How Hurricanes Work

It's a very beautiful little web page and it's got all the information. And if you already pre ordered, can't you just like upload your receipt and get that pre order gift. Yep, you can, and they will mail it off to you and you will get into mail and you say, oh, thank you, don't mind if I do. And it's a poster that you will love and cherish and possibly pass on down to your children as an heirloom. That's right, everyone, We couldn't be more excited about this book.

It's really coming together. Well, it's us through and through and you can go check out some excerpts at stuff you Should Read books dot com. Welcome to Stuff you Should know a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w. Chuck Bryan over there. Jerry's around here somewhere. So this is stuff you should know everybody. The Wrath of God Edition. Hi. Hi, I've been singing that Bob

Dylan song all day. Oh yeah, you know it's weird. I have two and I hadn't realized it until you just said that. Really, Yeah, my brain is left. Which song hard Rain is Gonna fall? Her? Yeah? Hurricane Hurricane, hard Rain is gonna fall? Are you crazy? I guess it would. It hadn't even occurred to me. Great song Hurricane. Now I'm going to be singing hard Grain is Gonna Fall, which is not nearly as good as the Hurricane song. I'm surprised. You know any Bob One song that's shocking?

Those are the two? No more than that? No, that's it. Oh, I know that one that goes d what's that one? Oh? It's all of them? Gotcha? God bless him. He's got a new album ount It's great, dude. How many does that make? M hmm. He's got a lot of records. Well, God's great song it is. It was a good movie too, sad I didn't see that. Yeah, Denzel Washington, I believe played him, And yes, it's I mean, if you like Injustice, you're gonna love that movie. You mean, if you like

movies about fighting injustice, just what you mean? Right, Either way, you're gonna like the movie. I love Injustice. Sadly, there are people who say things like that these days. That's true. So, um, Chuck, we're talking about hurricanes, not the Bob Dylan song, but about the actual like weather system, weather disaster, and not only I guess you mean typhoons. Uh no, I mean hurricanes, but that's the same thing, and so is Chuck, you mean cyclones? Kind of yes, all three of those are

this one and the same. Did you know that? You know? I think I knew that and just sort of forgot because when I read it, I was like, oh, yeah, I think I knew that, right, So, I mean, it just depends on where they occur in the world. Basically that there's I mean, aside aside from exactly you know, um, where they occur, where they make land, and then the way that they turn and move. They are the same thing.

They start the same way. They're the same uh group of of weird you know, weather coincidences that happen to assemble into something. And um, hurricanes to me are as good as it gets natural disaster wise. I mean, they are as interesting as they come. They are so ridiculously destructive and then theoretically what they could do if they got even worse, which they may. Um, It's it just boggles the mind. I'm a hurricane fan in a way, but I hate Miami U as far as their university

is concerned. Uh you hate the you No, not really, I'm just teasing. Yeah, And I think the other thing about hurricanes is so fascinating is it's, um, it's a regular thing. It's not like a volcanic eruption or a tsunami, uh, you know, or an earthquake. It's you know, every year they're gonna be you know, uh, like a hundred tropical storms and you know thirty to fifty of these are going to develop into hurricanes. You can count on it,

right Jack. Yeah. And they actually they have seasons, to tell you the truth, They're depending on where you are in the world and the um northern hemisphere, especially in the Atlantic You've got what's appropriately called the Atlantic hurricane season and it runs from about June one to November UM. Down Under in the Southern Hemisphere, they have a hurricane season that runs from about January to March UM. And again, like there's some differences to them, but that's it's essentially

the same thing. It's just that hurricanes tend to form over the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific um, and then cyclones are over the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, and then typhoons tend to hit the northwest Pacific Ocean around Asia to the Middle East. That's right. So I think the Australians would call them cyclones, is that right? Uh?

And we call them good old hurricanes, that's right. And actually hurricane, which since we're just spouting out facts about hurricanes at this point right now, it actually comes from an old um Mayan word hurrican, which is the name for one of their gods of destruction of thunder and lightning and wind. And I believe maybe rain who brought the flood that destroyed almost all people and then made

it recede because humanity out in too wicked. And if that sounds familiar, that's because there's a flood story and basically every culture in the world, which makes me really wonder, like, what happened? What is everybody talking about that actually may have happened at some point. I just find that fascinating. Yeah, and how hurricane forms can get very convoluted, as we

realized when we UH started diving into this research. And we'll describe it in a bit more detail, but you know me and my Earth Science for kids websites door UH.

