Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 01-24-25_FRIDAY_7AM

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Greg Roberts with the Outdoor report, talk on the reservoirs and snow pack, future of TV weather in southern Oregon and more.

The Bill Myers Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at clouserdrilling.com. Here's Bill Myers. Greg Roberts here, Mr. Outdoors from rogueweather.com and the Outdoor Report. Hey, Greg, welcome back. Interesting week, interesting weekend. I don't know, the weather could be still pretty boring over the next few days, huh?

Yeah, boring is a way to phrase that for sure. However, the end of boredom, if you will, is definitely in sight. And that now, the timing of that looks to be coming probably Thursday night next week. But at long last, we're finally going to break this pattern down and out, and we are going to move back into what is starting to shape up to look like a very active storm cycle as we hit the last couple days of January and then move into February. Okay. Now, are we actually going to start generating some more snow? Because, I mean, I could still see over on McLaughlin, you know, looking at there, I see lots of snow.

And so that's like high elevation snow. But what we haven't been getting, as you have mentioned before, is the lower elevation snow. And, by the way, I had some listeners that have sent me some pictures of the apple gate reservoir and they've been talking about how they were concerned that there just seems to be a lot of a lot of bare ground and they're letting a lot of water out there for rain which has yet to come what do you think about that well okay it kind of depends on your perspective of things i have seen photos of applelegate Reservoir that, to me, for the time of year and knowing what they do, we actually look like we've got more water in there than we would typically have. Applegate, you know, basically now through March is probably

the worst reservoir in all of Southern Oregon to look at and try and determine what the water situation is. And why is that then? And could part of it be that it's relatively small too? I don't know. It is. And it's also, it's narrow. It's not wide.

It's pretty deep. But the thing about it is when they take their mind to it to fill it up, really fill it, it actually fills very quickly. And so to see really low water levels in it at this time of the year is actually normal. And like I said, in the photos I've seen of it, because people have sent me pictures of it, I actually think there's more water in it than we would typically see. And, you know, when we were coming out of that last storm cycle, the Applegate River had a big flow to it coming through Seattle Bar and entering the reservoir. Now, what I find interesting is it took California decades to

finally learn the lesson, especially about Shasta. But they eventually stopped doing the pre-programmed releases. You know, if they were even a little bit ahead of where they were supposed to be, they quit doing releases out of Shasta until it reached a point where, okay, if we don't do some release here, we may have real trouble based on the amount of snow and inflow we're going to be seeing. Well, the situation with the Applegate is there is such little snow in the systems that drain into and fill Applegate Reservoir. I have said that I really wish they actually would not be releasing right now unless they absolutely get forced to because of the lack of snow that we have up there. And that's what

the listener who sent me the pictures was concerned about, too, not seeing much snow around there. Now, that said, the new 90-day outlooks from NOAA, February through April, look both wet and cold. So can our situation still turn around? Absolutely. There is a definite term in meteorology that people are probably familiar with, and that is Miracle March. And a Miracle March scenario, because of the La Nina now kicking in, is entirely possible. Well, what's a Miracle March. And a Miracle March scenario, because of the La Nina now kicking in, is entirely possible. Well, what's a Miracle March? Well, Miracle March is essentially where you get so much rain and snow that you actually catch up to or pass where you would typically be

in March at a given point in time. A few years ago, Mount Ashland had this happen. They came limping into March, and if I remember right, they had somewhere around 30, 40 inches of snow at the lodge. Then a miracle March hit, and I want to say this was 2014. Wasn't that the year that they extended the skiing season because they had so much snow? Well, yeah. And then what happened was they had 120 inches of snowfall in March. Yeah. And, yeah, they extended the ski season because all of a sudden, boom, they had their best snow packs of the entire season in March. That's what I'm talking about. We have seen a Miracle March in the Sierras in California, where they have picked up anywhere from 8 to 14 feet of snow just in March.

So a Miracle March can happen, with the La Nina hitting as late as it did to finally really get established to where it's official we're in a La Nina pattern. Yeah, that tends to set up a Miracle March scenario. So no reason to panic over low water in Applegate. Still possible that we're going to see enough snow get into the drainages for the Applegate to create a good enough snowpack. So we're going to have to see how this goes. But obviously right now, especially considering how long a break we've had here in January, how much snow pack we don't have between 3,500 and 5,000 feet, yeah, there's some concern. But we'll see how this is going to play out now because,

