather and space weather is something that it's hard to explain.

I mean, it's what's going on the sun and how it affects what's going here on Earth. But it's not it's not weather the way we think of of weather. You know what I mean? Yeah. There's no seven day forecast that you put out with the high and low temperatures on this stuff. But it's about the interaction of the, you know, proverbial world around us and the worlds around us.

Right. Jupiter, Mars, Neptune, they all have their own types of weather. In this case, we're talking a lot about the sun and how the sun, you know, and its interaction with the air or lack thereof, you know, whether it's Earth or in outer space and how it impacts us. So. Tony, Tony, also, we should say Sean has been on a number of our podcasts.

He has given us the astronomy report usually towards the end. So we are we're happy to have him and actually speak to us for more than the 60 seconds, you know, a little blurb he has. So we have a whole half hour with him and I think everyone's going to enjoy it, you know, if you like space, I think most people do.

NASA's always rates very highly as the government organizations with high favorability ratings think. You will like this podcast episode. Can we get. Yeah, I've really enjoyed Tony's astronomy reports. I always enjoyed that segment. As always. Is going out with something that's just super interesting, you know, whether it's something to look at in the sky or talking about the auroras.

And so like we knew that just off those little minute segments that he does, the guy is just fascinating. We've got to bring him on, do a whole episode with him. And that's what we did. And sure enough, it ended up being a pretty fascinating conversation. Yeah, we're going to so we're going to jump right into it from auroras to space, weather, radio, blackouts, all that stuff.

Here's our conversation with NASA Ambassador Tony Rice. Our guest this week is Tony Rice, NASA ambassador, which means there's a lot of education and outreach about astronomy and space science. Tony, thanks for taking some time with us on the Across the Sky podcast. It's good talking to you again, man. Yeah, it's been a little while since we've run into each other.

I appreciate the invite. You bet. You bet. Before we get into all the good stuff, Auroras gpps a coronal mass ejections can you explain to the listeners what what a NASA ambassador is? So it's a volunteer program through NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and it dates back to the Galileo probe, actually, and was an outreach program that was started on that.

It's really expanded a lot. And what we do is just basically try to get people interested in all the cool things that are happening in the sky. And there's ambassadors all over the country. So if you are a meteorologist, a broadcast meteorologist, go on the JPL website and look for NASA ambassadors and reach out to your local ambassador, especially if you're a teacher or a scoutmaster or, you know, anybody that's that's working with formal and informal education.

Reach out to your local ambassador and they can bring some really cool resources and resources and and and share some really cool things, not just about astronomy, but about all these cool missions that are happening right now that are teaching us so much about the universe. There is so much the Auroras have gotten a lot of press recently and with good reason, and I do want to get into those.

But first I want to step back about the cause of the Auroras in the first place. We know Earth has this, you know, magnetic sphere and it bends and particles and stuff like that. But I want to go back to the sun first, kind of where where the energy is coming from. These come from things called solar flares, coronal mass ejections.

Can you tell people what the difference between those two events are? They're very much related. And when we we think about the sun and we we take a glance at the sun when it's directly overhead or especially when we see it down on on the horizon at sunset, it looks very static. It just looks like this this orange disk, you know, there on the horizon.

But the sun is a very, very dynamic thing. It rotates like our planet rotates, too. So we're keeping an eye on all this dynamism that's going on there. You might have heard of sunspots. We probably heard of some of the solar flares. You mentioned coronal mass ejections. There are all of these things that are going on there that when they reach a peak, when they reach kind of a critical mass, they can create events that are very much going to impact us here on the earth.

So a sunspot is actually a cooler spot on the surface. I'm using the surface very, very generously because this is, of course, the boiling hot gases there on the on the surface of the sun, that cooler spot. All this energy is coming up from the center of the sun. Hello, everyone. I'm meteorologist Shaun Sublets and welcome to Across the Sky our national Lee Enterprises weather podcast Lee Enterprises has print and digital operations in 77 locations across the country, including my home base in Richmond, Virginia.

I'm joined this week by my meteorologist colleagues from across the sky, Matt Hollander in Chicago and Joe Martucci in Atlantic City and all across the Jersey Shore. Our colleague Kirsten Lang is taking a few weeks off to be with Stanley And Fellows, we've got a fabulous guest this week, our buddy Tony Rice, a niassa ambassador. We go to him for all things about astronomy.

We've had all the Aurora talk recently, so we're going to get into that and all things space, weather and space weather is something that it's hard to explain. I mean, it's what's going on the sun and how it affects what's going here on earth. But it's not it's not weather the way we think of of weather, you know what I mean?

Yeah, there's no seven day forecast. So you put out with the high and low temperatures on this stuff, but it's about the interaction of the, you know, proverbial world around us and the worlds around us. Right. Jupiter, Mars, nothing. They all have their own types of weather. In this case, we're talking a lot about the sign and how the sun, you know, and its interaction with the air or lack thereof, you know, whether it's earth or in outer space and how it impacts us.

So, Tony, Tony, also, we should say Sean has been on a number of our podcasts. He has given us the astronomy report, usually towards the end. So we are we're happy to have him and actually speak to us for more than the 62nd little blurb he has. So we have a whole half hour with him in. I think everyone's going to enjoy it, you know, if you like space, I think most people do.

That's always rates very highly as the government organizations with high favorability ratings think. You will like this podcast episode than we get. Yeah, I've really enjoyed Tony's astronomy reports. I always enjoy that segment. History always is going out with something that's just super interesting, you know, whether it's something to look at in the sky or talking about the auroras.

And so like we knew that just off those little minute segments that he does, the guy is just faceted and we've got to bring him on, do a whole episode with him. And that's what we did. And sure enough, it ended up being a pretty fascinating conversation. Yeah, we're going to so we're going to jump right into it from auroras to space, weather, radio blackouts, all that stuff.

Here's our conversation with NASA Ambassador Tony Rice. Our guest this week is Tony Rice, NASA ambassador, which means he does a lot of education and outreach about astronomy and space science. Tony, thanks for taking some time with us on the Across the Sky podcast. It's good talking to you again, man. Yeah, it's been a little while since we've run into each other.

I appreciate him invite You bet. You bet. Before we get into all the good stuff, Auroras gpps coronal mass ejections. Can you explain to the listeners what what a NASA ambassador is? So it's a volunteer program through NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and it dates back to the Galileo probe, actually, and was an outreach program that was started on that.

It's really expanded a lot. And what we do is just basically try to get people interested in all the cool things that are happening in the sky. And there's ambassadors all over the country. So if you are a meteorologist, a broadcast meteorologist, go on the JPL website and look for NASA's ambassadors and reach out to your local ambassador, especially if you're a teacher or a scoutmaster or, you know, anybody that's that's working with formal and informal education.

Reach out to your local ambassador and they can bring some really cool resources and resources and and and share some really cool things, not just about astronomy. What about all these cool missions that are happening right now that are teaching us so much about the universe? There is so much. The Auroras have gotten a lot of press recently and with good reason, and I do want to get into those.

But first I want to step back about the cause of the Auroras in the first place. We know Earth has this, you know, magnetosphere and it bends and particles and stuff like that. But I want to go back to the sun first, kind of where where the energy is coming from. These come from things called solar flares, coronal mass ejections.

Can you tell people what the difference between those two events are? They're very much related and when we we think about the sun and we we take a glance at the sun when it's directly overhead or especially when we see it down on on the horizon at sunset, it looks very static. It just looks like this this orange disk, you know, there on the horizon.

But the sun is a very, very dynamic thing. It rotates like our planet rotates, too. So we're keeping an eye on all this dynamism that's going on there. You might have heard of sunspots. We probably heard of some of the solar flares. You mentioned coronal mass ejections. There are all of these things that are going on there that when they reach a peak, when they reach kind of a critical mass, they can create events that are very much going to impact us here on the earth.

So a sunspot is actually a cooler spot on the surface. I'm using the surface very, very generously because this is, of course, the boiling hot gases there on the on the surface of the sun, that cooler spot. All this energy is coming up from the center of the sun. It's got to get its way out and it makes its way around that cooler spot.

And there's a lot of magnetic forces that are happening at the same time on the sun. So it's going to follow those magnetic lines. The energy is strong enough. It can follow those magnetic lines upwards and creates these kind of ropes, almost looks like twisted rubber bands. And we're talking a scale of of several several Earths long, huge, huge scale.

And as those ropes continue to twist back on themselves, they can snap. And when that snaps, there's a bunch of energy that is released in something called a coronal mass ejection. And it's going to push the the normal amount of solar wind that happens all the time. Just that energy and the particles that are being pushed out by the sun just by continuing to burn its fuel, it's going to push it out in a much more violent fashion and and create some of the effects that I'm sure we're going to talk about here in the next couple of minutes.

Okay. So so again, so how is that a little different from a flare or That is a flare. Yeah, that's the flare in a coronal mass ejection is a very significant flare, we'll call it. Okay. All right. Very cool. Just continue to walk us through the process here because we have this huge it's a big pulse of magnetic energy, right, that's coming towards Earth.

Right. And so the Earth's magnetic field is helping to drive these auroras. But what would happen if the Earth didn't have that magnetic field? Well, we'd all see auroras, that's one thing. And we'll talk about why the upper latitudes are the ones that see them most often. If the magnetic field didn't exist, we'd all see auroras, but also all of you would be out of a job because we'd have no atmosphere, there'd be no meteorology, we'd be Mars.

And that's one of the big things about all the talk we have about going to Mars that sometimes gets glossed over is Mars doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere. It's like 1/100 out of earth. And the reason it doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere is because it does not have that magnetic field that we have here on Earth. So pitcher, pitcher, Earth now pitcher, a big now shot.

You'll appreciate this because I'm going to use a Southern reference. I think you've got it up there in New Jersey. You know, I don't know if you've been blessed with it yet in Chicago, but pitcher giant Krispy Kreme donut, really big earth sized. Okay. You're you're in good shape, though. Yes. So picture a giant Krispy Kreme donut surrounding Earth.

And we're down in that hole. That is the shape of the magnetosphere, roughly. It's a Taurus. It's this donut shape. And it's not perfectly shaped because that solar wind actually causes the the backside of of the donut to stretch outward. But anyway, so as the solar wind is coming in and all that energy, all that magnetism and the charged particles and all of that, it's being deflected away from particularly the lower latitudes now, the upper latitudes that magnetosphere is, as the name suggests, it's magnetic.

Those particles can follow those magnetic field lines down into the donut. And as it moves farther down into the donut, that's when we start to see more effects of it, such as the aurora. So, you know, we had this big Aurora event just about what day was. I believe it was April 23rd going into the 24th. That's Sunday night.

And here in New Jersey, we're about 40 degrees latitude, you know, north latitude here. We did actually get to, quote unquote, see the aurora. But many people, I think, were disappointed that they couldn't see it with a naked eye. You can only see it with a long exposure camera at least in the southern part of the state where I am.

Tell us about in that specific event, how far south could you have seen that Aurora, both with and without the naked eye? Because it really captured the attention of the country that Monday. This was a naked eye event farther up into the upper latitudes. So let me ask you this one question. The pictures that you saw, that long exposure that you saw, was it overhead or was it closer to the horizon?

It was closer to the horizon. It was in Wildwood in New Jersey, which is actually about just about 39 degrees north latitude, if are really splitting hairs. But I did actually get a report, Tony, up in the far northwest corner of the state, about 41 degrees latitude that you could very faintly make it out with the naked eye there, because I'm wondering if that was about what you heard of across your findings over the over that day.

The most beautiful pictures I saw were actually taken near Asheville, North Carolina. So it did. Visibility was that far south. But again, those were long exposures, long exposure photography can create some some really amazing images. It's worth pointing out that all those beautiful space images that we see, whether it's taken with something like the James Webb Space Telescope or any of the amazing images that we can see taken from the ground.

Almost all of those are stacked images. They're long exposures and many, many, many of them dozens, sometimes hundreds of them stacked on top of each other because it's just you see things when a photon of light hits your eye and there's just not that many photons that are available to you when it's something that far away. If I ask about where you saw it and relative to the position in the sky, what you were seeing there in New Jersey was probably directly overhead, much even closer to the Canadian border.

These things are happening very high up in even past the stratosphere. So when you see something that low on the horizon, you know that you're actually looking quite a bit farther away and that's the reason it appears so low. Also, keep in mind, you know, I mentioned looking at the sun directly overhead, how very bright it is now we can look at it when it is sunset because we're looking through 40, 50, 60, 80 thicknesses of atmosphere there.

So when you see it on the horizon, it's so very much dimmer because you're looking through so much more atmosphere and that's causing those photons not to make it to your eye. We'll make it to your camera lens. And your camera lens can have a whole lot longer exposure than your eye can. So you're really up against the distance there.

And I'll just say to Tony, this was that long exposure camera was also taken by a fellow Narsa and Vasser. His name is Chris Bagley, who's over here in Cape May County. And it was a phenomenal photo he took. But I appreciate the insight into that because I was curious to know, and that's not something you can walk out with your iPhone and snap a picture and not the right kind of images.

Take a lot of practice to get to do right. It's beyond me. I really lean on a lot of friends that are really into that to get some of those incredible pictures that I share myself on Twitter and other places. And Tony, with this most recent bill, was there anything for us to be concerned about? Of course, you get these wonderful images and everybody gets excited about seeing something.

They usually don't get to see. But then the other thing that usually is associated with it is the buzzword, a solar storm. So was there any danger to anywhere in the planet with this most recent and what kind of a solar storm would we be talking about to really cause disruptions and problems? Aware? Yes. Concern, no. And the word solar storm, it aligns really well with we'll call it terrestrial meteorology.

Y'all are not the only ones making predictions out there. We've got our Space Weather Prediction Center, also run by Noah. There's watching these kind of things. Nothing to be concerned about there for most folks, but these kind of impacts, you know, when we see the additional auroral activity and see it that far south, the reason it is making that far south is because it's diving deeper into that donut that I was talking about.

It has the energy to push further south and that additional energy does create some additional risk for particularly something like an airline pilot or even the passengers that would be flying in one of those polar routes. I know there's a lot of polar routes that are flown out of Chicago into some of the Chinese destinations and and in other parts of of Asia, Airlines will delay and sometimes even forego a flight that's going polar.

There's following the polar route when there is a solar storm that is predicted because of the increased radiation exposure. So disruptive for the airlines. What about a communication? You know, as far as like GPS communication, satellite communication, does it interfere? Could there be a solar storm capable of disrupting cell phone signals for, for example, you know what? What would it take for that to happen?

Or is it not possible at all? Probably the cell phone signals, because most of the impacts are happening in the upper atmosphere. There are two areas you mentioned. One of them, GPS is one high frequency communications, particularly the ones that the airlines use when they're flying over water, when they don't have towers near them, they will communicate using high frequency radio.

It's up to individual planes to report their their positions to each other. Some of that's done via satellites as well as signals can be disrupted by solar storms because of of what these storms due to the atmosphere, they can make the upper atmosphere denser. They can make it more lumpy. And that's going to introduce errors into the GPS signals that could cause a blackout for a period of time.

