Ologies with Alie Ward - Meteorology (WEATHER & CLIMATE) Encore with Marshall Shepherd

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Bomb cyclones! Polar vortices! Atmospheric rivers! And rained out barbecues. One of the world’s leading Meteorologists, Dr. Marshall Shepherd – a former NASA scientist and current Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia – is here to field a downpour of questions. We chat about percentages in forecasts, hail, sleet, storm chasing, heatwaves, fluid dynamics, TV weather people, climate change delayism and his favorite weather-themed movies. Also: what not to do with a weather balloon. Follow Dr. Shepherd on Bluesky, Instagram or TikTokHis website: www.drmarshallshepherd.comHis podcast: Weather GeeksA donation went to: Institute for Sustainable Communities at sustain.orgMore episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Tempestology (HURRICANES), Fulminology (LIGHTNING), Nephology (CLOUDS), Snow Hydrology (SNOW/AVALANCHES), Cryoseismology (ICEQUAKES), Astrobiology (ALIENS), Oceanology (OCEANS), Phenology (FALL/SEASONS), Spesh Ep: Drawdown Design Project400+ Ologies episodes sorted by topicSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and engineering by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, hey, this is 2026 Alley. 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 orologies. 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 encore 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 nabbed the chance to sit down with this guest again because there's a weather system called El Nino that is already hitting the West Coast and the world this year, 26, and it is such a whopper. People are pretty freaked out about it, and 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 encore. And then, of course, there's a fresh secret at the end. Oh, hi. It's that vitamin stuck in your throat. I'm so sorry. Allie Ward.

How do I even start this? Okay. We're going to chitch out about the weather in a way that is anything but small talk. As it turns out, the stuff that's all around us is raging and swirling and heavy with emotion. And likewise, I don't even know how to preface this ologist experience. His bio is the longest list of accreditations 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 yes to do this. So several folks told me to find him and beg him to be friends. which I did. And this one has been in the works for a couple years. So he got his bachelor's, his MS, and his PhD in physical meteorology from Florida State University. He's been a NASA researcher, the president of the American Meteorological Society, where he now holds a rare distinction of being a fellow. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Weather and Climate Research by the White House. And in 2021, he received the American Geological Institute's Award for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of the geosciences.

He's advised the U.S. 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 his schedule. So we hopped on our respective mics, and I asked him all kinds of questions that were way below his pay grade.

But before we get there, just a quick thanks to everyone who supports the show at patreon.com.com. A dollar or more a month gets you in the club, and you could submit questions ahead of time. Ologies merch is available at Ologiesmerch.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 Allie 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, thank you for the work you do.

Everyone listened to Discard Anthropology if you hadn't. It's such a good one. So thanks for the work you do. I hope someone brings cookies to your garage. And if anyone left a review, no, I have read it. Let's get into meteorology. Legend has it the field was named by Aristotle, who wrote a tome about weather and named it Meteorogica from a root word meteor for lofty. So stuff above us. So let's get to what is over our heads. Let's get it in our domes and get ready for tornadoes.

Typhoons, wind, rain, forecasting, newscasting, wet bulb 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. Dr. Marshall Shepard, I guess I'm he, but what else did you ask? Oh, that's it. Okay. Yeah.

So I've been wanting to talk to you for literally. years. This is pretty exciting. You 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, you know, the really derogatory term that I hear from some of my female colleagues is when they call them weather girls. These are celebrated scientists with degrees. They're women. They're not weather girls. But yeah, you're really on to a point because the term meteorologists is synonymous with

weatherman for most of the public, but there are different types of meteorologists in the same way that they're different types of engineers. In fact, only a small percentage of our field, our TV meteorologists, or what we call broadcast meteorologists or weathercasters. And even within that group, there's a range. There are actually some people that have meteorology degrees, and you'll see the AMS seal by their name, typically, or some other seal. There are some people that have more journalism backgrounds but report the weather and so forth, although there's less of that and more degree 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 Gwinnett 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. Can 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 out 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. And 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 hows and why of weather. Like, why does that hurricane get stronger than others? And why are certain storms spent out tornadoes and some storms don't? And so that's when I started investigating schools in Florida State University. I'm from Georgia and Florida State was the closest meteorology program. And the rest of sister, I went on into 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. Shepard spent a mere 12 years as a research meteorologist at NASA-Gadard Space Flight Center and was the Deputy Project scientist for the global precipitation measurement mission, just casually one of the best meteorologists in the world. And now still do high-level research, teach, and do a lot of other things as well. But to really answer the second part of your question, what are some of the other options? Again, I think about 9 to 10 percent of our field work as TV meteorologists. Others go into sort of more private sector for airlines or other commodities companies, power companies, energy companies, and so forth.

