Podcasts about hurricane center

Eben reports on the increasing use of artificial intelligence tools at NOAA's Hurricane Center, to improve predictive modeling and forecasts for the current storm season.

As the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season begins, Jamie Rhome, Deputy Director of the National Hurricane Center, joins Off The Radar to discuss how hurricane science and communication have evolved over his 26-year career.While forecasting accuracy has reached new heights, getting life-saving information to communities remains a critical challenge. Jamie reveals the Hurricane Center's lesser-known fieldwork—quiet missions to storm-affected areas where teams gather crucial data from survivors about their evacuation decisions.This episode explores groundbreaking research into hurricane mortality, the technological and communication breakthroughs that have transformed the field. . Jamie also shares practical safety advice and how he's preparing his own home for potential impacts this upcoming season. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

(AURN News) — Hurricane Milton, the powerful category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 145 mph, is rapidly approaching Florida's west coast, prompting urgent warnings from the NOAA National Weather Service Hurricane Center. As of 11 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, Milton was located approximately 190 miles southwest of Tampa, moving northeast at 17 mph. The National Hurricane Center reports that multiple life-threatening hazards are expected to impact much of Florida from Wednesday afternoon through Thursday. “Milton right now, a category 4 hurricane, still expected to be a major hurricane when it reaches the west coast of Florida late this evening or overnight, tonight, and maintain hurricane status all the way across the Florida peninsula and out into the western Atlantic during the day, on Thursday,” said National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan on Wednesday morning. Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center are particularly concerned about the potential for devastating storm surge. A storm surge warning is in effect for almost the entire west coast of Florida. Areas from Anna Maria Island to Boca Grande could see 10 to 15 feet of inundation above ground level, while the Tampa Bay region may experience 8 to 12 feet of surge. The Hurricane Center strongly urges residents in storm surge evacuation zones to evacuate immediately, warning that some areas may become uninhabitable for an extended period due to structural damage and washed-out roads. In addition to the storm surge threat, Milton is expected to maintain major hurricane status as it makes landfall late Wednesday evening or overnight. Hurricane warnings are in effect for a large portion of central Florida, including Fort Myers, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Ocala, Orlando, Melbourne, and St. Augustine. Officials also caution that the storm will bring significant structural damage, widespread power outages, and impassable roads due to debris. Inland areas along the I-4 corridor are also expected to experience hurricane-force wind gusts. Heavy rainfall poses another significant threat, with 6 to 12 inches expected along and north of Milton's track, and isolated amounts of up to 18 inches possible. This could lead to widespread, life-threatening flooding, particularly along the I-4 corridor from Tampa to Orlando to Daytona Beach. As Milton approaches, residents are advised to stay informed through multiple channels, including wireless emergency alerts and battery-powered weather radios, to receive critical updates on flash flood and tornado warnings. For the latest updates on Hurricane Milton, you can visit the National Hurricane Center's website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When asked what keeps him awake at night, Jamie Rhome, Deputy Director of the National Hurricane Center says he echoes the sentiments of all Hurricane Center workers who fear the devastating consequences of a Tampa Bay landfall by a major Hurricane.The results would be devastating with perhaps thousands killed, a major US port shut down with an economic ripple felt across the nation and even hospitals unable to care for patients for several days. This is just one bit of information in this episode featuring Deputy Director Jamie Rhome of the National Hurricane Center, Jonathon Falk, Disaster Director of the National Association of Home Builders, and Florida Business Forum host Sam Yates. Support the Show.The Florida Business Forum Podcast is produced by Yates & Associates, Public Relations & Marketing, and hosted by Emmy Award winning reporter and television anchor Sam Yates. If you or your business or not-for-profit organization would like to share your news with our Florida, national, and international audience please contact Sam Yates, Sam@YatesPRO.com. The Florida Business Forum Podcast is the only business forum of its kind dedicated to Florida news, business, and not-for-profit organizations. When Florida business minds need to know, they turn to The Florida Business Forum Podcast first!Program Sponsorships are available starting at $500/monthly with a minimum six-month sponsorship. The Florida Business Forum Podcast is affiliated with the Pod National News Network USA providing business news podcasts to every State in the U.S.A. The Florida Business Forum Podcast is herd throughout Florida, the United States, and 32 countries and territories. Direct Media Inquiries to Sam Yates, Sam@Yatespro.com.

