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Oh hi, it's that vitamin stuck in your throat. I'm so sorry, Ali Ward. How do I even start this? Okay, we're going to chechat about the weather in a way that is anything but small talk. As it turns out, the stuff that's all around us is just raging and swirling and heavy with emotion. And likewise, I don't even know how to preface this ologist experience. His bio is the longest list of accredations and awards and bonkers important
jobs I have ever seen. I do not know how someone at chieves so much high level and deeply important work in one lifetime, and I'm shocked he said yes to do this. So several folks told me to find him and beg him to be friends, which I did. And this one has been in the works for a couple of years. So he got his bachelor's, his MS, and his PhD in Physical meteorology from Florida State University.
He's been a NASA researcher, the president of the American Meteorological Society, where he now holds a rare distinction of being a Fellow. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Weather and Climate Research by the White House, and in twenty twenty one, he received the American Geological Institute's Award for Outstanding contributions to the public understanding of the geosciences. He's advised the US Senate, the Department of Defense,
and Congress on climate and extreme weather. He's currently a Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia, and this past year he was selected as Professor of the Year. He also co hosts the Weather Channel's excellent podcast Weather Geeks. He writes for Forbes. He's
authored several books, including a kid's book called Doctor Fred's Weatherwatch. Frankly, I was lucky to weasele my way onto his schedule, so we hopped on our respective Mike's and I asked him all kinds of questions that were way below his pay grade. But before we get there, just a quick thanks to everyone who supports the show at Patreon dot com slash ologies a dollar or more a month gets you in the club, and you could submit questions ahead
of time. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmarch dot com. And thank you to everyone who just supports by telling a friend or by rating or subscribing or leaving reviews. I literally do read them all in his proof. Thank you Zachary Dakery, who wrote this review this week, saying Ali Ward is the best thing to listen to while driving a garbage truck, best binge worthy podcast out there. I will even stop my truck to charge my headphones
to keep listening for my entire shift. Drive safely, Zachary Dacre, thank you for the work you do. Everyone listened to discard Anthropology if you hadn't, it's such a good one, So thanks for the work. You do. I hope someone brings cookie your garage and if anyone left a review, no, I have read it. Okay, let's get into meteorology. Legend has it the field was named by Aristotle, who wrote a tome about weather and named it meteorologica, from a root word meteor for lofty. So stuff above us. So
let's get to what is over our heads. Let's get into our domes and get ready for tornadoes, typhoons, wind, rain, forecasting, newscasting, wet bowl globes, wind chill, humidity, polar vortices, atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, storm chasing, climate delaying, pop cultural weather phenomena, and more. With the distinguished icon of Atmospheric Sciences, professor and lifelong meteorologist and weather geek, Doctor Marshall Sheppard.
Doctor Marshall Shepherd. I guess I'm he But what else did you ask?
Oh? That's it, that's all. Yeah. So I've been wanting to talk to you for literally years. Business.
Thank you.
Pretty exciting. They are one of the most celebrated meteorologists in the country and I'm sure you have to get you have to explain this a lot to people. But the difference between being a meteorologist and being a weather person. There's a difference.
Yes, yeah, so you know, I get called the weatherman a lot or the weather guy. And then you know, the really derogatory term that I hear from some of my female colleagues is when they call them weather girls. These are celebrated scientists with degrees. They're women, they're not weather girls. But yeah, you're You're really on to a point because the term meteorologists is synonymous with weatherman for
most of the public. But there are different types of meteorologists in the same way that there are different types of engineers. In fact, only a small percentage of our field are TV meteorologists or what we call broadcast meteorologists or weathercasters. And even within that group there's a range. There are actually some people that have meteorology degrees, and you'll see the ams seal by their name typically or
some other seal. There's some people that have more journalism backgrounds but report the weather and so forth, although there's less of that and more degree meteorologists. So, yeah, I'm a meteorologist that doesn't do forecasting, and I'm not on TV unless I'm a special guest on the weather channel, or so he.
Joins us now from Gwennette County, Georgia.
Doctor Shepherd, thank you so much for being here today. When it comes to meteorology, how do you think that people choose their field, because I do think so many people think meteorology is just forecasting. But how did you pick what you do and what are some of the options?
Yes, question. I got interested in this in sixth grade, as most meteor illists do. I did a science project kind of sixth grade or predict the weather that started because I got stung by a bee. I wanted to be an entomologist, but I got stung by a bee and found out I was highly allergic to beastings and said, well, I need a plan. B punt intended, and so I did my science project on weather. So at that point I was bitten by the weather bug. Second punt intended.
And so from that point on, I knew I didn't want to be on TV pointing out a screen with colfronts, and I knew I didn't want to be a forecaster. I was more interested in the house and why of weather, like why does that hurricane get stronger than others? And wide are certain storms spent out tornadoes and some storms don't. And so that's when I started investigating schools and Florida State University. I'm from Georgia, and Florida State was the
closest meteorology program. And the rest is hisstory. I went on to graduate school, ultimately got a master's in a PhD. Worked at NASA for a while developing large space missions to study weather and climate.
So doctor Shepherd spent a mere twelve years as a research meteorologist at Nasogadard Space Flight Center and was the deputy Project scientist for the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission, just casually one of the best meteorologists in the.
World and now still do high level research, teach, and do a lot of other things as well. But to really answer the second part of your question, what are some of the other options? Again, I think about nine to ten percent of our field work as TV meteorologists. Others go into sort of more private sector for airlines or other commodities companies, power companies, energy companies, and so forth.
There are quite a few meteorologists that work in federal agencies like the National Weather Service or NASA and Noah.
So, Noah is not a guy or a biblical rising ocean's flood reference, but it just stands for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, AIR and c EPA.
State agencies have meteorologists, and then a lot of private companies are now developing interest in weather and whether it be IBM or formerly for that Panasonic and even smaller companies as well. So weather, there's quite a few places atmospheric scientists, which is the broader term including meteorologists and climate scientists can work.
Is it such a good meteorology program at Florida State because there's so much weather there? Would that program suck in La?
No? I mean UCLA has a really good meteorology program actually the bit so no, I don't think it has anything to do with the geography, although it does have a reputation for being pretty good at tropical meteorology expertise there so obviously being close to Florida. Even as we're recording this podcast today, Tallahassee, Florida, which is where Florida State is, is probably experiencing the tropical storm Nicole as we speak, and just FRII.
So Nicole ended up being a Category one hurricane about seventy five miles an hour is what it made landfall at and it caused eleven deaths and five hundred and twenty million dollars in damages. And now, if a tropical storm develops in the North Atlantic or the North Pacific in the east off the coast of the US and Canada, and has sustained winds of seventy four miles per hour
or faster, we call it a hurricane. But if they form over the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, they would like to go buy cyclones please, Well, then what are typhoons? This is a great question. I'm glad you asked. Those are the same thing. But they're over the Northwest Pacific off the coast of Asia. So we could do a whole episode on intraplanetary meteorology terminology, trust me. And what about learning about the weather on planet Earth versus working for NASA.
