Stuff You Should Know - How Hurricanes Work

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

Hurricanes are perhaps the most destructive force of nature we have to deal with here on Earth. When a mind-boggling number of factors all fall into place just right, the outcome can be an enormous system of storms that is as awesome as it is powerful. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, you may not know this yet, and if you don't prepare to be blown away, we are creating right now the first ever Stuff You Should Know book. It's called Stuff You Should Know,

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a production of iHeartRadios, How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. Jerry's around here somewhere, so this is Stuff You Should Know, everybody. The Wrath of God edition.

Hi. Hi. I've been singing that Bob Dylan song all day. Oh, yeah, you know what's weird? I have two, and I hadn't realized it until you just said that. Really? Yeah.

My brain is effed. Which song? Hard Rain's Gonna Fall or Hurricane? Hurricane, Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. Are you crazy? Well, that would fit too. I guess it wouldn't. It hadn't even occurred to me.

Great song, Hurricane. Now I'm gonna be singing Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, which is not nearly as good as the Hurricane song. I'm surprised you know any Bob Dylan song. That's shocking to me. Those are the two. You know more than that. Nope, that's it.

Oh, I know that one that goes, hee-lee-dee-dee. What's that one? Oh, it's all of them. Gotcha. God bless them. He's got a new album out, it's great. Dude, how many does that make?

He's got a lot of records. Yeah, he does, jeez. Well, good for him. Hurricane's great song though. It is, it was a good movie too, sad. I didn't see that. Yeah, Denzel Washington, I believe, played him. And yes, it's, I mean, if you like Injustice,

you're gonna love that movie. Well, you mean if you like movies about fighting Injustice, I guess what you mean, right? Yes. Either way, you're gonna like the movie. I love Injustice. Right. Sadly, there are people who say things like that these days.

That's true. So, Chuck, we're talking about Hurricane's, not the Bob Dylan song, but about the actual, like weather system, weather disaster. Anomaly, I guess. I think you mean typhoons. No, I mean hurricanes, but that's the same thing. And so is Chuck.

You mean cyclones. Kind of, yes. All three of those are the, one and the same. Did you know that? You know, I think I knew that and just sort of forgot cause when I read it, I was like, oh yeah, I think I knew that. Right.

So, I mean, it just depends on where they occur in the world basically that there's, I mean, aside from exactly, you know, where they occur, where they make land, and then the way that they turn and move, they are the same thing. They start the same way. They're the same group of weird, you know,

weather coincidences that happen to assemble into something. And hurricanes to me are as good as it gets, natural disaster-wise. I mean, they are as interesting as they come. They are so ridiculously destructive. And then theoretically what they could do if they got even worse, which they may, it just boggles the mind.

I'm a hurricane fan in a way, but I hate Miami as far as their university's concerned. You hate the U? No, not really. I'm just teasing. Yeah. And I think the other thing about hurricanes is so fascinating is it's a regular thing.

It's not like a volcanic eruption or a tsunami, you know, or an earthquake. It's, you know, every year there are gonna be, you know, like a hundred tropical storms. And, you know, 30 to 50 of these are gonna develop into hurricanes. You can count on it, Jack. Yeah.

And they actually, they have seasons to tell you the truth. They're depending on where you are in the world in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in the Atlantic. You've got what's appropriately called the Atlantic hurricane season. And it runs from about June 1st to November 30th. Down under in the Southern Hemisphere, they have a hurricane season that runs

from about January to March. And again, like there's some differences to them, but it's essentially the same thing. It's just that hurricanes tend to form over the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific. And then cyclones are over the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean. And then typhoons tend to hit the Northwest Pacific Ocean

around Asia to the Middle East. That's right. So I think the Australians would call them cyclones. Is that right? Yeah. And we call them good old hurricanes. That's right. And actually hurricane,

which since we're just spouting out facts about hurricanes at this point right now, it actually comes from an old Mayan word, hurricane, which is the name for one of their gods of destruction of thunder and lightning and wind. And I believe maybe rain who brought the flood that destroyed almost all people and then made it recede because humanity had gotten too wicked.

And if that sounds familiar, that's because there's a flood story in basically every culture in the world, which makes me really wonder, like what happened? What is everybody talking about that actually may have happened at some point? I just find that fascinating. Yeah. And how a hurricane forms can get very convoluted

as we realized when we started diving into this research. And we'll describe it in a bit more detail, but you know me and my earth science for kids websites. They're so great. Which I adore. In the very simplest of terms, hurricanes form over warm ocean waters near the equator in the tropics.