like I said, that 90-day extended look from NOAA looks really good. Okay, very good. What about your favorite fun if you're going to be heading in the outdoors this weekend for fishing or whatever else you might want to do? What do you think? You know, honestly, it's going to be a situation that, because of the weather, meaning sunny, pretty much any activity you want to go out and engage in, you can. Now, I will say this. We do have a cold weather advisory out for southern Oregon, you know, for the weekend. What that simply means is it's mainly because of overnight temps, but our daytime highs for Medford and Grants Pass are going to be running low 40s to mid 40s. So it's going to be

pretty chilly this weekend, but the sun will be out. And then in the overnights, that's probably where that cold weather advisory is going to have its biggest impact, because we're looking at lows through the weekend running right around 20 to maybe lower 20s. Again, the cold weather advisory is one of the new weather bulletins from National Weather Service for this area. They will issue it when overnight lows or daytime highs are expected to be a certain percentage below normal for the time of the year. And I want to say, if I remember right, they were saying like 20%. So we are definitely going to be seeing below average temps, especially in the overnights, thus the cold weather advisory. Can you kind of scornfully mock them for, oh my goodness, now they're just making a big deal about winter?

Yeah, I suppose so. But on the other hand, you know, this is kind of the world we live in now. It's overstate the obvious. I'm not going to get, you know, that carried away with me. You know, there is another way of looking at this, too, though, and that is, let's face it, we're still enduring a lot of concrete camping going on here in Southern Oregon, in our Southern Oregon cities. And I'll have to tell you, when you see those 23, 24-degree temps that we've been having sometimes, I think the coldest I had this week was 21. I think it was Tuesday morning, 21, at my house as I was coming in.

And, you know, outside on the concrete world is no place to be for any real human, you know? Well, the counter to that, I guess, a little bit is Bend. Much colder in Bend than it's been down here, and probably far more of the concrete campers in Bend. And that does amaze me, because in the wintertime up there, you know, when I was living there, we would see temps get down, just the air temps, mind you, as low as 25 below zero. Really? And, okay, if you want to be an urban... Well, it sounds like Fargo-Moorhead. You know, that's the kind of stuff we would see there.

Sure. But I never thought Bend would be the kind of place that the urban outdoorsman type would be drawn to, especially in the wintertime, considering it can get down well below zero. I don't know. Maybe it's a better class of restaurant, right? Yeah. And yet, Bend is definitely a big magnet for the urban outdoorsman. That's interesting. All right. So anyway, keep that in mind. I'll tell you what here.

I guess we'll wrap the outdoor report here and take a quick break, grab some calls. But I would like to dig in next to a story you've been covering. And the national trades are now starting to cover this. And this is with the vanishing local meteorologist. I think it's pretty interesting stuff. You want to dig into that with me here? Sure. All right.

We'll do that coming up here. Greg Roberts, once again, RogueWeather.com. We'll continue from the outdoor report to something different and also take your calls to 770-5633. And this is the Bill Myers Show on KMED. Don't settle for a typical store-bought cake. Serve a nothing but cake. And this is the Bill Myers Show on KMED. of flavors and thoughtful designs that give your celebration, big or small, a special touch. From blissful bundlets to show-stopping decorated cakes, you'll find them at Nothing But Cakes in the Northgate Marketplace across from Public Lands. If you don't plan on cooking tonight, plan on dining at Freddy's Diner. Friday and Saturday nights, Freddy's features their hickory smoked prime rib, plus there's everyday favorites like New York State, smoked beef brisket,

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that shops for the best coverage for less. Steve makes insurance easy. News Talk 1063 KMED. This is the Bill Myers Show. I'm back with Greg Roberts, RogueWeather.com. We do the outdoor report every Friday. For the next few weeks, though, since the outdoor shows are going on, we're going to move it to Monday.

So Monday we'll have you back, Greg, okay? We'll talk with you then. And let me go to Fred. Hey, Fred, you wanted to ask Greg a question. Go ahead. Immigrant lake is dry as a bone why aren't we talking about that what do you say there greg have you kept an eye on that um not so much on immigrant but i know they were doing some um they've been doing work on the talent irrigation system dams and i knew immigrant wasigrant was slated for that, and I believe that's why they have also pulled that down. Then again, Immigrant is also another reservoir where in the wintertime you can see it get really low.

Immigrant's a lot different, however, than what Applegate's situation is. There is a snowpack up there in all of the terrain that will eventually feed into Hyatt, Howard, and then down into Immigrant. And Talent Irrigation District will definitely be filling bottom up. And what I mean by that is they'll release water through their system to get down to immigrant, get immigrant full, shut immigrant down, and then start filling back up above, going through the four bit, going through Howard Prairie and Hyatt. So to see it low right now, it isn't too surprising, especially realizing they actually do have a snowpack that's going to be draining into that reservoir. So I'm not nearly of the same concern.