There are quite a few meteorologists that work in federal agencies like the National Weather Service or NASA 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. Aaron C. 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 weather, there's quite a few places, atmospheric scientists, which is the broader term, including meteorologists and climate scientists, can work. Is it such a good meteorology program at Florida State because there's so much weather there? Like, would that program suck in L.A.? No, I mean, UCLA has a really good meteorology

program, actually. It's one of the best. So, no, I don't think it has anything to do with the geography, although it does have a reputation for being pretty good at tropical meteorology expertise there. So obviously being close to Florida, even as we're recording this podcast today, Tallahassee, Florida, which is where Florida State is probably experiencing tropical storm, Nicole, as we speak. And just FYI. So Nicole, and 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 the coast to the U.S. and Canada and has sustained winds

of 74 miles per hour or faster, we call it a hurricane. But if they form over the South Pacific and the Indian ocean, they would like to go 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' weather. We were studying Earth's weather. 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 with a weatherman.

Most people that hear 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. Yeah, that's one of the things that I'm glad you asked because NASA studies planet. I argue it studies the most important planet of all, Earth, because that's where we live and we're not going to be going anywhere for some time. So thankfully, NASA devotes quite a bit of its resources and expertise to studying this planet using the vantage point of space. Climate versus weather. How many times a day do you have to explain the difference? Yeah, I know you're hitting all the common misconceptions that I deal with in my field.

So we're going to like take a number here. So, you know, it's getting to be the cold season. You know, we'll start seeing snow and colder weather. And inevitably, I'll have someone tweet me, hey, Dr. Shepherd, I've got 20 inches of global warming in my yard. It's snowing out here in Boston in January. Why do you guys keep talking about this climate change stuff? And so after I kind of fix my face and sort of roll my eyes a little bit, I say, well, you know, it's winter in Boston. You're supposed to get snow, first of all.

But then secondly, I say, you know, weather is your mood and climate is your personality. Something I like to say, you may have heard me say it. The weather today doesn't say anything about climate any more than your mood tells me about your personality. And so it's a really ill-posed premise to suggest that because it's snowing in Boston on Tuesday and January, that that somehow refutes climate change in global warming. Okay, so in a bit we're going to cover why a warming climate would make digging your car out of the snow, a more giant pain in the ass. Trust me, nerds. You know, your podcast is called Weather Geeks. Do you feel like you are kind of geeky about this? Does it get you really excited? Yeah.

Totally. Yeah, no, the Weather Channel, when they came to me about hosting the Weather Geeks, we did it as a TV show for four or five years on the Weather Channel, came on on Sunday afternoon, and then we just realized the changing landscape of how people consume information, so we switched it to a podcast. Nice move, kid. And we embrace the term weather geek, because people call us weather geeks anyway or weather weenies or weather nerds. But we wanted to empower the term weather geek because 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 and conversation of people talking about the weather, but what could be more exciting than like storms, whether or not you're going to have to wear a jacket or if your crops are going to grow? Yeah, all of those. And you just even touched on another misconception that's out there because you write, weather is 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 in it. And so I'll often have people come up and challenge me on the forecast or about climate change, and they're totally wrong. But, you know, it's an opportunity to sort of share and educate. So, for example, you know, people often say, you know, whether meteorologists and forecasts are 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 there are few bad ones, but those are the ones they remember if their cookout was rained on or their child soccer game got rained on. But, you know, I'll use a football analogy.

You know, a field goal kicker kicks a field goal and they make every single field goal all year long. That's a really good kicker. But if they miss one field goal in the Super Bowl that could have won the game, people are going to be remembering and talking about that kick and, wow, that kicker, he's stank. 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 of statistics, folks. Just keep an umbrella in your bag and a smile on your face. You're alive and there are crickets and birds and sunsets and electricity and indoor plumbing. And how much has weather science changed since you've been studying it and even just since the Industrial Revolution? It's really, you know, quite a few changes. Just our ability to observe aspects of the weather with different types of satellites and 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. 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's your calculus and how's your physical differential equations? Because that's what's mostly going to be in the classes you'll be taking. And so it's really an interesting sort of shock to the system for many of these students. But, you know, the observations, the computing capacity and capabilities, one thing that's really big right now is social sciences. There are a lot of psychologists and sociologists

and communications experts working at the intersection of weather right now because they're trying to understand how people 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 mine tomorrow I.O. and others are really using sort of advanced data technologies to mine all of this data to make precision information forecasts, weather intelligence, if you will, for, you know, agriculture, for business industries, energy companies, infrastructure. So that's the main thing on the weather front. Now on the climate front, it's obviously the increase in CO2.

