StarTalk Radio - StarTalk Live! Storms of Our Century (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 19, 2013

It's a perfect storm of science and comedy when Neil deGrasse Tyson and StarTalk Live surge into the Bell House the night before Winter Storm Nemo to discuss hurricanes and superstorms. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome everybody to another amazing installment of StarTalk Live. It is my great and humble pleasure to bring out America's voice of science, Neil deGrasse Tyson. So, Eugene, tonight we're going to devote the whole evening to talking about storm systems and climbing. So let's bring out our guests. Yeah, your guests first. Yeah.

Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Michael Showalter! I got two more seats. I have some expertise in weather and storms, but nowhere near what is necessary to pull this evening off. So I found Dr. Adam Sobel, who is a climate scientist from Columbia University. Adam, come on out. Adam. And we'd like to have someone who we all know, and he just came 20 minutes ago from 30 Rock. Join me in welcoming Questlove! Questlove, who I think has the largest afro left in the universe.

There's others that are larger. There's a rabbi I know. Yeah. So, we've titled this show storms of our century. And you know, we've had a few storms lately. So Adam seems to me, it's looking kind of bad. These intense storms. I don't know that we've had more storms.

The ones we've had seem to be sort of record breaking intensity and scale and size and damage. And so first, let me just ask you where the hell are these storms come from are you making them in your lab you're a mad scientist in your Columbia lab Al Qaeda prove me wrong science man no we don't make them. Okay, all right. Let the record show.

Scientific name for hurricane is a tropical cyclone, so they come from the tropics. Okay, so even if it goes across Manhattan, it's called a tropical cyclone. Well, are you blaming immigrants for storms? No. You could view the storm itself as an immigrant to our shores yeah yeah a venezuelan weapon that's how i see it a tropical cyclone formed in the tropics but it has some other characteristics and if it keeps those characteristics as it comes further forward then we still call it a tropical

cyclone that would be north translating I'm translating. In this hemisphere. Oh, sorry. So he gave the general answer because in the southern hemisphere, it could go to the south pole. Very good. Poleward. Very nice. Okay. He's not limited to a hemisphere of activity. Yes, he studies it all. You learn that when you talk to the Australians about cyclones. The Australians, yeah. So how do you make these storms what goes on a tropical cyclone has a few characteristics one of which is that it comes from the tropics another of which is that it tends to be when they get strong they're very circularly symmetric so when you look down from space as you

see those satellite images you see the swirling pinwheely thing more and more beautiful yeah it's more and more beautiful with a nice eye yeah right the other thing about it is that it's warm in the middle compared to the air outside whereas an extra tropical cyclone which is the kind that we're going to have tomorrow is cold in the middle so right after people go home tonight there's going to be a storm. This is bad coincidence. We're going to get blamed for this, you know. We'll blame you. So tomorrow it will be cold in the middle. So if you can have a storm where it's cold in the middle and a storm where it's hot in the middle, then you're not telling me that you understand what makes storms.

If it can be hot or cold. Yeah, if there's two of a thing, how could that be? No, if it's two. That sounds insane to me. If the two things are opposite i need some explain yes right so they get their energy from different places so the tropical cyclone gets its energy from the warm ocean the caribbean could be the caribbean okay could be other warm oceans of the world the pacific india wherever it's warm underneath wherever it's warm enough and it's

really warm compared to the atmosphere so it's giving off heat because the atmosphere is in some way colder than the ocean so it's venting the hurricane is a very organized and powerful way that the atmosphere sucks heat out of the ocean we hadn't thought about it that way yeah so the atmosphere sucks okay go on and the winter storm the extra tropical storm is different so it doesn't care that much about the ocean underneath it but it gets its energy from the fact that the low latitudes are warm and the high latitudes are cold and that's because of how the sun shines you know at different angles on the different parts of the planet and so when you have part of the planet being warm and part of the planet being cold the climate doesn't like that i mean if you were to heat up half of the room and cool the other

half you'd have a contrast that would want to even itself out and you'd make a wind to there'd be turbulence turbulence but because the earth is spinning they can't flatten out the warm air can't get to the pole easily and the cold air can't get to the equator easily because as they try to go the coriolis force coriolis nice yeah yeah coriolis force one of my favorite four forces it's not a real force actually but it's one of the corys i got that cory hame i got it cory f Feldman and Corey Olis. He was in The Lost Boys. Yeah, Corey Olis.