In the very simplest of terms, hurricanes form over warm ocean waters near the equator and the tropics, and that warm moist air rises up and then is replaced by cooler air, and then that air warms up and starts to rise, and that just causess this cycle that starts these clouds to form, and they start rotating and they get a little more organized, and if there's enough of that warm water, eventually that wind is gonna pick up and you're gonna get a hurricane, and they move in

the northern hemisphere, especially in the Atlantic um which we're going to kind of focus on Atlantic hurricanes here, but again, most of the souf we're talking about applies to cyclones and typhoons too, but in the Atlantic in particular, they usually start off the west coast of Africa and move down towards the equator where they slide over through the Caribbean and then up along Florida, the Carolinas, um sometimes to New England, but most of the time they'll hit

the the Gulf Stream and will be carried up to England where they peeter out and show up for a pine at the pub. Yeah. And you know, hurricanes will they eventually will die out. Um. Landfall will make them die out, because like that's the worst part for the people, you know, living on planet Earth, because that's where it hits the land. But that actually means the hurricane is dying because there's not that warm water anymore. Um. Or the further north they go, the cooler that water gets,

and that'll just peter her it out as well. Yeah, which I mean, if you really think about it, when you take all these factors into consideration, just those two that it needs warm water and um that it can't be over land like a hurricane. Is a startling series of coincidences that happen like again and again repeatedly during a certain section of the year in certain sections of the world, and they it just takes everything being perfect, like a perfect storm, but over and over again for

these things to happen. And like you said, you know, there's so many different storms that form off the west coast of Africa or off the uh the yeah, or off the west coast of Australia, um, that can form into these things, but they don't. They usually don't because all of those factors just aren't working just perfectly for the thing did not only kind of catch to ignite in a way, um, but also to on of developed steam and to really pick up and become a problem. Yeah.

And I know what you mean about loving hurricanes in a certain weird way. Um. Obviously, the landfall and just the destruction is terrible and we don't wish that ever. But when you see those images from above of the hurricane rotating and how big it is, it's just it's humbling and just sort of mind boggling display of nature at work. You know. It is that I mean that that hits it on the head. It's definitely not all the death and property destructs that I'm a fan of. No,

of course, I'm like, man, I love injustice. I know, man, this is what happened to you overnight. So um so, let's let's talk about this. Let's talk about how hurricane actually forms and then what it forms into. Okay, we're gonna do the Earth sign. Okay, I'll take over everybody. I hope you like my voice because that's all you're gonna hear for a little while. I think it's the listening they're probably you to that. Um do you know when we first started this, I couldn't stand my voice,

couldn't stand it. Y. Yeah, I finally reached I reached the day tent with it. I just ignore it. Um So, chuck, You've got air, right air over the ocean and over the land. The stuff that's closest to the surface is actually the warmest, which, as you know, like if you've ever been skydiving, is really cold up there. I haven't. No, it's really cold up there, trust me. Um. And when you um or like if you're ever like if you climb a mountain or something, it's always cold up there.

And one reason why is because I've never done it. The just trust me, trust me. The upstairs of my house is cooler, and it shouldn't be. It should be much warmer because heat rises in your house. Yeah, but the a C up there, there's fewer rooms. It just really Okay, you're making this our science thing way hard. So the air at the surface of the Earth is warmer because it gets warm by the Earth or by

the ocean, right open. Ocean temperatures kind of tend to warm with the seasons, and so by around June one, which was when hurricane season starts, you've got an ocean which with surface temperatures hovering around Sevenday nine to eighty degrees fahrenheit. Okay, Yeah, And I think eighty is where you've got to be kind of that's the threshold to even get if you want to talk about hurricanes, it's got to go to eighty degrees exactly, and not just

at the very surface. I think it needs to be that down to about a hundred and fifty feet because hurricanes mixes a lot of water together, and if it's not warm water that stays available, it's not it's just

gonna peeter out right. So you need eighty degree at a minimum um surface temperature water down to a hundred and fifty feet and so um, you've got that going on in the ocean around certain times a year, and if we can travel into the interior of Africa all the way to Sudan, a little monarch butterfly will flap its wings and that creates an air disturbance, and weeks later that develops into an even bigger disturbance, and it moves further west across Africa and finally off the coast,

and it will encounter that warm water and warm air that's that's being heated by the water, and that disturbance will actually encounter that water that's evaporating and rising. And as that water evaporates and rises, um, it's becoming less dense. Right, the molecules that make up that air with the water

vapor are further apart then cold are that's above it. Well, nature of abhoors a vacuum, right, and when the air leaves that area right above the surface of the ocean, cold are starts to move in below it, right, which pushes the other air further upward. But then that cold air is warmed up too, and that starts to rise. And so what you have under this disturbance in the air that was created by a butterfly's wings in Sudan

is this this motion in the ocean. That's all that that that is kind of this upward trajectory of air constantly moving upward, and it's full of water vapors. So it's when it gets high enough up into the cooler regions in the atmosphere, it condenses and forms clouds, and those clouds eventually start to rain, and as it condenses and starts to rain, that actually heats up that area. The latent heat of condensation heats up that area. So now you have this column of warm moist air rising up,