We didn't study other planets whether we were studying weather. Yeah, NASA has a very robust Earth sign program. So yeah, that's another misconception that I often get in the same way that people would ask me if I were with the weather. Most people hear NASA think space out and
looking at Mars and places. But a large part of what NASA does and still does, is to develop missions to study Earth's weather, climate, oceans, volcanic eruptions, changes in the criosphere, which is like greenland and Arctic ice sheets, and are antarctics. So yeah, that's one of the things that I'm glad you asked because NASA studies planet. I argue it studies the most important planet of all Earth, because that's where we live and we're not going to
be going anywhere for some time. So thankfully NASA devotes quite a bit of its resources and expertise to studying this planet using the vantage point of space.
Mm hm, climate versus weather. How many times a day do you have to explain the difference?
Yeah, I know you're you're hitting all the common misconceptions that I deal with in my field. So this we're going to like take a number here. So you know, you know, it's getting to be the cold season, and you know, we'll start seeing snow and colder weather, and inevitably I'll have someone tweet me, hey, doctor Shepherd, I've got twenty inches of global warming in my yard. It's snowing out here in Boston. In January, why you guys
keep talking about this climate change stuff. And so after I kind of fix my face and sort of roll my eyes a little bit, I say, well, you know, it's winter in Boston. You're supposed to get snow first of all. But then secondly, I say, you know, weather is your mood and climate is your personality. Something I'd like to say. You may have heard me say it that the weather today doesn't say anything about climate anymore
than your mood tells me about your personality. And so it's a really ill posed premise to suggest it because it's snowing in Boston on Tuesday in January, that that somehow refutes climate change and global warming.
Okay, so in a bit we're going to cover why a warming climate would make digging your car out of the snow a more giant pain in the ass. Trust me, Nerds. You know your podcast is called Weather Geeks. Do you feel like you are kind of geeky about this? Does it get you really excited? Yeah?
Totally. Yeah. No. The Weather Channel, when they came to me about hosting The Weather Geeks, we did it as a TV show for four or five years on the Weather Channel came on on Sunday afternoon, and then we just realized the changing landscape of how can people consume information? So we switched it to a podcast. Nice move, ken, and we embraced the term weather geek because people call us weather geeks anyway, or weather weenies or weather nerds.
But we wanted to empower the term weather geek because you know, some people often use the term maybe in a more sort of derogatory or spiteful or slide I guess the word insulting manner. But we wanted to flip it. We wanted to own it, and so that's why we call our podcast weather Geeks.
I love that it's something that you have so much knowledge and you're so authoritative about, but that you still love so much. Weather gets such a bad rap in conversation of people talking about the weather. But what could be more exciting than like, store, whether or not you're going to have to wear a jacket, or if your crops are going to grow?
Yeah, all of those And you just even touched on another misconceptionist out there, because you're right, weather is often a conversation point and it makes us struggle. For those of us that are scientists in this field because everyone experiences the weather, and so because of that, everyone thinks they know as much about it as people would degree.
And so I'll often have people come up and challenge me on the forecast or about climate change, and they're totally wrong, but you know, it's an opportunity to sort of share and educate. So for example, you know, people will often say, you know, whether you're all just in forecasts are wrong most of the time. Well, actually they're right almost all of the time, about ninety five percent of the time within three to five days. It's just that it's human nature for people to remember the bad ones.
And they are few bad ones, but those are the ones they remember if their cookout was rained on or their child soccer game got it rained on. But you know, I'll use a football analogy. You know, a field goal kicker kicks a field goal and they make every single field goal all year long. That's a really good kicker.
But if they miss one field goal in Super Bowl that could have won the game, people are going to be remembering and talking about that kick and wow, that kicker, he stinks, and oh my gosh, you know, fire him. But in fact, he's a really good kicker. He just missed that one. And so, you know, people don't tend to remember all the days that were right in terms of the forecast, so they sort of anchor on those sort of more isolated and fewer bad forecasts.
So don't blame the messenger for the nature of statistics. Folks. Just keep an umbrella in your bag and a smile on your face. You're alive. And there are crickets and birds and sunsets and electricity and indoor plumbing. And how much has weather science changed since you've been studying it, and even just since the Industrial Revolution?
It's really, you know, quite a few changes. Just our ability to observe aspects of the weather with different types of satellites and race our systems and so forth has changed. The speed of computers means that our weather models have gotten so much better.
And this part was absolutely news to me.
You know, weather forecasting is done by solving these very complex fluid dynamics equations. That's why people that want to be a meteorologist have to take so much calculus and dynamics and thermodynamics and physics. You know, I, as a director of a major program, I have students come to me all the time. Oh I love clouds, I love hurricanes, I love storm chasing. I want to be a meteorologists.
I want to be in your program. I was like, that's fine, I said, but how's your calculus and how's your physics and how are your partial differential equations because that's what's mostly going to be in the classes you'll be taking, and so it's a really an interesting sort of shock to the system for many of these students. But you know, the observations, the computing capacity and capabilities. One thing that's really big right now is social sciences.
There are a lot of psychologists and sociologists and communications experts working at the intersection of weather right now because they're trying to understand how people receive information about forecast. Do they make decisions based on a red morning boxer, do they hear certain things a certain way, and so forth. So that's kind of an emerging area, as is artificial intelligence.
That's why companies like IBM and various others that come to mind tomorrow, Io and others are really using sort of advanced data technologies to mine all of this data to make precision information forecasts. Weather intelligence, if you will. For you know, agriculture, for business, industries, energy companies, infrastructure. So that's the main thing on the weather front. Now on the climate front, it's obviously the increase in CO two. I mean, look, I mean I wrote an article in Forbes.
I'm a contributor to Forbes magazine, and I said, what's your CO two number? In other words, you can everyone has a birthday, but go look at that birthday that year and see what the parts per million CO two in the atmosphere was when you were born and compare it to today, and some of us that are older, you will be really scared, you see it, because we're well at around four hundred and twenty parts per million right now. Our atmosphere is, you know, responding to that.
Our seas are responding to that. Our ecosystems are ice sheets. So our climate has changed in response to human activities and the burning of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions.
And I'll link doctor Shepherd's Forbes article on my site, but you can also go to nature dot org and calculate the CO two levels in your birth year. It's kind of like astrology, but sadder. And today I learned that carbon dioxide has increased by twenty five percent in the scant time that I've been digging around on this planet, and this fact can be a real vibe changer, so
to speak. How is that personality affecting our mood? I know that I feel like in the last few years we've heard more about bomb cyclones and names for blizzards and storms and hurricanes that I had never heard of growing up. But how is that climate affecting the weather?
Well, and you know that's just the media, actually, I mean bomb cyclones and and these terms have been around forever in meteorology. They should just have been used more in the popular media. So I wouldn't use those as anchors of something different about the climate. Because bombogenesis and rapid and these are very common weather terms, polar vortex, these are terms that have been around in meteorology if you study meteorology for decades, So there's nothing new about those terms.
