Guest : Evan Bentley Episode Intro: In the world of meteorology, the letters “SPC” carry a lot of weight. From severe weather to flooding and fire, the Storm Prediction Center covers almost everything under the sun! Today’s guest has spent the past several years on staff at the SPC as a mesoscale-assistant/fire weather forecaster. He has brought his years of forecasting to Norman, Oklahoma and today he joins us on Weather Geeks… Welcome to the show Evan Bentley…. See Privacy Policy at https://ar...
Feb 28, 2024•44 min•Ep. 308
Guest : Dr. David Wilmouth Episode Intro: On January 15, 2022, a massive eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano occurred, sending literal shockwaves around the globe and releasing millions of tons of material into the atmosphere. This eruption was unprecedented in the modern satellite era in terms of how much water vapor was injected into the stratosphere and just how far into the stratosphere it penetrated. Here to talk about the impacts of the eruption on the stratosphere is Dr. Dav...
Feb 21, 2024•39 min•Ep. 307
Guest : Adam Smith, NOAA / NCEI Episode Intro: 2023 set the record for the most billion dollar disasters in the United States in one calendar year. As the name suggests, a billion dollar disaster is a weather or climate disaster event with losses exceeding one billion dollars. From flooding to drought, winter storms to hurricanes, there were 28 billion dollar disasters last year. Our next guest is the lead scientist for the National Centers for Environmental Information Billion-dollar Weather an...
Feb 14, 2024•30 min•Ep. 306
Guest : Dr. Jonathan Kahl, Professor at UW-Milwaukee If you’re a sports fan, you may know the term “Scorigami!” When you have a score combination that has never occurred before, you achieve Scorigami! And this inspired our guest Dr. Jonathan Kahl to create “Weathergami.” Instead of Team A vs Team B, he looks at high temperature vs low temperature at each location. While it sounds like a fun way to organize and visualize temperature data, it can have simple to digest benefits to discussing climat...
Feb 07, 2024•30 min•Ep. 305
Guest : Greg Carbin Over the past half a century, we’ve been experiencing the same thunderstorms, blizzards, and hurricanes. Our changing climate may have altered how these weather phenomena act, and in turn the technology we use to research and forecast these events have changed as well! From a local NWS office to the SPC and the WPC, today’s guest has seen decades of change across these institutions and has made them all greater along the way. We’re talking to Greg Carbin, chief of forecast op...
Jan 31, 2024•36 min•Ep. 304
Guest: Dr. Justin Sharpe We all know the saying “if a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well in our world, we can say something like “if a forecast is perfect, but it doesn’t get disseminated properly, did it do any good?” There are still leaps and bounds that need to be made in the weather industry to bridge the gap between the research and communication when it comes to severe weather of all shapes and sizes. We have Dr. Justin Sharpe here on t...
Jan 24, 2024•36 min•Ep. 303
Guest: Liz Leitman You are probably familiar with severe thunderstorm and tornado watches. The storm prediction center and its predecessors have been issuing them since the 1950’s to alert people that thunderstorms may develop and bring damaging winds, hail or tornadoes. About a hundred of these are issued every year. Believe it or not, the first convective watch issued by a woman was just last year in 2023. The author of that severe thunderstorm watch was Liz Leitman - and she is here today on ...
Jan 17, 2024•36 min•Ep. 302
Guest: Dr. Michael Mann The topic of climate change and the future of our planet is both a controversial as well as at times difficult topic to understand. But if we want to know more about our future, we need to take a look into the history of our planet and our species. In his latest book, Our Fragile Moment , Dr. Michael Mann walks readers through our paleoclimate record and illustrates how it can serve as a roadmap to preserving our fragile moment. What you decide to do from there is entirel...
Jan 10, 2024•40 min•Ep. 301
Guests: Jessica Arnoldy Introduction: A lot of us have memories of being carpooled to your Saturday morning Little League game or having PB&J’s at the picnic table after soccer practice with your teammates before seeing them in class the very next day. Or how about waking up early to tailgate for the afternoon football game? Sports have such an impact on all of our lives, whether we are actually playing or just enjoying from the stands, and both of those scenarios tend to involve the weather...
Jan 03, 2024•34 min•Ep. 254
Roundtable with: Jen Carfagno, Dr. Greg Postel, Heather Zons Another year around the sun means another year of all sorts of weather, both the beautiful and the horrible. Every single season brought its own flavor of extreme weather, from crippling winter storms to monstrous tornadoes to scalding wildfires and of course tropical storms and hurricanes. Even if these weather events didn’t physically impact you, their scope in the weather world was so large that you couldn’t ignore the conversation....
