Meteorology (WEATHER & CLIMATE) Encore with Marshall Shepherd

0:00Oh, hey, this is 2026 Allie. And I'm recording this from a hotel room because I'm on the road this whole week interviewing, I think like seven or eight guests in person. It's been such an adventure. I'm proud to report that I have now gone to all 50 states, West Virginia. I knocked you off the list. We're done. But obviously not done with interviews or allergies. So right now I'm in Athens, Georgia. A few hours ago, I had a very great pleasure of being the first guest speaker on the University of Georgia's new lecture series. It was moderated by this very guest that you're about to hear. So I needed a quick on court just so that I could catch up and I'm still bouncing around all over the place. And also, this deserves a revisit very much. And I napped the chance to sit down with this guest again because there was a weather system called El Nino that is already hitting the West Coast and the world this year, 2026. And it is such a whopper. People have pretty freaked out about it.

1:00And this guest will break down what's going on. So that is going to be a bonus update, very fresh episode on El Nino. It should be out in a day or two. So make sure you're subscribed. So all right, one sec and then we're going to get to this very, very good episode, very overdue on court. And then of course, there's a fresh secret at the end. If allergies just taught me anything, it's that everything is a specimen if you care enough and travel has a way of turning other people into fascinating case studies. Like you want to triple someone, turns out the friend who alphabetizes their spice rack, also alphabetizes vacation snacks. Surprising? Absolutely. You know what shouldn't be surprising is your vacation rental. When you book a verbal vacation rental, verbal care and 24, 7 live human support are included. If your stegosideways, verbal will step in and aim to make it right. Even if it takes moving you to another property, just one more reason why I love verbal and I run with them. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you Verbo, terms of fly,

2:01see Verbo.com slash trust for details. Today's show sponsored by strawberry.me. Are you where you want to be in your career or really any of us? Super successful people have mentors. They have coaches. They have people guiding them every step of the way. That's where strawberry.me career coaching comes in. It gives you the clarity, strategy, also accountability needed to turn your ideas and your goals into reality. Whether you're learning a new job, maybe you're trying to advance in the job you've got or you just want to leave your field and go into one that you love more. Career coaching gives you expert guidance. You'll identify obstacles holding you back. You can develop a step-by-step plan. It's really hard to know when the right time to act on things are, when you need more planning, when to just go for it. And professional coaching helps you take control of your career trajectory. I have had career coaching. Wouldn't have started allergies without it. And also, I've used strawberry.me to help me figure out how to make sure that I'm using my voice the most authentic way that I can. My coach was very empathetic, but also was straight talking

3:02to help me identify where I can take action. Go to strawberry.me slashologies and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's strawberry.me slashologies. It's like therapy for your career. Oh, hi. It's that vitamin stuck in your throat. I'm so sorry, alleyward. How do I even start this? Okay, we're gonna chitchat about the weather in a way that is anything but small talk. As it turns out, the stuff that's all around us is this raging and swirling and heavy with emotion. And likewise, I don't even know how to preface thisologist 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 achieves so much high level and deeply important work in one lifetime. And I'm shocked, he said, he has 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 years. So he got his bachelor's, his MS and his PhD in physical meteorology from Florida State University.

4:05He'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 2021, he received the American Geological Institutes Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Public Understanding of the Geo Sciences. 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 Dr. Fred's Weather Watch. Frankly, I was lucky to weasel my way onto a schedule. So we hopped on our respective mics and I asked them all kinds of questions that were way below his pay grade. But before we get there, just a quick thanks to everyone

5:05who supports the show at patreon.com slash allergies, a dollar or more a month gets you in the club and you could submit questions ahead of time. Allegis Merch is available at allegismerch.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. And as proof, thank you Zachary Dackery, who wrote this review this week. Saying Alli 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 Dackery. Thank you for the work you do. Everyone listen to discard anthropology if you had an it's such a good one. So thanks for the work you do. I hope someone brings cookies to 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 tone about whether and named it meteorological from a root word meteor for lofty. So stuff above us. So let's get to what is overheads.

6:06Let's get it in our domes and get ready for tornadoes, typhoons, wind, rain, forecasting, newscasting, wet, bold 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, Dr. Marshall Shepard. I guess I'm he. But what else to ask? Oh, that's it. That's all. Yeah. I've been wanting to talk to you for literally years.

7:06This is 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 weather man a lot or the weather guy. And then 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 really onto a point because the term meteorologist is synonymous with weather man 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, our TV meteorologists are 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

8:09or 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 degreeed meteorologist. 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 Gwyneth County, Georgia. Dr. Shepard, 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? Yeah, it's a great question. I got interested in this in sixth grade. As most meteorologists do, I did a science project in a 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 that I was highly allergic to bee stings and said, well, I need a plan B pun intended. And so I did my science project on weather. So at that point, I was bitten by the weather bug, second pun intended.