I mean, look, I mean, I wrote an article in Forbes. I'm a contributor to Forbes magazine. I said, what's your CO2 number? In other words, everyone has a birthday, but go look at that birthday that 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, you'll be really scared when you see it because we're well at around 420 parts per million right now. Our atmosphere is, you know, responding to that.

Our seas are responding to that. our ecosystems, our ice sheets. So our climate has changed in response to human activities in 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 dicking around on this planet. And this fact can be a real vibe changer, so to speak. How is that personality affecting our mood?

I know that I feel like in the last few years, we've heard more about bomb cyclones and names for blizzards and storms and hurricanes that I'd never heard of growing up. But how is that climate affecting the weather? Well, and, you know, that's just the media, actually. I mean, bomb cyclones and derachos and these terms have been around forever in meteorology. They should just have been used more in the popular media. So I wouldn't use those as anchors of something different about the climate because bombogenesis and rapid and these are very common weather terms, polar vortex.

These are terms that have been around in meteorology if you studied meteorology for decades. So there's nothing new about those terms. Let's do a lightning rundown of some of the ones you probably thought were just meteorologists yank in your chain. So bombogenesis happens when a cold air mass collides with a warm one and the barometric pressure drops. fast in a low pressure system. So some of the other fun things that you can call a bombogenesis 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 rainhole, 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 got to 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, which is a long, thin thread of wet weather that 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 slicker handy. But having said that, we know that climate change is impacting our weather today. We have more intense rainstorms. Our heat waves have more intensity and are happening with more frequency. Rapid intensification and the intensity of hurricanes is likely responding to climate change. There's greater sea level, a higher sea level amount. So when these storms push inland, they are actually pushing more water.

And so you see more storm 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, but now they can live in the United States and carry those diseases. What diseases? You ask? You want a little sampler platter of them? Okay. Well, I asked a 2012 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 Chikungaya, 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 Dengay 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 tense.

We'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 the 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 on my to do list. And we have technologies and processes to do that. And in some cases, we also have to adapt. Things are already sort of past the point of 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 in parts of the Pacific Northwest. Many homes don't have air conditioning. And there were many deaths because of that heat.

And just a side note, so this heat wave in June and July 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. What was the 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 way that 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. We just have to act and move beyond what I call climate. delayism. Climate delay isn't. I've never heard of. I mean, that's a great term for it. So yes, a little urgency is needed because we know the cause and the effects are already underway.

What about these weather 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 on, in the Earth's system is a finite amount. And we live on a very small percentage of the fresh water that's available to us. You know, we all learned about the water cycle somewhere along the way. But most of the water is in the ocean or it's locked away frozen in the ice caps or and so forth, glaciers and so forth.

So we live on a very small percentage of water that's evaporating and condensing the form rainfall and falling back into our reservoirs and rivers and streams or snowpack that melt. Okay, so I look this up because I needed numbers. and apparently there are 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 are 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 are dry will probably become drier and places that are wetter will become wetter. And so that's how you maintain conservation or balance because wet places are becoming wetter while the drier places on average are becoming drier. But what is really of more concern to us as climate scientists is not necessarily the amount that falls on an annualized basis or the amount. It's the rate of change. And so what I mean by that is here in Atlanta, where I am, the rainstorms now, there's just greater intensity in the rain. So when it rains really hard, it's much harder than it would have been on average in 1960 or 1970. Boy, when it rains, it pours.

So because of these higher intensity rain rates, it overwhelms the engineered system. And that's why we see so much flooding on roadways and then cities and so forth. With Hurricane Ida last year, it made landfall down in the newer, Orleans, Louisiana area, a little bit south of there. And then it moved into New York and caused tremendous flooding, flooded the subways and so forth, because the engineered system that we currently live in was designed for the rainstorms of 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 Pader Zyberg,

cited things like more walkable communities that could lower carbon emissions, smaller and attached housing structures, and also architecture that requires less of a strain on your HVAC system. Also, tree planting. Those are a few ways to go in urban planning for the future. But let's look back in time for a second. Was your 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 people because I just said warming and snow is cold.

Yeah. But 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 clausias clapperon equation. Let's break that down for all the listeners out there. It's a really fancy sounding term, clausias clapperon. But all it really means is as our atmosphere warms, there's more water vapor available to it. So as we have a net warmer atmosphere, there's more water vapor available to it,

which means there's more water vapor available to snowstorms, hurricanes, and even 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, or that's 7% for all the places that are not the U.S. and use Celsius. So let's take the northeast United States, though. About a century ago, the winters averaged 22 degrees Fahrenheit, but they have risen 4 degrees to 26 degrees Fahrenheit.