Dec 20, 2023•40 min•Ep. 300
Guest: Derek Manzello, Program Coordinator Picture a coral reef, and you probably have visions of Flounder from The Little Mermaid or Crush from Finding Nemo. Coral reefs should be brimming with life, and are one of Earth’s most diverse ecosystems, providing significant ecological, economic and societal benefits. Unfortunately, they are threatened by climate change, pollution and more. Dr. Derek Manzello - an award winning coral reef ecologist - leads NOAA’s efforts in the Coral Reef Watch Progr...
Dec 13, 2023•31 min•Ep. 299
Guest: Chris Goode, Climavision Founder Introduction: You know the saying: if you put good in, you get good out! In the meteorology world, if you put good data in, you’ll get a good forecast out. But what about the areas that don’t have good data to put into the model, more specifically good radar data? Some areas just aren’t adequately covered and lie in what’s called a radar gap or a doppler dead zone. This makes researching and forecasting severe weather in these areas much more difficult. On...
Dec 06, 2023•28 min•Ep. 298
Guest: Mayra Oyola-Merced, Assistant Professor at UW-Madison Introduction: Whether it is preparing for hurricane season or getting ready for a severe weather outbreak, you might hear the phrase “weather models.” All kinds of data go into these models, but a new input could be game changing for weather modeling as we head into the future. Satellites. Our next guest is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where her research focuses on satellite and space-borne re...
Nov 29, 2023•42 min•Ep. 297
Guest: Dr. Andrew Schwartz For several months of the year, the Central Sierra Snow Lab looks like a winter wonderland. Over 60 feet of snow fell this past winter at the lab and our next guest was there to experience it all. Dr. Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist and station manager of the University of California Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab, studies snowfall, snowpack, and the impact of climate change on these. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at ht...
Nov 15, 2023•30 min•Ep. 296
Guest: Dr. Stephanie Zick, Associate Professor at Virginia Tech When we think of tornadoes, our minds are immediately drawn to the Southern Plains or the Southeast, right? Well the Midwest has also had their fair share of damaging and deadly tornadoes, not just historically but every single year. A lot of research has been focused on our typical “Tornado Alleys” but sometimes the Midwest gets lost to the wayside. However, researchers at Virginia Tech have discovered multiple different breakthrou...
Nov 08, 2023•28 min•Ep. 295
Host Jen Carfagno with Guest Dr. Greg Postel With a raging El Nino in effect, the Eastern Pacific hurricane season was bound to be above average. However, the number of storms that have impacted land has been surprising! From October 9th to October 25th, western Mexico has been hit by FOUR consecutive tropical cyclones. Three were hurricanes at landfall, and the one we want to focus on today is Hurricane Otis. First thought to make landfall as either a strong tropical storm or a weak hurricane e...
Nov 01, 2023•27 min•Ep. 293
Guest: Dr. Greg Postel & Jen Carfagno, The Weather Channel Introduction: With a raging El Nino in effect, the Eastern Pacific hurricane season was bound to be above average. However, the number of storms that have impacted land has been surprising! From October 9th to October 25th, western Mexico has been hit by FOUR consecutive tropical cyclones. Three were hurricanes at landfall, and the one we want to focus on today is Hurricane Otis. First thought to make landfall as either a strong trop...
Nov 01, 2023•27 min•Ep. 294
Guest: Dr. Lonnie Thompson It’s not just superheroes and first responders that risk their lives to save others, but what about a climatologist? Would you believe that our guest today climbed the summit of multiple mountains for climate research so we could all better understand how our climate has changed over the years? Well it’s true, and it really is an honor to have him on the podcast today! Subject of the upcoming documentary CANARY, Dr. Lonnie Thompson went where no other climate scientist...
Oct 25, 2023•37 min•Ep. 292
Guest: Rei Goffer, Tomorrow.io Ursa Minor. Canis Major. Orion. These are all star patterns that you can detect in the night sky called constellations! No matter where you live on Earth, there are constellations that will greet you as you look up. That same principle inspired the company Tomorrow.io to create a plan to launch dozens of radar satellites to help increase coverage of life-saving weather observations around the entire globe, in the hopes that they will be able to sample every point o...
Oct 18, 2023•41 min•Ep. 291
Guest: Don Hartsell Introduction: In the upcoming months, we have not one, but two solar eclipses that are set to sweep across the continental United States: an annular eclipse on October 14 and a total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. The eclipse in April will be the second total eclipse to cross the country in the past decade and the last until 2044. It will also serve as the final exclamation point on a month-long research expedition across the country aimed at collecting data on airborne micr...