9:09And so from that point on, I knew I didn't want to be on TV pointing at a screen with cold fronts 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 why do certain storms spin 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 of the history, I went on and to graduate school, ultimately got a master's and a PhD, worked at NASA for a while, developing large space missions to study weather and climate. So Dr. Shepherd spent a mere 12 years as a research meteorologist at NASA Goddard 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.

10:10But to really answer the second part of your question, what are some of the other options? Again, I think about nine to 10% 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. They're quite a few meteorologists that work in federal agencies like the National Weather Service or NASA or NOAA. So NOAA is not a guy or a biblical rising oceans flood reference, but it just stands for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, AERANCE. EPA, state agencies have meteorologists. And then a lot of private companies are now developing interest in weather, whether it be IBM or formerly for that panasonic and even smaller companies as well. So whether there's quite a few places at atmospheric scientists, which is the broader term, including meteorologists and climate scientists can work. Is it such a good meteorology program at Florida State

11:12because there's so much weather there? Look, would that program suck in LA? No, I mean UCLA has a really good meteorology program, actually. It's one of the best. So 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 tropical storm, Nicole, as we speak. And just FYI, so Nicole ended up being a category one hurricane about 75 miles an hour is what it made landfall at. And it caused 11 deaths and $520 million in damages. And now if a tropical storm develops in the North Atlantic or the North Pacific in the east, off coast of the US and Canada, and has sustained winds up 74 miles per hour or faster, we call it a hurricane. But if they form over the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean,

12:14they would like to go by 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? Well, we didn't study other planets whether we were studying Earth or not. Yeah, NASA has a very robust Earth science program. So yeah, that's another misconception that I often get in the same way that people would ask me if I were the weatherman. Most people here, NASA think space out and looking at Mars in 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 cryosphere, which is like Greenland and Arctic ice sheets and Antarctic. So yeah, that's one of the things that I'm glad you asked because NASA studies planet.

13:15I 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. Climate versus weather. How many times a day do you have to explain the difference? Yeah, and now you're hitting all the common misconceptions that I deal with on planet Earth. We're going to take a number here. So it's getting to be the cold season. We'll start seeing snow and colder weather and inevitably I'll have someone tweet me, hey Dr. Shepard, I've got 20 inches of global warming in my yard. It's snowing out here in Boston in January. Why are you guys talking about this climate change stuff? And so after I fix my face and sort of like roll my eyes a little bit, I say, well, it's winter in Boston. You're supposed to get snow, first of all. But then secondly, I say, weather is your mood and climate is your personality. Something I like to say you may have heard me say it.

14:16The weather today doesn't say anything about climate anymore than your mood tells me about your personality. And so it's a really ill pose 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, your podcast is called Weather Geeks. Do you feel like you are kind of geeky about this? Does it get you really excited? Yeah. Hopefully. 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 people consume information so we switched it to a podcast. Nice move, kid. And we embrace the term Weather Geeks because people call us Weather Geeks anyway or Weather Weenies or Weather Nerds. But we wanted to empower the term Weather Geek

15:17because some people often use the term maybe in a more sort of derogatory or spiteful or slight, 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 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 and like storms? Whether or not you're gonna have to wear a jacket or if your crops are gonna grow. Yeah, all of the, and you just even touched on another misconception that's out there because you write, whether it's often a conversation point and it makes us a 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 with degrees. 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 it's an opportunity to just sort of share and educate.

16:18So for example, people often say, whether you're all just in forecast or wrong most of the time, well, actually they're right, almost all of the time, about 95% of the time within three to five days. It's just that it's human nature for people to remember the bad ones and their few bad ones. But those are the ones they remember if their cookout was rained on or their child soccer getting got a rain 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 and super bowl that could have won the game, people are gonna 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 forecast. So don't blame the messenger for the nature

17:19of 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 radar 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, 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 meteorologist, I want to be in your program. I was like, that's fine. I said, but how is your calculus and how is your physics

18:20and how are your partial differential equations? That's what's mostly going to be in the classes you'll be taking. It's really an interesting sort of shock to the system for many of these students. But 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 perceive information about forecast. Do they make decisions based on a red morning box or 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 forecast, whether intelligence, if you will, for agriculture, for business, industries, energy companies, infrastructure. So that's the main thing on the weather front.

19:21You know, on the climate front, it's obviously the increase in CO2. I mean, look, I mean, I wrote an article in Forbes, I'm a contributor to Forbes magazine, and I said, what's your CO2 number? In other words, everyone has a birthday, but go look at that birthday when you get year and see what the parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere was when you were born and compare it to today. And some of us that are older, will be really scared when you see it because we're well at around 420 parts per million right now. Our atmosphere is 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 Dr. Shepard's Forbes article on my site, but you can also go to nature.org and calculate the CO2 levels in your birth year. It's kind of like astrology but sadder. And today I learned that carbon dioxide has increased by 25% 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.