Not concerned about it. Okay. All right. Thanks for the call, Fred. Appreciate that. Jim's in Jacksonville. Jim, you're with Greg. Go ahead. Thanks, Bill. Greg, I had a question about fire mapping. The agencies that I've worked with are very careful of mapping of our areas so we could, maybe you guys already do it, but that's what we did in Malibu and brush clearance was fine And every five to six years. So you're thinking, Jim, that the actual mapping of the actual fires rather than the computer algorithm mapping of Senate Bill 762 might be more effective. I don't know if you look much into that or not yet, Greg, or not. Well, yeah. And, you know, there's definitely contradictory information out there. I was not aware of this, but FEMA has a publicly accessible map showing wildfire risk in Oregon, and it looks decidedly different than what the state of Oregon just produced. That's very interesting, Jim.

That may be an angle to work on when it comes to the appeal in Senate Bill 762-2, which I think everyone should be doing. Frank, appreciate the call. And let me go to the next line. Hi, you're with Greg. Good morning. Who's this? Hey, Greg. This is Brad. Hey, Brad. Hey, a quick question.

You, Bill, had Jeff Golden on recently, and he made a comment, and I'm curious about Greg's opinion of it, that we're on the track to be Southern California fire situation. Agree and disagree um overall is there some trending that would put us on the same track as southern california yeah there's some um but i totally disagree in that we're going to be in the same um situation of southern california number one we don't have that type of Santa Ana situation hit. Not very often. You know, I listened to him last Friday on the air with Bill, and a lot of what he was talking about, he was talking about mitigating a once-in-100-year event. You know, what I noticed that Jeff and others of his stripe tend to do, when something happens that to them was so totally unexpected, it scares them to their core, they overreact. And that's what I think he's doing. He's overreacting. The problem that we had that really fed Almeda could have really been easily addressed in the years before if they would have just done fuels reduction in the Greenway.

They didn't. County Fire District 5 in 1996, the chief at that time, Dan Marshall, asked me to drive the district and assess what I thought were the highest risk hazards for urban interface fires because I had something no other firefighter with Fire District 5 had, certification from the state of Oregon as an urban interface specialist. And that's really our major danger, wouldn't you say? Really? Yeah. And when I got done driving the district, I went back into Dan's office and he says, what's our highest risk? Siskiyou area on that east side of Ashland? I go, yeah, that's pretty high risk. I said, but you know what our actual real highest risk is? He goes, what's that? And I go, the Greenway. That Bear Creek corridor is so overgrown with brush and everything else

that you get a fire start ripping in there with the wind situation that we typically get in the afternoons. I go, you could get a big ripping fire smoking right up that greenway because of the fuel loads. And then you've got all of those trailer parks with those seniors there. And it's all connected. It's all connected. It's like a fire artery built into Jackson County in that area. Sure.

What's that? It's a fire artery, potential fire artery right there yeah so in the aftermath of almeda they have done what they have should have done years before which would have prevented almeda look at the amount of fuels reduction and that has spilled over all across jackson and josephine counties they got rid of all the natural cover in the off-ramp areas. They got rid of a lot of the vegetation growing along I-5. There's been all kinds of fuel reduction done now, but again, it's kind of locking the barn door after the horse has long been stolen. All right. Appreciate the call there, Brad. I will grab one more.

And, Greg, I'm going to hold you over for one more segment, if you don't mind, too. I hope I know I didn't ask you, but we get some calls. We're going to stick with that a little bit. Hi, you're with Greg. Good morning. Who's this? Good morning. Holly Morton, Josephine County.

Hi, Holly. Noah Robinson has introduced SB 678, which is a repeal of 762. And we need to, as citizens, support that 100%. People can look at that on OLS online and take a look at that. We're going to be making a lot of information about that available in the Joseph County Republican office. Okay. But that's the one thing citizens could be doing right now is supporting the repeal of 762. Yeah. Ultimately, it needs to be repealed, Holly.

Thank you for the update on that. Okay. Appreciate it. All right. Hey, Greg, let me break for the rest of the news. And then when we return here, I think we'll close up the fire talk because, yeah, there's a work in progress for sure here. But the national trades on the war against local weather people, I think it's quite interesting. And you were already covering that even before the national broadcast trades took it up here. But I want to get your take on it coming up, okay? Hang on.