And we've got to remember that in today's world, Gypsies isn't just something we use to get to the grocery store in our cars. It's critical to aviation. It's even critical to agriculture. So many of the tractors now are driven by GPS and they're they're planning things and they are they're they're watering their fertilizing based on down to the centimeter level of accuracy.

And when that's lost, you know, farmers are parking these tractors for a period of time until the solar storm threat is over. Yeah. I want to talk more about those when we come back after the break. But before I toss to break, Tony, one other question I want to just to get out there is about the colors of the aurora.

I mean, you know, my understanding is that, you know, you have high energy particles. They're coming into the atmosphere. They slow down and they and depending on what the is, once they release energy, it comes out in a photon of light. Is that a belt? Right, Or is there something a little more accurate about that? That's that's a pretty good way to describe it.

Another way of thinking about it is we've all seen fireworks and there's different colors of fireworks. It's different elements that are reacting in the upper atmosphere. In the case of the aurora. And those are the elements that are a part of the atmosphere itself. All the the sun is contributing here is the energy and the charged particles. And comparing that to fireworks, the fireworks themselves are made up of different elements so they burn different colors.

Is green nitrogen or oxygen. I get them mixed up. I don't have to look it up in my head. That's fine. That's why we have Google. All right. So we're going to take a quick break. And on the other side, I want to talk more with Tony Rice, our NASA ambassador, about space weather and some of the other issues that space weather presents with for life here on Earth.

So stay with us. We'll be right back with more on the Across the Sky podcast. And welcome back to the Across the Sky podcast. I'm here with NASA's ambassador, Tony Rice, talking to all things auroras and space weather. One of the great things or resources that we do have, Tony, is the space weather Prediction Center. And this is part of part of Noa, right?

They do all of our our terrestrial weather gathering or data gathering. You go to the the WPC Noa dot gov site and you see space weather conditions. Okay, this is great, but you see r. S g which is, you know, radio blackout, solar radiation storms, geomagnetic storms. What's the best way to interpret what those three categories are and what they impact and impact is?

The answer. Each one of those areas has a different impact or has a different area where the impact is felt the most. So you can have a green condition on R for radio blackouts and a red, yellow or red condition on the SE component of that, which is solar radiation. They want to reduce R for for obvious reasons, and that's going to be looked at by somebody like an airline differently.

Okay. So there's no radio blackout conditions expected in the next 24 hours. So that's green. So all of my transatlantic flights are probably okay. Their high frequency communications are probably not going to be impacted by anything. Solar, though. The solar radiation right out there is is showing a yellow or a red. I might want to rethink some of those over over the pole flights that we were talking about earlier.

And then the G is stands for geomagnetic storming. That's how much of a risk that we might see in the next 24 hours of a geomagnetic storm occurring. Now when we see that go above a green, that's when we start looking for auroral activity. So some of these things have some positive connotations and some of them have some negative connotation.

When it comes to the aurora. All right. So so to follow on that, we know that the higher energy storms are going to produce broader auroras and they do have the potential to do some damage. So I'm sure you're familiar with the term Carrington event. Oh, yeah, definitely. Without getting too deep in the weeds, that was a very, very, very bad solar storm that took out power grids and what the late 19th century, I think it was, or early 20th century.

I forget exactly what. So here's the thing. For those of us who study disasters, is that something we should really worry about? Is that is that something we should kind of have in the back of our minds? There's so much stuff to worry about nowadays. How much do we need to think about solar storms and electrical grids in this day and age?

And now anybody listening to this podcast probably doesn't need to worry about it. Again, awareness, not concern. But right now, you know, go to your pile of bills and go look for the power bill. Get that name of that power company. That power company has somebody sitting in it right now or maybe their parent company or somebody is overlooking their power grid, is probably sitting in a mission control type room with lots of really pretty maps up on the wall with with projectors showing them.

And probably one of those maps is coming from the Space Weather Prediction Center. And there may be another image of the sun that's coming from one of the the NSA assets. And we can talk about I'd like to talk about it. Some of the instrumentation is out there that helps us do these predictions. They are worrying about this and they are very interested in the kind of forecast that the Space Weather Prediction Center is putting out so that they can get ahead of any solar storms that are coming that might create a Carrington event.

And I wouldn't worry so much about a Carrington event. These kind of events are very much like floods. They're very much like hurricanes. They come in different strengths and there's hundred years events, there's a thousand years events that kind of thing. It's all about risk and probability. So you mentioned the character of it. That's probably the biggest one that we have on the books.

You know, that there was a a power grid failed back in 1989 because of a solar storm. Hydro-Quebec, their power grid, which serves both Ontario and upstate New York and some other areas, well, it went offline because of a solar storm. Now we've got a lot more assets up there in space that help us watch for these things.

We've got things like the Space Weather Prediction Center that Noah runs. There's a space weather group at Natural Resources Canada that's keeping an eye on these things. So long winded answer, you don't need to worry about it because there are people that are definitely on top of this. Okay, So that makes me feel better. But yeah, do tell me a little bit about about what we have up there in orbit to monitor.

I mean, I've heard of Soho, I've heard of a couple of other things, but what other one of the craft do we have up there to monitor? What's going on in the sun? So it kind of comes down to, to measurement techniques. It's really not that different from, you know, anything else in meteorology or a lot of other science.

There's observation and then there's in-situ measurements. It's actually measuring the solar wind and its components as it passes that spacecraft. So we do monitor the sun from the ground using optical instruments and watch it for things like counts of sunspots. That's where these things happen. So we want to stay on top of that. And we do watch it with a couple of NASA assets, specifically Soho and Stereo, which are they're looking at the sun 100% of the time.

Soho in particular is really interesting because it has a camera on board that creates what they call an artificial eclipse. It is covering up the brightest part of the sun at all times so that it can watch the atmosphere around the sun called the corona. And that's where we see things happen. That's where we see these coronal mass ejections as they occur.

We see changes in magnetic fields around the sun. But the the instruments aboard the Solar Heliophysics Observatory are really, really important because they don't eclipse the sun. They are looking directly at it. And those are the ones that we really want to see, those kind of CME, those coronal mass ejections, because those look like they call them crown events, they call them Halo events because you see the circle of of influences this this ball of energy gets pushed out.

And what you're seeing is it's coming right at us. Those are the really, really important ones. Those are the ones that are going to possibly impact Earth. This means they can happen anywhere on the sun. And keep in mind, this is all happening in three dimensions. So some of those CMEs might be directed directly up, not in Earth's path, but it's those ones that are directed directly at us that are a problem.

So I mentioned some of those in situ measurements. There's really two instruments out there, two spacecraft that we use to to measure those things. One is ACE, and it is all about the solar wind. It's measuring various components of the solar wind, the the density of it, the temperature, the polarity, the polarity of the magnetism at that point can impact how deeply that energy is going to make it into that donut that we've been talking about.

But the really important one is Discover, and that's a joint NASA's NOA mission. It's located out at L1. So there's a couple of Lagrange points. There are points of balance, really great place to put a spacecraft because it's the point of balance of gravity between the sun and the earth. L1 is where discovery is. It's between the earth and the sun.

And we've also got the James Webb Space Telescope is one of the other points we can kind of think of these like buoys, buoys out in the ocean that are waiting for that solar wind to pass over. And until that solar wind and or CME or all those charged particles that the sun is spit out, wash over that that discover spacecraft, we really don't have a super good idea of what is about to hit us and can't really make really pinpoint predictions or descriptions of what that is made up of again, until it passes over that.

So less than a day's warning is a way to look at it, too, because it's about a million miles out, which is not a whole lot when you're talking the the distance between the earth and the sun. Real quick, before I toss it to Matt, let him go. So if we can detect one on the sun, at least we see something's out there, then it has to pass the Lagrange point.

And then we have the final warning. But what? How fast is the solar wind going when we have one of these CMEs? Is that I mean, it's not light speed. Obviously they vary. Yeah, it's a couple of days. I mean, what is the variance in these and the speeds of these things? The fastest ones can make it to earth in about 15 hours and the slower ones, four or five days.

And that's part of of what is what's one of the components of the of the predictions, you know, based on what we're seeing during that event optically through Soho or Stereo or SDO. And Tony, you mentioned the word Eclipse. And immediately in my mind I'm thinking the next total solar eclipse next year, next April. You know, I happened to see the one in 2017.

I got in the path of totality and it was absolutely incredible. It's one of those moments that I'll just never forget. It is literally one of those moments. You can't overstate it. It was truly amazing. And so I definitely want to check out the next one because I want to repeat that feeling in that moment of awe. So what can you tell us about next year's total solar eclipse?

Well, I think that's a whole show right there. We should come back and talk about that because I've got some some some tips and tricks from folks that that go out to see every one of these because it is very dependent on the weather, on what kind of experience or what experience you're going to have at all. So we've got two coming up, actually, we've got one in October, and that is going to be an annular solar eclipse.

It was just an annular eclipse a week or two ago that was visible down in Australia. And actually eclipses occur when the moon is just far enough away that it can't completely cover the sun. So you're left with a ring of fire around. That annular eclipse is going to run from Oregon down through Texas. And when you're thinking of will be April of 2024, that's going to run through Mexico, into Texas, go up through kind of the Ohio Valley and then out to the Canadian Maritimes.

So we can have a whole long discussion about that. It is it is impossible to overstate how cool a total solar eclipse is. I totally agree with you there. And I think, yes, we're going to have to have a follow up episode as we get closer with lots of tips and tricks. Right. To take advantage of and maybe also how to deal with the traffic, because I would also mention the last one, it was incredible traffic, their early plan to stay late.

That was really the only advice. So yeah, I think we have another episode as we get closer to that event. Joe, what do you have? Yeah, so it's not so much about eclipses, but I'll keep on on on the sun here. So I sort of we have an increase in solar activity and we'll continue to see that through 2025.

What does that mean in terms of auroras or, you know, anything for Earth in general? We're probably going to see more auroras and farther south. Not only is there an increase in activity, the storms are getting more energetic, so they're punching further south into that donut, which makes them visible further south. So the event we saw a couple of weeks ago that was described as I forget on top of my head, I want to say it was 100 year event.

You know how that works with floods. Just because it's 100 year event doesn't mean it's not going to happen for another hundred years. We're seeing these things happen more frequently. The sun runs on a 11 year cycle. It's called the solar cycle, and we see an ebb and flow of the number of CME as it's counted based on on sunspots.

You know, we're seeing more sunspots than we expected for this point in the solar cycle. We're coming off of a solar minimum a couple of years ago, and it'll be a little while before we reach that solar maximum where we see the maximum number of sunspots across the surface of the sun. But, you know, like I say, it's outperforming.

We're seeing more sunspots than than we expect. What that means in the big picture of things, that's for heliophysics just a whole lot smarter than me. And they are absolutely studying these things and seeing the papers come through fast and furious. It's something that's definitely worth keeping an eye on for many of the reasons that we've talked about today, the impact that space weather can have on us.

Very cool. And then I think I got the last question here, so I want to circle back to what would happen if Earth didn't have this magnetic field and you were talking about Mars. And I'm wondering in regards to developing Mars, colonizing Mars, what can be done? Yeah, we don't talk about how much money it'll take, but what could be done to actually make Mars habitable in regards to not having any kind of real magnetic field?

Yeah, I've seen a lot of proposals thrown out there. You know, everything from, you know, bringing the atmosphere with us to purposely creating a greenhouse effect by releasing a nuclear weapon and punching a bunch of dust up into the atmosphere. I think this is me speaking. I think the the thing that makes the most sense to me is probably going underground.

It's probably using the soil itself as that tool for blocking the radiation. Now, standing here on Earth, everybody, you know, whether you're you're taking a flight to London or you're just working at home like all of us have done for the past, what seems like decade, we're getting the equivalent of a chest x ray about every 20 days.

Now that's ten times more just on a normal air flight. If you ignore the space weather prediction centers warnings during one of these events and you do fly over the poles, that's 100 times. It's many, many, many times worse than that on the surface of Mars again, because of that lack of a magnetosphere. So protect the lack of an atmosphere is a problem unto itself.

But that lack of a magnetosphere is something that's going to have to be addressed. There's know you just can't stay there very long without succumbing to some sort of radiation sickness. Very cool. I do not know that. I'll appreciate the info, Tony. Anything else? Anything else you wanted to share before we before we close up shop this week?

So you mentioned the Space Weather Prediction Center. And I really encourage everybody to go out and take a look at that. It's it's WPC dot note, dot gov, the home page. You're going to see some of those letters that that Sean mentioned there. Your first click needs to be dashboards and the the one that is going to give you information about if you hear that there's Aurora coming, click on that Aurora dashboard and you'll see the maps that show the prediction.

And it's this big green blob and it's the prediction over the next couple of hours of when Aurora might be seen. Note that red line there, the red line that is beneath that green blob that is your horizon line. You know, if you're above that red line and look to your northern horizon, you might be able to see it.

Some of the other dashboards that are there that are worth looking at are the space weather enthusiasts. That's kind of got a bunch of of different readouts from some of these satellites we talked about. But click on some of the others Emergency management, aviation, electrical power, global positioning. This will give you an idea for how these things are being looked at and what the impact are to these these various areas.

Now, what the electrical power dashboard is probably on the wall in that mission control and your local power company that I mentioned earlier. So it's a great resource. There's some media and resources. There's some videos that Noah has created that talk more about this and educate more about the different components of space weather. Tony, thanks so much, man.

We're working people find you on on social media. And to learn more about about the stuff you do so I'm RTP. Hokie okay. Eii well, proud Virginia Tech alum where we're at very well. So I'm RTP hockey on Twitter. And you can also reach out to me through JPL, through the Solar System Ambassadors website there. And if there's any broadcast meteorologist listening, I love to get in touch with you guys and visit with you and try to get some of this information out so that you can spread it out to your communities as well.

It is always good to to let people know what's up in the sky. That's kind of our mantra here as well. Tony, thanks so much for joining us. We are absolutely going to have you back in front of the 2020 for solar eclipse because I'm going to go see it. I just don't know where. Yes, Texas. That's what I'm thinking, because I don't want to be in a place that's going to be climate illogically cloudy.

So that. Yes, sir, for sure. I thought we all said we were staying at Matt's mom's house in San Antonio. Yes. And we agree on that. Yeah. I might have to make a trip back home. We might have to clear out some extra space and make room for a few other people. Are we going to let Tony go?

We'll be back with a few more closing thoughts on our Cisco podcast. Looking beyond the atmosphere, here's Tony Rice with your astronomy outlook. No Space Weather Prediction Center forecasted another moderate geomagnetic storm this past Sunday evening. You might have noticed that these tend to be coming a little more often, prompting to wonder what's going on. You know, it's a very natural upswing that we see every solar cycle.

A solar cycle is an 11 year ebb and flow of activity on the sun. It's measured by a count of sunspots. Sunspots are cool spots on the sun's surface that all that energy coming out of the core must root around. And this creates some stress on the magnetic fields, causing filaments and prominences many times longer than the Earth is wide to either fall back onto the solar surface and be reabsorbed or sometimes break, causing coronal mass ejections or CMEs.