moving with coal. They're trying to come in and replace it. As the warm air moves, and you have a lot of air movement, you have some storm starting, and you have all the ingredients now for what could become a hurricane. That's right, and uh that that heat exchange is going on, and that's going to create a lot of wind and that's just gonna make everything worse because those winds converge at the surface and they're colliding with each other, and that's pushing that warm moist air up and up, and

that cycle just starts to happen. That rotational cycle that's so tied to, like the image of a hurricane, and uh, those winds get involved and everything kind of everything kind of just synchronizes, right exactly. I mean, like that's what I'm talking about with all the different coincidences that have to number one, be present, then have to work just right, because if that wind that's converging at the surface to

replace that warm moist air that's rising. Um Man, I've never said moist this many times in my life and been okay with it, but I'm I'm all right, so far, how are you doing? Okay? Um, If the speed of that wind that's coming in at the surface is different than say, like the speed of that you know higher up in that column, you're gonna have what's called wind shear, and it's going to keep the storm from being organized

into a cohesive hole. So just that factor alone that somehow the winds at different levels of this storm that's starting to organize have to be moving at roughly the same speed. That's a big one, right, Um. And then because of these these thunderstorms that are are are starting and the more condensation that's um that they're heating more

and more, so they're creating more and more storms. So you've got all these storms that are kind of starting around this area, and they start to get organized together, and then this is this. Eventually, this is called a tropical depression. And eventually, if all, if everything that we're gonna keep talking about happens just precisely right, is going to organize into a tropical storm and then a hurricane. And then the hurricane, as we'll see, goes through different

stages of categorization. And all has to do with the speed of those winds that have now kind of organized into this rotational monster, which is really a tight or sometimes a loose collection of storms that form one big storm. That's what a hurricane is, that are all kind of moving in the same direction at about the same speed. And it all has to do with that that thing that started all this, that rising moist air in that

one spot. Because as these different storms assemble into a larger, more cohesive hole, the center, the lowest pressure center, right where there's the most the warmest, moistest air is rising up. Um it also has the lowest pressure, and because nature abhors a vacuum, higher pressure air is trying to come in to fill it. But there's something that um we have to talk about called the Coriolis effect, and here's where things really run off the rails for us ticket chuck. Yeah.

The Coriolis effect is when you see that hurricane rotating, that's a byproduct or I guess the product of that Coriolis force, which is we've talked about it before, but it's the natural phenomenon that makes fluids in any kind of free moving object either go to the right of their destination if you're in the Northern hemisphere, or to the left in the Southern hemisphere. Uh, not toilets in Australia.

I thought, I thought we said that. Okay, so I thought I said it wasn't true, and somebody showed us that it was. It was the opposite. Yeah, I think it's not true. Well we'll find out again. But at any rate, in the Northern hemisphere, your winds deflect to the right. In the Southern Hemisphere, they're going to deflect to the left. And this that deflection that gets the storm spinning. And that's why you get different rotations in

each hemisphere. They rotate counterclockwise here in the Northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern hemisphere. Right, But we do need to keep going with the Coriolis effect. Sorry, I didn't mean to scare everybody, but the Coriolis effect does two things. It makes the hurricane rotate like you were saying,

basically on an axis around that lowest pressure center. And then it also moves the hurricane physically itself as it kind of travels southward from West Africa towards the equator, which is really bizarre because at the equator the Coriolis effect is at its absolute weakest. It's strongest at the polls. But for some reason, something about the Coriolis effect moves the hurricane like a hurricane could theoretically cross the equator

from the northern hemisphere to the southern. Who knows what would happen when it and when it transferred over to the other like the opposite Coriolis effect. As far as we know, probably as far as we know, it's never happened. But we've only been keeping track of this stuff for about a hundred years, but it just doesn't ever seem to happen. For some reason, the Corioles effect, despite being weakest that the equator, moves hurricanes back upward over and

up back into the left right. So the Coriolis effect us two very important things for hurricanes, but probably the biggest one, the most important one as far as the hurricane itself is concerned, is to keep that thing spinning around in the same motion, clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on

your hemisphere. All right, I think we should take a break and we can come back and talk a little bit about what these different categories mean right after this, So, so, Chuck, before we talk categories, I have to pop one more thing in about the coreoles. It's important, you're ready, sure, So that lowest pressure center, what's called the eye m that is actually um. It's the clearest part of the hurricane.

Sometimes it's clear skies, um beautiful, eerily calm. And the reason why is because of the Coriolis effect, the lowest pressure center is never overwhelmed by the higher pressure air that's trying to get in. The whole reason that hurricane spins around the center is because all that wind from sometimes hundreds of miles away is traveling to that center trying to fill it, but the Coriolis effect deflects it.