20:24How 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'd never heard of growing up, but how is that climate affecting the weather? Well, that's just the media actually. I mean, bomb cyclones and derichos and these terms have been around forever and 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 bombo genesis and rapid and these are very common weather terms, polar vortex. I mean, 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 yanking your chain. So bomb agenesis happens when a cold air mass collides with a warm one and the barometric pressure drops fast in a low pressure system.

21:24So some of the other fun things that you can call a bomb agenesis 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 coward. 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 gotta be fictional weather term, but it's true. And it's like a 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,

22:28which 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 rain storms. 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 surge 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,

23:29but now they can live in the United States and carry those diseases. What diseases? You ask, you want a little sampler platter of them? OK, well, I asked a 2021 paper published in the Lancet called, Projecting the Risk of Mosquito-Born Diseases in a warmer and more populated world, which said that in the next 30 years, nearly half a billion more people on the planet could be at risk for contracting mosquito-borne diseases, such as yellow fever, zika, dengue, and chican 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 dengue arriving right on your doorstep, ding dong, hi, here to kill you. There are a host of ways. 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 2100. Climate change is now. We've got to stop using future tents.

24:30We're living it right now. And it's likely going to accelerate in the same way we saw with 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 this sort of even harbor on just the bad this 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 do we need to do. We know what we need to do. We've got to reduce carbon emissions. It's not like to do this. 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 non-change. It's going to change. So we have to develop adaptation strategies. Give you an example, out west. I know you're talking to me from out west. Up in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, there was a tremendous heat wave. People just aren't used to that type of heat

25:30in 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, 2021 reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Canada, folks. And it was a once in a thousand year weather event, they said, and it was 150 times more likely to occur because of climate change. So it was a cost nearly $9 billion financially, but 1,400 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. And the same with it in London this year, it got to 104 degrees, 85% of homes in London do not have air conditioning because they never expected those types of temperatures. And so we know what we need to do.

26:30We just have to act and move beyond what I call climate delayism. Climate delayism. I've never had them. I mean, that's a great term for it. So yes, a little urgency is needed because we know the cost and the effects are already underway. What about these weather systems 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 system is a finite amount. And we live on a very small percentage of the fresh water that's available to us. 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 some of our 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.

27:31OK, so I look this up because I needed numbers. And apparently there are 326 quintillion gallons of water on earth. What does that mean to you? Nothing, I get it. It means it's 326 million cubic miles of water on earth. And 99.7% 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 0.3% 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 tequitos 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,

28:32our dry will probably become drier and places that are wetter will become wetter. And so that's how you maintain conservation or balance because wet places are becoming wetter while the drier places on average are becoming drier. But what is really more concerned to us as climate scientists is not necessarily the amount that falls on an annualized basis or the amount is the rate of change. So what I mean by that is here in Atlanta where I am, the rain storms 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 1960 or 1970. Well, I want to rain the pores. 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.

29:32Because the engineered system that we currently live in was designed for the rain storms of 1960, not 2022. So if you're good at SimCity and you have been looking for a calling in life, consider the urban planning field of climate change mitigation. It's a real thing. And according to one article I just read, Urban Designer Elizabeth Pleiter's Iberk 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 grandfather's 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 to people because I just said warming and snow is cold.

30:35But we know that the hurricanes, rainstorms, snowstorms, they all sort of get started from water vapor. The gaseous phase of water in our atmosphere. And there's a basic physics principle called the Clausius Clapperon equation. Let's break that down for all the listeners out there. There's a really fancy sounding term, Clausius Clapperon. But all it really means is that 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 rainstorms. 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 4% increase in water vapor. That's 7% 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 winters averaged 22 degrees Fahrenheit.

31:37But they have risen four degrees to 26 degrees Fahrenheit. Some years are top in 30 degrees Fahrenheit, which would be a 32% increase in water vapor, while still being below the freezing temperature of 32 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 flimflam to address? What about red sky at night, sailors 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 cloud systems that are moving in, as it interacts with the sun as the sun is setting. You get 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 that are on the horizon and so forth. So anecdotally, there are some truths.