I heard he's selling his teeth on eBay. All right, so I got a blob of warm air north of the equator. I got a blob of cold air up north. Yeah. And they're trying to equalize yeah but they can't do it so instead what happens the coriolis force turns them and you get the jet stream the jet stream is what you have instead so the jet stream is like the boundary between the warm and the cold and it can stay there because the rotation of the earth keeps it there in balance

between the warm and the cold it blows around the planet but it's unstable so the warm and the cold still kind of want to mix because that would be uh fun if the climate exactly if the atmosphere could get how babies happen get a room warm and cold i know i know you cannot keep the warm and cold apart is your point you well you can keep them apart for a while, but the jet stream starts to wiggle. It develops undulations in it. And those are extra-tropical cyclones. Those are winter storms. Okay. Interesting.

Too easy? He's literally describing sex. And it makes me uncomfortable. Now I get why there's climate change deniers. There's no way the wind is doing it. So then the storm dances up on you. I haven't thought about it that way.

Because you describe it that way, I can't believe you haven't thought about it that way. All right, so you got the hot air trying to go north, cold air trying to come south, a jet stream that keeps them at bay temporarily, the jet stream gives in, begins to undulate, and that undulation is itself the birth of a storm. Yes. The jet stream is the chaperone of weather. Yes, there you go. At the junior high dance of climate science.

Okay. All right, so now we've got the hot air trying to go north and it overtakes the part where it's headed towards, right? Right. With permission. Yes. The overtaking gives you fronts. As the jet stream develops,

wiggles in it, the cold and warm, they wrap up and you get fronts. That's where you have cold air and warm air right next to each other. Okay. But now you get this sort of circulation. Yeah. But the thing to remember is that because an extratropical cyclone develops from a temperature contrast, that's an asymmetry. And so the extratropical storm, the winter storm, inherits that asymmetry. So they're not beautiful spirals?

No, the clouds tend to have a comma shape. I've seen that. Yeah. It's like the Nor'easters have that. Don't they? A huge comma. Right. Yeah. We call it a comma cloud. That's the technical term. Comma cloud. Okay. They do that in San Diego

every year, right? The comma cloud. Everyone dresses up like a robot. Yeah. Alright, I got here the Saffir-Simpson scale. Yes. Which has been invoked. Anytime you hear about them talking about hurricanes, they're using this scale.

And it's the hurricane intensity scale from one to five. Right. I once looked up the description of the damage at each one of these intensity scales. And it was like the descent into hell in a Dante storyline. So category one, they said, oh, heavy winds. So the wind is,

you got this memorized, the winds? Category one? 65 knots, which is about 75 miles an hour. We are not knot people here. We are... Sorry, you wanted meter per second? Oh yeah, meter.

That's better. Meters per second. i bet they're slopping these boundaries but it's like 75 up to like 100 100 miles an hour basically so they said at these speeds you lose some roofs some branches fall local flooding that's a category 2 96 to 110 miles an hour 20 percent of roofs will blow off some windows will blow out trees begin to topple people start defending each other on Facebook category 3 111 miles an hour 129 miles an hour like all roofs that are not hurricane-proof blow down. 50% of trees have broken branches. 20% fall over entirely.

Severe flooding in most places. People start following Justin Bieber. Category four, where we're up to 130 to 156 miles an hour. It talks about leaves on trees being ripped clean from the tree itself. And then it says, category five, no trees are left standing nearly. All roofs are blown off. Most structures are leveled.