The last solar minimum was in late 2020 when nary a sunspot was visible, ending solar cycle 24 and beginning the current solar cycle of 25. It's not a puff of white smoke that announces the next solar cycle, but a flip of the sun's magnetic fields. The sun's north and south poles switch. Over the next five years or so, activity increases until solar maximum is reached.

Along the way, you'll see more coronal mass ejections, solar flares and all that other space weather that the WPC keeps an eye on. Though most of the spacecraft and methodologies used to drive those forecasts are relatively new. The technology to monitor those sunspots has been around a long time. And when you look across the 400 years of records that are available, there are cycles that appear within those cycles.

Solar maximums have tended to get more maximum for a couple of solar cycles and then less so for a few more solar cycles. Interestingly, they also tend to vacillate between big solar maximums and then smaller solar maximums. Keep in mind that these are separated by 11 years. The patterns.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It was a remarkable winter in the western United States with phenomenal snow and heavy rain. Now that things have quieted down, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain joins the meteorologists to discuss what's next.

What will happen as all the snow melts? What will this year's wildfire season be like? Will the atmospheric rivers return next winter? It's a deep dive into all things weather and climate across the West on this week's episode.

About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hello, once again, everybody. I'm meteorologist Sean Sublette and welcome to Across the Sky, our National Lee Enterprises weather podcast. Lee Enterprises has print and digital news operations in 77 locations across the country, including in my home base in Richmond, Virginia. I'm joined by my meteorologist colleagues from across the sky, Matt Holiner in Chicago and Joe Martucci at the New Jersey Shore.

My colleague Kirsten Lang is taking some well-deserved time off in Tulsa for a couple of weeks. And guys, we've got Daniel West on the podcast today. A lot of people know him as Weather West. Why are you shaking your head at me? Daniel Swain. Okay. Daniel Swain. Daniel Swain. He's Weather West. Yes. You all knew where I was going with you?

Of course. Of course. Without a doubt. Without an end. And he's great. I mean, I've done some work with him when I was with the Climate Central. He's just got a wonderful, wonderful grip on what the weather and the climate are in the western part of the country. And it's really, really nice. Yeah, well, you know, Shawn, it's a good follow up from last week's episode where we talked with Donnie down at the Placer County Department of Public Works about all the snow that they plowed.

So we have the boots on the ground with your last episode with Donnie. This time we're taking it from the academic perspective and the forecasting and a look back perspective with Daniel Swain. So it's a good one two punch as we really exit out of the cool season, and then we promise we'll talk about warmer and more summery things as we go forward over the next couple of.

Yeah, this is a real interesting conversation with Daniel because he's just, you know, really focused in on the West. And I think oftentimes, you know, as meteorologists in the central and Eastern part of the country, because it seems like a lot of the time there's not much going on in the West, so it doesn't get discussed much. But, boy, this winter was truly the exception.

There was lots of talk on the National level about what's going on out west. And, you know, it kind of like shifted a tinge. It's like, wait a minute, I thought the you know, nothing happened in the West. It's just constant, never ending drought. And wildfires. Well, this is this year was the proof that you can't forget about what's going on our way because it's not going to be drought all the time.

It's not going to just be wildfires all the time. They're still going to get big rains. They're still going to get big snows and look at the impacts that it cause. And of course, Daniel is tuned in with the West all the time and is aware that it's not this drought going on out there. So he was the perfect person to bring on and really dive into.

This is a fascinating discussion. Yeah, it really was. We're glad to have him. So let's cue it all up and get our discussion started with Daniel Swain there at UCLA. And our guest this week is Daniel Swain, climate scientist at the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at UCLA and author of the popular Weather West blog and YouTube Channel.

He has been featured on numerous digital and legacy broadcast outlets talking about weather and climate in the Western U.S. And we are absolutely delighted to have Daniel on the podcast. It has been so busy, I know for you, Daniel. Thank you so much for joining us on the Across the Sky podcast. Thanks again for having me. Glad to be here.

I do want to talk about some of the big picture items down the road, but first, let's talk about immediacy. These next, let's say 1 to 3 weeks there in California, of course, with the phenomenal amount of snow. Everybody kind of gets that. But now it's starting to melt and we've got kind of a hot spell actually developing.

So what does this kind of portend or kind of lay the groundwork with regarding flooding there in California in the coming, let's say, one, two or three weeks? Well, I think you've nailed most of the key points there. But it's I think it's worth digging into a couple of them because, you know, California, just to review, you had an exceptionally wet winter in the central part of the state, which includes the southern half of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and really phenomenal amount of snow accumulated tens of feet at the higher elevations in these places.

And so currently the water stored in that snowpack in the southern Sierra is on the order of 2 to 3 times the average amounts, a 2 to 300% of average, which in some places in the far southern Sierra is the largest amount ever observed at this point in the season. So there is a huge amount of water up there, the vast majority of which is still yet to melt.

And all of that melt is eventually going to end up in rivers and streams that drain, mainly down the western slopes of the mountain range into California's Central Valley and the San Joaquin Valley and Tulare Lake Basins in particular. So all of that water that's up there in the mountains right now, a snowpack is eventually going to make its way to lower elevation areas and probably given this heat wave that's going to ramp up later this week.

So a lot of that's going to melt sooner rather than later. Can I get you to talk a little bit about to Larry Lake? I've just become aware of this over the last three or four weeks. I did not know that there was an actual lake there decades and decades ago, but there has been a change. So what is that all about there and about what part of California is that?

Yeah. To every lake is or was I guess was and perhaps will be a maybe is the best way of putting it given what's going on right now the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. This is quite a substantial body of water in the southern San Joaquin Valley of California. It was indeed a century or so ago drained mainly, so it could be used for agricultural purposes.

But but also a number of people now live within this historic lake bed, which is sort of maintaining itself in most years from becoming a lake again by having lots of levees and dikes and conduits, artificial interventions to keep the water away, essentially. And in recent years, recent drought years, you know, flood risk has been far afield. People haven't really been thinking about it.

But now that we've got got a very wet winter in this part of the state, now that we have this enormous snowpack upstream, a lot of that water is accumulating in this basin and there is no outlet to the ocean and to very lake based and of the flooding gets very severe and it spills over the top of the basin into the San Joaquin River.

The water that flows into Tillery Lake Basin, it it stays there, it accumulates. And so all of that we're hearing about all this flooding, that water isn't going to by itself just gradually drain out to the ocean. That water is just going to sit there and continue to get deeper as more and more water flows in. You know, so one challenge in addition to all the water that's flowing in from snowmelt and rain this past winter, is that the ground itself has subsided, literally sunk in the Tillery Lake Basin in recent years due to groundwater pumping during severe drought.

So we're actually seeing probably flooding that will be deeper and more prolonged here in this wet spell because of the drought conditions that just ended and the human response to that drought being to pump all this water out of the aquifers, the ground has sunk in some places by ten or more feet. So this is not a barely measurable thing.

This is you know, I'm I'm six foot four and the ground has sunk by, you know, considerably more than my height in recent years. That's going to affect the flooding in ways that are, I think, hard to predict from the outset. Yeah. Before I turn this over to Joe, I know you want to go next, but can you give us a little more idea of how big this lake is?

I'd say compared to someplace like the Great Salt Lake. Is it about that size? Half of that larger just for some kind of frame of reference? Well, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but, you know, it's it's the challenge is it's, you know, this especially this type of lake doesn't have a fixed size.

During the great flood of 1862, for example, much of the Central Valley all the way from the southern San Joaquin up to the northern Sacramento, I mean, that's 250, 300 mile stretch that was contiguous, inundated. It actually become one giant freshwater lake, almost 300 miles long, encompassing areas that are now home to millions of people and most of California's agriculture industry.

So, you know, if you measured it, then it would have been, you know, a truly enormous body of water. If you measured it last year, there's zero. It didn't exist. So it's you know, we often think about about bodies of water as these dynamic fix things. And that's that's almost never the case. But it's especially wasn't true even in its natural state for 244 to Larry Lake this was something that waxed and waned greatly from year to year before human intervention.

It has done so less since we drained it. But in the big years it's going to come back. And this year, you know, to very Lake is making a big time reappearance. Hey, Daniel, it's Joe here. I want to take a step back and get into your initial interest in weather here and maybe extreme weather. I know you went to, I believe, UC Davis for your bachelors and then got a Ph.D. from Stanford.

What drove you to be interested in whether there are any getting into the subset of the field that you're in now? Well, I was always a bit of a weather geek, maybe more than a bit of a weather geek, too, if I'm being totally honest. So actually my initial my undergraduate degree is in atmospheric science. So I actually specifically wanted to to pursue, you know, being a degree program that would give you the credentials to become an, you know, an operational meteorologist day to day weather forecasting.

And so I do have that degree. But then at some point in this process, I realized, you know, I'm still really interested in weather, but the big societal and scientific problems that are really interesting these days really seem to be sort about this weather climate nexus. So, you know, I'm really fascinated by the day to day variations in weather.

I enjoy cloud watching and watching storms and things like that. But also, you know, and that's where the societal impacts come from, right? Like climate change is affecting all of us. It's affecting ecosystems everywhere. But exactly how is it doing? So usually it's doing so by changing the envelope of extreme weather events, you know, shifting the range of what's possible or what's likely from what it used to be.

And so it turns out that this is kind of a niche that's underdeveloped or is certainly have been for for decades, where weather scientists, meteorologists and climate scientists were kind of siloed from each other. They're kind of viewed as different disciplines. But it's always struck me as a little bit odd because it's the same atmosphere and it's the same physics and chemistry.

There's this different time scales. And so, yes, you often use different assumptions, but I think that that separation has perhaps been too strict and too rigid. So I live a little dangerously and I mixed my my weather and my climate. They are different things, of course, But you know, what is climate? But the the you know, weather in aggregate, that's something I often like to say, because it's not just the average of weather, but it's also the extremes of weather.

It's it's the swings in whether it's the variability, too. So for me, that's sort of that that weather climate nexus is what really I think fascinates me. And now that I'm you know, I'm a climate scientist who has a background in meteorology and really thinks about climate change from a weather weather up perspective, if you will. Hey Daniel, it's Matt.

And going off of that, I kind of want to take a step back and look at the bigger picture because there's been a lot of buzz lately, of course, about all of these atmospheric river events and the improvement in the drought situation, even the removal of drought, particularly in California. But when you look at the big picture, I think what's getting lost a little bit is people think that the West is now completely drought free and that's definitely not the case.

In fact, in some parts of the West, there's still some extreme drought, not in California anymore, but other parts of the West. And so what can you say about, you know, the longer term trend? Yes, we had this really wet winter and there was improvement in drought across the West, but is this going to continue? Are we going to go back to drought?

What can you say about the general western U.S. in general and the outlook for drought? There is an important point because this has been, of course, a good water year in California and actually across much of the lower Colorado basin, which is the area in crisis because of the very low levels of flow on the Colorado River and all the big dams you hear about Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and sort of the the growing crisis there with water scarcity.

This, of course, helps in the short term in these places where, you know, there's been a good snowpack in the lower Colorado basin, there'll be better inflows into these reservoirs this spring and summer than there have been in recent years, that's for sure. But it certainly, as you say, it doesn't solve the long term problem because this really took decades on the Colorado Basin to develop.

So one good year certainly doesn't erase decades of accumulated water scarcity. And in California, I think the situation is a bit different because a lot of California gets its water for more local watersheds. So the northern two thirds of the state sees water mainly for the form of local reservoirs and then also snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada. And here, you know, the drought, I think it's fair to say, has broken.

But there's this broader question of what drought means in a warming climate, I think, which is really actually quite an active topic of research and conversation, because it's not entirely obvious. And a lot of what's happened in the West isn't so much because of lack of rain or precipitation, but it's more just that temperatures have been so much warmer in recent decades than they were in the 20th century that the evaporative demand, literally the thirsty ness of the atmosphere, its propensity to act as a giant sponge and extract water out of the landscape as it increased.

This is known as the increasing vapor pressure deficit in technical terms. And what it does is it just extracts more and more water out of the landscape more quickly. And unless you're seeing more precipitation than you used to on average, which were not, then there's going to be an accumulated deficit over time. So it's not just a question of the low precipitation years, but it's also a question of the high evaporative demand years, which increasingly have been almost every year, both the wet precipitation years and the dry precipitation years.

So what does it mean in a warming climate to have individual episodic wet periods? Do they completely counterbalance the accumulated, increased atmospheric sponginess, if you will, all the rest of the time? The math really doesn't pencil out because you'd need to get a lot of extra precipitation for that to be true. And we're not seeing a lot of extra precipitation now in California in particular.

And that is probably true to somewhat lesser extent in most of the West. We don't just expect to see drying in the future. In fact, in California, the hydro climate signature of climate change really appears to be increased variability. We call it increased precipitation or hydro climate whiplash because of how it kind of feels like to just wildly swing from dry to wet and back and forth.

And this again comes from that that sort of that that basic thermodynamics of the atmosphere, that increased atmospheric sponginess, as I mentioned, goes both ways. It both increases the atmosphere's ability to extract water out of the landscape. Think of a you know, a larger and larger dry sponge soaking more and more water up off your counter and you still a glass of water or something.

But on the other hand, that progressively larger sponge, once you've soaked up that water, you can wring out more water too, in the form of more intense precipitation. So in California, the signature really seems to be more of both, more of the very dry conditions on the one hand and more of the very wet conditions on the other.

And I think this is largely going to be true across much of the southwest. So in the long run, of course, if you only take the average, that might pencil out to be similar. But in practical terms, does it actually feel similar? No, not not at all. This is a radically different regime, You know, with with you know, either you're very wet or you're very dry increasingly, but you're really rarely in the middle.

And I think we've seen that a lot this decade where parts of California in particular have seen both record dry conditions and record wet conditions, in some cases more than once in the past decade, where we've broken the century long precipitation records and then also broken a century long non precipitation or dryness records in the same decade in the same place.

I want to that point about getting so much precipitation at once. There's also been a lot of discussion about about groundwater, especially in California and in the Central Valley in particular since so much of the wintertime. Vegetables certainly are grown there. When we have a situation like we had this past winter, How much does that help with with groundwater?

I mean, obviously we're still we're still very dry in the longer term. But would you say that this also helps the groundwater situation or at least buys us a little time? Well, this is a pretty complicated question, and I'm neither a geologist nor a hydrologist, but the situation is complicated, mainly because it's not just a question of pouring a bunch of water on the ground and hoping and it soaks in.

Unfortunately, we've done long term damage to the aquifers themselves by so much pumping and fracturing. I was talking about subsidence earlier, literally the ground sinking. The reason why it's sinking is all of that or space where the the essentially the air bubbles, not only bubbles but the spaces in between soil particles and in between rocks has become compressed over time.