Some years are top in 30 degrees Fahrenheit, which would be a 32% increase in water vapor, while still. still being below the freezing temperature of 32 degrees. So if your weird uncle is hit in the vape pen and declares global warming to be horseshit because his picnic table is under five feet of powder, just feel free to kindly educate him. Just get some numbers up in there. Any other flim flam to address? What about red sky at night, 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 sort of cloud systems that are moving in as it sort of interacts with the sun as the sun is setting. You get sort of longer pathways of that light through and there's red, but that can change depending on the types of clouds that are in the sky. And so that tends to indicate certain types of weather systems and are on the horizon and so forth. So anecdotally, there are some truths. Now, what are not true is that rodents like groundhogs or almanacs can predict the weather. So I often get that question. I'll have someone that says, well, I don't believe all this climate science stuff, but hey, what do you think of the

groundhog forecast today? I think it's a rodent. That's what I think. And so, you know, we have to kind of, you know, there are these anecdotal things that people have grown up on and they just believe that they're true. Like here in the South, people will ask me all the time. So is that heat lightning? Is heat lightning a thing? And I said, no, it's not. But people have grown up hearing about heat lightning all of their life. It's like the sky lights up with lightning, but you don't hear any thunder. And that's just because the storm is too far away to hear the thunder. But people, think it's the heat of the day causing the light, the sky to light up. So for more, so much more on lightning and clouds, we have whole ass episodes, fulmonology, 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, why 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, you know, it really gets into a very complex dynamics lesson that we probably would lose half your listening audience from if we really go down too deep in that road. 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. flowing around. And so if you think about a river, that's a fluid, and that river flows in a certain way. But now think about if you put that river on a rotating platform within a rotating platform, you're going to get all kinds of eddies and whirls and so forth. And so these sort of rotating systems are really very much related to the complexity of 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. Okay, so high pressure areas are going to naturally flow into low pressure areas. And the pressure gradient force is the difference in pressure between the two areas. And the greater the difference, the faster the air is going to rush from the high pressure into the low. And boom, you get wind. You get gentle breezes. You get gale forces. It's all fluid dynamics, spinning around on a spinning rock. And the Coriolis effect is all about which way that spin seems to deflect a flow. In the northern hemisphere,

low pressure weather systems circle counterclockwise or to the right, but below the equator, they take a clockwise or a left turn. And yes, this is affecting giant storms and cyclones, but also how the water drains out of your bathtub. Southern Hemisphere, to the left to the left, left, northern, right, and near the equator, your bathtub spin will be much less twisty. Isn't that weird? And really basic terms, but things like low pressure system, high pressure system, cold front, what exactly do those mean for people who watch the weather or read about it and say, I kind of don't get it? Fronts are sort of boundaries of air masses, and so cold fronts tend to be frontal systems

where you have a cold, dense air mass sort of moving in to lift and replace. warmer air because warmer air tends to be less dense. And so it rises. And so you get really violent storms oftentimes at cold fronts. Low pressure is just what it says. It's the lower atmospheric pressure, whereas higher pressure 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 to 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 waterbed, but now people under like 30 look at me like, what is a waterbed?

My parents had waterbed. Yes, I was going to say your parents probably had waterbed. So you push down on 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 houses. The same concept. You push down on one part, another part goes up. Our atmosphere has these sort of low-pressure troughs and high-pressure ridges, and it's sort of this undulating.

sort of fluid and has these areas of highs and lows as well. That banging noise was Dr. Shepard's arm undulating 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 their various wave patterns within it. Speaking of visuals. What's your favorite movie about weather? We just did a podcast episode on that.

So check out the Weather Geeks podcast by the Weather Channel. We had a, myself, Jen Carfagnano and Alex Wallace from the Weather Channel to on-camera meteorologists. We talked about what their favorite weather movies are and just what some of the Weather 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. The star of the movie, really, even though you might not think about it, was the massive heatway that was going on at the time.

And it was just almost every scene of that movie, the heat was playing some role. I have today's forecast for you. Hot! A lot of people will say Twister, and I like Twister to a tornado movie. And one that's really more climate-focused is the day. after tomorrow. Dennis Quaid and a few other people, Jake Gillinghall and others were in that movie was 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 that, yes. I was involved Then the kind of, a little bit in the most recent movie, Don't Look Up, which is a climate movie. And so they reached out to me to comment on aspects of the movie after the fact. And also one of really things, nice things I liked about that movie, they created an online community of people. Because that whole movie Don't Look Up, even though it was about a comet 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. Hey. Well, the handsome astronomer can go back anytime, but the yelling lady, not so much. And so they created an entire online community with things that people can go to do to learn more about climate change and what they can do. And I'm one of the science advisors for their website there too. This website is don't lookup.com.