Everything is flooded. This is Earth trying to kill us. The people who say, Earth is a haven for life. Earth is flooded. This is Earth trying to kill us. The people say, Earth is a haven for life. Earth is beautiful. Earth wants us to stop hooking up so casually. So you guys came up with the scale

and it's pretty devastating. Obviously the Catery Fives are rare, but in another segment of the show we'll go over the list of the badass hurricanes that have come through town i'm just curious uh this is an energy scale basically right yeah destructive energy it's the maximum sustained wind how you get a category five hurricane what are the ingredients you have to have very warm ocean usually not just at the surface of

the ocean but a deeper layer because as the spins, it'll mix up water from below and the water will be colder. And so if the water below is colder, it'll cool off. So you want a deep layer of warm water. So you're saying a hurricane can shut itself off? If it sits in one place for long enough. So if it moves fast, it doesn't happen. It keeps taking heat for every next place it just goes. Right, exactly.

I didn't know that. Yeah, but if it sits in one place for long enough and the water below the surface is cold, then the turbulence brings up cold water and it can shut itself off. Is that common? Do hurricanes commonly just stay in one place and then disappear? No, they move.

But if they move slow, that can happen to some extent. Okay, so it's warm deep. So as it sucks the heat, there's more heat available to it, so it doesn't shut itself off. So warm water, you want to start with a humid atmosphere, very high humidity in the heat. There's more heat available to it so it doesn't shut itself off. So warm water, you want to start with a humid atmosphere.

Very high humidity in the atmosphere. And another thing they don't like is what's called wind shear. Which is when the... Who's they? The hurricanes. They don't like it means that makes them less bad. Right. The hurricane is bad so anything...

We have a question. I have a stupid question. Could you stop a hurricane? Could you go, there's a really big hurricane happening. Yeah. Let's go get the hurricane stopper. Yeah. It's physically possible.

It's been thought about quite a lot. And it's just difficult and expensive. You're saying so no one has approached Samuel Jackson. Is it as expensive as the damage that a hurricane caused? That's a good question. So there's been a few ideas that have been... That's a smart question. Yeah, if it cost $50 billion and you could use it, I don't know, twice, would that be worth it?

There's a lot of ideas and the ones that those of us in environmental science don't like are the ones involving nuclear bombs. Oh, forget it. The ones that make a little more sense. Wait, wait, wait. How does a nuclear bomb... Yeah, I was like, how are you going to let this... You're like, obviously you could just drop

a nuclear bomb on a hurricane. But, you know, that sounds bad because it's so windy there. Yeah, because... So naturally... You just told me that hurricanes like heat, okay? Right. It is a bomb because it makes heat. Okay.

They are thermonuclear explosions. How do you stop a hurricane with a nuclear bomb? You have ten minutes, MacGyver. I'd rather not defend the nuclear bomb idea if I could. But we are curious. There have been ideas put out there with nuclear bombs. I don't think they're... It just does so much stuff.

You know, if you could change the circulation of the atmosphere enough, you could disrupt it. It blows up the hurricane and what's ever underneath it. It's sort of what you're saying. It's a bad idea. There's better ideas. Let's hear the good idea. Because the hurricane lives from getting its energy out of the warm ocean, if you could cool the ocean,

you could weaken the hurricane. So one idea that is feasible, but just very expensive. Ice cubes. Ice cubes? Well, it would take a lot of ice cubes, but one idea that's been... You drag a glacier down and stick it right there, and that's like a big ice cube. Or they just float down.

It's the Bruster's Millions. Yes, I remember that. Another idea is just pumps to bring up colder water from below. So if you had a lot of pumps in the ocean, bring up the colder water. You could cool the ocean and weaken the hurricane. That's a great idea. You'd need a lot of pumps. You'd have to get them there ahead of time.

You'd have to do it fast enough. And so, you know, the... I see. 40 pumps? 90 pumps? The amount of... The hurricane is very large. The pumps need to be mobile.

They certainly need to be mobile. Because you can't just line the whole ocean with pumps. Correct. You can't just preemptively put pumps everywhere. No. You'd have to deploy them in the right place at the right time. So it's very expensive. You know, the other interesting thing about it is

Plus, don't you mess with fishes? Oh yeah. If a fish likes cold water at the bottom because that's why they're hanging out there and you circulate them back up to the top You don't have to go all the way to the bottom. You don't have to go down a few hundred meters. Yeah, there's no fish in the middle.