Let's do a lightning rundown of some of the ones you probably thought were just meteorologists yank in your chain. So, bomba genesis happens when a cold air mass collides with a warm one and the barometric pressure drops fast in a low pressure system. So some of the other fun things that you can call a bomba genesis include explosive cyclogenesis, a weather bomb, a meteorological bomb, or a bomb cyclone. And at one point someone was like, shouldn't we stop
calling this a bomb? It's very scary to the people, And a meteorologist was like, you call them cold and warm fronts, like it's a war, so shut your rain hold. You cowered, And a bomb cyclone it was. Now. A polar vortex is a bunch of cold air near the poles of the Earth, and it's called a vortex because it's spinning, spinning, spinning, and in the winter it gets bigger and parts of it kind of get caught up in the jet stream and then they blast your whole
face with colder Arctic air. Now, a pineapple express is another that's got to be fictional weather term, but it's true, and it's like one hundred years old in terms of terms, but it's when colder, low pressure air from like the Gulf of Alaska meets up with some high pressure West coast winds plus a little bit of Hawaiian aka pineapple moisture, and it forms this thing called an atmospheric river, which
is a long, thin thread of wet weather. They can carry sometimes as much moving water as the Amazon River apparently, and you can call an atmospheric river a tropical plume or a water vapor surge or cloud band. But just keep a rain slick or handy.
But having said that, we know that climate change is impacting our weather. Today. We have more intense rainstorms, our heat waves have more intensity and are happening with more frequency. Rapid intensification and the intensity of hurricanes is likely responding to climate change. There's greater sea level, a higher sea level amount, so when these storms push inland, they are actually pushing more water, and so you see more storm search damage. And even without the storms, just the higher
sea level itself causes problems. We see changes in drought, which ultimately ends up affecting the cost of things we buy at the market or the grocery stores. There are mosquitoes that carry diseases that used to live in the tropical regions of the planet, but now they can live in the United States and carry those diseases.
What diseases you ask, You want a little sampler platter of them? Okay, well, I asked a twenty twenty one paper published in the Lanset called Projecting the Risk of Mosquito borne Diseases in a warmer and more populated World, which said that in the next thirty years, nearly half a billion more people on the planet could be at risk for contracting mosquito born diseases such as yellow fever, zeka dangay, and chicken gaya, which I'm sorry sounds delicious,
but it's a disease. Also, things like heat islands in densely populated cities may up the risks of malaria and dengey arriving right on your doorstep ding dong hi here to kill you.
There are a host of ways there. I often like to talk about climate change in terms of what I call the kitchen table issues, the so what. For too long, we've talked about climate change in terms of polar bears in the year twenty one hundred. Climate change is now. We've got to stop using future tints. We're living it right now, and it's likely going to accelerate in the same way we saw at the COVID pandemic. It started and accelerated rapidly. That's what we worry about as scientists
right now. But the good news in terms of your question, is we know. I don't like the sort of even harbor on just the bad this is happening because we know that that is what it is. But we know what needs to be done. That's the good news. If anyone's listening to me and say, well, what's the optimism, the optimism is this is not a problem where we're scratching our heads like what we need to do. We
know what we need to do. We've got to reduce carbon emissions to do list, and we have technologies and processes to do that. And in some cases we also have to adapt. Things are already sort of past the point of not non change. It's going to change, so we have to develop adaptation strategies. Give you an example out west. I know you're you're talking to me from out west. Up in the Pacific Northwest. In twenty twenty one,
there was a tremendous heat wave. People just aren't used to that type of heat in parts of the Pacific Northwest. Many homes don't have air conditioning, and there were many deaths because of that heat.
And just a side note, so this heat wave in June and July twenty twenty one reached one hundred and twenty degrees fahrenheit in Canada, folks. And it was a once in a thousand year weather event, they said, and it was one hundred and fifty times more likely to occur because of climate change. It was a cost nearly nine billion dollars financially, but fourteen hundred lives lost to heat related deaths. So global warming is not a future issue, it's now. So what can we do immediately?
So an adaptation strategy might be to retrofit many of those homes with air conditioning now that don't have homes because they may not have expected that type of heat in Portland in the same way that in London this year it got to one hundred and four degrees. Eighty five percent of homes in London do not have air conditioning because they never expected those types of temperatures. So we know what we need to do. We just have to act and move beyond what I call climate.
Delayism climate delays, and I've never heard of I mean, that's a great term for it. So, yes, a little urgency is needed because we know the cause and the effects are already underway. What about these weather system where we've got droughts in some areas, we've got flooding in others. We know that glaciers not doing so well. Where is the water going and what is moving it around?
Well, water is conserved on the planet. The amount of water in the Earth's system is a finite amount, and we live on a very small percentage of the fresh water that's available to us. And you know, we all learned about the water cycle somewhere along the way, But most of the water is in the ocean, or it's locked away, it frozen in the ice caps, or in
so forth, glaciers and so forth. So we live on a very small percentage of water that's evaporating and condensing the form rainfall and falling back into our reservoirs and rivers and streams, or snowpack that melt.
Okay, So I look this up because I needed numbers, and apparently there are three hundred and twenty six quintillion gallons of water on Earth. What does that mean to you? Nothing, I get it. It means it's three hundred and twenty six million cubic miles of water on Earth, and ninety nine point seven percent of that is in the oceans. It's in the soil, it's all wrapped up busy in the ice caps for now at least, and it's also
in the atmosphere. So that just leaves a slim little point three percent of water that's usable by our weird little species of human and we definitely need water to exist. So if you aren't me, and you're dehydrated and you're filled with tiketos and gingerbread cookies and you're sitting there thirsty, but you're refusing to hydrate yourself, please drink some water and say thank you to the water. Say I would literally die without you water, You would die so fast.
So one of the things we've always known about climate change is that places that will are dry will probably become drier, and places that are wetter will become wetter. And so that's how you maintain conservation or balance, because that wet place is becoming wetter while the dryer places on average are becoming drier. But what is really of more concerned to us as climate scientists is not necessarily the amount that falls on an annualized basis or the amount,
it's the rate of change. So what I mean by that is here in Atlanta, where I am. The rainstorms now there's just greater intensity in the rain. So when it rains really hard, it's much harder than it would have been on average in nineteen sixty or nineteen seventy.
It pours so because of.
These higher intensity rain rates, it overwhelms the engineered system, and that's why we see so much flooding on roadways and then cities and so forth. With Hurricane Ida last year, it made landfall down in the New Orleans, Louisiana area a little bit south of there, and then it moved into New York and caused tremendous flooding, flooded the subways and so forth, because the engineered system that we currently live in was designed for the rainstorms of nineteen sixty, not twenty twenty two.
So if you're good at some city and you have been looking for a calling in life, the urban planning field of climate change mitigation, it's a real thing. And according to one article I just read, urban designer Elizabeth Plater Zyberg cited things like more walkable communities that could lower carbon emissions, smaller and attached housing structures, and also architecture that requires less of a strain on your HVAC system, also tree planting. Those are a few ways to go
in urban planning for the future. But let's look back in time for a second. Was your grandfathers walk to school uphill both ways in the snow worse than your current situation?
You know, it's counterintuitive to people, but I could actually make an argument that the snowstorms and blizzards are worse because of climate warming. See that's counterintuitive people, because I just said warming and snow is cold. But we know that the hurricanes, rainstorms, snowstorms, they all sort of get started from water vapor, the gaseoest phase of water in our atmosphere. And there's a basic physics principle called the Clasius Clapperon equation. Let's break that down for all the
listeners out. There's a really fancy sounding term Clasius Clapperon, but all it really means is as our atmosphere warms, there's more water vapor available to it. So as we have a net warmer atmosphere, there's more water vapor available to it, which means there's more water vapor available to snowstorms, hurricanes, and even rain storms.