I'll link this on my website. But no, the producers did not call him and just have him scream into the void with frustration. But it was so wonderfully done with that kind of allegory about climate science. But I thought one thing it did so well, and 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, well, I think we're kind of past that, though. I think more people are listening.

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 at your Thanksgiving table saying, well, I saw on YouTube this, and I 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 Six America study that Yale does every year, and they surveyed 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 tennis going back and forth. And that survey, by the way, it measures six different responses to climate science, ranging from, here are some flavors. Alarmed, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive. Now, alarmed, thankfully, largest group clocking in this past year at 33% of those surveyed. They're like, I'm alarmed.

This shit's scary. Dismissive on the other end of that spectrum, who's like, no, not real. That's at 9%. But the smallest group of them all is apathetic, with just 5% of Americans identifying as disengaged. So I'm going to link this short four-question Yale survey on my website. It's called the Six Americas Survey, aka SAC. 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 weather? What are some facts to have in your pocket that you're like, how 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 mean, I wish people knew what, 30% chance of rain means because most people don't. I mean, when I ask people, they generally get it wrong. And because of that, they often sort of misinterpret that we got the forecast wrong when, in fact, they didn't know what 30% chance of rain, which really is trying to capture this notion that there's a 30% 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 in 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, oh, the storm's going to go down the center of the cone. And if it doesn't, I'm good. But in fact, what that cone means is there's a 67% chance that the center of that storm can be anywhere in that hurricane cone. And so, you know, there are just, one of the things that I've learned over the years as a professor at the University of Georgia and a scientist at NASA and a communicator with the Weather Channel and Forbes, the American public generally struggles with probabilities, anything related to uncertainty, anything that

has more than two processes happening at the same time, or anything that they can't simplify to their level. Not one thing that I've noticed that as a scientist, people will tend to sort of simplify things to what they, to the level of their understanding and at the expense of getting it wrong sometimes. That makes plenty of sense. And there's a reason why there are people like you who are very good at this. And then there are people like me who forget to bring a jacket everywhere I go, which is like why it's amazing to interview. Can I ask you some questions from our listeners? Sure, happy to do it. And shout out, I hear there's a special question coming. Yes.

from someone that maybe had me in class or something. I don't know. Yes, not even a question. Jessica Ventra says, I'm too excited to formulate a question. But Dr. Shepherd taught my weather and climate class at UGA. He was a fabulous professor. I taught high school science for a decade and always recommended his class to my students.

And Jessica says that they still have notes from your class. That's so cool. No, it's really, and you know, if she taught high school that long, then that means she took me probably over a decade ago at the University of Georgia. So shout out to Jessica. Thanks for taking what I bet was intro to weather and climate 1112. But before we do, we like to shower a cause of the ologist 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 and scaling equitable climate change mitigation and resilient solutions for those most profoundly impacted by the global climate crisis. They also ensure solutions emerge from within the community. And Marshall is a board member, and you can learn all about them at sustain.org. That is linked in the show notes, and that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, great questions. About to rain down on you from patrons of the show via patreon.com slash ologies. 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 gropple, what's the difference? Susan Baxter is a first-time quest asker and said, could you tell us about grapple? What exactly is it? So, yeah, grapple, you know, in clouds, oftentimes precipitation is forming by ice crystals. The rain that falls in most places in the United States actually started out as a snowflake. It just melts and becomes rain when it gets down below the freezing level. But there are oftentimes in clouds where these ice crystals, they bump into some of the liquid water in the clouds and it freezes and it becomes this little seedling of ice and we call that gropple. But in thunderstorms, that gropple can continue to

take trips up and down in that big thunderstorm or cumulonimbus 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. Sleet is actually ice crystals. They fall. They may melt. Then they refree. freeze as they fall down to the ground, and that's what we get asleep. And then there's another one that I'll add to our question, freezing rain. Freezing rain, the ice crystal starts out as a snowflake in the cloud. It melts when it falls down to the ground. When 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 mean that I would 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. No, that's sleet. Because hail only happens in thunderstorms. So yes, sleet is snow that melted and re-froes before hitting the ground.

Hail 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. Okay, what about humidity? Tyler Nelson, Stephanie Coomber's want to note. Tyler says, is a fall 40 degrees actually colder than a spring 40 degrees because of differences in moisture?