That's what it sounds like. I said, I'm worried about the fish. Oh no, you don't have to go there. No, there's no fish in the middle. That's what it sounds like. I said, I'm worried about the fish. Oh, no, you don't have to go there. No, there's fish everywhere in the ocean. I don't know what it would do to the fish. Fish might not like it. But that would work. That would be one solution. You could at least weaken a hurricane that way.

You could do a lot of things. I think one thing that somebody brought up once in a discussion I was in about this is that there's other ideas that would change the track of the hurricane yes and send it to Iran so if probably not that far but but a lot of these words Iran when we try to intervene in the atmosphere in these in these ways we usually don't do it quite right and things don't go exactly as you plan because the atmosphere is very unpredictable so if you were to try to do something to a hurricane uh no matter what you did and no matter whether you

did it or not if the hurricane hit anyone they would sue you because you they could say you made it happen right yeah yeah so in a legalistic society it's probably not so my actual example of iran was actually pretty good to be the one place that people would be like i don't care that you're suing me that's right no but this is this is an interesting socio-cultural point that's right because if you don't redirect the hurricane as insurance forms duly indicate it's an act of God if you do redirect the hurricane it's an act of Andy Joe Biden excuse me but even if but if you tried to redirect it and even if you didn't do anything to it, but you tried to do something, it would look like you did it, right?

Because nobody knows where the hurricane would have gone if you hadn't done it. So they'd rather blame God than a human being. They can't sue God. That's right. They could probably file. But you could then redirect a hurricane, you just would never bring it up. I don't know if we could do it, but you know. But if you tried to, don't tell anyone you did that. Right.

Just to avoid the legal headache the evening, and I collaborated with the bartender. So we created something called the stormy weather. It is rye, a common drink from the north, mixed with ginger beer, a common drink from the tropics. Stormy weather up the whole coast. So tell me what happened with Sandy. I lived in lower Manhattan. We were out of electricity for five days.

Ran out of water after two days so you can't flush the toilet. So we had to leave. And what intrigues me about Sandy is that the hurricane didn't take out lower Manhattan. It was the tides. That's all it was. And that was enough to take us out. Yeah.

You live at the edge of an island. And wasn't it also the levees in New Orleans? And the levees in New Orleans. So here we are ready to blame hurricanes and I'm thinking, no, there's an engineering problem here that has not been met. No, I'll say that I live right where, okay, I'm a brand

new New Yorker. Okay, not West Side Highway, but the East Side Highway. Yeah, thanks. In September, three weeks before new new yorker okay not west side highway but the fdr the east side highway yeah thanks in september three weeks before sandy i noticed that the water level was unusually higher than normal and you didn't tell anyone okay i'll be honest the person next to me was like they were making a big deal of it like something's going to happen because the water level was different. You know, I just dismissed it. Like, whatever, you're crazy.

Right. And then three weeks later, that person was first on the phone. Like, I told you, I told you, I told you it was going to happen. You know, I was like, well, what are you out there every night, like, measuring the water levels? Yeah, what are you, a water scientist? That's a thing. Yeah, so I was just intrigued because, yeah, there were some trees down and some awesome trees fell. You know, all the basements were flooded.

And the underground parking garages, cars were bobbing up out from the openings. And it was like an apocalypse. Downtown apocalypse. And it was not even any of the properties of the hurricane that are normally cited because it didn't rain very hard it was mostly windy and then the windy and then the tide surge storm surge yeah the storm surge and so what i find interesting is most people think that the full moon has like extra gravity to make the tides the moon when it's full does not make any higher tides than it's at any other phase the only difference is it lines up with the sun at the same time so that their tides add

together giving you the highest tides of the month because the tide is only a function of how far the moon is from earth so that has nothing to do with the phase at all wait so the full moon is just an indication that the tides will be higher because it's lined up with the sun but not the result of it it's not the result of it being full it's when it's lined up with the sun you're seeing a full side of the moon lit up but the fact that the moon is full alone is not if there were no sun you'd have the same high tide every day so it'd. So it'd be fine if we just had no sun. That is a very good point, Neil. Thank you for clarifying that the real culprit is that we have a sun.