And so that compression you've lost the the the the space where the water would have gone aquifers generally, you know, some folks think of them as these huge open caverns where water sits. That's really not what they are. They're they're actually it's just the accumulated effect and that effect of huge amounts of small air pockets that can fill up with water if the soil gets saturated, if you compress those air pockets enough, they don't magically reappear when you dump water on top of the ground.

Now, the water just kind of likes to sit there on the top of the ground and cause flooding and then runoff into rivers and into the ocean eventually, rather than soaking in nicely. So unfortunately, there's some long term damage we've done. Geography is in some places it makes it harder for them to recharge when we do get wet.

Years like this. And the other reality is that in general, even in a you know, even in an ideal, an undisturbed water system, there are only some places where aquifer recharge happens at a good pace. There are some places where naturally the soil is just too full of clay a rock. To really allow rapid recharge, you need to have you need to have, you know, water sitting there for years, not just for one season.

And so for these reasons, I think that the groundwater problem is not remotely going to be solved by even one, maybe not, probably not even by two consecutive very wet winters. It certainly helps, but it mainly helps because what it means is that there's less desire to pump water out of the ground. So it helps mainly in an indirect way because it means that there are fewer straws sucking that water out of the aquifer because there's water available elsewhere.

There is some recharge going on. There is movement to actively facilitate that recharge as a groundwater management and flood control strategy in California, which I'm optimistic about moving forward. But it's tricky because just because there's a lot of water doesn't magically mean that you've recharge aquifers and you know, this is going to be an ongoing problem, unfortunately. So.

So know that that part of the long term scarcity problem is definitely not solved by one really good year like this one. And it also underscores the need for a cross-disciplinary work between the geologists, the hydrology artists and meteorologists and climate scientists. We're going to take a little bit of a break, then we'll come right back with Daniel Swain and talk about El Nino, talk about some atmospheric rivers.

When we come back on the Across the Sky podcast. And we're back with Daniel Swain. Weather West on the Across the Sky podcast talking about the very wild winter and the repercussions for that in the western United States. So, Daniel, we've just come off the third consecutive LA Nina, which oftentimes means that it's drier than average and all signs are are pointing toward going into an El Nino, into this late this summer, into perhaps this coming winter, which oftentimes means wetter than average, not always, but oftentimes.

How do you kind of reconcile those things? I mean, we know that it's not 1 to 1, but but how do you kind of reconcile those things to do the public? Yeah, this is become actually a really major and consequential weather and climate science communication challenge in California because the it's probably helpful to think a little bit to review the history actually of El Nino in California in pop culture first, because really the first El Nino event of prominent public dialog was back in the early eighties and this was the 1982 83 event, which was a very exceptionally wet year in California.

There was a lot of flooding and there were a lot of problems. And, you know, folks in the media really linked that event to the very wet conditions that occurred at that point. And with good scientific reason. The scientists agreed. Then there was another big El Nino event in 97, 98 of similar magnitude, which was again a very wet winter in California with lots of flood related impacts.

And so that really reinforced this public idea that major El Nino events were were wet years in California. Then in 2015, 2016, there was another strong El Nino event and everyone got excited about how it was going to break the drought. And then it didn't. It was not an exceptionally wet winter in California, did not experience, you know, significant drought relief as a result that year.

Now, you know, we're heading into another year where indeed, as you say, it does look quite likely, I would say probably 80 or 90% chance at this point that an El Nino of some magnitude will emerge later this year. But interestingly, the public dialog is now centered, including in the local media, around how El Nino is so uncertain that it doesn't matter.

And I think we've swung too far back in that direction. It is absolutely true that El Nino is not everything, and there are other influences that in some areas can completely override its influence and produce an opposite outcome even. But on the other hand, there are a lot of pretty basic physical science reasons why especially strong El Ninos in particular, really should and do influence the hydro climate of the American Southwest pretty profoundly and know, as you say, it's not a perfect relationship.

But I think the challenge is a lot of folks go and try and do a literal linear correlation between the the El Nino surface ocean and surface temperatures anomalies and average annual precipitation. And of course, that signal is pretty weak in a lot of places. But if you focus only on the strong events and you focus specifically on El Nino, which is a bit asymmetric from its counterpart, La Nina, we'll talk about that a bit in a minute.

But there still is a pretty strong signal. So, yes, if El Nino is strong, despite the failure in 1516, I would still put my money on a wider than average winter, perhaps a greatly wetter than average winter, especially in central and southern California and in some parts of the lower Colorado basin. So there's usually a dividing line in El Nino and La Nina years separating the Pacific Northwest from the rest of the West.

And usually it's the opposite sign. So when the Pacific Northwest is dry, the rest of the West is often wet and vice versa. And usually in El Nino, the wet conditions occur in California and the Southwest and in the Pacific Northwest is dry and long on any of the opposite is true. We're lining as wet in the Pacific Northwest and dry in the in the Pacific southwest.

Of course, that's subject to some some variability. But but, you know, I think that that's a pattern that in the long run still holds true for reasons that physically make sense. But let's back up for a moment and think, okay, so what what is El Nino and La Nina? What is this in the first place? Well, technically, it doesn't directly have anything to do with the western United States.

It's a tropical ocean temperature oscillation that is strongly coupled with the tropical atmosphere. So El Nino simply means that that ocean surface temperatures in the eastern part of the tropical Pacific Ocean have been warmer than average for a sufficiently long period and long. Nunez and which means that ocean surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific have been cooler than average for a sufficiently long period.

So there need not necessarily be any specific conditions in California or the American West for an El Nino or a La Nina to occur. And it's worth noting that even in 2015, 2016, where the rains did not come in great volume to California, the prediction for a strong El Nino event was correct. The strong El Nino event occurred in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

It just didn't produce the results that some folks had anticipated. And, you know, there's been lots of research on why that is is probably been in the weeds for this conversation. But I think in the long run, I would still put my money on a particularly for a strong El Nino event. And it looks like there's a decent chance that's where we're headed this year, although it's still a little bit early to talk.

The intensity that we might end up seeing back to back unusually wet winters in California and parts of the lower Colorado, which we have not seen in quite some time. Okay. Got me thinking back to now. You know, this recent winter that we had here, what were predictions for snow and precipitation and atmospheric river events going into this past winter?

And then I believe and I've saw some reports of there were 31 atmospheric river events or is actually a river is a is a small is a relatively narrow but intense moisture plume that comes in. But where were the forecasts versus reality going into this winter? Yeah, I will emphasize that there were more like 15 or 16 atmospheric rivers in California.

I think the 31 numbers for all of the West Coast that's out of Denver for California. Yeah, my fault in that one. Sorry. Not no worries. Well, so the seasonal prediction for California this past season was, as has been the topic of discussion was where a slight tilt in the odds towards drier than average conditions because of the moderate to almost strong and and persistent third year persistence of La Nina.

Now obviously that didn't happen. But if you look if you look at the large scale atmospheric pattern, though, it's kind of interesting. So the reason why there's a slight tilt in the odds towards drier than average conditions during a significant linear event is because it tends to favor a strong ridge of high pressure somewhere over the Gulf of Alaska, as it turned out, that did actually happen.

There was a seasonally persistent ridge in the Gulf of Alaska. But the problem or maybe the the the saving grace for California was that it was slightly farther to the west and the typical position of the La Nina Ridge. And so instead of blocking storms from making it to California and dropping rainfall and snowfall, it actually was far enough to the west that the return southward flow on the eastern flank of that high pressure system injected a bunch of cold air and atmospheric instability into the mix and helped juice up these subtropical moisture plumes, producing a bunch of atmospheric river storms and a persistent stream of significant storminess all winter long.

So physically, you know, the high pressure system that's connected with cool temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific essentially happened. But something else occurred that shifted it a little further west than had been initially anticipated. And that resulted in an enormous difference for California, an exceptionally wet winter in some places instead of a drier than average winter. This was something I actually talked about in a blog post back in the autumn last year, which is that, you know, the problem with La Nina and the reason why this linear correlation is not so great is because if you tried to linear correlate La Nina with the ridge in the Gulf of Alaska, there'd be a very strong

correlation. But the problem is the relationship between that ridge in California, precipitation is very tenuous. We're kind of on the razor's edge. If it's far enough to the east. We we are warm and dry in the winter, but if it's far enough west, it's literally the opposite surface condition that's cold and wet because of the direction that the winds end up coming from.

So that's the hard part, is getting the exact longitude of that big ridge correct months in advance. So you can't just say there'll be a big red blob somewhere in the Gulf of Alaska. You need to be able to say exactly where it is, because if you're off by even 500 or 800 miles, which is not a very big margin on the global planetary climate, seasonal prediction scale, you get the completely wrong outcome for California.

And I think that's what happened this year where that ridge was just too far west and we were on the other side of that razor's edge in California on the cool and one side. This year, as is true with much of meteorology, little differences add up and can we do some big changes in the ultimate outcome? One thing I want to look ahead to, you know what has been again until this winter and all the snow and the atmospheric river events, you know, besides the drought in the west.

The other thing that got a lot of attention in the West was wildfire season. How these wildfire seasons seem to be keep getting worse with very little fluctuation. So I kind of want to look ahead to this wildfire season as we get through the summer and things quiet down and get into the fall. What are you thinking as far as wildfires go in the West?

This year is a complicated picture this year because there's as you mentioned earlier, there are actually patches of drought that have gotten worse this winter, despite the rapid improvement in the California Colorado basin. The Pacific Northwest, for example, is headed for a significant drought right now. So we might actually see a were a relatively worse fire season in the Pacific Northwest later this year than than in some other places.

The other thing is that even within California, for example, there's great complexity. So we have such a large snowpack that I think the high elevation fire season this year in California and throughout most of the West, fortunately will be pretty mild because literally there is snow on the ground. It's impossible to have wildfires of any real magnitude right now.

And that might still be the case for a few more months. So by the time August gets around, the snowpack is finally melting away. Well, you don't have snow on the ground anymore, but now you have all this residual soil moisture. So everything is going to be pretty damp up at high elevations. I don't think we're going to see and this has been a real, really big problem in recent years.

We have seen very high elevation, high intensity wildfires which were historically rare and have recently become much more common. I don't think we'll see that this year in places that have a really exceptional snowpack. So that's some good news, a place where I think there will be a mitigated fire season up above seven, eight, 9000 feet. Of course, there's a lot of territory in the West.

In fact, the vast majority of the West is below that elevation. So what happens there? Well, it depends a bit on the ecosystem type. It's actually the case in a lot of the West. The wet years tend to be worse. Fire years historically, because what it means is you have a lot of extra growth of brush and grass.

So if you're in the desert, if you're in grasslands or in sort of mixed trees and brush and grass woodland kind of regimes, you usually get worse for areas after wet winters because you have so much more fuel to burn. That's because these these are regimes that are actually known as fuel limited, meaning that the reason why you don't have more and more widespread and more intense fires is usually because there isn't enough vegetation to burn on average.

Well, these are the years where there is enough vegetation to burn because you've grown extra because there's so much more water than usual. So all of that greenery you're seeing now, lower elevations will become eventually fuel for fires later in the season. And so there's also this interesting dynamic where in places like California, where there were severe windstorms and snowstorms and these no middle elevation zones this winter, there's a lot of trees and branches that came down which are going to end up essentially forming additional fuel for fires later this season as well, along with all that extra brush and grass growth.

So this could be a year where if we do get significant wind or heat or events at the end of the season, we could see a pretty serious failure in certain lower elevation zones, but a really mild failure at higher elevations. And so I think there's both geographic variation where the Pacific Northwest is actually pretty dry right now, but the Pacific Southwest is pretty wet.

And there's also a elevational dependance for places that had a big snowpack right now probably aren't going to have much of a fire season this year, but the lower elevations might see potentially a elevated fire season in some places, depending on how things go. Yeah, that's really the irony of the whole bit, to be sure. Before we let you go, I do want to talk a little bit more about atmospheric rivers.

I think that term has really jumped into the lexicon over the last 5 to 10 years, especially in the West. What do we know about atmospheric rivers and and the warming climate in general? Yeah, So there's a strong consensus at this point in the scientific literature that the strongest atmospheric rivers will become considerably stronger moisture and produce more intense precipitation than a warming climate.

Interestingly, there's less consensus about what happens on average to the frequency of atmospheric rivers overall. So really the strongest argument that we can say is that really throughout western North America, where our rivers are relevant, that the most extreme atmospheric rivers in a warming climate will be significantly wetter and will pose significantly greater flood risks. But doesn't necessarily mean we're going to see more atmospheric rivers overall.

In fact, we may even see in some places like California, more variable city of atmospheric rivers from year to year. Rather, the wet years are really wet, increasingly so. And as I mentioned earlier, the dry years or perhaps even drier, you know, this really comes down once again to basic thermodynamics. As you mentioned, atmospheric rivers are at their core.

These concentrated plumes of atmospheric water vapor, long but narrow, pushed by strong winds over your head. They can they can carry volumes of water that are many times that of the Mississippi River in flood, but in the form of vapor over your head. So these are huge amounts of water volume that we're talking about. And you can imagine that in a warming climate where the water vapor holding capacity of the atmosphere increases exponentially for each linear increment of warming.

So in other words, this is about 7%, four centigrade degree centigrade or about 4% per degree Fahrenheit of warming, that atmospheric sponginess increases by either 4% per Fahrenheit or 7% per degrees Celsius. You know, that would be a pretty darn good interest compound interest rate in a bank. If you get a47 percent guaranteed return. I think anybody would be excited about that.

But it's a little bit scary you we talk about it in the context of the ceiling on extreme precipitation, which by our best estimates does increased by about 4 to 7% or Fahrenheit or Celsius degree of warming. And globally, we're already at 1.2 or so degrees Celsius of warming, getting close to two degrees Fahrenheit of warming locally in California during, you know, in some places we're already higher than that because, you know, the land is warming faster than the ocean.

So this is not an insignificant change. Yeah, for sure. And I think that's one of the things that I think all of us as scientists and media that's meteorology or climate science, I think a lot of people understand outside of the scientific disciplines that, yeah, if it's warmer, you can evaporate more. I think a lot of that's intuitive, but I'm with you.

I don't think people understand that it's not linear. It goes up dramatically as you get warmer so that when we do have these higher end events, they are so much worse. Daniel, we're going to cut you loose. We appreciate you joining us. An addition to the Twitter and YouTube. Where else can people find out about the work you do?

Well, I do also write the weather blog. You can find that at Weather West Tor.com. As you mentioned, you know, I try and spread my my public facing science communication across these platforms, Twitter, YouTube and my own weather. WESTCOTT So and, you know, I like to join other people's podcasts on a pretty regular basis, too, So you can find me here, there and everywhere, I guess.

DANIEL Terrific. Thanks again so much. I know you're busy. It has been a wild, wild winter and early spring and now mid-spring. There in the western United States. So we hope to talk to you again real soon. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks again for having me. I'll be right back with a few closing thoughts on the across the podcast.