And Stephanie Coombs wants to know, is there really a difference in wet versus dry, cold, or is it all in our heads? Lauren Mascobrota and Christy Hager also desperately needed answers on this. Yeah, so 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. Dry heat. Yeah. Yeah, but 110 degrees is still hot. Whether it's dry and out.

But I think the point there is that 110 degrees with more humidity would be oppressive. And so here in Georgia, we can get to 90 degrees, but our hair. humidity may be quite high such 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. It tries to capture the temperature and humidity. but also some other ways that our body is exchanging heat with the surrounding atmosphere. So it's just a better metric to determine whether our body's going to be sensitive to heat and humidity. And that is called the wet bulb globe temperature, which according to weather.gov, is a measure of the heat stress in direct sunlight, which is just a dirty little combination of temperature, humidity, wind speed, and the sun angle plus cloud cover. And some wet bulb globe thermometers need to be covered in a moistened cloth to get good ratings.

Also, why does wet bulb globe sound so horny? It doesn't help that the Weather Reporting Service, ACUE 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 or perspiration. And the function of that perspiration or sweat is to evaporate. Because when it evaporates, it cools the layer of skin. But if the atmosphere is saturated, the evaporation of sweat doesn't happen because that water vapor from the sweat has nowhere to go. The air is full.

So it can't evaporate. So it just stays there as sticky sweat on your body and it doesn't evaporate. Because when evaporation happens, it cools things. When they're forecasting with 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? Yeah, it's done with the forecast.

Okay. I mean, there are laboratory studies, I'm sure, and other things that have been sort of conducted on sort of bodies and how they respond to different windchills or heat indices or wet bulb globe temperatures. But once that's established, our weather models predict the temperature in the winds, and then you can determine the wind chill based on your expected wind and or temperature. Ah, okay. See, this is, I'm learning so much already. A ton of people want to know about tornadoes. Looking at you, patrons, Francis Hirst Brewerpaker, Elijah, Kelsey Simpson, Leah Anderson, Rebecca Rodarte,

Jonathan Mary, Richard, Rebecca Ann Frey, on behalf of their second grader Aldo Frey, one-time Kansas dweller, Mary Franks, and Sarah Montgomery, first-time question-asker, says, their understanding is that hurricanes can only rotate in one direction, but tornadoes can rotate in either direction. And also, like, what causes a tornado alley? Why do some places get tornadoes and some places don't? 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 tend to also have counterclockwise rotation as well,

but there may be some that spin out in the opposite direction. I would highly recommend, and it's not because I'm in this series, but I am in this series. Netflix just dropped a new series called Earthstorm, 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 cold 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 the 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 a tornado? Have you ever tornado? Not very close at all. Okay.

I run away from them, not to them. But I say that because there are certainly we're in this era of storm chasers now because you know, and some storm chasing is very important because you want to get data for science and so forth. But when there's some people that go out there for the thrill or to get pictures to sell to the media and so forth and more power to them, but I am a person that wants to be as far away from a tornado as possible. Okay.

Good. So have you ever been in peril from your work? Not directly. I mean, I've certainly been in some pretty bad hurricane situations, particularly Opal is one that comes to mind. 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. Patrons Mark Hewlett and Alia Myers asked if he had to storm chase, and I hope they sleep better tonight. I was, I had a chance to fly, we were doing a mission for NASA when I was a scientist at NASA and the planes 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. I know. Good. Yeah, good. We need you here. So. But there are certainly people to do it, though. I 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. Now, I think you've got that right, actually.

There are a lot of people that criticize reporters like my colleague Jim Cantorri at the Weather Channel. Like some people are like, why don't you just go inside or what are you? 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 Seidel, my colleague at the Weather Channel, was reporting recently from Florida during Hurricane Ian. And he was in a protected place, but you could really get a sense of the storm surge and how dangerous it was.

Without that 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. Yeah, when I watch coverage of like Out Your Way earthquake, I mean, we don't experience really bad earthquakes here in Georgia.

We do have them or wildfires in the way that you have them out there. 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 Dave Parker at second base. So the Oakland A's take take. I'll tell you all.

We have to hurt him. I don't know if you watch the Giants and the A's, but we had a giant earthquake in San Francisco as the World Series was playing out in the Bay Area. And it was live. So a lot of people got to see, you know, Candlestick Park shaking. And they're like, oh, yeah, that sucks. That's amazing. 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 hurricanes so hard to track? and also a few people McKenzie King wanted to know, is hurricane season maybe going to go longer in the year? So, yeah, some good questions. Actually, hurricanes aren't that hard the track within about five days. They tend to be a little less easy to track when they're beyond about five days out in the 10-day range.