So was it just bad luck that Sandy hit Manhattan at high tide of the day and high tide of the month because there's several high tides in a day and then it's the highest tide during full moon and new moon. Yeah it was bad luck the difference between high and low tide at that time was about five feet and yeah the peak of the storm surge which doesn't last that long a couple hours maybe came very close to the high tide so that we got the maximum of both of them at the same time. So the tide was about at the battery. The battery at the tip of Manhattan. Lower Manhattan, right. There's a tide gauge there. And it measured, so five feet of tide,

nine feet of storm surge, about 14 feet above the low tide. I have a question. Is it easier instead of getting rid of a hurricane to delay it then? To just be like, it'll come like tomorrow. No, no, no, not tomorrow. Come in a few hours.

Come in a few hours. Come in a few hours. Yeah, yeah. If it came three hours later or earlier, we would have been fine. If it had come three hours later, it would have been a lot better for Manhattan

and maybe Staten Island, Brooklyn too. It would have been a lot worse in Long Island Sound because their tides are three hours. Ah, who cares? I know, right, right. Way more people live in Manhattan than on the Long Island Sound.

Billy Joel's best albums are behind. Oh, your mom lives, okay. So Sandy was unusual for New York simply because we had bad luck, is what you're saying. Well, it was unusual in a lot of ways. The synchronization of the storm surge and the tide was one of them. It was also just a big storm surge because it was marginal category 140 or something miles per hour so winds that strong were out to about 500 miles from the center so something like a thousand end to end wow so very very large area of high winds

okay and they were blowing right towards the shore over a very long area so that builds up the tidal so it builds it up the length over which the wind blows the same way is called the fetch. And the fetch was very large. It blowing the water continuously. So persistent winds is what gives you the. Persistent and blowing right into shore. So the point is the surge can get us. Heavy rains can get us.

Heavy winds can get us. There's three ways hurricanes mess with us. Yeah. And surge is the one we'll always have to worry about the most in New York. Because we're in a lot of low-lying areas. We're not going to get a Category 4 or 5 storm here. The water's too cold. Miami or something is a different storm. I was just imagining that was Category 1 that was sandy,

and if sandy were Category 3, we'd still be without power. Yeah, well, it depends. I mean, a smaller storm would have been very destructive, but over a much smaller area. And the surge depends on the angle it comes in at, the speed it comes in at, the size of the storm. So it was a bad scenario for New York City. Yes, no, that we know. You think we figured that out. Okay. So we have some bad hurricanes. In 1900, the great Galveston hurricane. Now, I read this, and someone's applauding.

You're giving up for a hurricane? Give it up for Hurricane Galveston. So I look at this. Wait. Peak winds, 150 miles an hour. The island, Galveston, this is off southern Texas. The island is eight feet above sea level. And the storm surge was 15 feet.

So the entire island got wiped clean. I heard a Jesus over here. It's the first time that person has heard about anything sad. In Galveston, 6,000 people died. This was before we had satellite images. And half the people said, I don't need a space program. Oh, wait, is the hurricane coming? So back then, they couldn't predict.

So tapping my greatest hits list here, 1926, there was a hurricane that hit Miami. That was 1926, 128 mile an hour winds. If you had that hurricane hit today on that trajectory, it would be the most devastating hurricane in history because the population centers are different today and are much more dense than they were back then so because people keep having sex yes precisely and so hurricanes can grow in their damage factor simply because of our living patterns i got 1936 labor day hurricane so this is the most powerful hurricane on record hitting the United States. Did you know this? I did not. Yeah.

So that one tore through the four keys. Full up category five, 180 mile an hour winds. Whoa. Atmospheric pressure, 26.35 inches of mercury. Yeah. That was low. I got 1991, Hurricane Grace. You know what put that on the map?