And that warm moist air rises up and then is replaced by cooler air. And then that air warms up and starts to rise. And that just causes this cycle that starts these clouds to form and they start rotating and they get a little more organized. And if there's enough of that warm water, eventually that winds gonna pick up

and you're gonna get a hurricane. Yep. And they move in the northern hemisphere, especially in the Atlantic, which we're gonna kind of focus on Atlantic hurricanes here. But again, most of the stuff we're talking about applies to cyclones and typhoons too. But in the Atlantic in particular, they usually start off of the west coast of Africa

and move down toward the equator where they slide over through the Caribbean and then up along Florida, the Carolinas, sometimes to New England, but most of the time they'll hit the Gulf Stream and will be carried up to England where they peter out and show up for a pine at the pub. Yeah. And you know, hurricanes will,

they eventually will die out 100%. Landfall will make them die out, because like that's the worst part for the people, you know, living on planet Earth, because that's where it hits the land, but that actually means the hurricane is dying because there's not that warm water anymore. Or the further north they go, the cooler that water gets,

and that'll just peter it out as well. Yeah, which, I mean, if you really think about it, when you take all these factors into consideration, just those two that it needs warm water and that it can't be overland, like a hurricane is a startling series of coincidences that happen like again and again, repeatedly during a certain section of the year

in certain sections of the world. And it just takes everything being perfect, like a perfect storm, but over and over again for these things to happen. And like you said, you know, there's so many different storms that form off the West coast of Africa or off the, yeah, or off the West coast of Australia

that can form into these things, but they don't, they usually don't, because all of those factors just aren't working just perfectly for the thing to not only kind of catch to ignite in a way, but also to kind of develop steam and to really pick up and become a problem. Yeah, and I know what you mean about loving hurricanes in a certain weird way, obviously the landfall

and the destruction is terrible and we don't wish that ever. Absolutely. But when you see those images from above of the hurricane rotating and how big it is, it's just, it's humbling and just sort of mind-boggling display of nature at work, you know? Right, it is, I mean, that hits it on the head.

It's definitely not all the death and property destruction that I'm a fan of. No, of course not. I'm like, oh man, I love injustice. I know man, this is what happened to you overnight. So let's talk about this. Let's talk about how a hurricane actually forms and then what it forms into, okay?

We're gonna do the earth science thing. I'm done with that part. Okay, well, I'll take over. Everybody, I hope you like my voice because that's all you're gonna hear for a little while. I think if you're listening, they're probably used to that. Do you know when we first started this, I couldn't stand my voice, couldn't stand it.

Yeah, I finally reached a daytime with it. I just ignore it. So Chuck, you've got air, right? Oh boy, okay. Air over the ocean and over the land, the stuff that's closest to the surface is actually the warmest, which as you know, like if you've ever been skydiving,

it's really cold up there. I haven't. No, it's really cold up there, trust me. And when you, or like if you're ever, if you climb a mountain or something, it's always cold up there. One reason why is because- Never done it.

The, just trust me, trust me. The upstairs of my house is cooler. It shouldn't be, it should be much warmer because heat rises in your house. Yeah, but the AC up there, there's fewer rooms, it just really packs it in. Okay, you're making this earth science thing way hard. So the air at the surface of the earth is warmer

because it gets warm by the earth or by the ocean, right? Ocean temperatures kind of tend to warm with the seasons. And so by around June 1st, which was when hurricane season starts, you've got an ocean with surface temperatures hovering around 79 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, okay? Yeah, and I think 80 is where you've gotta be kind of, that's the threshold to even get,

if you even wanna talk about hurricanes, it's gotta go to 80 degrees. Exactly, and not just at the very surface. I think it needs to be that down to about 150 feet because hurricanes mix a lot of water together. And if it's not warm water that stays available, it's just gonna peter out, right? So you need 80 degree at a minimum surface temperature water

down to 150 feet. And so you've got that going on in the ocean around certain times a year. And if we can travel into the interior of Africa all the way to Sudan, a little monarch butterfly will flap its wings and that creates an air disturbance. And weeks later that develops into an even bigger disturbance and it moves further west across Africa

and finally off the coast. And it will encounter that warm water and warm air that's being heated by the water. And that disturbance will actually encounter that water that's evaporating and rising. And as that water evaporates and rises, it's becoming less dense, right? The molecules that make up that air with the water vapor

are further apart than cold air that's above it. Well, nature abhors a vacuum, right? And when that air leaves that area right above the surface of the ocean, cold air starts to move in below it, right? Which pushes the other air further upward. But then that cold air is warmed up too and that starts to rise.