Where we've had progress over the years is actually our forecast track has been improved steadily over the last several decades. We're never going to be perfect. That's another thing I wanted to mention, so I'm glad you asked this question. There is this expectation by the public that we can get it exactly right. We'll never be able to do that, whether it's a hurricane track, a tornadoes 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 nonlinear system that we're trying to predict with equations. We will never have that level of accuracy with weather forecasting because we're dealing with a fluid on a rotating planet that we're trying to predict with equations. But we've reduced the error in track forecast significantly in the three-day, four-day, two-day, one day out. So 50 to 100 nautical miles of error, from my panis, one is actually pretty good.

So in other words, we can tell you within a 50 to 100 miles whether hurricanes 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 Safier-Simson Hurricane Windscale, SSHWS, from a, ready, starts at Tropos. depression to a tropical storm to a category one, if it reaches 74 mile an hour sustained 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 II, military meteorologists named hurricanes after their

partners and love interests and wives and girlfriends until this wonderful person named Roxy Bolton in the 70s, an ardent and accomplished feminist icon and activist suggested maybe they should alternate those with male names, although Roxy initially suggested that the devastating storms should be named after senators. But the baby name convention stuck and Noah keeps these pre-written lists that rotate every six years until there's a hurricane that's so devastating that they just retire its jersey for good. Like there will never be another Hurricane Katrina. And yes, there has been an off-sided study that came out in 2014 titled female hurricanes

are deadlier than male hurricanes. And it found that because of gender bias, folks do not heed warnings when it comes to a hurricane named after a woman, as much as they do 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. So some people can test it. 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 Arlene and hope that they don't look at the link that I'm posting on my website to NOAA.gov that has all the hurricane names for the next six years. And hopefully they don't listen to that before hurricane season, which starts in June, and it lasts longer than Thanksgiving leftovers. But there is some evidence because the waters stay warmer longer or perhaps get warmer earlier in the season

that the hurricane season might start to be extended beyond June 1st and November 30th. I remember in 2005, we had hurricanes or tropical systems in December. A few years ago, we had a 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 Fahrenheit temperature or so. But because of the climate warming of the ocean, we're starting to see warmer oceans that can feed these storms. A lot of folks spoke to one of the flim flams that you were kind of busting earlier, Maisie Lopez, Jen Skrull, Alvarez, Josephina, Benjamin, and DeVau, James Hales, Olivia French,

Andrew Arcade, Rebecca Davis, Justine Dahl, Kat Kessler's husband, and Freddie B, all wanted to know. what does a percent chance really mean and how do you quantify the chance of precipitation? It's related to like 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 anecdotal example. I was up in the North Georgia Mountains doing some river tubing with my son one day. and it started raining, and this woman sort of starts complaining about the meteorology.

She said, there was only a 20% chance of rain today. See, those meteorologists are always wrong. Obviously, she didn't know as a meteorologist. I was floating right now next to her. So I'm thinking to myself, it wasn't a 0% 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 wasn't a 0% 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% of that did. So, well, nothing was wrong with that forecast at all. So 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 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. Cass C wants to know,

how do we get the precision of in-situ measurements with the coverage of remote sensing to improve model accuracy? And Trevor Durning wants to know, ENSO 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, Enso is just the El Niño Southern Oscillation cycle and AMO is the Atlantic multi-decatal oscillation. So Enso is the like El Niño-Lanina phase. And so there is some level of some predictability of the Enso cycle. Right now, for example, we're still in a Lanina phase, which means the ocean waters in this equatorial Pacific are cooler than 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 Enso phase, whether we're El Nino and La Nina. 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 Lanina 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 U.S. So El Nino is warmer Pacific ocean waters, and yes, La Nina is cooler. And per Trevor's question, more predictable. So scientists are still figuring out the AMO, which is the Atlantic Ocean's

pattern of warming and cooling that tends to switch about every 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. Shepard to talk about the scientific community's current, no pun intended, thoughts and predictions on what is being called a Godzilla El Nino, 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 out that fresh as hell 2026 interview

with Dr. Shepard about this, which I recorded earlier today. As an L.A. resident, will the 26 El Nino 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 went up, we also released a two-part tempestology episode all about hurricanes with Matt Lanzah 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 Durning 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 same.