The perfect storm. The Perfect Storm. The Perfect Storm, that's right. Matt Damon. He's not in it, but he might as well. You find a way to mention Matt Damon for every one of these StarCrafts. I just want him to be my friend. Please find me, Matt Damon.

I am also from Boston. So that one apparently is only category two. But it combined with a mid-Atlantic cyclone so everything came perfect for the hurricane and it made a movie. Yeah. It was similar to Sandy in a lot of ways except that Sandy hit us.

Sandy, I got a place out on Long Island so I care about this Long Island sound. I joked earlier. I care. And a three,000 pound tree fell two feet to the side of my car. The car still got dinged up, but it wasn't smashed up. I told my son to go out and count the tree rings, which he did. He got something like 70 rings. And this is one of the biggest trees in the property. And I said, wait a minute.

If this is one of the biggest trees and has presumably the most rings, that means none of these trees were here earlier than 70 years ago. So one ring equals one year? Yes, yes. Because the ring represents the growth pattern. Because over the winter, the tree doesn't grow. It needs energy from the sun, which it gets through photosynthesis in the leaves. So it needs the leaves. Oh, and there's no sun over the winter the tree doesn't grow it needs energy from the sun which it gets through photosynthesis in the leaves so it needs the leaves oh and there's no sun in the winter i get it go on no there's no leaves in the winter so then i looked it up and i found out

there was a devastating hurricane that crossed long island like in 1938 yeah so there's no like significant vegetation that survived that transition so a high-powered hurricane you pivot civilization on things like that yeah 38 was a very destructive storm the strongest one i think to come make landfall that was in rhode island yeah it made landfall first in long island and then went through new england so, so I got a couple more here. So Hurricane Andrew. Yep. Now, because it's named Andrew

and Andrew begins with A, that means what about it? First one of the season. So Hurricane Andrew is on the books at $40 billion in damage. And it was huge. It was a huge hurricane. It carried a lot of energy in it, right?

Yes. Okay, just... Thank you. It was costly to hurricane. It carried a lot of energy in it, right? Yes. Okay, just... Thank you. He missed that class. He obviously missed the Hurricane Andrew class. 2005, of course, Katrina. In fact, that was Category 5 in the Gulf. Landfall was only Category 3.

And so New Orleans should have surely survived that. And it's really just faulty engineering there. Does anybody else get severe weather like the United States does? We get hurricanes and tornadoes and drought and flood and fires and locusts and frogs and we call our country, you know, God bless America and it looks like God is not blessing America when you add all this up. There's definitely places that get it a lot worse in terms of hurricanes. In tornadoes we're number one. We win! Oh by the way we take for granted that in The Wizard of Oz they just showed a

tornado but if we are the capital of tornado and Kansas is tornado alley then what is routine for us becomes the center point of a film for the rest of the world. That's an extraordinary weather phenomenon. Yeah. So is the land of Oz. So is the land. Yeah, Oz would have been a little more surreal than the tornado itself. I would have to agree with that. so you know hurricanes before this past century right the storm of 1609, that decade was extraordinary in science and literature.

Kepler was alive at the time, a famous astronomer. So was Galileo. 1609, Galileo made his first observations of the night sky with his newly built telescope and published a book a year later called Sidereus Nuncius, where he drew the fact that Jupiter had these stars that hung around with it that would turn out to be Jupiter's moons. He mapped spots on the sun, and Queen Elizabeth was Queen of England, and at work was also Shakespeare.

And the storm of 1609, various fleets were in the mid-Atlantic moving between England and the colonies. That became the basis of William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Oh. Oh. When did you guys

start naming hurricanes? And who names them? And who names them? Thank you. And why isn't it me? Hurricane Mr. Jelly! Can't be mad at him! I don't know the exact year. They started getting names shortly after World War II.