Oct 11, 2023•35 min•Ep. 290
Guest: Dr. Randy Cerveny When we hear about extreme weather and changing climate, often we hear about the extreme records that are associated with these events: Things like the hottest temperature streak, the heaviest rainfall, and so forth. You may notice when these events are reported, it’s often with the caveat: “if verified”. An often overlooked, but vitally important caveat. So, who are these verifiers and how do they corroborate world record weather? For the World Meteorological Organizati...
Oct 04, 2023•35 min•Ep. 289
Guest: Dr. Michael Mann The topic of climate change and the future of our planet is both a controversial as well as at times difficult topic to understand. But if we want to know more about our future, we need to take a look into the history of our planet and our species. In his latest book, Our Fragile Moment , Dr. Michael Mann walks readers through our paleoclimate record and illustrates how it can serve as a roadmap to preserving our fragile moment. What you decide to do from there is entirel...
Sep 27, 2023•40 min•Ep. 286
Guest: Dr. Justin Sharpe We all know the saying “if a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well in our world, we can say something like “if a forecast is perfect, but it doesn’t get disseminated properly, did it do any good?” There are still leaps and bounds that need to be made in the weather industry to bridge the gap between the research and communication when it comes to severe weather of all shapes and sizes. We have Dr. Justin Sharpe here on t...
Sep 20, 2023•36 min•Ep. 288
Guests: Dr. Linnea Avallone & Nicholas Anderson, National Science Foundation While aircraft radar has come along away over the past several decades, the U.S. National Science Foundation, or NSF, is looking to take things a step forward with an investment of over 90 million dollars to create the Airborne Phased Array Radar. This will be a state-of-the-art radar that will be attached to the outside of an aircraft and flown over land and oceans to get remarkably close 3D views of what is going ...
Sep 13, 2023•37 min•Ep. 285
Guest: Dr. Rick Knabb Introduction: As we approach the midpoint of the 2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season, we just experienced the landfall of Hurricane Idalia: a major hurricane. With much of the season still ahead of us, we're joined today by The Weather Channel hurricane expert, Dr. Rick Knabb, to discuss the storm and what to expect going forward into the rest of the season. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-...
Sep 06, 2023•35 min•Ep. 287
Guest: John Valliant While this year’s wildfire season in the United States hasn’t really picked up steam, the wildfires in Canada have taken over the headlines. Not just because of the extent of the fires, but because of the smoke they are emitting that is wafting into the U.S. and causing some of the worst air quality seen in years. This has been forcing Americans to pay attention to what is happening north of the border and ask questions about these fires, in the past, present and future tens...
Aug 30, 2023•37 min•Ep. 284
Guest: Dr. Sundararaman Gopalakrishnan With the Atlantic hurricane season in full swing, a new hurricane forecast model is ready to improve forecast accuracy as well as increase our understanding of tropical cyclones. Joining me today is Dr. Sundararaman “Gopal” Gopalakrishnan, senior meteorologist and leader of the modeling team that is behind NOAA’s newest hurricane forecast model. The Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, or HAFS, integrates the best of existing hurricane forecast models wh...
Aug 23, 2023•36 min•Ep. 283
Guest: Lieutenant Commander Valerie Gardner, Chief of Behavior Health and Wellness at the National Weather Service Forecasting for natural disasters brings one level of stress, and the aftermath can raise it to a whole new level of challenges. There is a lot of attention on the well-being of the people affected by these natural disasters…but what about those making the forecasts? Lieutenant Commander Valerie Gardner has extensive experience in this field and now she is extending her expertise wi...
Aug 16, 2023•24 min•Ep. 282
Guest: WDSU New Orleans' Chief Meteorologist Margaret Orr For over 40 years, viewers in New Orleans have tuned in and watched Margaret Orr deliver their forecast on their local news, eventually becoming her station’s chief meteorologist in 2009. Throughout her career, she’s covered numerous landmark weather events in southeast Louisiana and earned her viewers trust as not only a meteorologist but also with her efforts to give back to the community she calls home. Here to discuss her career, her ...
Aug 09, 2023•42 min•Ep. 281
Guest: Liz Leitman Introduction: You are probably familiar with severe thunderstorm and tornado watches. The storm prediction center and its predecessors have been issuing them since the 1950’s to alert people that thunderstorms may develop and bring damaging winds, hail or tornadoes. About a hundred of these are issued every year. Believe it or not, the first convective watch issued by a woman was *this* year: 2023. The author of that severe thunderstorm watch was Liz Leitman - and she is here ...
Aug 02, 2023•36 min•Ep. 280