They end up going around that center the winds and then up so lifting more warm air up, and they never make it to that middle which is what causes that. And the stronger the winds, meaning the stronger the pressure gradient between the center of the the hurricane and the outer bands beyond the eyewall, the stronger the difference between that gradient, the stronger the hurricane is going to be because the stronger the winds are gonna be trying to

fill that low pressure void. That's what causes hurricanes to spin around clockwise or counterclockwise. That is absolutely fascinating to me. It's very cool either storm commest place in the world. It really is, although it's counterintuitive. It is. So the categories category one and this is all broken down and very sort of uh. I mean there's there's really there's. It's it's pretty stiff as as far as how they categorize. He's saying, right, it's not willy nilly. They don't say

like this. It's getting pretty bad. I think it's a two. Actually measure things and there are demarcation lines by usually wind speeds is one of the big parts. Um is a category one and that's gonna you know, I could blow a tree branch into your roof or or get some shingles shuttering. You might have to get out the pruners. Category two is ten miles per hour. That's getting pretty dangerous and you're gonna get some pretty extensive damage at

this point. Um Like you know, the siding of your house, the frame of your house. Shallow trees can be snapped or uprooted. At this point, you're probably gonna get some power loss. Number three is a major hurricane. Category three is at one eleven hundred twenty nine miles and they rank this as devastating damage and you know, lots of trees uprooted. You definitely will lose probably power and water

for a period of time for the category three. And then you've got your category four, which is a hundred and thirty to a hundred and fifty six. Category five is hundred and fifty seven. Are higher. You're probably not gonna see many Cat fives, but the Cat four is pretty catastrophic, and those are the ones that we've seen more and more of in more recent years. Category fives

are just, yeah, that's extreme catastrophe there monsters monsters. So category four and five, there's not a tremendous amount of differences of both, like you said, considered catastrophic um damage causing hurricanes, But I get the impression that the difference between four and five and really like real life is substantial.

But either way, they're gonna like leave so many trees and power lines down that you're this that whatever area gets hit substantially by one of those UM category four or five are going to basically be isolated both without power but also um the roads are going to be made impassable. And sometimes you can be stuck in the midst of this for weeks before you can can be reached again. The destruction can be so bad from them. Yeah, and you know, if you're are a coastal liver, um,

this is a part of your life. Every year hurricane season is a big deal. You've got your your house retrofitted ideally at this point, I think like almost any

coastal house these days is on stilts. If it's you know, built in the last twenty plus years, well, not just that, I think after two thousand five, I want to say it was Hurricane Andrew um Florida in particular, past new building codes that I like, if you put a roof on, it has to have like this kind of joist and um Like whatever windows are put in have to be

like wind proof. Up to thirty miles. Probably they've definitely like started to take that seriously because so many people were dying before, but also because of the billions and billions of dollars of property damage that would happen every year. Yeah, I mean here in Atlanta, obviously we don't get hurricanes. Coastal Georgia, we certainly do, but we do get the outer bands of the hurricane, and we can get some really bad wind and rain and some flooding and stuff

like that. But we're obviously far enough inland to where the eye of the hurricane is not going to really affect us. But if you're in the Gulf or along the Florida or South Carolina, North Carolina up into Virginia even um, and then you know, like you said, they can go higher Maryland and New England, but in even New York City. But generally I think like kind of from Virginia down is where you're gonna be the most

worried in hurricane season. So um, you know, you mean, And I have a place in Florida, right and we were down there once and I think it was Hurricane Michael a year or so ago, came through and we got out of there and came up to Atlanta, and that thing followed us all the way up to Atlanta and knocked the power out. We're at our place. There was that a shaggy dog story. Do you know what a shaggy dog story is? A story that seems um uh worthwhile or worth saying to the person saying it,

but not to anybody else. Oh, I don't think so. And why did they call it a shaggy dogs? I have no idea. We need to get to the bottom of that someday. No, I think it's a great story. Um. And I remember when that happened. In fact, you do. Wow. I love it when my life is part of your life. I know it's like happens to it three times a year and every Tuesday, that's right. Uh, yeah, I totally

remember that. And you've also, um, you know, like any good coastal liver, you've got hurricane shutters and stuff like that, right, No, yeah, for sure, and like the high impact windows and all that stuff. Yeah, you just gotta do that stuff these days. Oh, you definitely do. And it's like really kind of scary if you're out there not like that, you know, because there was two thousand five when they passed that building.