That late? Yeah. Wow. And I remember... So, for example, the 38 is called the 38 Hurricane. It's not called... It's not called Fred or something. Okay, now, I understood.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Initially, all hurricanes were only named after women. Because... They're terrible. were only named after women because they're terrible because they use their wiles to control us yeah you know because at the time no one was able to predict which way the hurricane was going and all of the meteorologists were men like so they analogize the unpredictability of hurricanes to the unpredictability of their spouses you're lying i can't believe i was less sexist than there's uh but there's the line uh the shakespeare line hell hath no fury like a woman scorned i can neither confirm nor deny that

okay wait because it was only during the rise of the modern women's liberation movement of the 1970s where they started interlacing them with male names. Yeah, wait, I have a question. When could they start predicting that hurricanes might come?

Like, because in the 1800s they probably were like, oh my God, it's so windy. But no, 38 hurricanes, they didn't know until two seconds before, right? I think it was a little bit better than that. Better than two seconds in advance. I mean, there were forecasts

from way back, but they weren't any good. That's not a forecast, that's witchcraft. A forecast is just if you say what's going to happen. Being right is another thing. Yes. Whoa! But that's a super interesting thing.

That's why they pay me to do that. When did they start forecasting with, like, a modicum of possible accuracy? The first attempts to use the laws of physics to predict the weather were, you know, in the early 20th century. It got more serious after World War II when we had computers to actually solve equations. Doesn't Doppler have something to do with it? Doppler has something to do with it. That came later. Doppler radar used that to see how fast the raindrops are moving. Yeah. Yeah, wait. What't Doppler have something to do with it? Doppler has something to do with it. That came later. Doppler radar used that to see how fast

the raindrops are moving. Yeah, wait. What is Doppler then? How fast raindrops fall? That sounds very romantic. Was that a guy? It's a gentleman named Christian Doppler. He's a German physicist.

He did experiments with train whistles. He noted that as a train approached it got louder. Well, yes, it got louder. It got louder. Isn't that what it was? The discovery wasn't that noises get louder as they approach you. So the

train whistle comes and what he noticed was that the pitch of the sound was higher as it approached him than what it was when it receded. So for us modern folk, if you stand on the edge of a highway, the car will go... It was very good. Very good.

So you can calculate the shift change, the shift in the pitch, and know exactly the speed of the train. So the sound waves get emitted. So I emit a wave, but I'm in motion. So I come a little closer, and then I make my next wave, so I've compressed the waves in front of me. So the wavelength increased, and when you have an increased wavelength, the pitch is lower. Right. Okay?

The frequency, in physics terms, is lower. So once you measure that shift, you know exactly how fast the thing is moving and it's because of that fact of physics We know we live in an expanding universe But back to raindrops right so on a more cosmic scale Yeah, also tells us how fast the raindrops are moving towards us or away from us. Doppler radar can tell you not just that it's raining or how hard it's raining, but which

direction the winds are blowing in the place where it's raining. And so when did forecasting go from like, I think it's going to be windy in a week to like... I know it's going to be windy in a week. I'm pretty sure it's so windy. This is an important story of Hurricane Sandy, actually. The modern science of weather forecasting started to be what it is shortly after World War II with the first computer weather models.

And then over time, those computer models have gotten better and better. Of course, computers have gotten much more powerful. What your phone can do is much more powerful than the first computers that ran weather models. I know. I wish I could go back in time and tease those people. Right. And then the observations, the measurements with the balloons and the radars, now the satellites that we need to tell the models how to start the forecast because the balloons and the radars, now the satellites, that we need to tell the models how to start the forecast because they need to know what's happening now to get to the future,

has all gotten much better. Hurricane Sandy was forecast pretty accurately by some of the models about a week ahead of time. Some of them were doing something different a week ahead of time, so we weren't sure if that forecast was right. By about four days before, we were pretty sure. That's an amazing achievement that couldn't have been done a decade or two ago. And four days warning is enough to prepare a city. So in New York City, the mayor, we pre-closed the subway and we pre-closed the public transportation. There's a lot of prep work that was done in anticipation of this.

And there's a day where you wouldn't have known it in enough time to do anything about it. Absolutely. We got to end this segment. We are live from the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York.