And so what you have under this disturbance in the air that was created by a butterfly's wings in Sudan is this motion in the ocean. That's all that comes. That is kind of this upward trajectory of air constantly moving upward. And it's full of water vapor. So when it gets high enough up

into the cooler regions in the atmosphere, it condenses and forms clouds. And those clouds eventually start to rain. And as it condenses and starts to rain, that actually heats up that area, the latent heat of condensation heats up that area. So now you have this column of warm, moist air rising up, moving with cold air trying to come in

and replace it as the warm air moves. And you have a lot of air movement. You have some storms starting. And you have all the ingredients now for what could become a hurricane. That's right. And that heat exchange is going on and that's going to create a lot of wind

and that's just going to make everything worse because those winds converge at the surface and they're colliding with each other and that's pushing that warm, moist air up and up. And that cycle just starts to happen, that rotational cycle that's so tied to the image of a hurricane. And those winds get involved and everything kind of,

everything kind of just synchronizes, it seems like. Right, exactly. I mean, that's what I'm talking about with all the different coincidences that have to number one be present and then have to work just right. Because if that wind that's converging at the surface to replace that warm, moist air that's rising,

man, I've never said moist this many times in my life and been okay with it, but I'm all right so far. How are you doing? I'm great. Okay. If the speed of that wind that's coming in at the surface is different than say like the speed of that, you know, higher up in that column,

you're going to have what's called wind shear and it's going to keep the storm from being organized into a cohesive whole. So just that factor alone, that somehow the winds at different levels of this storm that's starting to organize have to be moving at roughly the same speed. That's a big one, right?

And then because of these thunderstorms that are starting and the more condensation that they're heating more and more, so they're creating more and more storms. So you've got all these storms that are kind of starting around this area and they start to get organized together. And then this is eventually,

this is called a tropical depression. And eventually if everything that we're going to keep talking about happens just precisely right, it's going to organize into a tropical storm and then a hurricane. And then the hurricane as we'll see goes through different stages of categorization and it all has to do with the speed of those winds

that have now kind of organized into this rotational monster, which is really a tight or sometimes a loose collection of storms that form one big storm. That's what a hurricane is, that are all kind of moving in the same direction at about the same speed. And it all has to do with that thing that started all this,

that rising moist air in that one spot. Because as these different storms assemble into a larger, more cohesive whole, the center, the lowest pressure center, right? Where the warmest, moistest air is rising up. It also has the lowest pressure and because nature abhors vacuum, higher pressure air is trying to come in to fill it.

But there's something that we have to talk about called the Coriolis effect. And here's where things really run off the rails for us. Take it Chuck. Yeah, the Coriolis effect is the, when you see that hurricane rotating, that's a byproduct or I guess a product of that Coriolis force, which is,

we've talked about it before, but it's the natural phenomenon that makes fluids and any kind of free moving object, either go to the right of their destination, if you're in the Northern hemisphere or to the left in the Southern hemisphere, not toilets in Australia, as we found out. I thought we said that.

Okay, so I thought I said it wasn't true and somebody showed us that it was. It was the opposite? Yeah, I think it's not true. Well, we'll find out again. But at any rate, in the Northern hemisphere, your winds deflect to the right, in the Southern hemisphere,

they're gonna deflect to the left. And it's that deflection that gets the storm spinning. And that's why you get different rotations in each hemisphere. They rotate counterclockwise here in the Northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern hemisphere. Right, but we do need to keep going

with the Coriolis effect. Sorry, I didn't mean to scare everybody. But the Coriolis effect does two things. It makes the hurricane rotate like you were saying, basically on an axis around that lowest pressure center. And then it also moves the hurricane physically itself as it kind of travels southward from West Africa toward the equator,

which is really bizarre because at the equator, the Coriolis effect is at its absolute weakest, its strongest at the poles. But for some reason, something about the Coriolis effect moves the hurricane. Like a hurricane could theoretically cross the equator

from the Northern hemisphere to the Southern. Who knows what would happen when it transferred over to the other, like the opposite Coriolis effect. As far as we know- Think of it in the horizon. Probably. As far as we know, it's never happened,

but we've only been keeping track of this stuff for about a hundred years. But it just doesn't ever seem to happen. For some reason, the Coriolis effect, despite being weakest at the equator, moves hurricanes back upward over and up, back into the left, right? That's right.

So the Coriolis effect does two very important things for hurricanes, but probably the biggest one, the most important one, as far as the hurricane itself is concerned, is to keep that thing spinning around in the same motion, clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on your hemisphere.

All right, I think we should take a break and we can come back and talk a little bit about what these different categories mean right after this. So, I'll see you guys in a minute. All right, then, I'll see you guys next time. Bye! Bye!

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Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Chuck, before we talk categories, I have to pop one more thing in about the Coriolis effect. It's important, you ready? Sure. So, that lowest pressure center, what's called the eye, that is actually, it's the clearest part of the hurricane. Sometimes it's clear skies, beautiful, eerily calm.