CA There's a lot of places that haven't been retrofit, and you know, it's like the whole community kind of comes together to take care of everybody who who needs

help around that time, which is pretty cool. But one of the reasons why everybody has, you know, days to prepare for this kind of thing and go to the store and buy every banana you can get your hands on and like five loaves of bread and all that um and put up sandbags and stuff is because of the modeling and um forecasting that has has been developed in the last I don't know, fifty sixty years UM. That's really saved a lot of people's lives because we

didn't have warnings before. It was just the sky started to look pretty bad and you know, an hour or two later your town was gone. Yeah, and it's you know, I rent the beach house on Isle of Palms every usually in all those houses are you know, fifteen feet off the ground on those on those legs, And it's just crazy to me to think about the old days when you would just have a house sitting on the sand like seventy five ft from the from high time. This is such a bad idea. Because such a bad idea.

One of the things, one of the big problems that make hurricanes so destructive, Chuck, is that not only um is it the wind that can come through, and you know, once it reaches I think like a category three, four or five, you're that's when you're gonna start to lose your deck. Um not just your decks are your roof decking is really what I meant, you'd be like my deck, which would suck because decks are kind of expensive. But it's your roof decking that you really be worried about.

And that happens when the wind itself yours is the envelope of your house, like it breaks a window or something like that, and now all of a sudden, you've got a pressure difference inside and outside of your house, which can actually pop the roof right off of your house. Which once that happens, your your walls start to give way. It's a bad jamp. Wind is very destructive too. But the reason people started putting houses on stilts is because that wind is so strong and the hurricane can be

so massive that it actually pushes the ocean inland. It's it's not like a huge wave. It's a it's here's the ocean way further inland than it should be, and it's called a storm surge. And it's a huge problem with with hurricanes. Yeah. And you know, I've been to places before and after, uh, just from year to year on vacation, and the it can literally remake the coastline. Um,

they look vastly different after a hurricane. I think that one of the years we went to Isle of Palms, it was after a hurricane and instead of uh, you know, the walk to the beach from the house, instead of you know that sort of gradual uh declined to the to the water, it was in some places like a fift ft drop of just a sheer wall cliff of sand and people had ladders and stuff like that. You would literally have to climb down a ladder to get

down to the to the ocean e beach part. Yeah, and that's not good if your house is built on that sand that used to be there. And as we saw in our um, we're running on a sand and that really matters episode that we need that sand. We can't afford the ocean to just come reclaim that that's our sand. Yeah, And well, the good thing about Isle of Palmzo is those houses are set back a great deal. Uh, They're not on that sand. There's that big area of

sea grass and just do shrubbery and stuff in between. Uh. And so it's it's just a safer bet when you're trying to book a place because it's not it's not a hurricane proof. But by the time the water gets there, I mean that would have to be a really really big surge. Yeah yeah, um, but it happens. It does happen. I mean it definitely like a storm search can be pretty bad. I think Hurricane Harvey uh in Houston in

two thousand seventeen. One of the reasons it was so destructive it was, from what I saw, was the second most expensive storm UM that's ever hit the US. It costs a hundred and twenty dollars that's it. It costs a hundred and twenty eight billion dollars in UM damages. And one of the reasons why is because of that storm search and not just you know, flooding houses and causing property damage. That kind of storm search can overwhelm your sewer system and mess with your drinking water supply

and do all sorts of horrible stuff. We can kill off tons of wildlife because that's something that gets overlooked in hurricanes. You know, the humans are so worried about us and then our pets and everything. The wildlife itself can really take a hit like fish. Hurricanes can kill fish. That's how destruct if they are. They slam them into like underwater outcroppings and sandbars and stuff and just kill the fish. That's how That's how forceful these things are.

So there's a lot of other problems that arise from the hurricane, in particular the storm surge too, that we've only really started to kind of grasp in the last like a few decades of of examining hurricanes. Yeah, but you were talking about tracking, it's gotten so much better

these days. Um. On the ground, there's something called the Regional Specialized meter Meteorological Centers, and this is just basically a network all around the world of global centers that are designated by the World Meteorological Organization, and they are the ones who track these things using weather satellites, uh, using infrared technology and infrared sensors. They're they're going to detect all those all the minutia of the temperature differences, uh,

cloud heights, all these things. You know how you mentioned that all these things have to kind of be perfect. They have all these ways of measuring these little bits of perfection as they align, and they know pretty well. Now, Um, you know, things can change and things can reverse course. I know people get frustrated when they keep changing the path of the herc and you know, they don't keep changing it when they report all changes. But that's I

think people kind of act that way. Sometimes they do for sure, you know, you make me leave my house and this thing didn't even make landfall. It's like they're they're doing a pretty good job and they're doing the

best they can. Well, it's problematic too as far as forecasting goes, because if you do that to people in a coastal area, you know, a couple of times in one year, they're gonna stop listening to you, and you know, you might be a percent right and and something's gonna make landfall right on top of them and they're not gonna leave. So there is definitely a fine line, and there is kind of a balance between knowing too soon