And we're back with some closing thoughts on the Across the Sky podcast. And meteorologist Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times Dispatch, along with Matt Hollander in Chicago and Joe Martucci at the Jersey Shore, the press of Atlantic City. And Daniel, guys, he is just he has such a deep understanding of the weather patterns there. We kind of forget about how volatile it can be in the western United States.

We've all kind of, you know, got locked into this idea, well, it's dry and it rains on occasion and they're in trouble. They're running out of water. And then you have a winter like they just had. They're in the western United States. And it really reminds you just how volatile can be. You know, they don't have tornadoes and like we have east of the Rockies, but they had their own entire set of issues, that is for sure.

Yeah. And he did explain all the intricacies of water and making sure there's enough water for everybody. I mean, one thing that stuck out was how much So that land has been sinking in the valley just through pumping out the aquifers. I think I've even seen a couple of photos online of like these huge rollers. If you guys ever seen these, like these huge rulers of like tens of feet about how much actually the land has sunk over the past couple of decades.

So and the other thing is to, you know, one of these really wet winters is good, still a long way to go to being really on top of it there. And we get throw in the climate change factor. And I like to say it's a lot of time the people do. It's not so much you're just over one.

We're more variable in our weather events. And when it comes to Western water management, that's something that. It's just getting, I believe, harder for our water managers to, you know, taking control in terms of these forecasts because we do have, you know, hey, we had a extremely wet winter this past winter, is it? Daniel said he's trending towards having another one of these kind of winters as we go into next winter.

Good news. In the short term, we have to see what it means. Well, the other thing that stands out to me is just how the atmosphere is becoming more extreme. You know, we were dealing with the extreme drought and then quickly switched and remarkably, how quickly we switched to extreme rain and flooding. And that's just what we're seeing with climate change is how the extreme nature of these events, these extreme events are happening more frequently.

I mean, you can talk about, you know, it goes with other areas, too. You know, when you're looking at, you know, the intensity of hurricanes, for example, there's some uncertainty in the exact number of hurricanes and how that's going to change with climate change. But what there is a clear trend towards is an increase in intense hurricanes and increase, as Daniel referred to.

You know, it's still uncertain exactly the number of atmospheric rivers that we're going to see. But when there is an atmospheric river, it's more likely to be an extreme atmospheric river. When we have a drought, it's more likely to be an extreme drought. So there's going to be fluctuations. It doesn't mean like the West is always going to have droughts or it's always going to flood.

You know, it's more complex than that. But what we are clearly seeing is a trend in these more extreme events, which is the most high impact from an economic standpoint, you know, and the toll that it takes on people. So, gosh, just, you know, that's that's what really stands out to me is just how many extreme events and not just in the West but across the planet.

Yeah. I mean, we've always known that that part of the United States has very highly variable weather to begin with, and they're kind of susceptible to dry and wet periods. But I think that Daniel's point is that we're really seeing that ratcheted up even further. And, you know, we try to remind people it doesn't all just balance out because the evaporation rates are so much higher in a warming climate so that the ground dries out faster.

And if you have heavy rain on dry ground, there's more running off than it would be if the ground was a little bit moist, kind of like, you know, you turn the spigot on on top of a wet sponge versus a dry sponge, you get two very, very different impacts from that. So it is going to be quite a quite a challenge for water management, certainly in the western United States for decades and decades to come.

With that, we're going to close it up for this week. We do have a few more things kind of percolating in the weeks to come. We've had the aurora borealis show up, so we're kind of working on a couple of things there. We hope to have some news on that coming up soon. But right now for Matt Holiner in Chicago, Joe Martucci, Atlantic City and Kira Saline and Tulsa, our meteorologist Sean Sublette.

And we will see you next time on the Across the Sky podcast.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For many of us, winter snow is an occasional inconvenience. For those living in the Sierra Nevada region of California though, it's a way of life.

Placer County stretches roughly 65 miles from the suburbs of Sacramento all the way to the border of Nevada and the shore of Lake Tahoe. Dealing with massive amounts of snow, with few places to move it, is a regular problem here. But this winter was truly exceptional. More than 700 inches of snow fell, making it their second snowiest on record.

On this week's episode, Donny Francis, Placer County's Road District Superintendent, talks about what this winter was like and the huge effort that was needed to try and keep the county's roads clear.

About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hello, everybody. Meteorologist Joe Martucci here with the Across the Sky podcast, Lee Enterprise's national weather podcast. I am joined this week with Sean Sublette from the Richmond Times Dispatch. Matt Holiner in the Midwest. Kirsten Lang is on maternity leave. We wish her the best. She delivered a healthy baby boy not too long ago, so congratulations to her. We miss her.

We will see her in a couple of months. We'll be back here on the podcast sometime later in June or July. Guys, this week we're talking about snow. And I know for many of you listening, you're like, Hey, snow season ended a month ago or three months ago. Or if you're like Sean and I, we didn't even have a snow season.

But that is a much different story out west. We'll take you to Lake Tahoe, where one town, two homes got 435.4 inches of snow. Another place got over 700 inches of snow, and that is with Donny Francis. He is the road district superintendent for Placer County in California. Was talking to us all about. You may not know Placer County, but you do.

Now, one of the towns there that is Tahoe Cities is right at Lake Tahoe. They actually have an interesting mix of the valley areas, the foothills and then these mountains here. We had the pleasure of chatting with him. We'll go over to Shawn. This was quite the episode, especially for us. Shawn, where I think we saw maybe combined like White Point eight inches of snow between Richmond and South Jersey.

I mean, yeah, we're our big snow seasons here are 20 or 30 inches you know and they would get that in a day, you know, several hundred inches of snow this year in Tahoe. And, you know, his county there goes from from the Central Valley all the way up toward Lake Tahoe. So have a huge range in elevation there.

And they have to serve areas around ski resorts, too. So they have a wide variety of terrain. They've got to handle narrow roads with these population, you know, these small population centers that are densely populated right around the ski areas. And just some of the things that they have to do to get this job done are phenomenal. Well, after this winter and all the snow pictures we were seeing on social media and all the news stories about just round after round, we knew we had to get somebody on the podcast to talk about that, who is out there in the trenches dealing with injury, like somebody from like the Department of Transportation or somebody who's

clearing the roads because what does it take to clear hundreds of inches of snow? I mean, where it is just dumping and dumping. So I am so glad that we are on the show because it is truly a unique experience, you know, and this hasn't happened in a long time. So some good stories to share. Yeah. Especially when he talks about the number of hours that that they've worked over the years and taking care to ski resorts.

And when he was talking about the ski resorts, I was like, I wonder why they would take care of those, you know, roads right around there. But it's such a huge tourist attraction, obviously, for everybody who's coming. If you can't get to the ski resort, the county is losing out on money from the businesses. And I think I know I have I don't know if you guys saw there is a one photo of the snow actually up to the ski lift, the chairs there on the chairlift where they could even move an chairlift.

The snow is so high. So it was it was pretty incredible. So without further ado, we're going to turn it over to Donny Francis. And we're all about this season's snow near Lake Tahoe. So we are here with Donny Francis from Placer County in California. Here he is with the the Public Works Department. He is a road district superintendent.

And he has seen a lot a lot of snow all winter and spring long, too. Donny, good to be here with you today. How's it going? It's going good. How are you? Good, Good. We're doing good. You were saying, when we were recording this on April 20th, that it's a nice sunny day in some 80 degree weather. So that'll take out, you know, maybe one or 2% of the hundreds of inches of snow this winter.

It's certainly been near record breaking to record breaking across the area. Let me ask you this. And I kind of do I do a couple of road department stories a year, you know, mostly in New Jersey or I should say, all in New Jersey, of course. What's the mindset of your road crews going into the winter and let's just say going into this winter?

And what's the morale like after such a tremendous snow season? I know it's still going to be going in parts, but what's the feeling like before and after? I think after, you know, a long summer, it gets pretty hot here, too. A lot of people look forward to winter. And, you know, we got a lot of people in the valley down here that volunteer to plow snow in the snow districts.

So we got three snow districts. There's about nine, ten guys per district. So I think a lot of them look forward to it getting up there because they know they're going to make a lot of extra money, get to play in the snow, run heavy equipment. So that's always a morale booster until you get these record breaking storms where guys are stuck up there.

You know, we have to put them in a condo or hotel for I think the last stretch was 31 days straight away from their family. So I think some people really dig it. You know, they love it. And some people kind of just, you know, taper off and get tired and you're working 12 to 16 hours a day, maybe noon to midnight or midnight to noon.

So it gets tiring. So then, you know, a lot of people look forward to spring and summer after the door. And from from what I see here and this is a total from a cooperative observer program stations associate with the National Weather Service 316 inches of snow in Tahoe City. Donna, I want to be honest with you. I don't know if I've even seen 316 inches of snow in my life in New Jersey, let alone in one winter.

I believe Colfax saw 62 inches of snow. Can you give us a lay of the land? What does a county look like geographically and on a climate basis as well, in terms of what you're seeing during the winter months within the county? So we see everything from flooding to, you know, rockslides, mudslides, significant amounts of snow. We go from a valley level, you know, a couple hundred feet elevation where it's flat farmlands, rice growers, and you get a lot of flooding down there.

Appear to the foothills. You'll see some snow and then up to 7000 feet on Donner Summit where we got actually this year, record is 730 inches of snow. And we we plow roads at 7000 foot elevation. So to spring serene lakes, we see the most snow there. You know, I think we're we're usually right top most snow in the United States for you know and expenditures and then up to 5 million, you know, a year in snow removal.

So we go from valley to mountain, you know, I-80 corridor. You know, Caltrans takes care of 80, but we take care of all the subdivision side roads and everything in Placer County. It's a pretty big area, 1100 miles of roads we take care of. And depending on elevation, you'll get, you know, those 1100, 3 to 500 miles of snow covered roads that we have to plow.

Big area. Absolutely. I'm trying to wrap my mind, too, around 730 inches of snow. Now. I'm trying to get an idea of what your workflow is like. Like how often are those plows having to go like, what was the the worst period of it for you? I mean, I'm sure you you've been busy all winter long and into the spring, but what was the busiest stretch for you and how many drivers did you have out and how frequently were they having to clear the roads late February onto, say, the 27th and 28, we got 52 inches of snow in a 48 hour period.

We had bad storms in December, late February, just in Tahoe, we have 12 graders with push plows, eight blowers or push plow trucks. It takes just in Tahoe when we go to 24 hour shifts. We did a stretch of 31 days straight where we worked and that takes up to 28 guys to run that equipment around the clock.

And then you come downhill this way a little bit, actually higher elevation. When I say down the hill, our farthest north is Tahoe City, but before that's Donner Summit. And there we have four more graders, five Rotary snowball loaders, multiple push plows, because when the snow level drops, it come all the way down here to Auburn. Then we got to get our valley guys with two wheel drive plow trucks down here with chains.

And it's just it's go, go, go. 24 seven. Yeah. So Shawn, here in Virginia, again, just for some kind of additional perspective, we know it has not been as busy. The last few few seasons have not been as busy as this year, obviously. But can you speak to how much how much more busy you are regarding time commitments and manpower in terms of getting these things done?

I mean, is it is it six or seven times the workflow? Is it one or two times the workflow? Did you have to was there a big hiring to get people? Were you running out of resources in terms of what we've seen in years before this this snow year? How how, how is this tax to resources? I've been here 22 years and it's the worst I've ever seen.

We we've had the contract out both for contractors to help us remove snow and plow extra snow. We have school roads we can't get to. You know, some days they don't want to close the school. So we have contractors we've rented, we've rented extra graders and push plows. We don't really hire extra help other than contractors, but we have 80, 80, not 80 men in our road department.

And we ask for volunteers every year to go up to sort of the to go volunteer to pull snow. So, I mean, it takes at one at one time there's probably 40, 50 guys working at once just to plow snow. So in terms of the weather part of this, the weather forecast, who are you working with? Who are your weather partners or partner that you're working with throughout the winter?

Mostly? Noah Got it. So the National Weather Service. And are you are you actually speaking with them or like are you speaking with them over the phone or is it something where you're just you're you're reading their forecasts on their website? How does that work? And, you know, before this big, you know, let's say your bigger events, how far out are you planning with their forecast?

Well, we have meetings with Noah once, twice a year. And when we have these big events coming in, we will team up with the Office of Emergency Services, which they work with the weather, you know, more than we do. So we'll go have meetings with them and just kind of get a game plan together of what we're going to do and even after and how are we going to recover from it.

We have people get trapped in their homes. Oh, yes. Sheriff's search and rescue. Everybody's on board to chip in and, you know, help get through the on average, an average year for us is about 215 inches of snow. And this year, you know, significantly more 730. So and I should ask, too, where do you live? Are you living in the mountains or are you down in the valley?

I'm in the foothills, actually, so I'm right in the middle of it all. But I've worked in every district we have in my 22 years here. So I've seen the flooding, the snow that we had early winter. We had trees, low snow, which brought down tons of trees. So then we go into tree clearing mode and then we had to hire contractors for that.

I think we put out 500,000 for five contractors to help clear roads and and just open it up for emergency services and so we can get thousands there to open the roads. Okay. So here's kind of a another daunting question I have with my little Eastern bias here. So I apologize. But once you remove this snow, where do you put it?

I think Midwest. And that's why our way, when you're driving up our roads up there, the walls of snow are like 20 foot high. So it's just a the process, the repeated process constantly work when it's snowing. Plows are on the ground, pushing it to the side. You know, you can ramp it off in certain places, but we don't have right away.

We just have road edge. So we plow. We plow. We plow. When you get a break in the storm, then we send all of our rotary snow blowers out, which cut the snow back. We blow it as far back as we can. Sometimes there's some open area. We can blow it. I mean, we have to stick it between houses.

For instance, in serene lakes, the walls are 20 feet high and sometimes you don't know where you're blowing it. You have to experience burying in propane tanks, putting it on people's roofs. We blow it windows quite often because you just can't see where it's going. So, yeah, it's a a process of pushing it off the road and then your roads get so narrow, you're down to one lane or you close them.

Then you just blow the snow paths back as possible some place. Some places like in Tahoe City, Caltrans has to blow it in the back of dump trucks and hold out because there's just no place to put it. And we almost ran into that this year. We say don't explain that to us one more time because I might have missed.

Are you saying you're putting plow and other dump trucks to hold the snow? Is that what you're saying? Yes. So there's some tight little neighborhoods and in cities up there, Tahoe City, Kings Beach, for one, where there's businesses and sidewalks, you get so much snow, you can only plow it so far. Then you have to blow it with a rotary snow blower and blow it in the back of a dump truck and hauling out to a storing staging area.

But what guys, basically, they do that every year in Kings Beach in Tahoe City. Wow. It's less than if you're listening to this podcast and you live out in the Mountain West and I'm sure you get it. I think for the three of us here who, you know, we've seen snow, but not snow like that, that that's just a wild experience.

We're here with Donny Francis from the Plaza County partment of Public Works. We're talking all about their crazy snow they had this past week. They're on the Across the Sky podcast. Back with you after the break.