And the reason why is because of that Coriolis effect, that the lowest pressure center is never overwhelmed by the higher pressure air that's trying to get in. The whole reason that hurricane spins around the center is because all that wind from sometimes hundreds of miles away is traveling to that center, trying to fill it, but the Coriolis effect deflects it. They end up going around that center, the winds,

and then up, so lifting more warm air up, and they never make it to that middle, which is what causes that. And the stronger the winds, meaning the stronger the pressure gradient between the center of the hurricane and the outer bands beyond the eye wall, the stronger the difference between that gradient,

the stronger the hurricane's gonna be because the stronger the winds are gonna be trying to fill that low pressure void. That's what causes hurricanes to spin around, clockwise or counterclockwise. That is absolutely fascinating to me. It's very cool. The eye of the storm, calmest place in the world.

It really is. Although it's counterintuitive. It is. So, these categories, category one, and this is all broken down and very sort of, I mean, there's really, it's pretty stiff as far as how they categorize these things, right?

It's not willy-nilly. They don't say like, hmm, it's getting pretty bad. I think it's a two. They actually measure things, and they're a demarcation line by usually wind speeds is one of the big parts. Yeah. 74 to 95 miles per hour is a category one,

and that's gonna, you know, I could blow a tree branch into your roof. Sure. Or get some shingles shuttering. You might have to get out the pruners. Category two is 96 to 110 miles per hour. That's getting pretty dangerous, and you're gonna get some pretty extensive damage

at this point. Like, you know, the siding of your house, the frame of your house, shallow trees can be snapped or uprooted at this point. You're probably gonna get some power loss. Right. Number three is a major hurricane. Category three is 111 to 129 miles an hour,

and they rank this as devastating damage. And, you know, lots of trees uprooted. You definitely will lose probably power and water for a period of time for the category three. And then you've got your category four, which is 130 to 156. Category five is 157 or higher. You're probably not gonna see many cat fives,

but the cat four is pretty catastrophic. And those are the ones that we've seen more and more of in more recent years. Right. Category fives are just, yeah, that's extreme catastrophe. They're monsters. Monsters. So category four and five,

there's not a tremendous amount of differences both like you said, considered catastrophic damage causing hurricanes. But I get the impression that the difference between a four and five in real life is substantial. But either way, they're gonna like leave so many trees and power lines down that whatever area gets hit substantially

by one of those category four or fives are gonna basically be isolated both without power, but also the roads are gonna be made impassable. And sometimes you can be stuck in the midst of this for weeks before you can be reached again. The destruction can be so bad from them. Yeah, and if you are a coastal liver,

this is a part of your life every year. Hurricane season is a big deal. You've got your house retrofitted, ideally at this point. I think like almost any coastal house these days is on stilts if it's built in the last 20 plus years. Well, not just that. I think after 2005, I wanna say it was Hurricane Andrew, Florida in particular passed new building codes

that said like if you put a roof on, it has to have like this kind of joist and like whatever windows are put in have to be like windproof up to 130 miles per hour. They've definitely like started to take that seriously because so many people were dying before, but also because of the billions and billions of dollars of property damage that would happen every year.

Yeah, I mean, here in Atlanta, obviously, we don't get hurricanes, coastal Georgia we certainly do, but we do get the outer bands of the hurricane and we can get some really bad wind and rain and some flooding and stuff like that, but we're obviously far enough inland to where the eye of the hurricane

is not gonna really affect us. But if you're in the Gulf or along the Florida or South Carolina, North Carolina, up into Virginia even and like you said, they can go higher Maryland and New England but even New York City, but generally I think like kind of from Virginia down is where you're gonna be the most worried

in hurricane season. So, you know, Umi and I have a place in Florida, right? And we were down there once and I think it was Hurricane Michael a year or so ago came through and we got out of there and then came up to Atlanta and that thing followed us all the way up to Atlanta and knocked the power out at our place there.

Was that a shaggy dog story? Do you know what a shaggy dog story is? It's a story that seems worthwhile or worth saying to the person saying it, but not to anybody else. Oh, I don't think so. And why did they call it a shaggy dog story? I have no idea. We need to get to the bottom of that someday.

No, I think it's a great story. And I remember when that happened, in fact. You do? Sure. Wow. I love it when my life is part of your life. I know. It's like happens two or three times a year.

Sure. And every Tuesday. That's right. Yeah, I totally remember that. And you've also, you know, like any good coastal liver, you've got hurricane shutters and stuff like that, right? Oh yeah, for sure. And like the high impact windows and all that stuff.