and um and not knowing at all. And we're kind of working our way toward that sweet spot for sure, and it's gotten way better. But very very famously, if you ever follow hurricanes um as they start to kind of come towards the US, Like there's the famous the spaghetti model. Have you ever seen one of those? So all of those is just a tangle of tracks of

the hurricane that have been forecasted. So the European model is typically thought of as probably the most accurate, and that's put together by an agency in Europe and they say, here's what the track that we think. Then there's like ten or a dozen or fifteen different agencies and groups

all forecasting a track. When you put them all together, it looks like different colored lines of spaghetti over the map, and you get a pretty good idea of just where the thing's gonna go based on all of these different um predictions, kind of like the wisdom of crowd, do

you know what I mean? Where the more information you have and you put together, the more guests as put together, probably the closer combined they're going to be too accurate than any one of them individually would have a chance

to be. Yeah, and the cool thing about spaghetti models, and this is true of like uh, percentage of rain and stuff that you might see every day is a lot of it is based on past data, um, like what's going on now for sure, But then when you plug that into all the past data and behaviors of storms in the past and what they've done and how they've moved and behaved, you can get a pretty cool model.

And I've always loved that about whether that they use so much historical data to predict what could happen this time, right, That's what they used to produce the Cone of Uncertainty, which is one of the most confusing meteorological models, maybe any kind of model there is on the planet. Um, it's a really great useful tool if you know what it's talking about. If you don't know exactly what it's talking about, it's seriously confused, using, and really misleading in

a lot of ways. But with the Cone of Uncertainty is everybody's seen it. It's like kind of like this funnel. It looks like a tornado basically that that looks like it shows the path and width of the hurricane. It goes from kind of small to wider and wider and wider, so it looks like what it's showing you is the track of a hurricane and how big the hurricane is gonna grow over time. That's not at all with the

cone of uncertainty. Shows what the cone of uncertainty is. Instead, it's a plot of like I think about five different circles representing the next seventy two onto five days out forecasts, and it says, here's all the data we have, and we're crunching those numbers, and then we're comparing them to how accurate we were in the last five years for predicting hurricanes that were five years out. And then all of a sudden you put that together. That forms the circle.

And that five day out circle is always the biggest because it's hardest to predict weather patterns five days out. But what it looks like when you take those increasingly larger circles and connect them with the line is that it's forming a path. And really what it's showing is this is the potential distance between the track of the hurricane the center of the hurricane um and it could it could land anywhere in here, not the edges of it.

We're talking just just the center. So every time hurricane season rolls around, people go and look up what the cone of uncertainty means, because it doesn't mean at all what you think it does. Hopefully, I've cleared it up for like two people, and I probably just confused the other million even further. Uh. The cool thing about those two is that they can be changed with a sharpie. That's right, it's really neat. Seen it done. All right, I think we should take a break maybe and come

back and talk about these hurricane names history. How about that. Let's do it alright, So hurricane names are named after people. Now, Uh, this wasn't always the case, and I didn't know this. This is kind of cool, but for many hundreds of years, if you were in the West Indies, you would hear hurricanes named after the Catholic Saints Day on the day that that storm made landfall. So it would be like Hurricane San Felipe hit Puerto Rico in on September six.

Another little fun fact is if another hurricane hits on that same day, which actually happened in one, they would name that the second, So that was Hurricane San Felipe the second. During World War two is when we started to give human names. Uh, and they were all masculine names though. Yeah, I can kind of followed that whole, like Bravo, whiskey tango thing. Yeah, how does that? I don't understand that. Well, it's like that, what do you mean?

It's because those aren't names. I don't understand it either from what I saw. From what I saw, we didn't really start to use names in the West, um until I think the fifties or the seventies. So masculine names like Bravo and tango is just they're calling that a masculine name. I guess so, because I think we started using human names in the fifties and then um, we started using um, male and female names in the seventies.

At first, it was first they were they were ladies, right, yeah, And they said, well, that's that's not cool to name that after woman. And and every time you guys show like the weather model, the forecast model, it's it's not a hurricane, it's a woman with rollers in her hair and a rolling pin yelling. It seems sexist. And everyone finally said, you know, you're right, that is sexist. So we're gonna start to alternate between men's names and women's names.

And so at the beginning of every hurricane season, the the what is the World Meteorological Association, Yeah organization. Sorry. They release a list of all of the names that the Atlantic hurricane season could possibly have, and each name starts with a different letter A, B, C, D, and so on. Can I listen? This year's you got Arthur? Okay, Bertha nice crystal ball. Yeah, you got Dolly, you got Edward,

you have Faye. And we should mention too that they use, you know, names from uh places all over the world now, which is great because hurricanes affected places all over the world. So you have Faith and you have Gunzalo, you have Hannah, you have uh. I don't know even know how you pronounced this. I S A I A S says no I S A I A S should say us, I say us. Then you've got Josephine, nice name. You've got Kyle.