And welcome back, everybody, to the Across the Sky podcast, Lee Enterprises National Weather Podcast. You can catch new episodes every Monday, wherever you get podcasts or on your favorite Lee Enterprises news website. Here we are with Donny Francis. He takes care of the county roads that surround Lake Tahoe, the same county that Tahoe City is in. That is the one that he is with in the state of California.

He is a road district superintendent. He was just telling us in the break here that 4700 hours work between the crews this winter. Can you tell us when your first day of plowing was this winter? And we're recording this on April 20th. So what was the last day that you guys have plowed so far? Well, you can stop me on that one.

Oh. Oh, man. On the first day about maybe that would be October, October, November. And then, you know, the storms come and go, or the worst part of the winter was beginning of December and end of February. Last time we plowed snow was actually last Monday. We got a couple inches up on the summit. Right. Okay. And that's April 17th, is what you're saying, that a couple days ago.

Roger. Okay. And you were saying you actually plow some of the ski resorts as well. Tell us about that. Well, we have to we have three actually. Tahoma has one to our main ski resorts or Palisades Olympic Valley, which used to be Squaw Valley. They held the Olympics there in the sixties. The Winter Olympics. And then we have Alpine Meadows.

So these are ski resorts in Placer County subdivisions. So there's houses, lots of houses, lots of streets. So we plow all the all the roads in and out and the subdivisions, the ski resorts plow their own parking lots, you know, groom their own runs and stuff. But yeah, those are elevations at around like six, 7000 feet in a lot of snow.

And Danny, I'm curious when you're in the worst of it, like that period you mentioned at the end of February, how do you prioritize, I mean, when the snow is just dumping and you're trying to get as many people out there as possible? I mean, you're basically I mean, it's just a continuous process going 24 seven. How do you prioritize which areas are getting the most coverage and which areas are you going to most really?

Is it by popular action? Is it by how big the road is? How significant is it by how much you just go to the snowiest area and focus on that? I mean, especially being such a large county and when it's snowing everywhere, how do you prioritize which areas to really focus on? Tahoe City. So we have ten zones that we have our own road district department there, and then Colfax has their own and they plow Donner Summit and Scherger.

So two Springs area. So they have a few different areas, zones we call them. And then Tahoe City, we have ten zones. So normally you start your zone at point A and B, right? So but on these heavy storms, you just by the time you get halfway through zone, you can't even tell you plowed. So prioritizing by main roads and main accesses.

So we'll just go hit school routes main roads, main roads I mean way like Alpine Meadows Road that goes into that huge subdivision, Olympic Valley. So you start out with your main arteries when you get these heavy snowstorms, start out with your main arteries to keep them open for emergencies and stuff like that. And then when you get those open, you branch off into your side streets and stuff and that's all the heavy store.

Normally you plow a zone from beginning to end and then you start it all over. And it's just a process because the snow doesn't start sometimes. So you might start your zone by the time you get back there, there's another 12 inches. That's just it. And it's tough for for me to fathom. So let me ask you this.

Are there even in a normal year, are there roads that you that are very high elevation that you was like, well, we're just not going to touch these this year. They're not easy to access in the first place. So we just let them go. And if so, are there additional ones in the year like you just had where you're we are like, we just can't keep up with everything.

So we're going to make these other ones exceedingly low priority and just let the snow pile up. Is there anything like that going on at all? Rarely, because we have residents that need, you know, access in and out. So we rarely let anything go. But we did this year have to leave some while we concentrated on the main arteries.

So yeah, there was roads that were inaccessible for a short amount of time. And you know, they get so much snow where you can't push the snow. So you take a blower out there and you just open it up with the blower and then you got to clean up behind that. So it's just a long process. We're supposed to plow every road once one pass every 12 hours, two passes every 24 hours, and that's just kind of our motto, just to keep everybody safe and have access.

You know, you said that you were that you're born and raised in the area you were and Sacramento and then moved to the foothills here. Most of the crews that you work with, the people who you know, are they from the area, do they understand what it is in such a, you know, snow heavy region like Tahoe? Is most of your crews local or do you have people who are coming from around the country or do you and I don't even know, do you have people say, hey, I want to come here because I love plowing snow so much, This is where I want to be.

Is this a haven for people who are who love snow plow? We have we have a guy from Maine, actually, he just retired. He splits his time from there. And here now, because he loves the snow so much. You work for us for years and he was the foreman in total. But normally it's just local people from around I'd say around California.

I don't think anybody flocks here to work, but it's mostly local people, a lot of people that have grown up here and, you know, they know they know what's happened and where we get snow and where we don't. Do you run up against people who have relocated there recently and really have had to learn what this is all about or most of the people that that are in your service area have been there a long time and they kind of get it.

Or do you still run into these people who are relatively new and they're surprised? Yes, that's one of our the biggest problems we have for complaints is people that moved to Tahoe from maybe the Bay Area. And and if it was this year, then they're always calling and when's the plow come? And I haven't seen a plow. You haven't plowed in days.

Well, we have a zone or system or plows that we can go to the GP's and we can track and look and see where the plows been so we can say no, it's been plowed, just not another foot since you looked. So yeah, that's a huge hurdle for us is to just to curb the complaints because we've got a young people, young money that moves up there and you know, they want stuff done Now in the winter like this.

It's hard to keep up with just a normal winter. It's hard to keep up with. But yeah, we got a lot of new people in the area and they've never experienced snow like this before. So lots of complaints this year. And I'm sure after a winter like this, you know, with so many crews out there plowing for so many hours, I'm sure you've heard a few good stories this season.

Is there one in particular, though, from just chit chatting with the guys as they're coming back and forth, coming in for a quick break and going back out? Is there one story in particular from from this season that stands out to you? Not really. I mean, you get a lot of there's a lot of good in that. You get more complaints than you do, you know, pats on the back.

But, you know, probably the the best one was when we had the avalanche in the Olympic Valley, a huge avalanche came down and hit some condos. So, you know, of course, they call us to the rescue. We have to get in there and open it up for emergency search and rescue and that. So we had we sent graders out there and blowers, and that was probably the best story of the year, you know, just to help out, you know, save some people and get them out to safety.

Comparing this to the record setting storms since they've been recorded, we're number two right now. Behind 1982, they got over 800 inches. There's a story. It's called the 1982 Avalanche Alpine Letters. And that one actually killed some people. That was that was the biggest record setting snowfall ever recorded here. So this was kind of a flashback because I just watched the documentary.

And then here we get hit with another avalanche. What I'm coordinating snow removal. So that was a good story. Just to help out, can you give people a scale of about how much terrain an avalanche is, is covering? You know, there's there's been an avalanche. How how big of like a square mile area do you have to go, you know, effectively excavate after an event like this just to a ballpark?

I haven't seen anything bigger than probably a square mile. Okay. So usually there is multiple avalanches in years like this. They may come down on the highway. There is a self triggered avalanche control. The Alpine meadows does they set off, you know, compression bombs and cause them themselves. And sometimes it covers our road. We have to clean them up, but don't usually see a lot of avalanches that consume buildings or people, you know.

So this was a first for me. Those compression bombs sound similar to prescribed burning for wildfires. They're intentionally set off to to limit something that's unintentional and bigger. And I know that you said that was good. You said that you also brought up the, you know, the record snowfall mount. I believe you said just those in the 1980s.

What I'm curious about is could you tell us how technology has changed with plowing snow over the decades, you know, in terms of either equipment or salting or brining even how much weather, as you know, weather forecasting and improvements there has impacted your job? It's changed a lot. Like, for instance, in 82, you know, watching the documentary, you see these old trucks with push plows on it and stuff like how do you even I think that's back when they lost roads or there wasn't enough population up there, they didn't have to plow as much.

So it's been getting a lot better. When I started in 2000, I was running a 1959 international snowblower. That's so that was all back then too. Yeah. So, yeah, we've got a lot of new equipment, but yeah, it's changed a lot. We have a lot more equipment. It's too still though. It's not enough to keep up with the population and the houses they're building and, you know, roads and we're getting new equipment constantly.

We got new graders this year, we got new blowers, so we're getting up to date with equipment. Finally, I think our oldest piece of equipment is like a 95 blower, which is about done. Yeah, I bet, especially after this winter. And you know, my final question for you, Donnie, is, you know, now that we're getting these warmer temperatures and finally less snow, are there any concerns, though, about all the snow that is still piled up in these massive piles, this huge amount of snow?

Are there any concerns now that we're getting these warm temperatures with the melting? What are your thoughts about that? What are your crews doing to prepare for all of this melting snow now, there's already been warnings for flooding like on the Walker River, but that goes off in towards Nevada. If we get the heat, there's no in-between anymore.

It seems like with these winters, the summers, it's goes from cold as heck to 100 degrees. And with this much snow up there, all of our reservoirs are finally full or close to. So they're letting water out. Rivers are at capacity, so they're predicting some more flooding from all the snowmelt that's coming because it's already warming up quick.

It's like I said, it's going to be 80 this week, so that'll turn to 100 within probably a month. So for us that all we can do is close roads. You know, we don't have the power to to build levees or stuff, but, you know, our state does and they do without some breaches in levees this year because some a lot of flooding and loss of houses and stuff.

But yeah, there's already some warnings for the well, this was very eye opening, especially if you live in a place that doesn't get snow. But even for the three of us or who are low on the snow totem pole, Midwesterners and mid-Atlantic people here, it was really interesting to hear your insight. Dani, anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up with the podcast or I just wish I had some pictures to show you and we'll do the video series next time.

If you do some photos though, in the next couple of days, shoot us an email. We can we can get some out as we talk about this episode before we release it here, which I'm sure everyone's listening to now, either on April 24th or sometime thereafter. But otherwise we really appreciate the time and hope you guys have a nice long summer break here.

And you know, hopefully next winter will be a fun challenge, but hopefully not record setting like this past winter. So thank you again for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you. And I'll definitely send you some pictures. Awesome. Sounds good. We are going to take one more break then three of us. We're going to wrap it all up here on the Across the Sky podcast.

Thanks again to Donnie for the time here. We know things have been slowing down for him, at least on the snow aspect. But like he said, they're now moving into flooding season with all of that melted snow that has to come. But we do hope he does enjoy a nice long summer here. As you look this up, the most snow that I've experienced in a winter season is 68.2 inches.

That was in 2010, 2011. And some places didn't even see 10% of that or excuse me, that was only not even 10% of what some places up by him saw for the winter. Still chilly, incomprehensible amount of snow. Now, what what did you think of the interview? Well, you know, the mountains are just a whole nother a whole nother animal of your if you're a plains person like me, you know, in much of the Midwest where it is, it's pretty flat.

You get some hills. But, boy, I mean, so when we get a big snow here, you know, you're talking six, eight, and then, of course, you know, noteworthy. So you're talking about a foot 14 inches. But to be talking about, you know, just getting 12 inches in a matter of hours. A matter of hours, and then, you know, another another 12 inches like that's just an everyday thing up in the mountains when you get up into elevation, it is truly incredible how much it snows.

You get up into the Rockies or Sierra Nevada and boy, it it it's remarkable because you could see how much snow in just a short distance, how different it can be. When you go from low elevation to high elevation, you get into those colder temperatures and the snow just just piles up. It is, you know, some really challenging weather forecasts out there, some really, really tight gradients on the snowfall forecasts.

Now, forecasting snow is always a challenge, but when you're forecasting the mountains and trying to predict and wrap your mind about forecasting, you know, five feet of snow making a forecast for that and then another system coming in right behind it. And so, you know, to Donnie and those crews, I cannot believe how busy they were this winter.

But it's important work, too. I mean, gosh, you know, all the people that are being impacted and, you know, people need to get on with their lives, need to get to school, get to work, but they need help to get to work and get to school. And folks like Bonnie and his crews make it happen. So shout out to them for dealing with one heck of a winter again.

And there's still so much snow sitting on the ground there. I mean, I just pulled up visible satellite images and I'm just looking at at the Sierra right now, just packed with snow, deep white, bright whites on the satellite imagery, all this snow that's just sitting there in the Sierra. And as you mentioned, that's it's melting and the water is high.

So, you know, they have to manage all of that with rising water from the the snow melt. I mean, you were going to talking earlier on, Joe, about how much snow have you seen in the season? The most I've seen is about 100 inches, 110 inches. And that's when I was up at Penn State in the in the early nineties.

And it just a brutal, brutal winter in 93, 94. But that was the last time I'd been through something that one white might call a truly bad winter that was brutally cold, brutally snowy. It wasn't here in Virginia, it was the central mountains of Pennsylvania, although you could get you can you get over 100 inches of snow in Virginia and some of the mountains.

And, you know, I think you might be able to pull it off in far northwestern Virginia in the higher elevations in Frederick County or maybe in the in the very high elevations of deeper southwestern Virginia, our paths, I-77, But even that that's a tough that's a tough nut to crack, as we used to say. Got it. And we certainly hope that they catch a little bit of a break here, hopefully as all this snow melts, you know, they're not going be just as busy closing down roads.

And I know because I mean, I'm sure that, you know, inevitably there's going to be some road closures due to flooding, but we certainly hope it's not going to be a widespread issue and they can relax a little bit. Boy, they they need it after after this winter. Absolutely. All right. Well, I think we're going to wrap it up for this week's episode of the Across the Sky podcast.

We'll be back with you next week. And gosh, it's going to actually be May next week, which sounds kind of crazy. This year is flying by last year. I did not think it flew by this year, but we're going to have a whole bunch of guests for you lined up as we go into May. Of course, we have severe weather season getting into hurricane season two.

That officially begins June 1st in the Atlantic Hurricane Basin. Three of us, we'll keep you updated as we go on over the next couple of weeks. So thanks again for listening to the Across the Sky podcast.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season doesn't begin until June 1, but we're already getting some early indications of what to expect. The first hurricane forecasts of the year are coming out. 

In our hurricane season preview, the meteorologists discuss the factors that will impact the number of storms that form this year, including El Nino, La Nina, Saharan dust, and water temperatures.

Wonder what names the storms will be given? The team reveals those as well, plus what happens when the initial list of 21 names gets exhausted. They also discuss how to better warn people as the storms approach the coast and share their most memorable hurricane stories. 

Related episodes

About the Across the Sky podcast

The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Across the Sky, our Lee Enterprises Weather podcast. I'm Matt Holliner, covering weather for all of Lee's Midwest websites, apps and social media accounts. And I'm joined by my fellow meteorologist Joe Martucci with a press of Atlantic City in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Sean Sublette with the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Richmond, Virginia.

And for this episode, guess it's just April. Hurricane season does not begin until June 1st, but we're starting to get some indications, some early signs of what we might expect this hurricane season of course, we've got to get through severe weather season first, but we know there's lots of interest once we get to this time of year and we start to get warmer temperatures, even in the Midwest where I am, my goodness, 80 degree weather.

But then you start thinking, wait a minute, with warmer weather, so comes warmer sea surface temperatures and you start looking to the Atlantic. And when we get an early season surprise this year and then what about the peak of Atlantic hurricane season? So we're going to start to share some of our thoughts. What's going to help this season, what's going to hinder it, and what are we ultimately going to get?