So that's huge. A warmer planet means more water in the atmosphere, but how much how much water are we talking? So per degree fahrenheit about a four percent increase in water vapor or that's seven percent for all the places that are not the US and use celsius. So let's take the northeast United States. Though about a century ago the winter's averaged twenty two degrees fahrenheit, but they have
risen four degrees to twenty six degrees fahrenheit. Some years are top and thirty degrees fahrenheit, which would be a thirty two percent said increase in water vapor while still being below the freezing temperature of thirty two degrees. So if your weird uncle is hitting the vape pen and declares global warming to be horseshit because his picnic table is under five feet of powder, just feel free to kindly educate him. Just get some numbers up in there.
Any other flim flam to address? What about red sky at night, sailor's delight? Any truth in that?
Yeah, there are certainly these little sort of sayings. They have some truth in that. They tend to be related to sort of cloud systems that are moving in as it sort of interacts with the sun. As the sun is setting, you get sort of longer pathways of that light through and there's red, but that can change depending on the types of clouds that are in the sky, and so that tends to indicate certain types of weather systems and are on the horizon and so forth. So anecdotally,
there are some truths. Now, what are not true is that rodents like groundhogs or almanacs can predict the weather. So I often get that question. I'll have someone that says, well, I don't believe all this climate science stuff, but hey, what do you think of the groundhog forecast there? I think it's erodent, That's what I think. And so you know, we have to kind of you know, there are these anecdotal things that people have grown up on and they
just believe that they're true. Like here in the South, people will ask me all the time, so is that heat lightning? Is heat lightning a thing? And I say, no, it's not. But people have grown up hearing about heat lightning all of their life. It's like the skylights up with lightning, but you don't hear any thunder, and that's just because the storm is too far away to hear the thunder, but people think it's the heat of the day causing the light the sky to light up.
So for more, so much more on lightning and clouds. We have whole ass episodes folmonology and nephology episodes. I will link them in the show notes. You will be swimming in stormfacts and not smart question. But when it comes to cyclones and tornadoes and hurricanes, why so twisty? Why do things go in big circles?
Yeah, it seems like a lot of things in weather, dude, that don't they like tornadoes and low pressure systems and hurricanes. Well, you know, it really gets into a very complex dynamics lesson that we probably would lose half your listening audience from if we really go down too deep in that road. But it's really an interplay between some fancy things called pressure gradient forces and Coriolis force because remember we're on a rotating planet. We are not on a stagnant planet.
We are on a rotating planet with this fluid the atmosphere flowing around. And so if you think about a river, that's a fluid and that river flows in a certain way, But now think about if you put that river on a rotating platform. Within a rotating platform, you're going to get all kinds of eddies and whirls and so forth, and so these sort of rotating systems and are really very much related to the complexity of being having a fluid on a rotating earth that also is differentially heated.
It's colder the poles and warmer at the equator, and so because of that you get some really interesting dynamics.
If you're wondering what a pressure gradient force is all about, let's tell you. Let's back up a second. Okay, So high pressure areas are going to naturally flow into low pressure areas, and the pressure gradient force is the difference in pressure between the two areas, and the greater the difference, the faster the air is going to rush from the high pressure into the low and boom, you get wind,
you get gentle breezes, you get gale forces. It's all fluid dynamics spinning around on a spinning rock, and the Coriolis effect is all about which way that spin seems
to deflect a flow. In the northern hemisphere, low pressure weather systems circle counterclockwise or to the right, but below the equator they take a clockwise or a left turn, and yes, this is affecting giant storms and cyclones, but also how the water drains out of your bathtub hemisphere to the left, to the left, northern right, and near the equator, your bathtub spin will be much less twisty.
Isn't that weird? And really basic terms, but things like low pressure system, high pressure system, cold front, what exactly do those mean? For people who watch the weather or read about it and say, I kind of don't get it.
Fronts are sort of boundaries of air masses, and so cold fronts tend to be frontal systems where you have a cold, dense air mass sort of moving in to lift and replace warmer air, because warmer air tends to be less dense, and so it rises, and so you get really violent storms oftentimes at cold fronts. Low pressure is just what it says. It's the lower atmospheric pressure,
whereas higher pressure as higher atmospheric pressure. And you know, lower pressure tends to be associated with more stormy, cloudy type weather because the air rises associated with low pressure, whereas in high pressure, air tends to sink. When air sinks, it compresses and warms, and so that's why typically when you see high pressure, you're gonna be dealing with really clear, perhaps dry, even drought like weather that could call it lead to things like wildfires and so forth.
So fronts are big patches of air, and cold patches are more dense, and they lift the warmer, less dense air up, and that's called a low pressure system, which is stormier, while high pressure systems tend to be hotter and drier. I have never understood weather before, so this is thrilling, you know.
I like to use this very simple analogy. I used to use an analogy of a water bed, but now people under like thirty look at me, like, what, it's a waterbed? Yes, I was gonna say, your parents probably had waterbed. So you push down on the water one part of the water bed, it goes down, but another part goes up. Well, something that younger listeners may know about is the bounce houses, the inflatable bounce house. The same concept. You push down on one part, another part
goes up. We our atmosphere has these sort of low pressure troughs and high pressure ridges, and it's sort of this undulating sort of fluid and has these areas of highs and lows as well.
That banging noise was Doctor Shepherd's are undulating as a visual aid.
You got it. Really, it's hard for many people to envision it. The atmosphere is a three dimensional fluid from the surface all the way up to the top of the atmosphere and their various wave patterns within it.
Speaking of visuals, what's your favorite movie about weather?
We just did a podcast episode on that, so check out the Weather Geeks podcast by the Weather Channel. We had a myself, Jen Carfagno and Alex Wallace from the Weather Channel to on camera meteorologists. We talked about what their favorite weather movies are and just what some of the Weather Geek's listeners favorite movies are.
So that's the Weather Geeks podcast episode called Lights, Camera Climate, which is linked on my website. So he had an answer all teed up for this, bless him.
So the one that came to mind for me was not one that probably many people would even think about. It's a movie by Spike Lee called Do the Right Thing. The star of the movie, really, even though you might not think about it, was the heat, massive heat wave that was going on at the time, and it was just almost every scene of that movie. The heat was playing some role.
I have today's forecast for you hot.
A lot of people will say Twister, and I like Twister to tornado movie, and one that's really more climate focused is The Day After Tomorrow. Dennis Quaid and a few other p. J. Gillenholm and others were in That movie. Is a movie about sort of the climate going wacky here on planet Earth, and it costs a very strange weather storm is just gonna get worse. Should we do, I will come for you. Do you understand me? A
really good movie. It was very unrealistic from a scientific standpoint, but it was very entertaining.
Do you get asked to consult on movies?
I've had a couple of that. Yes. I was involved in the kind of a little bit in the most recent movie, Don't Look Up, which is a climate movie, and so they reached out to me to comment on aspects of the movie after the fact. And also one of the really thinks nice things I liked about that movie they created an online community of people because that whole movie Don't Look Up, even though it was about a comment approaching and destroying Earth, it was really a large metaphor for climate change.
There's eight one hundred percent chance that we're all on to die hate hate.