You've got Laura, You've got Marco. You've got Nana, sweet Nana. Uh. You've got Omar paul Lette, which I for some reason sounds funny to me, Hurricane paul. Uh. You've got Renee, Sally, Teddy, Vicky and finishing up because they don't have y or Z for some reason. Uh, Wilfred, that's a good one, Hurricane Wilfred sounds tough or an ex Yumi's predicted that Hurricane Nana is going to be a particularly bad one.

And there's actually a longstanding myth that was supposedly, um uh, found to be correct by some study a few years back that people um don't respect the female names of hurricanes. But yeah, so there's this whole there's there's okay, I don't know what's wrong with me, I'm putting anything so terribly a day. But get this, there's this, this this urban legend that hurricanes that have women's names are the most destructive because people don't take them as seriously and

they don't leave. So there's more people present to be killed when a hurricane lands for a woman named hurricane than a man named hurricane. And for a long time, for a long time, it was just this kind of old wives tale or something, and then this this study found in like I think two thousand fourteen or something like that that know this actually is true. Somebody sat down to crunch the number. And then finally, I think two years ago, they're like, this study was terrible, and

that's absolutely not true. If we looked at the numbers two and that's just not the case. All right. Well, that's good to know, because that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It is kind of dumb, but it has like this weird kernel of truth to It's like a perfect urban legend, you know what I mean, because it's believable and who's who's ever gonna sit down and prove it one way or another? You know? Yeah, that's true.

Oh wait, hold on one more thing, choke. While we're on names, Um, there are different names elsewhere in the world. So the names you just said those are for Atlantic hurricanes. In Australia they have their own set of names that they name cyclones, and then elsewhere in the world, there's thirteen member nations that name typhoons and some cyclones um

countries like Bangladesh and India and Thailand. Each one submits thirteen names, and each list contains thirteen names from each one of those countries, So you have a hundred and sixty names to choose from every year. So depending on where you are in the world, whether patterns going to have a much more localized name than than what you would expect. That's right, And if a hurricane is really destructive,

they will retire that. And I'm using air quotes there because they really just put it down for ten years. I don't know why they don't just don't do it forever, Like there should never be another, Like in eleven years, surely they won't have a Hurricane Katrina or an Andrew or a Harvey. Right, I don't know why would they. There's so many names. I don't know why bring it any name back. I have no idea. I think they're like, we have better things to do than come up with

more stupid names, you know. Yeah, I just uh, I mean they obviously do that to avoid confusion. Uh. And once this storm is sort of this legendary storm, like a Katrina. Um, there's just no reason to ever name another one that. No, No, I'm with you, I agree, Um, if you you don't believe in luck, I just think it's not a good idea. It does seem like ten years is a little short. I could not see them doing another Katrina. That's just not gonna happen, you know. No,

there's no way. So let's talk about climate change. You want to, Yeah, Well, before we talk about climate change, just quickly, as far as the historical record goes you know, there's always been hurricanes, and this will kind of segue nicely into climate change because things are getting worse. But there always have been hurricanes, even way back in the day. We didn't have great records, but there are um you can do research on, uh, like cave wall drawings and

things like that seemed to indicate stuff like hurricanes. And I think there was an L s U team that studied thousands of years of lake bed evidence and they can tell that over I think like thirty four years, there have been about a dozen Category four or higher in that area, most of which were in the past thousand years. Yeah, it does, but I mean that's just for that area. Another one, there was a really big hurricane historically speaking, when Um Genghis Khan was going to

invade Japan in twelve seventy four. The Mongols were invading Japan. There's a fleet that had something like a hundred or two hundred thousand people on board and they were really going to invade Japan, and Hurricane blew in and sunk the fleet, and the Japanese had a name for this incredible miraculous act of mercy by whatever God was watching

over them. Uh. They named it divine Wind. Yeah, and that actually would come into term into use later on in World War Two because divine wind in Japanese is kamakassi kamakazi. Yeah, and that's a chapter in our book, right. I'm so glad I was teeing you up. I was like, come on, Chuck, I didn't know if we could reveal that, But yeah, we got a book coming out this fall, and uh, you can preorder it now, plug plug plug. And there's a great, great chapter on kama kazee in there.

The whole thing is just great from top to bottom. Chuck. I'm wondering when will be allowed to do some of those chapters as podcast episodes if ever, I don't know. I don't know what it gives us that permission. I think we give ourselves that permission, okay, us, okay, maybe maybe a couple of years after it's out, we can start start doling those out a little bit, harvesting it for parts. Sure, that's another way to put it, right.