32:38Now, what are not true is that rodents, like groundhogs, or almanacs, can predict the weather. So I'll 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? I think it's a rodent. That's what I think. And so we have to kind of, 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 lighting? Is heat lighting a thing? And I say, no, it's not. But people have grown up hearing about heat lighting all of their life. This like the sky lights up with lighting, but you don't hear any thunder. And that's just because the storm is too far away to you, 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, Fomenology and Nephology episodes. I will link them in the show notes. You will be swimming in storm facts. And not smart question. But when it comes to cyclones and tornadoes and hurricanes,

33:38why so twisty? Why do things go in big circles? Yeah, it seems like a lot of things in weather do do that. Don't they like tornadoes and low pressure systems and hurricanes? Well, 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. Try me. 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, slowing 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 worlds and so forth. And so these sort of rotating systems and are really very much related to the complexity

34:39of having a fluid on a rotating earth that also is differentially heated. It's colder at 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. OK, 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 system circle counterclockwise or to the right. But below the equator, they take a clockwise or a left turn.

35:40And yes, this is affecting giant storms and cyclones. But also, how the water drains out of your bathtub. Southern hemisphere to the left, the left, northern, right, and near the equator, your bathtub's fin 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 into 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 is higher atmospheric pressure. And 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

36:41to sink when air sinks. It compresses and warms. And so that's why, typically when you see high pressure, you're going to 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, now people under like 30 look at me like, what is a water bed? My parents had water bed. Yeah, so I was going to say your parents probably had water bed. So you push down on the 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. Well, atmosphere has these sort of low pressure troughs and high pressure ridges and it's sort of this

37:44unilating sort of fluid and has these areas of highs and lows as well. That banging noise was Dr. Shepard's arm unilating as a visual aid. You got to 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 there are 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 myself, Jen Carfagnone, Alex Wallace from the Weather Channel, too, on camera, meteorologist. We talked about what their favorite weather reviews are and just what some of the Weather Geeks 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.

38:44The star of the movie, really, even though you might not think about it, it was the heat, massive heat wave that was hanging on at the time and it was just almost every scene of that movie, the heat was playing some role. I have today's podcast for you. Hot! Just for you, wow. A lot of people will say Twister, and I like Twister to, a tornado movie. And one that's really more climate focused is the day after tomorrow. Dennis Quaid and a few other PJ Gillingham, others who in that movie is a movie about sort of the climate going wacky here on planet Earth and it causes a very strange weather. Storm is just going to get worse. What should we do? I will come for you. Do you understand me? It's 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 of that. Yes. I was involved in the, a little bit in the most recent movie Don't Look Up,

39:44which 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 nice things I liked about that movie. They created an online community of people because that whole movie Don Look Up, even though it was about a comment approaching and destroying Earth, it was really a large metaphor for climate change. There's a 100% chance that we're all going to die! Hey, hey! Well, the handsome astronomer, I'm going back any time, 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 website, they are too. This website is Don't Look Up. Count us in.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 I was so wonderfully done with that kind of allegory about climate science. But I thought one thing it did so well

40:46and all the people I talked to who are involved with climate science are like, yes, we're upset and it's upsetting that no one will listen. Yeah, 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 and I was 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, 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.

41:46It's going back and forth. And that survey, by the way, measures six different responses to climate science, ranging from here some flavors, alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive. Now, alarmed, thankfully, largest group. Clocking in this past year at 33 percent of those survey, they're like, I'm alarmed. This should scary. Dismissive on the other end of that spectrum, because it's like, no, not real. That's at 9 percent. But the smallest group of them all is apathetic. With just 5 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 America's Survey, aka Sassy, 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? What are some things that you wish people knew about whether, what are some facts to have in your pocket that you're like,

42:46how do more people not know this? Well, I wish most people realized 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 wish people knew what 30 percent chance of rain means, because most people don't. When I ask people, they generally get it wrong. And because of that, they often misinterpret that we got the forecast wrong. When in fact, they didn't know what 30 percent chance of rain we do. It's really is trying to capture this notion that there's a 30 percent chance with certain confidence for a 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 2022. 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 as meaning,

43:47oh, the storm is 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 67 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 in 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 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. You're far on your feet. You're far on your feet.

44:47I 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 then shout out. I hear there's a special question coming. Yes. Someone that maybe had me in class or something. Yes. Not even a question. Jessica Ventura says, I'm too excited to formulate a question. But Dr. Shepard 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. And she taught high school that long. And that means she took me probably over a decade ago with the University of Georgia. So shout out to Jessica. Thanks for taking what I bet was in total weather and climate 1112. But before we do, we'd like to shower a cause of theologist choosing with some monetary thank-yous. And this week, Dr. Marshall Shepard selected the International Nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Communities, which supports communities by creating and implementing

45:47and 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.org. That is linked in the show notes, and that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before all of these existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates. They have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients. You can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing

46:47and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to squarespace.com slash, oligies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code oligies to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. Do you remember in school when you knew that you had a teacher who had like a favorite blazer? You're like, oh, Mr. Shep, he's wearing the burgundy again. And yes, Mr. Shep, he had a favorite student. It wasn't me. But my friend Marcy was killing it with her algebra homework. Let's talk about another real favorite thing that's not Marcy or me. Their favorite tissue brand, Kleenex. According to teacher lists, they're the number one facial tissue trusted by teachers. Kleenex, ultra-soft tissues, are silky soft to help prevent skin irritation. You don't want. And now you can take them anywhere. With Kleenex snap and go. Because really at any time, at any moment, you could need Kleenex tissue. That in the background was my husband growing his nose,

47:49which is proof. So do the best thing for your kids' teachers. This year, stock up on the ultimate classroom favorite and necessity. I don't know. Maybe it'll make them their teacher's favorite student. Just kidding. They do not have a favorite. They probably do. So for whatever happens next, grab Kleenex. Listen, sometimes you get out of your routine. That happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my ritual. Essential for women 18 plus. It's a multi that I've been taking for years. And guess who landed in another country without a me? Didn't feel right. They contain nine key nutrients. Two delayed release capsules designed for optimal absorption. But ritual, why do I love them so much? They have a team of scientists. They poured over thousands of studies to figure out what are common gaps that people need in their diet. But they don't actually consume. It's also designed to be gentle on the stomach. You can take it with or without food, which I love. Plus, I like that it looks like a tiny lava lamp. I tell you that every time it has its beads and oil,

48:51it tastes like mint, easy down the hatch. I usually take them in the morning. And the reason why I've stepped with ritual for so many years is because my schedule is all over the place. Sometimes I meet in breakfast. Sometimes I'm running through an airport with one shoe. So instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com slash allergies. That's ritual.com slash allergies for 25% off your first month. I know parents aren't supposed to have favorite children, but I have favorite pieces of clothing and I'm not afraid to admit it. The softest sweater ever that goes with everything and feels good on my arms. The jeans that fit perfectly that also make me feel cool. Guess what they have in common, quince? I've been buying from quince for years. From Mongolian casual sweater, bags, jacket, shoes, and it's not just clothes, they also have the same approach to everything they make. They have really nice like hotel kind of bedding. And they have bath, kitchen essentials. They also have great furniture. Recently my niece moved and I was like,

49:52yo, hit up quince. They make really well-designed pieces for everything. So whether you want a capsule wardrobe of really classic clothes that you'll wear over and over and have for years, or you want to make your life cosier and cool looking in other ways, find the fall pieces you'll reach for the most at quince. You can download the quince app for app exclusive offers or you could go to quince.com slash allergies, get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. So that's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash allergies. CBS Sunday, September 13th, the new season of 60 minutes begins. Okay, let's go. Every second, a story unfolds. This is one of the great mysteries of human nature. Every minute, a new question. We were vying access to the president. Every week, a deeper understanding. When we take the field, the expectations are to win. It's time. We're preparing to go out on this grade for the new season. It was gunfighting.

50:52All the way in, all the way out, 60 minutes. CBS Sunday, September 13th, and streaming on Paramount Plus. Okay, great questions. About to rain down on you from patrons of the show, via patreon.com slash allergies. Now this first one was also asked by patrons Miranda Panda, Slayer, Derek Allen, and Brittany Kaufman. We had some great questions from a bunch of listeners wanted to know sleet, hail, and grapple. What's the difference? Susan Baxter is a first-time quest jasker and said, can you tell us about grapple? What exactly is it? So yeah, grapple, you know, in-sth-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 grapple. But in thunderstorms, that grapple can continue to take trips up and down

51:56in that big thunderstorm or Kimilo Nimbus Cloud. And they can grow and take on layers like an onion if you sliced it. And it falls out of the thunderstorm as hail. Slate is actually ice crystals. They fall. They may melt, but then they re-freeze as they fall down to the ground. And that's what we get as sleet. And then there's another one that I'll add to her 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 temperature is below freezing and then it freezes on surfaces. And that's called freezing rain. So the thing that I would sort of meet with, that I wouldn't note about this question. Hail only happens in thunderstorms. So if 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 I would know that's sleet. And because hail only happens in thunderstorms. So yes, sleet is snow that melted and re-froze before hitting the ground.

53:00Hail happens in thunderstorms. Grapple is snow coated in ice. And 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. OK, what about humidity? Tyler Nelson, Stephanie Coombers, want to note, Tyler says, is a fall 40 degrees actually colder than a spring 40 degrees because of differences in moisture and Stephanie Coomb's wants to know, is there really a difference in wet versus dry cold, or is it all in our heads? Lauren Maskebrota and Kristi Hogger also desperately needed answers on this. Yeah, so you know, I'll flip that a little bit, because you often hear people talk about, oh, I'm going to Vegas. It's 110 degrees, but it's a dry heat. Yeah, but you know, 110 degrees is still hot with it's dry enough. But I think the point there is that 110 degrees with more humidity would be oppressive.