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All the foods in the, or the, you know, the peanut butters and the proteins are very, any nut butter, really, that you can use with that. Okay? All right. It is 19 before 8. Greg Roberts over at RoadWeather.com. Greg, you've been, of course, reporting weather there for a long, long time. No doubt you have been checking out allen media group which owns channel 12 you

were talking about this a couple of weeks ago on rogue weather and it is now hitting the national trades because it's affecting a lot of different markets with allen media discontinuing their local meteorological coverage in the next what couple of months guess, is when that's going to hit first, right? Yeah, they're saying March. And they're kind of vague about when exactly in March, but they're saying March. March, okay. All right. And this has been a trend that we've been seeing for a long time.

You know what happened with KTBL a little while ago, right, in which KTVL essentially is a shadow of what it once was. But I can almost say that, you know, with rising costs and various other things, and I don't know if you can have three full-scale television news places and make any money at it. I'm just saying, you know, looking at it financially. But what is going to be coming? And what does this mean, in your opinion, in the real world? Well, okay, to set this up, I'm going to go back to something that happened to me clear back in 2011, before we did Rogue Weather. Back in 2011, KTVL was owned by Freedom Corporation, and they had a weekend weather guy. I'm trying to remember his name right now.

I remember his first name was Curtis, but he announced he was going to be leaving. I had worked at KTVL previously in much the same capacity I worked in over there with you. You know, meaning not directly on camera, but doing sales and promotions and that kind of thing. So anyway, people who already knew my background for weather over there reached out to me and said, do you have any interest in this? And I said, yeah, actually I do. Because I started thinking about, you know, bringing it full circle because Leon Hunsaker had been at KTVL forever and became a legend. He was like your idol, wasn't he?

I remember you always talking about Hunsaker. Sure. But that was my first thought was, oh man, that'd be so cool to be, you know, TV weather guy at KTVL and bring it all full circle for me personally because Leon started it. Now I'm carrying the torch for Leon and becoming the new KTVL weather guy. And discussions were underway. They were getting me set up to get in and get training with Crystal Henderson, who was here at that time before she went to Phoenix, Arizona. And everything was going great. And then Freedom sold to Sinclair.

And Sinclair put a hold on everything, including me. And I was kind of bummed about that. This would have been probably March, April of 2011. And I was already putting the concept of rogue weather together, but I immediately put it on the back burner because of what was happening with KTVL. Okay. so once that ended up uh so you're kind of recognizing a similar pattern here um but you know we've been dealing with to finish this because this is important okay yesterday i dedicated rogue weather to a gentleman by the name of joel taylor that uh joel rose to a certain level of fame

because of the discovery show Storm Chasers. And I reached out to him, and he got back to me, and that started us talking back and forth. I mentioned to Joel I was really bummed about the KTVL job not happening, and I will never forget what Joel said next, and it actually really solidified me into doing Rogue Weather. He said, and this is 2011, don't be bummed that you didn't get that position because the future of weather forecasting is going to be on the internet and social media. Okay. And that's of course where you ended up taking it then. Now, is that affecting our local television stations now? Is it just the

way it's playing out? What's causing all of this is the fact that, unfortunately, traditional media, especially TV, is not doing well in the digital age, and ad revenues are going down big time. Proof of that came on Monday, when it was announced that CNN had lost $400 million in the last three years alone. Now spread that out to local TV stations. I'm not going to say KDRV lost $400 million, but if you extrapolate it and you convert it down to the local market, yeah, they probably have. Because, you know, I can drive around town and listen to radio stations. And with my background, I can tell you every bit of the holes in the commercial inventory. The same thing is true with TV.

The other thing the digital age did, everybody jumped on board streaming. And then streaming allows them to completely block out ads. On the national level, advertisers, ad agencies, they're well aware of it. They have moved to digital. And TV especially now is getting clobbered. And TV has real high cost associated with it. And most of that is human cost when it comes to maintaining staffs, paying benefits. This isn't necessarily about a greed thing. So many people are saying, well, they're only doing this because they're greedy. No, and I wanted people to understand that too, because the other aspect, and this is another part about it that doesn't get talked enough,

but also the domination of Google on this, in which somehow if you're going to sell advertising around here digitally or whatever it is, you're having to almost partner with Google and give those chiselers a cut of it all too. But I can't do anything about that. That's just the reality where we find ourselves these days. And unfortunately, TV and radio sales staffs are also feeding that because desperate to pull in any kind of money, they are doing digital ad sales. What they basically become are their own little ad agencies for the people they deal with. Yeah, and that's happened in the television thing, too.

I guess the point, though, is that, all right, Allen Group ends up owning the Weather Channel, right? So they already have a bunch of meteorologists in there. So they're going to remove the local guys. Is that going to cause problems, you think, in the long run? Oh, absolutely. Because here's the thing. I've been forecasting here for 40 of my 60 years of life. In being here, watching our weather, seeing what happens, I can't be 100% accurate here.