Hey, well, the handsome astronomer can go back anytime, but the yelling lady not so much. And so they created an entire online community with things that people can go to do to learn more about climate change and what they can do. And I'm one of the science advisors for their their website there too.
This website is don't look up dot count usin dot com. I'll link this on my website. But no, the producers did not call him and just have him scream into the void with frustration. But it was so wonderfully done and with that kind of allegory about climate science. But I thought one thing it did so well, and all the people I talk to who are involved with climate science are like, yes, we're upset, and it's upsetting that no one will listen.
So yeah, well, I think we're kind of past that, though I think more people are listening now. I think there are still pockets of people that aren't listening, but it's not the majority of people. Although they tend to be the loudest. They tend to be the ones that are on Twitter the most, and at your Thanksgiving table saying, well, I saw on YouTube this as well. Was it a peer reviewed, vetted study or was it a YouTube study?
So you know, we still deal with a little of that, but for the most part, I think we're kind of over that hump of having to convince most people again probably about a nine. There's a study out there called the sixth America Study that Yale does every year, and they survey the American public and that crowd that we call the dismissive crowd that they're coming in at about seven or eight percent. Now, the folks that are just dismissive, and you're not going to be able to move the
needle with them no matter what you say. So my approach is on Twitter, I don't bother, I don't try to engage with them or play Twitter tennis, going back and forth.
So, and that survey, by the way, it measures six different responses to climate science, ranging from here are some flavors alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive. Now alarmed, thankfully, largest group clocking in this past year at thirty three percent of those surveyed. They're like, I'm alarmed. This shit's scary. Dismissive. On the other end of that spectrum, Whreuch is like, no,
not real, that's it nine percent. But the smallest group of them all is apathetic, with just five percent of Americans identifying as disengaged. So I'm going to link this short, four question Yale survey on my website. It's called the Six Americas Survey aka SASE, which is a fantastic reason to take it already in addition to helping climate researchers learn stuff. But what about information that you are gathering? Uh?
What are some things that you wish people knew about? Whether, what are facts to have in your pocket that you're like, how do more people not know this? Well?
I wish most people realize knew that we make weather predictions based on computer models that solve equations that try to predict how that fluid that I've been talking about changes in one day or three days or five days. I mean, I wish people knew what thirty percent chance of rain means, because most people don't. I mean when
I add ask people, they generally get it wrong. So and because of that, they often sort of misinterpret that we got the forecast wrong, when in fact they didn't know what thirty percent chance of rain meane, which really is trying to capture this r notion that there's a thirty percent chance with certain confidence who are given area of the forecast, And so I wish people understood what
the hurricane cone really means. We saw that recently with Hurricane Ian and Florida, which devastated parts of Florida this year in twenty twenty two, and there were people that evacuated from one part of the hurricane cone to another part of the hurricane cone, when in fact, you shouldn't evacuate anywhere in the hurricane cone. But most people interpret that cone is meaning, Oh, the storm's going to go down the center of the cone, and if it doesn't,
I'm good. But in fact, what that cone means is there's a sixty seven percent chance that the center of that storm can be anywhere in that hurricane cone. And so you know, there are just one of the things that I've learned over the years as a professor at the University of Georgia and a scientist at NASA and
a communicator with the Weather Channel and Forbes. The American public generally struggles with probabilities anything related to uncertainty, anything that has more than two processes happening at the same time, or anything that they can't simplify to their level. Not one thing that I've noticed that as a scientist, people will tend to sort of simplify things to what they to the level of their understanding, and at the expense of getting it wrong.
Sometimes that makes plenty of sense. And there's a reason why there are people like you who are very good at this, and then there are people like me who forget to bring a jacket I go, which is like why it's amazing to interview. Can I ask you some questions from our listeners?
Sure, happy to do it. And Son shout out, I hear there's a special question coming. Yes, I'm someone that maybe had me in class or something. I don't know.
Yes, not even a question. Jessica Ventra says, I'm too excited to formulate a question. But doctor Shepherd taught my weather and climate class at UGA. He was a fabulous professor. I taught high school science for a decade and always recommended his class to my students. And Jessica says that they still have notes from your class.
That's so cool. No, it's really and you know it's you know, if she taught high school that long, then that means she took me probably over a decade ago at the University of Georgia. So shout out to Jessica, thanks for taking what I bet was intro to weather and climbate eleven twelve.
But before we do, we like to shower a cause of the ologists choosing with some monetary thank yous. And this week doctor Marshall Shepherd selected the international nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Communities, which supports can by creating and implementing and scaling equitable climate change mitigation and resilient solutions for
those most profoundly impacted by the global climate crisis. They also ensure solutions emerge from within the community, and Marshall is a board member and you can learn all about them at sustain dot org. That is linked in the show notes and that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
When it comes to a great deal, Virgin Mobile doesn't play around introducing our new simplan price locked at fifteen euro month for life with unlimited data, calls and texts and ninety nine percent coverage. Switch today at Virginmedia dot ie Virgin Media It's playtime.
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Okay, great questions about to rain down on you from patrons of the show via patreon dot com slash ologies now. This first one was also asked by Patron's Miranda Panda Slayer, Derek Allen and Britney Kaufman. We had some great questions from a bunch of listeners. Wanted to know sleet, hail and gropple. What's the difference? Susan Baxter is a first time question jasker and said, could you tell us about grapple? What exactly is it?
So, yeah, gropple. You know in storm in clouds, oftentimes precipitation is forming by ice crystals. The rain that falls in most places in the United States actually started out as a snowflake. It just melts and becomes rain when it gets down below the freezing level. But there are oftentimes in clouds where these ice crystals they bump into some of the liquid water in the clouds and it freezes and it becomes this little seedling of ice, and
we call that gropple. But in thunderstorms, that groppl can continue to take trips up and down in that big thunderstorm or cumulo nimbus cut cloud, and they can grow and take on layers like an onion if you slice it and it falls out of the thunderstorm. Is hail. Sleet is actually ice crystals. They fall, they may melt, then they refreeze as they fall down to the ground, and that's what we get as sleep. And then there's another one that I'll add to our question, freezing rain.
Freezing rain. The ice crystal starts out as a snowflake in the cloud. It melts when it falls down to the ground, but it falls to the ground the temperatures below freezing, and then it freezes on surfaces, and that's called freezing rain. So the thing that I would sort of meet that I would note about this question, hail only happens in thunderstorms. So you see bouncing pieces of
ice falling during the winter, it's probably sleet. Because I often hear people say, oh, it's hailing outside, and no that's sleet because hail only happens in thunderstorms.
So yes, sleet is snow that melted and refroze before hitting the ground. Hail happens in thunderstorms. Grapple is snow coated and ice. The freezing rain turns slick upon hitting a surface. There's so much also more about snowfall in the snow hydrology episode, which I'm going to link in the show notes, and I hope you listen to it with a warm mug of something, because my digits are frigid just thinking about it. I had no idea. Okay,
what about humidity? Tyler Nelson Stephanie Komber's want to note. Tyler says, is a fall forty degrees actually colder than a spring forty degrees because of differences in moisture? And Stephanie Coombs wants to know, is there really a difference in wet versus dry cold or is it all in our heads? Lauren Maska Broda and Christy Kauger also desperately needed answers on this.