54:03And so here in Georgia, we can get to 90 degrees, but our humidity may be quite high, so that it feels like it's 110 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 in the humidity as well. But a better metric these days is something called the wet bulb globe temperature. Yeah, that's a big fancy one. 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 bodies are going to be sensitive to heat and humidity. And that is called the wet bulb globe temperature, which according to whether.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.

55:05And 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 acu weather 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, our perspiration.

56:06And 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 as 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 the wind chill 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 mannequin would be. But with a wind chill, is that all just done numerically or how do you think about that? Yeah, it's done with the forecast. Okay. I mean, our 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 indices or wet bulb globe temperatures. But, yeah, once that's established, our weather models predict the temperature and the winds,

57:09and then you can determine the wind chill based on your expected wind or, or to end our temperature. Ah, okay. See, this is, I'm learning so much already. A ton of people want to know about tornadoes. Look at you, patrons, Frances Horsbrew Baker, Elijah Kelsey Simpson, Leah Anderson, Rebecca Rodarte, Jonathan Mary Richard, Rebecca Anne Frey, on behalf of their second grader Aldo Frey. One time, Kansas to Eller, 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? Yeah, so hurricanes in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise, and they're much larger storms than the tornadoes, which are much smaller scale storms, that tin also have counterclockwise rotation as well, but there may be some that's been out in the opposite direction.

58:09I 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 Plains, of the coal, Canadian, landmass, 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 a dev formation of tornadoes. It's a twister! It's a twister! I should ask, though, you did mention twister. What's the closest you've been to our tornado? Have you ever tornadoed it? Not very close at all. I run away from them, not towards them. I say that because there are certainly weirdness, era of storm chasers now, and some storm chasers are very important, because you want to get data for science and so forth.

59:12When there's some people that go out there for the thrill, or get pictures of the cell 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, have you ever been in peril from your work? Not directly. 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 research or work that I do to go and put myself in front of a landfalling hurricane or a tornado. Okay. Patron's Marculette 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 submission for NASA when I was a scientist at NASA, the planes were 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 risk averse. Yeah, good. We need you here. So, there are certainly people to do it though.

1:00:12I have a theory that they have to put people like on CNN have to be out in a windbreaker in a storm because you won't know how bad the storm is until you see a windbreaker flapping around. Yeah. I think you've got that right. Actually, there are a lot of people that criticize reporters like by colleague Jim Cantor with the weather channel. And there are some people like, well, why don'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 side L, my colleague at the weather channel was reporting recently from Florida during hurricane Ian and he was going to protect the 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 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 wind like that. So, that's helpful for me at least.

1:01:16Yeah. When I would I watch coverage of like, I'll show you a way earthquake. I mean, we don't experience really bad earthquake here in Georgia. We don't 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, 1989 World Series anyone? And he fails to get the Parker at second days. So the open days take take. I don't know if you watch the giants in 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 those images for sure. A ton of Floridians wrote in, of course, I feel like people of Florida see the like meteorology and they're like, I have questions. But Katie Collins wants to know Floridian here, why are hurricane so hard to track and also a few people in McKenzie King wanted to know is hurricane season maybe get it go longer in the year.

1:02:26So, you know, 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 the 10 day range, where we we've had progress in the 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 will never be able to do that, whether it's a hurricane track, a tornado storm or a precipice. 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. We 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 several level of accuracy with weather forecast because we're dealing with a fluid on a rotating planet that we're trying to predict with equations.

1:03:34But we're we've reduced the error in track forecast significantly in the three day, four day, two day, one day out. So 50 to 100 nautical miles of error from my parents was actually pretty good. So in other words, we can tell you within a 50 to 100 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 intensity follows the sephyr Simpson hurricane wind scale SSHWS from a ready starts at tropical depression to a tropical storm to a category one. If it reaches 74 mile an hour stained winds all the way up to a category five, which has over 157 mile per hour winds. 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 Roxie Bolton in the seventies and ardent and accomplished feminist icon and activist suggested maybe they should alternate those with male names.

1:04:55Although Roxie initially suggested that the devastating storms should be named after senators, but the baby name convention stock and NOAA keeps these prewritten 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 cited study that came out in 2014 titled female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes. And I 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 one named after man. Although some people contested this saying that the data set included hurricanes from 1950 to 1978 when they only used female names. Some people contested what's my point my point is if a hurricane is 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 2023 will be named.

1:05:58Arlene and hope that they don't look at the link that I'm posting on my website to Noah.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 water stay warmer longer or perhaps get warmer earlier in the season that the hurricane season might start to be extended beyond June 1st and November 30th. In December 2005, 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 80 degree fair and high temperature or so. But because of the climate warming of the ocean, we're starting to see warmer oceans that can feed these storms though. A lot of folks spoke to one of the flim flams that you were kind of busting earlier, Macy Lopez, Jen Scroll, Alvarez, Josephina Benjamin and DeBao, James Hales, Olivia French, Andrew arcade, Rebecca Davis, Justin doll, Cat Kessler, Susman and Freddie B all wanted to know what is a percent chance really mean. And how do you quantify the chance of precipitation?