Yeah, you just got to do that stuff these days. Oh, you definitely do. And it's like really kind of scary if you're out there not like that, you know, because it was 2005 when they passed that building because there's a lot of places that haven't been retrofit. And, you know, it's like the whole community

kind of comes together to take care of everybody who needs help around that time, which is pretty cool. But one of the reasons why everybody has, you know, days to prepare for this kind of thing and go to the store and buy every banana you can get your hands on and like five loaves of bread and all that and put up sandbags and stuff

is because of the modeling and forecasting that has been developed in the last, I don't know, 50, 60 years that's really saved a lot of people's lives because we didn't have warnings before. It was just the sky started to look pretty bad and, you know, an hour or two later, your town was gone. Yeah, and it's, you know, I rent the beach house

on Isle of Poms every usually and all those houses are, you know, 15 feet off the ground on those legs. And it's just crazy to me to think about the old days when you would just have a house sitting on the sand like 75 feet from high tide. It's just such a bad idea. Because one of the things, one of the big problems

that make hurricanes so destructive, Chuck, is that not only is it the wind that can come through and, you know, once it reaches, I think, like a category three, four, or five, that's when you're gonna start to lose your deck. Not just your decks are your roof decking is really what I meant. You'd be like, my deck,

which would suck because decks are kind of expensive, but it's your roof decking that you really be worried about. And that happens when the wind itself pierces the envelope of your house. Like it breaks a window or something like that. Now all of a sudden you've got a pressure difference inside and outside of your house, which can actually pop the roof right off of your house,

which once that happens, your walls start to give way. It's a bad jam. Wind is very destructive too, but the reason people started putting houses on stilts is because that wind is so strong and the hurricane can be so massive that it actually pushes the ocean inland. It's not like a huge wave.

It's a, here's the ocean way further inland than it should be and it's called a storm surge and it's a huge problem with hurricanes. Yeah, and I've been to places before and after just from year to year on vacation and it can literally remake the coastline. They look vastly different after a hurricane. I think that one of the years we went to Isle of Palms,

it was after a hurricane and instead of, you know, the walk to the beach from the house, instead of, you know, that sort of gradual decline to the water, it was in some places like a 12, 15 foot drop of just a sheer wall cliff of sand and people had ladders and stuff like that. You would literally have to climb down a ladder to get down to the oceany beach part.

Yeah, and that's not good if your house is built on that sand that used to be there. And as we saw in our, we're running out of sand and that really matters episode that we need that sand. We can't afford the ocean to just come reclaim that. That's our sand. Yeah, and well, the good thing about Isle of Palms though is those houses are set back a great deal.

They're not on that sand. There's that big area of sea, grass and just- Dunes. Shrubbery and stuff in between. Yeah. And so it's just a safer bet when you're trying to book a place. Right.

Cause it's not, it's not hurricane proof, but by the time the water gets there, I mean, that would have to be a really, really big surge. Yeah, yeah. But it happens. It does happen. I mean, it definitely like a storm surge can be pretty bad. I think hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017.

Oh yeah. One of the reasons it was so destructive. It was, from what I saw was the second most expensive storm that's ever hit the US. It cost $128. That's it. It cost $128 billion in damages. And one of the reasons why is because of that storm surge.

And not just, you know, flooding houses and causing property damage, that kind of storm surge can overwhelm your sewer system and mess with your drinking water supply and do all sorts of horrible stuff. It can kill off tons of wildlife. Cause that's something that gets overlooked in hurricanes. You know, humans are so worried about us.

And then our pets and everything, the wildlife itself can really take a hit. Like fish, hurricanes can kill fish. That's how destructive they are. They slam them into like underwater outcroppings and sandbars and stuff and just kill the fish. That's how, that's how forceful these things are. So there's a lot of other problems that arise

from the hurricane, in particular the storm surge too, that we've only really started to kind of grasp in the last like few decades of examining hurricanes. Yeah, but you were talking about tracking. It's gotten so much better these days. On the ground, there's something called the regional specialized meteorological centers. And this is just basically a network

all around the world of global centers that are designated by the world meteorological organization. And they are the ones who track these things using weather satellites, using infrared technology and infrared sensors. They're gonna detect all the minutia of the temperature differences, cloud heights, all these things, you know, how you mentioned

that all these things have to kind of be perfect. They have all these ways of measuring these little bits of perfection as they align. And they know pretty well now, you know, things can change and things can reverse course. I know people get frustrated when they keep changing the path of the hurricane, you know, they don't keep changing it when they report on changes.

Right. But that's, I think people kind of act that way sometimes. No, they do for sure. Well, you know, you make me leave my house and this thing didn't even make landfall. Yeah. It's like they're doing a pretty good job and they're doing the best they can.

Well, it's problematic too, as far as forecasting goes because if you do that to people in a coastal area, you know, a couple of times in one year, they're going to stop listening to you and you know, you might be a hundred percent right and something's going to make landfall right on top of them and they're not going to leave. So there is definitely a fine line

and there is kind of a balance between knowing too soon and not knowing at all. And we're kind of working our way toward that sweet spot for sure and it's gotten way better. But very, very famously, if you ever follow hurricanes as they start to kind of come toward the US, like there's the spaghetti model. Have you ever seen one of those?