Yeah, so you know our flip that a little bit because you often hear people talk about, oh, I'm going to Vegas. It's one hundred and ten degrees, but it's a dry heat right here.
Yeah, yeah, but you know.
One hundred and ten degrees is still hot whether it's drying up. But I think the point there is that one hundred and ten degrees with more humidity would be oppressive. And so here in Joy, Georgia, we can get to ninety degrees, but our humidity may be quite high such that it feels like as one hundred and ten degrees because of that extra humidity. So yeah, there is something to the fact that humidity does add to the comfort level.
In terms of temperature, we often use something called the heat index to sort of talk about what the temperature really feels like when you add into humidity as well. But a better metric these days is something called the wet bulb globe temperature. Yeah, that's a big fancy. It tries to capture the temperature and humidity but also some other ways that our body is exchanging heat with the
surrounding atmosphere. So it's just a better metric to determine whether our body's going to be sensitive to heat and humidity.
And that is called the wet bulb globe temperature, which according to weather Dot GOV is a measure of the heat stress in direct sunlight, which is just a dirty little combination of temperature, humidity, wind speed, and the sun angle plus cloud cover. And some wet bulb globe thermometers need to be covered in a moistened cloth to get good ratings. Also, why does wet bulb globe sound so horny?
It doesn't help that the weather reporting service acuweather has trademarked the term real feel for this measurement meteorology making wet bulb globes hotter than expected.
So yes, some of your listeners may not be familiar with the term, but it's going to become more broadly used in the future. Now, the other sort of side of that is something called wind chill. When it's cold and windy, it makes it feel colder to us, so you know, you have to factor in that wind to determine what it actually feels like to our skin. One other thing that might be an interesting tidbit to kind
of go along with this question. When it's very humid outside, in fact, when the atmosphere is almost near saturation, which means it can't hold any more water vapor. Oftentimes that's when we feel very uncomfortable because our bodies produce sweat perspiration, and the function of that perspiration or sweat is to evaporate because when it evaporates, it cools the layer of skin.
But if the atmosphere is saturated, the evaporation of sweat doesn't happen because that water vapor from the sweat has nowhere to go. The air is full, so it can evaporate, so it just stays there, a sticky, sticky sweat on your on your body, and it doesn't evaporate. Because when things, when evaporation happens, it cools things.
So when they're forecasting what a wind chill or trying to figure out what exactly windchill is, I always picture them having like a mannequin with a bunch of sensors out in the wind trying to figure out how cold the mannekin would be. But with a wind chill, is that all just done numerically or how they forecast that's.
Just I mean, there are laboratory studies, I'm sure, and other things that have been sort of conducted on sort of bodies and how they respond to different wind chills or heat in diseased or wet bulb globe temperatures. But yeah, and once that's established, our weather models predict the temperature and the winds, and then you can determine the wind chill based on your expected wind or end or temperature.
Ah Okay, see this is I'm learning so much already. A ton of people want to know about tornadoes, looking at you, Patrons, Francis Hirstpreu Baker, Elijah Kelsey Simpson, Lea Anderson, Rebecca Rodarte, Jonathan, Mary Richard, Rebecca and Frey On behalf of their second Greater Aldo Fray, one time Kansas dweller, Mary Franks, and Sarah Montgomery. First time question asker says their understanding is that hurricanes can only rotate in one direction,
but tornadoes can rotate in either direction. And also like what causes a tornado alley? Why do some places get tornadoes and some places don't.
Yes, So, hurricanes in the northern Hemisphere rotate counterclockwise, and they're much larger storms than the tornadoes, which are much smaller scale storms that tend to all have counterclock rise rotation as well. But there may be some that's been out in the opposite direction. I would highly recommend and it's not because I'm in this series, but I am in this series. Netflix just dropped a new series called earth Storm, and there's earth Storm Hurricane, earth Storm Tornado.
I'm in the hurricane episode, but in that earth Storm Tornado episode does a really good job of explaining why, for example, the United States gets quite a few tornadoes. It's because of our juxtaposition, particularly the great planes of the cold Canadian land mass, the Rockies to the west, and the Gulf of Mexico. Those three geographic features are sort of very important in setting up the environment that's conducive for the formation of tornadoes.
It's a tistedst I should ask, though you did mention twister. What's the closest you've been to a tornado? Have you ever tornido?
Very close at all? I run away from them, not told to them, but there I say that because there are certainly we're in this era of storm chasers now, because you know, and some storm chasing is very important because you want to get data for science and so forth. But are there some people that go out there for the thrill or to get pictures to sell to the media and so forth, And more power to them. But I am a person that wants to be as far away from a tornado as possible.
Okay, good. So you have you ever been in peril from your work?
Not directly, I mean I've certainly been in some pretty bad hurricane situations, particularly Opal is one that comes to mind. Or I don't put myself in That's not the kind of researcher work that I do to go and put myself in front of a landfalling hurricane or a tornado.
Could Patrons Mark he Lette and Alia Myers asked if he had to storm Chase and I hope they sleep better tonight.
I was. I had a chance to fly. We were doing a mission for NASA when I was a scientist at NASA, and the planes are going to fly into the hurricane to take some data. And I think I had an opportunity to do that, but I passed. I'm very ill.
Yeah, good, we need you here.
So but there are certainly people that do it, though.
I have a theory that they have to put people like on CNN have to be out and a windbreaker in a storm, because you won't know how bad the storm is until you see a windbreaker flapping around.
Yeah, now, I think you've got that right. Actually, There are a lot of people that criticize reporters, like by colleague Jim Cantore at the Weather Channel. Some people like, well, why aren't you just go inside or what you know, Look, if he's willing to take the risk, it is providing a service because I don't think people have a good sense of how strong winds are and what a storm
surge looks like. Mike's side out. My colleague at the Weather Channel was reporting recently from Florida during Hurricane Ian, and he was in a protected place, but you could really get a sense of the storm surge and how dangerous it was without that, Without that that journalism, I don't think people wouldn't really have a sense of that, and they might be inclined to stay and in a
dangerous situation in the future. But maybe by seeing that, maybe it will make them make a better decision down the road.
Yeah, it always helps me to realize, like, oh, I know what wind feels like, and I've never felt win like that, So that's helpful for me at least.
But yeah, when I when I watched coverage of like out your Way earthquake, I mean, we don't experience a really bad earthquake here Georgia. We do have them or wildfires in the way that you have them out there, you know, but seeing them or experiencing them from the lens of the camera gives me an idea that if I did ever live in that area, i'd sort of have a feel of what to do, and we're not what not to do?
Yeah, I mean nineteen eighty nine World Series anyone, and he.
Fails to get Dave Parker bad second day.
So the Oakland A's take take.
I don't know if you watch The Giants and the A's, but we had a giant earthquake in San Francisco as the World Series was playing out in the Bay Area, and it was live, so a lot of people got to see, you know, Candlestick Park shaking, and they're like, oh, yeah, that sucks.
That's yeah, I've seen I've seen those images.
A ton of Floridians wrote in of course, I feel like people of Florida seither like meteorology and they're like, I have questions. But Katie Collins wants to know Floridian here, why are hurricanes so hard to track? And also a few people Mackenzie King wanted to know is a hurricane season maybe going to go longer in the year, so some good questions.