1:07:12It'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 a probabilistic forecast. So I'll give you a little anecdote 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 20% chance of rain today. See the meteorologists are always wrong. 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 20% region that day. So I mean that forecast wasn't wrong at all. Right. 20% there was a 20% there wasn't a zero percent chance that that particular area would receive rain. There was a 20% chance. So it rained likely in a statistical sense, 80% of the area didn't get rain, but we were in the 20% that did. So well, nothing was wrong with that forecast at all.

1:08:22So that percentage can mean that 20% 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 60% confidence that rain will occur over 60% of a given geography, then the POP for that day would be 36% 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 do we get the precision of in situ measurements with a coverage of remote sensing to improve model accuracy. And Trevor Durning wants to know, ESO 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, and so it's just the El Nino Southern oscillation cycle and AMO is the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation. So in so is the like El Nino La Niña phase. And so there is some level of some predictability of the in so cycle right now, for example, we're still in a La Niña phase, which means the ocean waters in this equatorial Pacific or cooler.

1:09:43The normal and that tends to affect weather patterns, whereas on warmer than normal equatorial Pacific is the El Nino. And so the climate prediction center or the European center, they actually can predict the sort of in so phase, whether we're El Nino and La Niña, and 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 La Niña or El 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 El Nino is warmer Pacific ocean waters and yes, La Niña 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 the tends to switch about every 70 or so years. Perhaps due to the regular ocean conveyor belt currents, but scientists think it may also be affected lately through climate change. Okay, so yes, we released this episode in winter of 2022, but I'm recording this new aside on September 8th, 2026. I just got back from this University of Georgia's campus and I hung out again with Dr. Shepherd to talk about the scientific communities current, no pun intended, thoughts and predictions on what is being called.

1:10:59A Godzilla El Niño what to expect and how it affects not only the West Coast of the United States, but the rest of the world. So again, subscribe because on probably Thursday, I'll be putting up that fresh as hell 2026 interview with Dr. Shepherd about this, which I recorded earlier today as an LA resident will the 2026 El Niño predicted to be the worst any living person on earth has ever seen end up killing me. We're going to get to the bottom of it. Oh, and since this episode, one of we also released a two part 10 past all the episode all about hurricanes with Matt Lanza and Dr. Kim Wood. So we'll link that in the show notes because it's definitely worth a listen, especially if you are a weather geek or you're wondering what is going to happen to you and Trevor, during 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 less clear right now. I think one question you mentioned was about QG theory and something about a skew T chart.

1:12:18So that was patron Dana Warheitz question, which read, please ask about QT theory and how the skew T is the ultimate atmospheric gauge for what is happening in the atmosphere at the moment, which is a plot that we used 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 atmospheric sciences that explains many of the motions again, it's way too complex to talk about on a podcast. So I would recommend a dynamic class in a meteorology program to get into QG theory or because if I start talking about it, your head's going to explode and your headphones or your pods are going to fly out of your ear right. Hi, I went to the American meteorological society's glossary terms and I brought this back in my little basket for us. So a quasi geostrophic theory is a theory of atmospheric dynamics that involves the quasi geostrophic approximation and the derivation of the quasi geotrophic equations.

1:13:23And 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 advection. It continues, but I blacked out trying to read it. So just please respect your weather 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. So, yeah, is there an issue with weather balloons because of a helium shortage? There was. Yeah, we've had periodically we have had some issues with the national weather service. Now, I think one thing that really helps us out is some 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 work consistently and over many other places with a weather balloon. We only have it where we have it and when we launch it and that's sometimes just twice a day.

1:14:30But 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 Samsung, 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 result 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 pressure measurement from a barometer where you're sitting alley. That's pretty good resolution. A satellite might be only able to give you a resolution over the square mile of where you're sitting. So it would be a much more blurred course or measurement. I just wanted to tell you that in 1982, a truck driver named Larry Walters filled 45 weather balloons with helium. And then he tied them to a lawn chair and flew 16,000 feet over Long Beach for about 45 minutes, just cruising in a lawn chair covered in balloons.

1:15:36And 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 557 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. It can be annoying. It can be difficult. It can be whatever. Hardest thing about the job. I think 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. It's it's it really is the discipline is from a science standpoint is really just fluid dynamics, a bunch of physics and a bunch of calculus.