Yeah. So all of those is just a tangle of tracks of the hurricane that have been forecasted. So the European model is typically thought of as probably the most accurate and that's put together by an agency in Europe and they say, here's the track that we think and then there's like 10 or a dozen

or 15 different agencies and groups all forecasting a track. When you put them all together, it looks like different colored lines of spaghetti over the map and you get a pretty good idea of just where the thing's gonna go based on all of these different predictions. Kind of like the wisdom of crowds.

You know what I mean? Where the more information you have and you put together, the more guesses you put together, probably the closer combined they're going to be to accurate than any one of them individually would have a chance to be. Yeah, and the cool thing about spaghetti models and this is true of like a percentage of rain

and stuff that you might see every day is a lot of it is based on past data. What's going on now for sure, but then when you plug that into all the past data and behaviors of storms in the past and what they've done and how they've moved and behaved, you can get a pretty cool model and I've always loved that about weather

that they use so much historical data to predict what could happen this time. Right, that's what they use to produce the cone of uncertainty, which is one of the most confusing meteorological models, maybe any kind of model there is on the planet. It's a really great useful tool if you know what it's talking about.

If you don't know exactly what it's talking about, it's seriously confusing and really misleading in a lot of ways. But what the cone of uncertainty is, everybody's seen it. It's like kind of like this funnel. It looks like a tornado basically that looks like it shows the path and width of the hurricane. It goes from kind of small to wider and wider and wider.

So it looks like what it's showing you is the track of a hurricane and how big the hurricane's gonna grow over time. That's not at all what the cone of uncertainty shows. What the cone of uncertainty is instead, it's a plot of like I think about five different circles representing the next 24, 48, 72 onto five days out forecasts. And it says, here's all the data we have

and we're crunching those numbers. And then we're comparing them to how accurate we were in the last five years for predicting hurricanes that were five years out. And then all of a sudden when you put that together, that forms a circle and that five day out circles always the biggest one because it's hardest to predict weather patterns

five days out. But what it looks like when you take those increasingly larger circles and connect them with the line is that it's forming a path. And really what it's showing is this is the potential distance between the track of the hurricane,

the center of the hurricane. And it could land anywhere in here. Not the edges of it. We're talking just the center. So every time hurricane season rolls around people go and look up what the cone of uncertainty means because it doesn't mean at all what you think it does. Hopefully I've cleared it up for like two people

and I probably just confused the other million even further. The cool thing about those two is that they can be changed with a Sharpie. That's right. It's really neat. Seen it done. All right, I think we should take a break maybe and come back and talk about these hurricane names

and a little history. How about that? Let's do it. Let's do it, let's do it. Unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

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All right, so hurricane names are named after people now. This wasn't always the case, and I didn't know this. This is kind of cool. But for many hundreds of years, if you were in the West Indies, you would hear hurricanes named after the Catholic Saint's Day on the day that that storm made landfall. So it would be like Hurricane San Felipe hit Puerto Rico and on September 13th, 1876.

Another little fun fact is if another hurricane hits on that same day, which actually happened in 1928 on September 13th, they would name it the second. So that was Hurricane San Felipe II. During World War II is when we started to give human names, and they were all masculine names, though. Yeah, and kind of followed that whole like Bravo, Whiskey, Tango thing.

Yeah, how does that, I don't understand that. Well, it's like, what do you mean? It's like- Because those aren't names. I don't understand it either. From what I saw, we didn't really start to use names in the West until, I think, the 50s or the 70s. So masculine names like Bravo and Tango is just a, they're calling that a masculine name?

I guess so, because I think we started using human names in the 50s, and then we started using male and female names in the 70s. At first it was all- Because at first they were ladies, right? Yeah, and they said, well, that's not cool, to name that after a woman. And every time you guys show like the weather model, the forecast model, it's not a hurricane,

it's a woman with rollers in her hair and a rolling pin yelling, seems sexist. And everyone finally said, you know, you're right, that is sexist, so we're gonna start to alternate between men's names and women's names. And so at the beginning of every hurricane season, the, what is it, the World Meteorological Association? Yeah.

Organization, sorry. They release a list of all the names that the Atlantic hurricane season could possibly have, and each name starts with a different letter, A, B, C, D, and so on. Can I list this year's? Yeah. You got Arthur.

Okay. Bertha. Nice. Cristobal. Yeah. You got Dolly. You got Edward. You have Faye.

Okay. And we should mention too that they use, you know, names from places all over the world now, which is great because hurricanes affect places all over the world. Yeah. So you have Faye, then you have Gonzalo. You have Hannah.

You have, I don't even know how you pronounce this, I-S-A-I-A-S. Isaiah. Issaic. No. I-S-A-I-A-S. I-S-A-I-S. Issaic.