So, guys, what are some of your initial thoughts as we look ahead to hurricane season? Of course, with you guys being closer to the coast, the impacts a little bit higher as well. Yeah, I mean, you know, we are the press of Atlantic City. Atlantic City is smack dab on the Jersey Shore here. Many of us, you know, very, very cognizant of Superstorm Sandy, which I just can't believe.

But it was 11 years ago here, you know, looking at the Colorado State University forecast, they're kind of like the gold standard, along with the National Hurricane Center for these forecasts fairly average for this compared to climatology. So, you know, 13 named storms averages 14.46 hurricanes. The average is 7.2 major hurricanes. That's category three. Four or five hurricanes is a to average is three.

I think we can certainly take, you know, a little bit of a sigh of relief that we're not being forecasted to be above average, especially over the past couple of years. You know, I think El Nino is really the player for this. You know, after three winters in a row with a La Nina and we talked about that in our winter forecast episode back in November, you know, we're transitioning into an El Nino that's warmer than average waters along the equatorial Pacific, basically to tell people to go off the coast of Peru.

And your temperatures are above average. That should stifle some tropical development. You know, at the same time, waters generally in the North Atlantic are above average. That's been the trend for the past couple of decades. We don't see that going away any time soon. So that can really help to fuel some storms. You know, to be honest, not you know, for us at the Jersey Shore, I think, you know, Sean would say something similar.

We never let our guard down. That being said, you know, it could definitely be in a more impactful area like the Gulf Coast or Florida. Yeah. I mean, to that point, you know, anywhere in the Middle Atlantic and southeast coast always needs to be mindful during hurricane season. And, you know, these exercises and the folks at Colorado State have been doing this for 40 years now.

These exercises in seasonal hurricane forecasting are very important so that we get a better understanding of how the ocean and the atmosphere kind of react in this way and what kind of seasons do they produce. You know, I, I don't know if you guys get this, but I still get a lot of like, well, why bother doing this if it only takes one?

Why do you care? Well, one thing we need to understand the ocean and atmosphere better, too. Insurance companies are really interested in this kind of stuff, you know, even if just an individual homeowner or an individual business owner may not care that much or this might not change their preparation to beginning of the season, it's still important in the longer term understanding and ultimately for business impacts as well.

Right now we like to tell people no matter what the outlook is, if one hits your backyard or you get flooded out or whatever, then it's been a bad season for you. I think the classic example of this is Hurricane Andrew in 1992, when that was during a very otherwise relatively quiet season. But obviously, Andrew, the impacts of Andrew in South Florida are still being felt today, which is, you know, 30 years later.

So that's I think the key here is that this is important. It shouldn't change preparation, I think, for anybody. But it is nice to see, you know, for me, I'm really curious because as you said, you were coming off of three consecutive La Ninas. Now we're all the numerical guides is just screw seeming like we're going to get an El Nino.

And that tends to inhibit hurricane development, doesn't prevent it, but of course, it backs it off a fair bit. But at the same time, we've got very high temperatures with respect to normal of the water and the Atlantic. So there's also this kind of academic idea in my head. So which one of these things is going to win out?

You know, and I think to make sure that we're clear for people who aren't familiar, you know, when we're talking about El Nino, we're talking about above normal sea surface temperatures in the Pacific. But we're also seeing above normal season temperatures in the Atlantic. But what the thing is, the Pacific being a larger body of water, when you get those above normal sea surface temperatures and I'm sitting right now, we're in a neutral phase, to be clear.

We've come out of landing and we're in a neutral phase. But already we're seeing a warming trend like the Pacific is getting ready to transition to El Nino. I think that's the question is how quickly does that occur? Because when you get above normal sea surface temperatures in the Pacific, what happens is there's increased wind shear across the Atlantic.

And when there's more wind shear across the Atlantic, higher level winds that tears up these storms and makes it harder for them to form. So typically when you have El Nino, you see reduced tropical activity in the Atlantic and it's the opposite. La Nina and the Pacific causes enhanced tropical activity in the Atlantic because of the reduced wind shear across the Atlantic.

So it's an opposite effect. LA Nina enhances Atlantic hurricane season. El Nino causes it to typically be lower. But the catch this year is we're seeing above normal sea surface temperatures in Atlantic. So you're absolutely right, Sean, Which one of these is going to win out? And I think what it's also going to come down to is how quickly does El Nino form, if it holds off a little bit and doesn't get going?

You know, we don't really see a true El Nino set up and that increased wind shear until September or October. You know, watch out for July and August. I think, because the water is definitely going to be warming up and there's not much wind shear and then we could get some activity. No, it was remarkable how quiet August was last year.

I would be surprised if we had the same results again this year. So, you know, for people who are or who are going to continue to monitor this in the months and weeks ahead, and it's how quickly do we get El Nino to actually set up in the Pacific, the sooner the better, because that will increase the wind shear and make it less likely that hurricanes will form.

But if it takes longer, then I think we have to watch out. You reminded me mad about how quiet we were for a while here with our tropical systems. I believe we went and here we go again. Now, from July 2nd to September 1st, we had not one storm. And typically August is when you really ramp it up.

We had nothing. We ended up calling on the second. Then we had Danielle in September. I believe at that time I believe I believe maybe you guys know, was it the only time we in Tropical history we were without a named storm in August? They remember that. I feel like that was a nugget that seems to stick in in my head, at least in the modern era, at least in the satellite era.

I think that's the case. Again, like you said, I'd have to go back and look it up. My sense and see if you all remember this. The way I do it was that there was a little more Saharan dust in August, the window and or we were in a phase of the Mad Julian oscillation, which also did not favor tropical development.

And that's just off the top of my head. I can't remember that for certain, but I think those two things kind of put a little squashing on the activity in August of last year in a time that would otherwise be fairly act. No, you're 100% right on the dust, Shawn. And I remember that not only for the reason you said, but Florida.

There was a lot of there was a haze in the sky from Florida, from some of that dust as well. And I'm actually looking at the it's called the United States Drought Monitor. And you'll look at Florida. I do believe some of the reason why Florida is in drought right now is because of that dust last summer, which really helped to dry things out.

And they didn't get a lot of rain starting back to last year. And I'm looking at now a year ago, 21% at this time Florida was in drought, now it's 66%. And there was that increase throughout the summer and fall of last year, which got them to that point. So, yeah, I mean, and again, you know, that that was good, that we were that we were quiet, you know, relatively quiet through August.

But then we went to September, got to made up for that really quickly because we had Danielle, Earl, Earl, Fiona Gaston in her mean, we even had a tropical depression in there. And Ian of course that that's that that's pretty close to the Mount Rushmore of most significant hurricane impacts you'll see And what is it with the ice storms, by the way?

I mean, we've noticed this, right? For some reason, the ice storms tend to be the have whether it's just a statistical freak or whatever. But the ice storms, I think, have been more retired than any other storm. You know, when we go through it alphabetically, you know, we have we have these lists of storms. You know, it's repeated every six years or these six list because people like where do they name these things anyway?

Well, there are six main lists for the Atlantic hurricanes. So they're you know, they're repeated every six years. And every once in a while when a storm is especially bad, causes a big loss of property and or there are fatalities. The name is retired because it's such an impactful event. The name doesn't want to be repeated. And that's done by the World Meteorological Organization.

And Ian was retired from last year. And do y'all remember what was the other one that was retired last year? Yeah, that was Fiona. Diana. Yes. Yeah. Which was just like two weeks before Ian did a lot of damage in the Canadian Maritimes of all places. Yeah, Yeah. I think it was the most costly storm to hit Canada.

If I recall. Right, and that's a big reason why I was being retired. It was also damaging in the Caribbean, not really an impact to the U.S., but they don't get you. Typically the cold water kicks in and these things dissipate before they actually make landfall in Canada. But that one did not happen. It was moving fast and came in, I think only as a category one, but a category one in Canada is a big deal.

And so I I'm pretty sure I read that it was the most costly storm. Yeah. And to your point, we always have to be careful about saying only quote unquote category one, because there's still so much water with these things as well. You know, this goes back to the we could speak for like three or 4 hours about the surfer Simpson scale, right.

About impact. And don't don't get so locked in with the category when it comes to impacts because they can rain like like crazy and be quote unquote only a cat one and they could do massive amount of flooding, even though it's only a cat one. I mean, Sandy was a cat one transitioning to an extra tropical cyclone as it came onshore, the Jersey Shore.

And you know, all this I mean, Joe, you know about this way more than I do, buddy. But yeah, yeah. These things, no matter what their category, they do damage. You know, Sandy, of course, was well, it wasn't technically a cat one at landfall as opposed tropical cyclone. Just to speak on behalf of my New Jersey brethren, our last landfalling hurricane was back in the 19 tens.

We have not had a landfalling hurricane since then. Going back to that, I though, Sean, we've had 13 ice storms retired. That is the most and we had three this decade in Aida, which was the year before. And then Iota. Oh, yeah. Do you want to. Yeah, I don't think we should count that though. Because of what? Because it wasn't the ninth one.

Because that whole weird Greek alphabet thing. Wow. Yeah. I mean, do we want to go down that rabbit hole? Well. Well, the other thing is that we don't, you know, we don't do the Greek alphabet anymore. If we run out of names, there's a new. There's a second debris list. So if we run out of the primary list, we don't do this alpha, beta gamma stuff anymore.

Yeah. Which I think is probably much better, but I think people got a little too attached to the Greek letter, like, Oh, we're going Greek, you know. You know, all the fraternity memes come out on Twitter with with the hurricanes and all that good stuff. And then a serious point, You know, what do you do when you have a Greek alphabet storm that was tremendously impactful and, you know, it gets brought up for a vote to be retired because there's no other Greek letter.

I think that was part of the impetus for doing it. If it was. Yeah. Why do you suppose the original impetus, the impetus that's a good that's a good vocab word for it for our Across the Sky podcast listeners, I think with that that was such a great word, Sean. I think, well, we'll take it. That also starts with I know, yes it does it also, but I will retire for a little bit after that.

I and we'll come back in just a minute. Everybody here, thank you for listening. And we've got to in just a second on the across the Sky bond. And welcome back, everyone, to the Across the Sky podcast. Come out with new episodes every Monday. And we do thank you for listening. You know, we have seen our audience steadily grow.

We just had a meeting about how things are going with the big bosses and they were happy with the podcast, so we do appreciate it. If people weren't listening, we would have been canceled. We have not been canceled. We are continuing and if you enjoy the podcast, also give us a wherever you listen to your podcast, give us a review, give us a rating that helps as well.

So do thank you for tuning in and this week's episode all about hurricanes. And the main reason we decided to do a hurricane themed episode, even though it's April and kind of get into the peak of severe weather season, is because Colorado State usually comes out with the first forecasts for the Atlantic hurricane season every year. And they just came out with the one for 2023 and we mentioned it at the top of the episode.

But to recap their forecasts for this Atlantic hurricane season beginning June 1st, 2023, and going through November 30th, they're calling for 13 named storms. And of those 13 named storms, that includes tropical storms and hurricanes. Of those 13 named storms, six becoming hurricanes and two becoming major hurricanes. And compare that to a normal year, we typically see 14 named storms, seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes.

So they're basically going one number below the average. And in their reasoning for it, they're conflicting issues with the forecast. So we do expect El Nino to form and wind shear, more wind shear than usual across the Atlantic. So that should hold down activity. But the problem is we're seeing above average sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic. So which one wins out?

And because we're thinking maybe El Nino could end up setting up actually this summer, even before the fall, where they're leaning with El Nino running out just slightly. Just slightly. So basically a near-normal season. But I guess that is better compared to what we dealt with in 2020 and 2021. Now, 2022 was actually near normal, but it was looking like it was going to be above normal season.

I think everybody definitely had some PTSD after 2020 and 21 to blockbuster years, so we kind of caught a break a little bit. But I tell you what, people in Florida, I don't think they caught a break last year with Ian coming through. So again, that was another example of how, you know, it was especially we went through that quiet August and nothing was going on and then, boy, did things change.

So that's why you can't let your guard down, even though it's technically being forecast right now. And there are other forecasters come and we'll see how this all plays out with still, when you're talking about a near average hurricane season, that does not mean you need to go through the motions of not preparing for a hurricane, because we could absolutely have multiple landfalls in the US, you know, and that's the thing we can't forecast is where these things are going to occur.

Are they just going to be out in the middle of the ocean or are they going to make landfall and we can't say that this far out. So, guys, what else are you thinking about this upcoming hurricane season? I'm thinking about some of the the changes that the Hurricane Center has put out every year. They put out this this memo that says what's new and what's updated for the season.

And, you know, in terms of the forecast cone, I think that's always the the the sexy one. That's the one that that we think about the most here. Not much of a change with that forecast cone. There's been a little bit of an adjustment towards a narrower cone 60 and 72 hours out. But we're really talking like a matter of like miles.

And then at 96 and 120 actually expands like three miles at 96 hours, five miles at 120 hours. And that cone and I love to talk about this because I feel like it's time that we need to change the definition of the cone. Right now. It's where the center of the storm is with 66% confidence. And I just think we're so good at forecasting the track and even the intensity of hurricanes, we can make that 75% or something higher.

You know, I, I think people believe that that forecast cone is 100% certainty and it's not. So I always like to get on on that. I think we do such a good job. I think it's time to become a little more confident and expand it. I think there's a lot of merit to that argument. Joe. I think know, after last year and what happened with the end, there was a lot of people revisiting the cone and what the cone really meant.

And we realized, I think we always realize this to a point that people misunderstand the cone. They just don't understand it the way we think they understand it. There's certainly a lot of value in there, but I try to tell people it's an important thing but is not the only thing. I mean, if you think about the last ten or 15 years since the cone has really been very highly visible in forecasting your public facing forecast, I mean, we push the cone out all the time and we haven't done a good enough job.

I mean, not three of us, but I think the community needs to do a better job at saying impacts are not limited to the cone. Sing along if you know the words, the impacts are not limited to the cone. All right. This is our best guess of where the center is going to be. And yeah, near the center, that's where the wind is going to be.

The most ferocious. But impacts extend far away from the cone, especially storm surge. Especially storm surge. I think this is kind of what we need to to drive home even more. You know, we keep working. It's a work in progress. Right. But back to your point about the historical probabilities, Joe, I think we have reached a point where we can do something that's a lot more dynamic.

But this is where we feel with 75% confidence or whatever percent confidence, this is where it's going to be in this timeframe. You know, the other thing I'd like to see this is tougher, but start when we were Hurricane center puts these things out. And of course we've got a new hurricane director, Hurricane Center director from Virginia, which is, you know, cool for out here guy from from Cape Spring, which is where I used to work many moons ago anyway, to to put some place on a map that is clear.

Like we know it's not going here. You plop a big map of the Gulf Coast and you put like, I don't know, let's say New Orleans to Brownsville. That's green. We know absolutely it's not going there. We know that or incorporate something like that. Because one of the things I think a lot of the social science is teaching us as people want to know when they can start paying attention.