They could have another life. So um, well, I mean the stuff that we talk about, they're not like necessarily entire podcast episodes. Like there there's definitely more to be said about it. So I think we can take any single one of those chapters and turn it into a

podcast episode. So climate change, here's a startling statistics. Since the nineteen seventies, the number of Cat five and Cat for storms has just about doubled, and to the casual observer a couple of things, it seems like they're getting were and more frequent. And you don't have to be a genius to figure out if you need warm water to make a hurricane, and ocean waters are warming due to climate change, then you're gonna have more frequent and

more severe storms, right or now? Yeah, I mean that's the that's how logic goes, and they basically think that's a given that we're going to have more frequent and

more powerful storms. But the the at least according to Woods Whole Ocean of Graphic Institute, there are plenty of X factors left that it's not like we just definitively understand how bad hurricanes are gonna be or how many more we're gonna have, because remember, the surface water has to reach down about a hundred and fifty feet for a hurricane to form. And one of the big questions is if the if there is global warming going on and it's heating the ocean. How deep is it heating

the ocean? Because if if that water, that warm water, went beyond a hundred fifty feet, then hurricanes should ostensibly be able to become bigger and bigger. And similarly, if that the surface temperature of the ocean is rising, then that just means more evaporating water, which is the key that's the fuel to any hurricane. Is that moist evaporating water that's rising. That the more you have of that,

the bigger amount more powerful as storm can be. The more energy there is for the storm to use too, to become big and huge and destructive. The question is you know, just how bad is it going to be? But there does seem to be just general consensus that yes, climate change is happening and it's going to result in in worse hurricanes. And it's I mean, already there were two named storms this year in the Atlantic before hurricane season even started. So they think hurricane season is gonna

last longer. Uh, it's gonna start earlier and last longer. There's going to be more of them, They're probably going to be more destructive. There's something else that I thought was Really interesting though, too, is that um, the uh, this particular year may not be as bad as it would have been otherwise. It was supposed to be really bad because of the warm sea levels. Um, because it started earlier, and because it's a lat Ninja year, which

actually pushes hurricanes back out to sea eventually. Um. Because there's a lat Ninja, those those breezes are kind of stilled, comparatively speaking, so that her any hurricanes that do develop are just gonna sit on land like it did, like Dorian did the Bahamas a year or so ago. It just sat on the Bahamas for forty eight hours. That's not supposed to happen. And they were worried that that's going to happen because this is a lat Ninia year.

But you know the Saharan dust storms that's going on, they think that that's actually drying the air and preventing hurricanes from forming. Right now, the question is how long that will last. Well, it lasts through the whole hurricane season, or will that eventually stall and hurricanes will come raging through in August and September? Who knows. Wow, so there's

hurricanes everybody, that's right. I think we're going to release a bonus add on someday into our feed where I try again to explain hurricanes and the cone of uncertainty. This stuff drives me nuts. Man, Yeah, you're ready, I'm ready. Well, obviously, since we're done talking about hurricanes, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this the other side

of the coin. We always like to keep things fair and balance here, right, right, Hey, guys discovered your show about two years ago and wondered, where have you been on my life? I love the show. Don't change a thing and the Robber Barons episode. He said that conservatives, Josh said, Conservatives say people aren't perfect. We can never have a perfect society, so let people do whatever they want. That's kind of right, but it's oper simplified in their

for misleading. Uh in our view, Uh, and I take it. Tim is a conservative. He says, since humans are all corrupt, obviously some more than others, no government can be uncorrupt since it's run by people. Therefore, we should limit the power of government and give people more freedom. Since people will generally act in their own best interests, let them decide how they want to spend their money. Who they

work for, and who they hire and fire. As long as the government protects people's basic rights from others, we will have a pretty good society. I've always been conflicted about anti monopoly laws, but the longer I live, the more I think they're a good thing, because we should limit the power of large companies, just as we limit the power of the government, since those companies are also

run by corrupt people. Capitalism says, of course you're selfish, and so am I, So if you want my money, you have to give me some kind of product or service that makes my life better. Again, we can never have a perfect society, but it would be far worse if the government has too much power to decide how we spend our money, because again, they are corrupt. Also, thanks for all the great research and the super fun way you in it. Keep it up. That is Tim

in Minnesota. That's pretty awesome. Thanks a lot, Tim, that was a really great email. Um well, I'm a conservative now Wow. All right, I'm pretty weak willed as it is. Um No, but Tim, that was great. Thank you for explaining it further because I definitely knew I was oversimplifying things and to just kind of have the tea's crossing the eyes dotted. That's very helpful. We're gonna have to

bring you on to explain hurricanes one day. Yeah, and that was a better email than a lot of the blowback we got, which wasn't so instructive and more just like, uh, you guys just reduced that and it's not true blame. I guess you can put in uh. Well, if you want to get in touch with this, like Tim didn't just be a champion hero, you can do that. You can send us an email to Stuff podcast and i heart radio dot com. Stuff you should know it is

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