Actually hurricanes aren't that hard to track within about five days. They tend to be a little less easy to track when they're beyond about five days out in the ten day range. Where we've had progress over the years is actually our forecast track has been improved steadily over the last several decades. We're never going to be perfect. That's another thing I wanted to mention, so I'm glad you asked this question. There is this expectation by the public
that we can get it exactly right. We'll never be able to do that, whether it's a hurricane track, tornadic storm, or a partcipit. That's why we give you the forecast as a cone or as a probability, because we can't and we won't ever have the ability to give you a precise answer to is it going to rain in the backyard near my tomato plant next to the dog bowl. I will never be able to give you that precision
of a forecast. The atmosphere doesn't behave that way. It's a non linear system that we're trying to predict with equations. We will never have that level of accuracy with weather forecasting, because we're dealing with a fluid on a rotating planet that we're trying to predict with equations. But we've reduced the error in track forecasts significantly in the three day, four day, two day, one day out, So fifty to one hundred nautical miles of error from my panish one's
actually pretty good. So in other words, we can tell you within a fifty to one hundred miles whether hurricane is making landfall. That's about as good as the science allows us to get right now.
So the track or location of our hurricane slash typhoon slash cyclone is easier to predict than the intensity of it and the intense he follows. The Sephir Simpson Hurricane Windscale SSHWS from a ready starts at tropical depression, to a tropical storm to a category one if it reaches seventy four mile an hour sustained winds, all the way up to a category five, which has over one hundred and fifty seven mile per hour wins. But what about their names? Why are we calling them names that we
would name our nieces or nephews. Well, in order to not confuse storm systems. During World War Two, military meteorologists named hurricanes after their partners and love interests and wives and girlfriends, until this wonderful person named Roxy Bolton in the seventies, an ardent and accomplished feminist icon and activist,
suggested maybe they should alternate those with male names. Although Roxy initially suggested that the devastating storms should be named after senators, but the baby name convention stuck, and Noah keeps these pre written lists that rotate every six years until there's a hurricane that's so devastating that they just retire. It's Jersey for good, like there will never be another
Hurricane Katrina. And yes, there has been an oft sided study that came out in twenty fourteen titled female Hurricanes are Deadlier than male hurricanes, and it found that because of gender bias, folks do not heed warnings when it comes to a hurricane named after a woman as much as they do when named after man, although some people contested this, saying that the data set included hurricanes from nineteen fifty to nineteen seventy eight when they only used
female names, so some people can test it. What's my point? My point is if a hurricane's coming, please don't fuck around, thank you. So if you want to win some easy money, though, you can bet someone that the first hurricane of twenty
twenty three will be named Arlen. And hope that they don't look at the link that I'm posting on my website to Noah dot gov that has all the hurricane names for the next six years, and hopefully they don't listen to that before hurricane season, which starts in June and it lasts longer than Thanksgiving leftovers.
But there is some evidence because the waters stay warmer longer, or perhaps get warmer earlier in the season, that the hurricane season might start to be extended beyond June first and November thirtieth. I remember in two thousand and five we had hurricanes or tropical systems in the December. A few years ago we had hurricane or tropical storm Alex and that was in January. So it's all related to when those waters start becoming warm enough to support a hurricane.
You typically want about an eighty degree fair and heighth temperature or so. But because of the climate warming of the ocean, we're starting to see warmer oceans that can feed these storms.
A lot of folks spoke to one of the flim flams that you were kind of busting earlier. Mazi Lopez, Gens, Girl Alvarez, Josephina, Benjamin and Dbao, James Hale's, Olivia French, Andrew Ricaid, Rebecca Davis, Justin Dahl, Kat Kessler's husband, and Freddie be all wanted to know what does a percent chance really mean and how do you quantify the chance of precipitation.
It's related to the data that comes out of our models, and so we look at sort of how much confidence do we have that a certain amount of rain is going to fall at that location within a given area, and so it's it's a probabilistic forecast. So I'll give you a little anecdotal example. I was up in the North Georgia Mountains doing some river tubing with my son one day and it started raining, and this woman sort of starts complaining about the meteorology. She said there was
only a twenty percent chance of rain today. See, those meteorologiers are always wrong. She didn't know as a meteorologists. I was floating right now next to her, So I'm thinking to myself, it wasn't a zero percent chance of rain. In fact, we were probably in the twenty percent region that day, So I mean that forecast wasn't wrong at all, Right, twenty percent, there was a twenty There was a zero
percent chance that that particular area would receive rain. There was a twenty percent chance, so it rained likely in of just a statistical since the eighty percent of the area didn't get rain, but we were in the twenty percent that did so well, nothing was wrong with that forecast at all.
So that percentage can mean that twenty percent of the area will definitely see rain. But other meteorologists might use a slightly different formula to determine the pop or the probability of precipitation, which works out to be the confidence of rain times the area. So if there is a sixty percent confidence that rain will occur over sixty percent of a given geography, then the POP for that day
would be thirty six percent chance of rain. You know what, as long as we're getting formulaic and jargony, these next ones are for the real weather geeks. One last listener question. I'm going to pick one that I feel like you will appreciate because we don't know what it means. Cassie wants to know how to get the precision of incituo measurements with the coverage of remote sensing to improve model accuracy, and Trevor Dirty wants to know E NSO is highly predictable.
How far would you say we are away from being able to predict AMO at similar resolution. I don't know what any of those mean.
Yeah, Well, in SO it's just the El Nino Southern oscillation cycle, and AMO is the Atlantic multi decadal oscillation so INSO is the El Nino La Nina phase, and so there is some level of some predictability of the
INSO cycle. Right now, For example, we're still in Ala Nina phase, which means the ocean waters in this Equatorial Pacific are cooler than normal and that tends to affect weather patterns, whereas long warmer than normal Equatorial Pacific is the El Nino and so the Climate Prediction Center of the European Center, they actually can predict the sort of INSO phase, whether we're El Nino and La Nina, not as precisely as we can sort of day to day weather,
but we can have a sense of whether we're going to be in a lin Nini or an al Nino pattern, and that in turn leads to some understanding of what type of weather we'll see in certain parts of the US.
So al Nino is warmer Pacific ocean waters, and yes, La Nina is cooler and per Trevor's question, more predictable. So scientists are still figuring out the AMO, which is the Atlantic Ocean's pattern of warming and cooling that tends to switch about every seventy or so years, perhaps due to the regular ocean conveyor belt currents, but scientists think
it may also be affected lately through climate change. And Trevor Derning wanted to know how far away would you say we are from being able to predict the AMO at similar resolution.
The AMO is the sort of larger, long varying cycle in the atmosphere that has been linked to hurricane activity in the Atlantic, for example, And you know whether we're in a sort of active phase versus a non active phase. I think our predictability of that is that's clear right now. I think one question you mentioned was about QG theory and something about a skew.
T chart, So that was Patron Diana Warheight's question. Which read, oh, please ask about QT theory and how the skew T is the ultimate atmosphere gauge for what is happening in the atmosphere at the moment.