They want to know when it's safe, not just they want to know when the threat ends. They want to know when they're safe. And I don't know the best way to do that. That's again, that's a social science question, but I think there is some value in that. If we can do it the right way. Now, John, I think you're absolutely right about letting people know when you don't have to worry anymore, because oftentimes, you know, we start watching these things.

You know, when they come off of Africa as a little tropical wave. And basically we have to tell everybody, look, this has the potential to develop, but we really do not know if this was just going to curve out in the Atlantic, if it's going to make its way in the Caribbean, maybe the Gulf. And so basically have to tell everybody, like the whole East Coast, it has to be on standby for this one.

But that's very early on. And so people and of course, that gets lots of buzz on social media. And then, you know, especially once you do get a story, it looks like it's going to go into the Gulf. Then we have to say the whole Gulf Coast has to be on alert because there's still a lot of uncertainty where this is going to go.

And so then everybody in the Gulf Coast gets all worked up and it's on social media and starts to get nervous. But inevitably, that's why you have to keep following the updates. Don't see one forecast, especially when it's five days out and think, Oh, that's it, it's going to change. They're going to be adjustments. There's going to be greater confidence in where that storm is going to go and wherever is the most likely past five days out, four days out.

That is likely going to change. Unfortunately, That's why we give you a range of possibilities. But I think you're very right, John. At some point, as you get closer and closer to the landfall, the folks that are going to be feeling the impacts, the number does get smaller. And so letting people clearly know like this area, like Louisiana on West does not have to worry about this storm, like making that very clear, because sometimes I do think that gets lost because then people stop hearing about their location and but they're still concerned because they were never given the all clear.

And until somebody hears that all clear, then you get an unnecessary number of people that are overly worked up anxious. They making unnecessary preparations. So yeah, I do think that just as important as messaging, who needs to prepare and who is going to feel the worst impacts, letting people know who is not going to be impacted. And you're absolutely right, that needs to happen as well.

Yeah, and there's been a couple of options out there to change. You know how the cone looks. I've seen some like things where like the cone is like really dark in the where the best forecast is and then, you know, gets a little lighter as you spread out to show some more ideas of the impacts, you know, because anywhere in the cone is at the same you know, has the same you should be concerned anyone within that cone, even if you're not in the middle in the hurricane center, did a good job a couple of years ago.

Maybe you guys remember what year it is. But removing that line, you know, that connects those dots. Now there's the dots sometimes like in my forecast, I don't even show the dots. I just show the cone. But but that was a good call. You know, it's a lot of social science stuff that we keep getting better at and really was triggered a lot by Hurricane Katrina back in 2005 year.

You know, just just looking at some other updates to the Hurricane Center. And I just had it and then I lost it. Hold on. Give me one second, everybody. We're going to do this in real time. So for that, Joe, I think you know what's worthwhile and a big question that a lot of people get, you know, is this is our outlook episode for the upcoming hurricane season.

One of the big questions that always comes up is what names are on the list? Oh, yeah, because remember, there are there are six lists that rotate. So if your name is does come up one year, you're going to have to wait six years for it to come up again. But we do have this year's list, so I'm just going to run down from a through W what the names are and see if your name is on the list number A And I know the problem is if you have a name low in the way down the alphabet, sometimes we never get to that name unless it's a really active hurricane season.

So maybe especially if you have a w the W we don't want to get to the W storm, but we do have it on the list, so let's just run through it real quick. Most likely we will get an Arlene that is Storm one, number one. And also by the way, remember these these names alternate between female and male.

So it's a female name then a male name, a female name, then a male name, and then next year and we'll start with a male name and go to a female name. So Arlene is number one, and then it's Brett. The sea storm is Cindy. Then we have Don, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harold, I believe it's e Dalia. I've got the pronunciation guide up here to the ice storm.

So a little bit tricky one e dahlia Jose at Tia, I believe it's Katia is how it's pronounced. Lea Margot The end storm is Nigel. Then we have Ophelia, Phillipe, Rena, Sean We've got a Sean on this year's list. I hope we don't make it to the storm, but John as a possibility might use your name this year.

Hammy events. And the storm is Whitney. You know, I actually like this this list this year because most of these are pretty easy to pronounce. There's some years where there are some that are real tough and there's lots of discussion. Exactly how do you say this? And I'm glad the Hurricane Center comes out the pronunciation, guys, because some years their names are a little bit tougher than usual.

And this is an international list of names. It's the World Meteorological Organization. It puts together these names. So that's why it's not just us names. It is names from around the world. And that's why you sometimes hear some unusual odd names, and especially when it comes to the ice storms, because so many have been retired, sometimes have to go and find some rather unique names.

But that is the list for 2023. If either one of you had your names retired, I don't think so. I think I haven't even looked at Hurricane Matthew. Yeah, Yeah. Hurricane Matthew was retired. Okay, That's right. So let's say currently Matt is not on. They probably haven't added Matt to the list. They probably like that die with Matthew.

Yeah, but I don't know. There's been a similar Hurricane Joseph because I've got the list of all six years. I don't see Joseph up here. There's a Josephine Josephine. Yeah. And Jose. Yes. Very close which is going to be Jose's on the list this year is on a list for this year. So I was going to ask you, though, Matt, to have you guys covered those storms with your name and your career like Sean, have you had?

No, because Sean came up because there was another storm that was retired and that name and I forget what storm, but there was an S storm that was retired, I want to say, six or 12 years ago. And then CNN was added to the list. I'd have to go back and look to see what names retire, but that hasn't been on the list that long.

Would it be kind of odd to cover a storm with your name? I'm going to go. Yeah, I remember doing it with a hurricane, Matt. Now, to be clear, I was in Cincinnati, Ohio, at the time. I was working at the Fox station out there because this this storm occurred in late September, early October of 2016. And so I was in Cincinnati at the time.

So I was not being directly impacted by it, but when you have a storm that's impacting the US, every meteorologist in the country is going to talk about it. So I was certainly talking about it. And I think what helped me is though, my my legal name is Matthew. Everybody calls me Matt. So it didn't seem that odd that say, Hurricane Matthew wasn't like I was directly repeating my name.

And everybody was like, Oh, hey, Matt, what's the situation with Matthew? And so it sounded a little bit different. I think that that helped making that statement as as odd because of it being Matthew instead of Matt. And everybody called me Matt. So it wasn't wasn't too hot. And especially because I didn't have to talk about all the times, it hasn't directly impacted me.

And I just looked up Hurricane Stan in 2005 was retired and then my name went into there, Sean. And so Stan knew it was Rick. Sandy was retired the Oh, you're asking and you said Stan was 2005. Sandy, of course, was retired too, but that was 12 was 2012. Yeah, right. So that 423 that doesn't cycle in. So it had to be Stan in oh five.

Gosh. And I guess before we we wrap up this episode kind of go around the horn and talk about our most memorable hurricane experience. I know from again, they start to wind together after a while, you know, and I know some people that were, you know, directly impacted by storms. And I've covered, you know, so many, but most of them indirectly.

But I would have to say my most memorable experience is one that actually I was covering blow by blow and actually experienced at the same time. And that was Hurricane Hanna in 2020 that moved over Deep South Texas. And again, that was a great example of it was just a Category one. But my goodness, were there some tremendous impacts now where it actually made landfall?

Hurricane Hanna You know, I was in the Rio Grande Valley at the time, which is Deep South Texas, Brownsville, McAllen are by the most notable cities down there. Now. It made landfall north of there. Technically, the eye came in just north of the four counties in the valley. But what this storm did is after it made landfall, I took a dive to the south and west.

So it did move over our viewing area and the Rio Grande Valley and the winds were incredible, even though we were technically again, it was already inland, but the winds of this thing was cranking and we weren't even in the most populated part of the valley. It wasn't even in the area with the worst winds. But how much wind damage there was from this was impressive.

So I can't you know, it was hard to imagine, like if this had been a category four, Category five, I mean, it was already just tremendously windy. But I think ultimately, despite the wind damage, the amount of tree damage was done in roof damage. My apartment had shingles removed. There was actually a leak that developed in my apartment.

You know, all these things that end up happening. But ultimately, again, it wasn't It it wasn't the wind that was the worst part. As bad as it was, it was the amount of rain, because what happened is the storm just slowed down and it basically almost stalled out just to the southwest down in Mexico and just kept rotating, though.

And these rounds of rain kept coming in. And even in these rain bands, there were some embedded tornadoes like technically the hurricane itself that passed with these rain bands on the backside of it had some little weak circulations. Well, weak tornadoes popped up on the backside of it. And just the rounds of rain, the flooding that we saw, you know, until you go through a hurricane, you've actually lived through it.

You realize how long they last oftentimes. And just all the different impacts and all the different things. I mean, that's why it's just the most fascinating weather out there, because you can have tornadoes within the hurricane and the flooding in the wind. It was truly an incredible experience. But one was enough. I hope I'm okay not covering with being through another hurricane.

That was that was good. Good for me. Yeah. So for me, it goes back the first time I was in was a first verse incarnation of Hurricane Charley in August of 1986. We were scheduled to go on vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and and we knew it was coming. Of course, this is 86. All you had was television and radio, and we didn't even have the Weather Channel at my house in Richmond.

So I remember this very well because we decided to go anyway, even though the hurricane was was coming in. And as we were going out the back door to get in the car to drive from Richmond into North Carolina, my mom's like, Should we still go? She looks at me. I'm six years old, weather geek. She looks at me.

Should we still go? I'm like, Well, it's too late to decide now. Let's go. And we went. It was we made it. I mean, we rode it out. We got down there before. Before we had the biggest impacts that actually pushed back off shore. But that was a windy day for sure. We didn't go anywhere that day. And then the rest of the week, the weather was just kind of air, but that was the first when I was legit in in terms of a legit tropical system.

And ironically, because I covered a lot doing through my TV days, I didn't go down to the shore. We always sent somebody else to go cover them at the coastline. I was doing most of the anchoring from the studio, so I haven't been in that many of them. But in terms of other impacts, Isabel is is also one of the the top ones here recently in Virginia.

But, you know, all of our big flooding events here in Virginia are tropical systems. If you go back to Agnes Haight and Hazel, Hazel was big in the fifties, but Agnes Camille left over from one in 85. It's all about the water here now. Yeah. And for me, there's not one weather event I can think of that puts sometimes tears in my eyes.

Then Superstorm Sandy. In 2012, we were without power for without a week. We knew some people who had power loss for more than two weeks. It was a storm, you know, famous for its left turn right into Brigantine, just north of Atlantic City here. And the destruction you saw on our barrier islands was tremendous. And I think the one part that separates New Jersey from other coastal states is that our whole shore is a barrier island and it juts out into the water.

I shouldn't say the whole shore of a 90% of the shore. And the memories in the economy and all the good times you had were laying there in shambles. And that included where I went to a lot every year growing up, which was Seaside, which in many ways was ground zero for the storm. And you know, leading up to it, you knew for days it was going to come.

And, you know, the weather geek society is really excited. You're like, wow, this is a once in a lifetime storm. It is coming right for me. And, you know, you balance that out with, well, jeez, people are going to die. There's going to be damage and there's going to be tremendous devastation. I was at Rutgers at the time.

I was a senior then and I was in charge of our weather TV weather department weather watcher program at the time and, you know, planning coverage for that. And then I think I said this when we talked about our Superstorm Sandy ten year anniversary episode, I ended up getting into a bicycle accident where I ended up with a concussion and I lost teeth, banged up my nose a little bit, and I was literally, you know, just home was if you ever had a concussion with a very empty feeling and you really couldn't you know, I really was just kind of out for the count during the storm.

It was one way I was actually pretty good because classes were canceled for a week and I wasn't going to school anyway. I was concussed. But, you know, when you see the roller coaster that you've been on in the water and you know, you see the places that you used to go, go with with your family and friends, you know, be destroyed.

And there was such a sense of unity among everybody in New Jersey to get this right and to pick things back up and to get us back in action. And, you know, I was I our Rutgers group, we went to Midway Beach, just south of Seaside Heights to participate in the cleanup effort. That's actually how in or in a small way, I'm married to my now wife.

That was like our first kind of like really talked to each other event that we did with that cleanup. So a lot of memories from Sandy. And we talk about it to this day. And, you know, it was the biggest storm on record in terms of size and it's not the worst storm we could have had at the Jersey Shore.

You know, we you know, in our circles here in Jersey, you know, our realistic worst case scenario is a Cat three three that really runs up the coast and provides a you know, it might not be as long lasting as Sandy, but a more powerful strike to the shore. So that's it for me. That's Sandy without a doubt.

Yeah, that's quite the story. Joe, you know, I love hearing you just tell it because, I mean, you can hear the emotion in your voice. You know how impactful that storm was. I did realize that while you were up with that story, there's probably something that we should have mentioned at the beginning of the show that I think we were overlooked.

Our fellow co-host, Kirsten, not with us. And I didn't even mention why at the beginning, but it's kind of a big reason because we also need to mention it because she's not going to be around for a while because as of just yesterday, April 12th, she delivered a baby boy. So she is this is her her third child.

And so she's going to be on maternity leave and flexible leave late June. So she's going to be out for a while. But everything went fine. The baby is healthy. She is doing well. So all is good. We're so happy with that. Is that is in the books for every now and then. She also has some time off to enjoy, enjoy the baby.

And she shared a picture and it does look like a cute baby. I'm going to be honest. I don't think all babies are cute. I most. Wow, you're fired. I think most babies are cute. But be honest. Not not all. Not all are. But but this one is. Sure. Since Baby Maxx, you know, obvious thing. So. But I'm just saying, not all babies are bad.

I think that gets exaggerate a little bit now. You know, you can't say that to anybody. You have to tell everybody the baby's cute. But as honestly say, the Kirsten's babies get they get cuter the day after for sure. There you go. Yeah. No, congratulations to her. We were really happy for her and core part of this podcast.

You know, without her, we wouldn't be doing this in a way in which we are. So she'll be back at the end of June, and I believe it's the end of June. And we're going to we're going to miss our next couple of months. We'll still chat with her, you know, three of us, but we'll have her back here and I'm sure with some some really good stories when we come back.

But, you know, certainly congratulations to her. You can follow her on Facebook, Kirsten Lange and on Instagram as well. I believe it's Kirsten Lang one, if I'm correct with that, I think we're going to wrap, right? That. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. But just wanted to be clear, if you don't hear it. Curious to know she was not fired.

She went make it very clear she's just on maternity leave enjoying some time with the family. But on that note, I hope you enjoyed this early look at hurricane season 2023. And of course, we will have other hurricane related episodes to come as we get closer to the season starting and of course covering all other topics. Weather related.

And one other reminder, if you ever want, there's something you would like to hear us discuss. Contact us on social media. We're always looking for ideas we want to hear discussed. Email, contacts for social media and maybe a topic for next week's episode. But on that note for Sean Sublette in Richmond, Joe Martucci in Atlantic City. I'm Matt Holliner in Chicago.

Thanks for listening, everyone, and we'll catch you next time.

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