Sure. Issaic. Issaic. Then you got Josephine. Nice name. You got Kyle. You got Laura. You got Marco.

You've got Nana. Sweet Nana. You've got Omar. Paulette, which for some reason sounds funny to me. Yeah. Hurricane Paulette. Yeah. You've got Renee, Sally, Teddy, Vicky,

and finishing up because they don't have Y or Z for some reason. Wilfred. That's a good one. I mean, Wilfred sounds tough. Or an X. Yumi's predicted that Hurricane Nana is going to be a particularly bad one.

She called- Because it's the sweetest grandma name. I think so. And there's actually a longstanding myth that was supposedly found to be correct by some study a few years back that people don't respect the female names of hurricanes. What?

Yeah. So there's this whole- What do you mean, respect? I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm putting everything so terribly today, but get this. There's this urban legend that hurricanes that have women's names are the most destructive

because people don't take them as seriously and they don't leave. So there's more people present to be killed when a hurricane lands for a woman named Hurricane than a man named Hurricane. And for a long time- Oh, that's not true, was it? Yeah, for a long time it was just this kind of

old wives tale or something. And then this study found in like, I think 2014 or something like that, they know this actually is true. Somebody sat down and crunched the numbers. And then finally, I think two years ago, they're like, this study was terrible and that's absolutely not true.

If we looked at the numbers too, and that's just not the case. All right, well, that's good to know because that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It is kind of dumb, but it has like this weird kernel of truth to it. It's like a perfect urban legend, you know what I mean?

Yeah, because it's believable. Yeah, and who's ever gonna sit down and prove it one way or another, you know? Yeah, that's true. Oh, wait, hold on, one more thing, Chuck, while we're on names. There are different names elsewhere in the world. So the names you just said,

those are for Atlantic hurricanes. In Australia, they have their own set of names that they name cyclones. And then elsewhere in the world, there's 13 member nations that name typhoons and some cyclones. Countries like Bangladesh and India and Thailand, each one submits 13 names

and each list contains 13 names from each one of those countries. So you have 160 names to choose from every year. So depending on where you are in the world, a weather pattern's gonna have a much more localized name than what you would expect. That's right, and if a hurricane is really destructive, they will retire that.

And I'm using air quotes there because they really just put it down for 10 years. I don't know why they don't just don't do it forever. Like there should never be another, like in 11 years, surely they won't have a hurricane Katrina or an Andrew or a Harvey, right? I don't know.

Like why would they? There's so many names. I don't know. Why bring it any name back? I have no idea. I think they're like, we have better things to do than come up with more stupid names, you know?

Yeah, I just, I mean, they obviously do that to avoid confusion. And once a storm is sort of this legendary storm, like a Katrina, there's just no reason to ever name another one that. No, no, I'm with you. I agree. And if you don't believe in luck,

I just think it's not a good idea. It does seem like 10 years is a little short. I could not see them doing another Katrina. That's just not gonna happen, you know? No, there's no way. So let's talk about climate change. You want to? Yeah.

Well, before we talk about climate change just quickly, as far as the historical record goes, you know, there's always been hurricanes and this will kind of segue nicely into climate change because things are getting worse, but there always have been hurricanes even way back in the day. We didn't have great records,

but there are, you can do research on like cave wall drawings and things like that seem to indicate stuff like hurricanes. And I think there was a LSU team that studied thousands of years of lake bed evidence and they can tell that over, I think like 3,400 years, there have been about a dozen category four or higher in that area,

most of which were in the past 1,000 years. Right. That seems low, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. But I mean, that's just for that area. Another one, there was a really big hurricane, historically speaking, when Genghis Khan was going to invade Japan in 1274,

the Mongols were invading Japan. There was a fleet that had something like 100 or 200,000 people on board and they were really gonna invade Japan. And a hurricane blew in and sunk the fleet. And the Japanese had a name for this incredible miraculous act of mercy by whatever God was watching over them.

They named it divine wind. Yeah. And that actually would come into use later on in World War II because divine wind in Japanese is kamikaze. Kamikaze? Yeah. And that's a chapter in our book, right?

I'm so glad. I was teeing you up. I was like, come on, Chuck. I didn't know if we could reveal that, but yeah, we got a book coming out this fall and you can pre-order it now. Plug, plug, plug. And there's a great, great chapter on kamikaze in there.

Yeah. The whole thing is just great from top to bottom, Chuck. I'm wondering when we'll be allowed to do some of those chapters as podcast episodes, if ever. I don't know. I don't know what that is. And it gives us that permission. I think we give ourselves that permission.

Okay. It's up to us, okay? Maybe a couple of years after it's out, we can start doling those out a little bit. Harvesting it for parts? Sure. That's another way to put it, right? They could have another life.