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 tea chart. So that was patron Dana Warheight's question, which read, ooh, please ask about QT theory and how skew-T as the ultimate atmospheric gauge for what is happening in the atmosphere at the moment? Which is a plot that we use to plot soundings, which is when we send weather balloons up, they take information about temperature and moisture and wind, and we plot those on a skew-tie 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 dynamics class in a meteorology program to get into QG theory, because if I start talking about it, your head's going to explode, and your headphones or AirPods 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. 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 a 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. deserve so much better. Oh, it's some good geeky stuff that we certainly talk about on weather geeks, though. Yep. 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 more consistently and over many other places. With the weather balloon, we only have it where we have it and when we launch it, and that's sometimes just twice a day. But it's still, the satellites don't have the same level of resolution. The 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, the number of megapixels tells us how good the photos are on those phone. So the more megapixels, the better the picture. So the finer the resolution is of the model

or 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, coarser 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. And then he took a pellet gun. He thought about this ahead of time. And he

shot the balloons until he dropped the gun on accident. He didn't think about that. But he floated back down to Earth. He got tangled into 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 are I was to ask? Hardest thing about meteorology. It can be annoying. It can be difficult, it can be whatever. Hardest thing about your job. The hardest thing about meteorology is that it's fluid dynamics, but it's accessible to many in the public. So they think it's much

more simple than that. It really is, the discipline is from a science standpoint, is really just fluid dynamics, a bunch of physics and a bunch of calculus. But to the public, all they see is co-fronts on a map or something. But a lot when it's, into getting to that point. And so that, the challenge 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 deck or in the front yard, as long as I can, trying to see what's going on before I have to get the safety. But no, I'm still legitimately fascinated

it by weather. So I don't feel like I work. What I do, 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 a 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 have ever seen. Your list of awards is bonkers. How celebrated you are, And clearly you're very into this and passionate about it because, I mean, you're just, it shows in the work you do and the outreach you do. And I follow you on Twitter and you're a joy to follow on Twitter. But anything else that you want to shout out?

I know we mentioned weather geeks. We'll mention. Yeah. No, I definitely, if you like anything, you hear we 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 Marsh 4FSU.SU. I'm on TikTok at Dr. Shepard Knows.

So that's just a new forayed in the TikTok fairly recently. So still kind of feeling my way around that format. But yeah, I'm out there. I'm not your typical science as a professor. I really like to engage. Thank you so much for doing this. This is a joy. It's been an honor, honestly.

Thank you so much for having me, Alan. So there you have it. You can ask brilliant, distinguished professors, sometimes dorky questions. because they're just a deluge of facts. And learning stuff makes the planet healthier for all of us. So there are links to Dr. Marshall Shepard's social media and website and to sustain.org. And so many things that we discussed up at my website at alleyward.com slash ologies slash meteorology.

That's linked in the show notes. We're at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Allie Ward with one L on both. I'm at Alley underscore Ologies on TikTok. Say hi. Smologies episodes are right in our feed and they're safe for all ages. You can find them at Allieward.com slash Smologies. Thank you, Mercedes-Maitland, Jared Sleeper, and Z. Rodriguez-Thomas for editing those.

Ologies merch is available at Ologiesmerch.com. Thank you, Susan Hale, for managing that, plus doing so much more. Thank you, Nuel Dilworth, for all the scheduling. Emily White of the wordery makes our professional transcripts, and Caleb Patton bleeps them. Those are up for free at alleyward.com slash ologies-extras. Aaron Talbert admins, the Ologies podcast Facebook group with the assist for Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis. Kelly Ardwyer 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-Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions, which is linked in the show notes at maitlanda-dio.com. Huge thanks to her for the tremendous job she's doing and giving Mr. Jarrett Sleeper some time to explore his other passions. I'm so excited for him for that.

If you stick around to the end of the show, you know I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that I watched Germo 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 horsehair worm in there. Because if you've ever seen a horsehair worm crawl out of a cricket or a praying mantis's butt, wow, it puts like pimple videos to shame. Just Google it. They put its little butt in water, and then the horsehair worm is like, I'm out of here. And it is like a mile of worm. But no, Pinocchio. didn't touch on horsehair worms. I wish it did. It did make me cry a lot. I cried so much. Also, Guillermo Deltoro at one point on Twitter said he would appear on ologies on an episode about creatures and monsters. So he's been a little busy since he tweeted that two years ago. But don't think that it's not on my wish list. All right. 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 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 you all clapped and I started straight up crying. And I wish I could have taken just a selfie with all of us since I couldn't stay and chat with everyone individually. Also, 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, you know, branded lanyard, 10 or 10 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 convos starter. Also, I am in Athens. I just ate at this place called The National and they're chickpea fritters. are so good and they smelled 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 that's just slipped off like the outer charred 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? All right. Go dance around in the rain. It's great. Okay. Bye-bye. Zoology, Lottology, meteorology, Where outside is weather.