1:16:37But to the public, all they see is co-fronts on a map or something, but a lot went into getting to that point. And so that the the challenge and of explaining that complexity to me is very difficult. 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 decker 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 legitimately fascinated by weather. So I don't feel like I work. I would I do. I'm look I was a former president of the American Meteorological Society. I work for NASA. I get to do basically big science projects for a 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 tread 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.

1:17:48And 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 will maintain. Yeah, I definitely get to get my few you like anything you're a week geek out every week with various weather climate science experts on the weather geeks podcast by the weather channel. Check out my Forbes articles. Follow me on Twitter at Dr. Shepherd 2013. I'm on Instagram at March for FSU. I'm on TikTok at Dr. Shepherd knows. So that's just a 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 I'm not your typical scientist or 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 out. So there you have it. You can ask brilliant distinguished professors. Sometimes dorky questions because they're just a delusia facts and learning stuff makes the planet healthier for all of us. So there are links to Dr. Marshall Shepherd social media and website and to sustain.org and so many things we discussed up at my website at alleyward.com slash allegy slash meteorology. That's linked in the show notes.

1:18:57We're at allegies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm an alley ward with one L on both I'm at alley underscore allegies on tiktok say hi. Smaller Gs episodes are right in our feed and they're safe for all ages. You can find them at alleyward.com slash small Gs. Thank you Mercedes, mainland, Jared sleeper and see Rodriguez Thomas for editing those. Allegies merch is available all a Gs merch dot com. Thank you Susan Hale for managing that plus doing so much more. Thank you. Thank you. Noel Dillworth for all the scheduling Emily White of the word. He makes our professional transcripts and Caleb Patton bleeps them. Those are up for free at alleyward.com slash allegies dash extras Aaron Talbert admins the allegies podcast Facebook group with the sister and bunny Dutch and Shannon Feltis Kelly are to wire stays 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 mainland of mainland audio productions which is linked in the show notes at mainland audio dot com huge thanks to her for the tremendous job she's doing and giving Mr. Jared sleeper some time to explore his other passions. I'm so excited for him for that if you stick around the show you know I tell you a secret.

1:20:03In this week's secret is that I watched a Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio on Netflix and the entire time I was watching it they have a 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 hairworm in there. If you've ever seen a horse hairworm crawl out of a cricket or praying mantis but wow it puts like pimple videos to shame just google it they put its little butt in water and then the horse hairworm is like I'm out of here and it is like. A mile of warm Pinocchio didn't touch on horse hairworms I wish it did it did make me cry a lot. I cried so much also Guillermo del Toro at one point on Twitter said he would appear on allergies 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. Alright that's enough enemy. Just kidding here's a new updated 2026 secret so first off I just want to thank everyone who came out to today's University of Georgia event and I know there were a lot of you in an overflow room and I'm going to say that I'm going to be a little bit more careful.

1:21:12I'm going to make an overflow room and then some people who didn't make it to that overflow room I'm sorry it was filled up thank you to everyone who attended. I was so heartened I walked in the building and some of y'all clapped and I started straight up crying. And I wish I could have taken it just a selfie with all of us since I couldn't stay in chat with everyone individually. I did want to show some school spirit so I bought a University of Georgia Lanyard for $6 nearby and I asked the hotel desk for scissors and I cut it into a ribbon and then I made a bow tie out of it. So if you're at a conference and you see an extra branded Lanyard ten or ten can make a good bow tie. You can also tie two of them together and keep the knot at the back of your neck. You know if you need more length but it's a nice kind of snazzy look definitely a combo starter. Also I am in Athens I just ate at this place called the national and their chickpea fritters are so good and they smell really good. I ate one so fast as soon as the plate hit the table that I now have a patch of skin on the roof of my mouth.

1:22:12This just slipped off like the outer charts skin of a marshmallow and I deserved it. I could have waited one minute and I just didn't and they were worth it. Okay El Nino fresh bonus episode out on Thursday. It's very good. Am I going to die in El Nino? Alright go dance around on the rain. It's great. Okay bye bye. The weather outside is weather. Introducing Toyota's family full of all electric rides as cool as you are. The adventurous busy woodland the trend setting, C-H-R and the versatile B-Z. Zip around town in the B-Z with a smooth and sporty driving dynamic. Explore the outdoors in the B-Z woodland with dual motors and available all-trained tires be bold on the road with the C-H-R's sharp handling.

1:23:21Imagine what you can do with an all-electric vehicle that gets you. Learn more about the new all-electric family at toyota.com. Toyota let's go places. CBS Sunday September 13th the new season of 60 minutes begins. Okay let's go. Every second a story unfolds. This is one of the great mysteries of human nature. Every minute a new question. You were buying access to the president. Every week a deeper understanding. When we take the field the expectations are to win. It's time. We're preparing to go out on this race for the new season. It was gunfight all the way in all the way out. 60 minutes CBS Sunday September 13th and streaming on Paramount Plus.