So, well, I mean, the stuff that we talk about, they're not like necessarily entire podcast episodes. Like there's definitely more to be said about it. So, I think we could take any single one of those chapters and turn it into a podcast episode. So, climate change, here's a startling statistic. Since the 1970s, the number of cat five and cat four storms has just about doubled.

And to the casual observer, a couple of things, it seems like they're getting worse and more frequent. And you don't have to be a genius to figure out if you need warm water to make a hurricane and ocean waters are warming due to climate change, then you're gonna have more frequent and more severe storms, right or no? Yeah, I mean, that's how logic goes.

And they basically think that's a given that we're gonna have more frequent and more powerful storms, but at least according to Woods Hole Ocean and Graphic Institute, there are plenty of X factors left that it's not like we just definitively understand how bad hurricanes are gonna be or how many more we're gonna have.

Because remember, the surface water has to reach down about 150 feet for a hurricane to form. And one of the big questions is if there is global warming going on and it's heating the ocean, how deep is it heating the ocean? Because if that warm water went beyond 150 feet, then hurricanes should ostensibly be able to become bigger and bigger.

And similarly, if the surface temperature of the ocean is rising, then that just means more evaporating water, which is the key, that's the fuel to any hurricane is that moist evaporating water that's rising. That the more you have of that, the bigger amount, more powerful a storm can be. The more energy there is for the storm to use

to become big and huge and destructive. The question is just how bad is it gonna be? But there does seem to be just general consensus that yes, climate change is happening and it's going to result in worse hurricanes. And it's, I mean, already there were two named storms this year in the Atlantic before hurricane season even started.

So they think hurricane season is gonna last longer. It's gonna start earlier and last longer. There's going to be more of them. They're probably going to be more destructive. There's something else that I thought was really interesting though too, is that this particular year may not be as bad as it would have been otherwise.

It was supposed to be really bad because of the warm sea levels because it started earlier and because it's a La Nina year, which actually pushes hurricanes back out to sea eventually. Because there's La Nina, those breezes are kind of stilled comparatively speaking.

So any hurricanes that do develop are just gonna sit on land. Like Dorian did to the Bahamas a year or so ago. It just sat on the Bahamas for 48 hours. That's not supposed to happen. And they were worried that that's going to happen because of this La Nina year. But you know the Saharan dust storms that's going on?

Oh yeah. They think that that's actually drying the air and preventing hurricanes from forming right now. The question is how long that will last? Will it last through the whole hurricane season or will that eventually stall and hurricanes will come raging through in August and September?

Who knows? Wow. So there's hurricanes everybody. That's right. I think we're gonna release a bonus add-on some day into our feed where I'd try again to explain hurricanes and the cone of uncertainty. This stuff drives me nuts man.

Yeah. You ready? I'm ready. Obviously, since we're done talking about hurricanes that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this the other side of the coin. We always like to keep things fair and balanced here, right? Right.

Hey guys, discovered your show about two years ago and wondered where have you been all my life? I love the show. Don't change a thing. In the robber barons episode you said that conservatives, Josh said conservatives say people aren't perfect. We can never have a perfect society so let people do whatever they want.

That's kind of right but it's oversimplified and therefore misleading. In our view, and I take it Tim is a conservative. He says, since humans are all corrupt, obviously some more than others, no government can be uncorrupt since it's run by people. Therefore we should limit the power of government and give people more freedom.

Since people will generally act in their own best interest, let them decide how they wanna spend their money, who they work for and who they hire and fire. As long as the government protects people's basic rights from others, we will have a pretty good society. I've always been conflicted about anti-monopoly laws but the longer I live, the more I think they're a good thing because we should limit the power of large companies

just as we limit the power of the government since those companies are also run by corrupt people. Capitalism says, of course you're selfish and so am I so if you want my money, you have to give me some kind of product or service that makes my life better. Again, we can never have a perfect society but it would be far worse if the government has too much power to decide how we spend our money

because again, they are corrupt also. Thanks for all the great research and the super fun way you present it, keep it up. That is Tim in Minnesota. That's pretty awesome. Thanks a lot, Tim. That was a really great email. Oh well, I'm a conservative now.

Wow, all right. Yeah, I'm pretty weak-willed as it is. No, but Tim, that was great. Thank you for explaining it further because I definitely knew I was oversimplifying things and just kind of have the T's crossed and the I's dotted, that's very helpful. We're gonna have to bring you on

to explain hurricanes one day. Yeah, and that was a better email than a lot of the blowback we got which wasn't so instructive and more just like, you guys just reduced that and it's not true. Yeah, blame, I guess you could put it. Well, if you wanna get in touch with us like Tim did and just be a champion hero, you can do that.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast. at iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts

or wherever you listen to podcasts.