Which is a plot that we use to plot soundings, which is when we send weather balloons up, they take information about temperature and moisture and wind and we plot those on a skew T charts. And quasi geostrophic theory or QG theory, which was mentioned, that's just sort of one of the sort of governing synoptic dynamic theories in
the atmospheric sciences. That explains many of the motions. Again, it's way too complex to talk about on a podcast, So I would recommend the dynamics class in a meteorology program to get into the QG theory, because if I start talking about it, your head's going to explode and your headphones or EarPods are going to fly out of your ear.
Right, Hi, I went to the American Meteorological Society's glossary terms and this back in my little basket for us. So, a quasi geostrophic theory is a theory of atmospheric dynamics that involves the quasi giostrophic approximation and the derivation of the quasi geotrophic equations. What's a quasi geotrophic approximation you're dying to know. I'll tell you. It's a form of the primitive equations in which an approximation to the actual
winds is selectively used in the momentum and thermodynamic equations. Specifically, horizontal winds are replaced by their geostrophic values in the horizontal acceleration terms of the momentum equations, and horizontal advection in the thermodynamic equation is approximated by geostrophic adviction. It continues, but I blacked out trying to read it. So just please respect your whether people never comment on their outfits on TV. They deserve so much better.
Oh, it's some good geeky stuff that we certainly talk about on weather gigs.
So yep. Is there an issue with weather balloons because of a helium shortage?
There was, We've had periodically we have had some issues with the National Weather Service. Now, I think one thing that really helps us out as we can get some of the same kind of information from satellites these days that we can get from weather balloons and in some ways, the satellites are better because we can get coverage and
more consistently and over many other places. With the weather balloon, we only have it where we have it and when we launch it, and that's sometimes just twice a day, but it's still the satellites don't have the same level of resolution. Satellites are much coarser resolution. And what I mean by resolution if most of you probably have an iPhone. I'm Team Android, I have a Samsum. But on our cameras on our phones, a number of megapixels tells us how good the photos are on those phones. So the
more megapixels, the better the picture. So the finer the resolution is of the model or the resud of the observation, the more fine scale weather we can actually measure. So right now you know, when you've got a weather balloon, or you've got a temperature measurement from a thermometer or a pressure measurement from a barometer where you're sitting alley,
that's pretty good resolution. A satellite might you only able to give you a resolution over the square mile of where you're sitting, so it would be a much more blurred courser measurement.
I just wanted to tell you that in nineteen eighty two, a truck driver named Larry Walters filled forty five weather balloons with helium, and then he tied them to a lawn chair and flew sixteen thousand feet over Long Beach for about forty five minutes, just cruising in a lawn chair covered in balloons. And then he took a pellet gun. He thought about this ahead of time, and he shot the balloons until he dropped the gun on accident. He didn't think about that, but he floated back down to earth.
He got tangled in some power lines, but he climbed down to safety, and then he was on some talk shows. But ultimately his life got really sad and he died by his own hand. We won't go into it. Also, I know you don't care, but I just figured out that to lift me off the ground it would take five hundred and fifty seven party balloons, which would be scary and a waste of helium. So I'm good, just
sobbing to up last two questions. I always ask, hardest thing about meteorology can be annoying, it can be difficult, it can be whatever hardest thing about.
The hardest thing about meteorology is that we're we're it's fluid dynamics, but it's accessible to many in the public, so they think it's much more so than that it really is. The discipline is from a science standpoint, is really just fluid dynamics, a bunch of physics and a bunch of calculus. But to the public, all they see is cole fronts on a map or something. But a lot went into getting to that point, and so that's the challenge of explaining that complexity to me, is very difficult.
Mm hmmm. What about your favorite thing? Your favorite thing about weather? About meteorology, what's fascinating?
I can't help. But when there's a storm, you know coming, you know, if I'm looking at the radar and I see you know, I'm out on my deck or in the front yard as long as I can trying to see what's going on before I have to get the safety. But no, I'm still legitimate, only fascinated by weather. So I don't feel like I work what I do. I'm look. I was the former president of the American Meteorological Society. I work for NASA. I get to do basically big
science projects. We're living now as a scientist and a professor at the University of Georgia. I mean, I'm still a kid in the candy store. I don't dread going to work.
This is why I wanted to talk to you. You're honestly like the most qualified meteorologist I've ever seen. Like your list of awards is bonkers. How celebrated you are, and clearly you're very into this and passionate about it, because I mean, you're just it shows in the work you do and the outreach you do. And I follow you on Twitter and you're a joy to follow on Twitter. But anything else that you want to shout out, I know, we mentioned weather Geeks, we'll mention.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely guess Jim. If you like anything you hear, We geek out every week with various weather and climate and science experts on the Weather Geeks podcast by the Weather Channel. Check out my Forbes articles. Follow me on Twitter at doctor Shepherd twenty thirteen. I'm on int Gram at marsh for FSU. I'm on TikTok at doctor Shepherd Knows. So that's just the new for eight in the TikTok fairly recently so still kind of feeling my way around that format. But yeah, I'm out there.
I'm not your typical scientists a professor. I really like to engage.
Thank you so much for doing this. This is a joy. It's been an honor.
Honestly, thank you so much for having me Alan Wow.
So there you have it. You can ask brilliant distinguished professors sometimes dorky questions because they're just a del yusha facts and learning stuff makes the planet healthier for all of us. So there are links to doctor Marshall Shepherd's social media and website, and to sustain dot org and so many things that we discussed up at my website at aliwar dot com, slash ologies slash meteorology that's linked in the show notes. We're at ologies on Twitter and Instagram.
I'm at ali Ward with one L on both. I'm at ali Underscore ologies on TikTok say Hi. Smologies episodes are right in our feed and they're safe for all ages. You can find them at aliwar dot com slash smologies. Thank you Mercedes Maitland, Jarreed Sleeper, and Siegredriguez Thomas for editing those ologies. Merch is available ologiesmirch dot com. Thank you, Susan Hale for managing that plus doing so much more.
Thank you Noel Dilworth for all the scheduling. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts and Caleb Patten bleeps them. Those are up for free at aliward dot com. Slash Ologies Dash Extras. Aaron Talbert admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group with the sist from Bunnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis Kelly ar Dwyers days on top of our website
and can design one for you. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and lead editor for this episode was the wonderful Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions, which is linked in the show notes at maitland audio dot com. Huge thanks to her for the tremendous job she's doing and giving mister Jared Sleeper some time to explore his other passions.
I'm so excited for him for that. If you stick around to the end of the show, you know I tell you a secret, and this week's secret is that I watched Gieramo del Toro's Pinocchio on Netflix and the entire time I was watching it, they haven't Jiminy Cricket character and he's got kind of a rotund little belly, and I just kept thinking, Man, I wonder if he's got a horse hair worm in there, because if you've ever seen a horse hair worm crawl out of a
cricket or a praying mantis's butt, wow, it puts like pimple videos to shame. Just google it. They put its little butt in water and then the horse hair worm is like, I'm out of here, and it is like a mile of worm. But no, Pinocchio didn't touch on horse hair worms. I wish it did. It did make me cry a lot. I cried so much. Also, Girmo Delt horror at one point on Twitter said he would appear on Ologies on an episode about creatures and monsters. So he's been a little busy since he tweeted that
two years ago. But don't think that it's not on my wish list. All right, this is not a bout me go dance around in the rain. It's great, okay, bye bye. The weather outside is weather.
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