Nobody can. Just Medford. This area is the second most difficult area to weather forecast in the United States. The only place tougher is southeast Alaska. And now I've got people at KDRV telling me, oh, they're going to be very well versed. And I'm like, no, they're not. I've watched people come into this market, try and forecast weather that never got it. I have had the former head of Medford's National Weather Service office tell me he's had people that really struggled. It took them years of being here before they really understood it. Yeah, because of the microclimes,

everything else we've talked about over the years. And that's why you'll get people that I know that they'll yell at me, well, the weather didn't happen here the way that the forecast was talking about. It's like, yeah, because we've got about 40 different microclimates and you were within the microclimate that didn't get the rain or got the snow, that kind of thing. I mean, you've talked about these sort of things. Yeah, 40, I wish. Try thousands. Okay, thousands. Okay, thousands. There are thousands of microclimates across Southern Oregon and Northern California. And I'm sorry, I don't care how good you are. If you're sitting in Atlanta, Georgia, and you've never been here. Now, I'm being told the local meteorologists are being offered positions within the weather channel

to help facilitate local coverage. Well, none of them are taking it because it means moving. And I've talked to the two chief meteorologists most impacted by this at KDRV and KEZI. No, they are not taking that offer. They're moving on to do other things. Okay. I really wish I had the money to bring them on board with me because I'd do it in a blink. Yeah.

Well, they're good people. I mean, it's just the way it is. But the other part about this is that this is one thing I love about Southern Oregon is that it's a small market. It's a small town. And, you know, you can have a much more intimate relationship with audience and listeners and such. And I'm not like a national host that's always yelling at you, get off my phone, you big dope. You know, that kind of thing. But you know what I'm getting at here.

I know exactly what you're getting at. But because of the fact that we are a smaller market, and like I said, I've worked in larger markets, Seattle and Sacramento, places like that, and it's a very different economic model that you're dealing with there. And the consolidation broadcast, radio broadcast, started the consolidation really in the late 1990s, where we first started getting affected with that. And you were working here. We were working together, you know, back in those days.

And it's just the way it is. It hit television, but it hit television a lot later. And it also then had combined with the one-two punch of streaming. And like you were just mentioning, I think that's a lot. Right. A lot to do with it. So it truly did. The real difficult part here is when we're going to have major things happening. And they're also stating,

Allen Media Group, that is, well, when real severe weather events or things are happening, we'll send people from Atlanta to cover it. In Medford? Really? My reaction to that was, if you believe that, I've got lovely beachfront property in North Dakota ready to sell to you right now. And of course, North Dakota, I just figure if it's winter, it's cold and snowy, okay? All right, now then. Yeah, a barbed wire fence from the North Pole in the winter and a barbed wire fence from hell in the summer. Yep. All right. All right, Greg. It'll be interesting to watch this one, and it is just the reality. It is the financial reality here, and it's sad.

It's sad to see this. I mean, first KTVL, then KDRV. I have a feeling KOBI is going to be able to keep a better staff going here for a little bit longer, given their ownership. I think they will. I mean, just the sad part is when I started Rogue Weather, I never foresaw a scenario where I would literally be the last guy standing doing local weather and alerting people to what's going on. And now all of a sudden, that's my very new reality. I may very well be the last guy standing. Well, hey, I feel the same way here in talk radio, in local talk radio.

Hey, Greg, I feel the same way in local talk radio here, okay? What's that? I feel the same way in local talk radio here, like last guy standing, you know? Yeah, and you absolutely will be. I have no doubt about that. Okay, Greg. We're going to talk about what it was like in the old days. Yeah, the old days.

Come here, kids. Gather around. Let me tell you about 2010. Yeah, exactly. Hey, Greg, have a good weekend. I just wanted to get your hot take on that. And like I said, we're going to be experiencing the new media landscape

here in the television world in the coming weeks. You take care. I'll tell you what, Bill. I had no idea in 2011 that I was really going to be the first step into the future. I had no clue about that, and there's the reality yep that's it

hey thanks greg greg over at rogueweather.com okay you take care good weekend we'll talk we'll catch up on uh there probably won't be a whole lot of changes on monday we'll do a quick outdoor report on monday okay actually get to real outdoor information on monday i promise okay really thanks greg see you then yeah greg over at Weather, 754-770-5633. It is open phones for the next hour or so, so we can get into all sorts of different conversations. Just astounding stuff, okay? And by the way, anytime I talk with Greg on the Outdoor Report,

Outdoor Report is sponsored by Oregon Truck and Auto Authority on Airway Drive in Medford. We appreciate them doing that. It's 548-770-5633. Hi, this is Cassie from Closet Drilling.