Hurricane Idalia became the eighth major hurricane to make landfall on the Gulf Coast in the last six years, leaving behind a trail of destruction in its path. On this week's episode, the Lee Weather Team looks back on the storm to discuss what stood out to them the most. How good was the forecast? Was the forecast communicated effectively? Why did some people choose not to evacuate? What can we learn from this storm before the next hurricane strikes the United States? Get the meteorologists' perspective in our in-depth review of Hurricane Idalia. We want to hear from you! Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode! You can also email questions or comments to podcasts@lee.net. About the Across the Sky podcast The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team: Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:   Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Across the Sky, our National Lee Enterprises Weather podcast. I'm Matt Holiner in Chicago. One quarter of the lead weather team, but the whole game here today, meteorologist Joe Martucci based in Atlantic City. Sean Sublette in Richmond, Virginia and Kirsten Lang in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Together the four of us cover weather across the country. Yes, not just across the sky, but across the country. And this national weather coverage is new. So if you're listening to this podcast on a Lee Enterprise's website or app, you're probably going to be seeing more forecast videos from us, especially when bad weather is expected. But I think it's safe to say this podcast, this is the first thing that went national and I think it's the favorite part of our jobs. And nothing is changing here. In fact, each week we continue to see our number of listeners go up. So really, we can't thank you enough for tuning in and subscribing and this week, just like the national weather story for the last week. This episode is all about Hurricane Idalia. The damage is still being assessed, but it is clear that this was another devastating storm for parts of the southeast. And of course, right off the bat, our thoughts and prayers are with all the people trying to recover from this storm. Now, obviously, lots to discuss here. But to start, guys, let's just go around the horn and talk about the first thing that stood out to you about Dahlia. Sean, let's start with you, because you were doing a lot of updates on this storm for our Carolina properties. Yeah, I think for me, one of the things that I take home from Idalia is actually how well it was forecast. You know, we are we are in an environment you know, we've been talking about this for a few months now. We've got very high ocean heat content, high sea surface temperatures, basically warm water. But we've had the El Nino going on and there's this whole battle back and forth between the two. Which one of these impacts is going to be larger? And we kind of said, well, once things get started, they can really, really go. And that's kind of what happened. I mean, the Gulf of Mexico was especially warm, and it is not common for the National Hurricane Center to to talk about rapid intensification in their discussions and their technical discussions as this environment is primed for rapid intensification. And and by that, we mean something very specific, effectively going up two categories in 24 hours. I mean, technically, it's 35 miles per hour and 24 hours, but two categories, right? So for them to be talking about rapid intensification, which such high confidence, then it comes to fruition pretty much as forecast. I mean, their track was spot on. But, you know, it's tough. You know, you're looking at just this blob of clouds in the Yucatan Channel and you're thinking 36 hours. This is going to be a major hurricane. That is not a forecast you can make 15 or 20 years ago with any kind of confidence. So for me, I'm especially happy with how far we have come in intensity forecasting in the last five or ten years. You're on the coast, You know, I know this is not your storm, obviously, but what kind of things were you thinking about? I was thinking about this is another instance where the surge was the bit was the biggest deal with this. And kind of I've been thinking about this for the past month, like the sapphire system scale. Is that the best way of categorizing hurricanes? I'm not trying to like open a can of worms on the podcast, but you know, you got something that and I just read a tweet by Greg Purcell from the Weather Channel about how there really was nothing more than tropical storm force sustained winds on any land, on land observing site with this storm. Even though it was a hurricane. So, you know, if that were to be true, well, it wasn't a Category three at landfall by technicality, because it would you would have to have something that was over 74 miles an hour sustained winds. But the impacts of the storm are, you know, like a Category three. I guess what I'm trying to say is, you know, is there is there a better way to categorize hurricanes that take into account the surge, you know, the flooding, the pressure maybe or even the, you know, taking went into account to because it's all comes back know, again, just being at the Jersey Shore comes back to Superstorm Sandy, which was a category one, you know, at landfall. But, you know the damage did not feel like a category one at the Jersey Shore. So it's just more of a broader picture for me. You know, with this, you know, can we get to a place, you know, is a safer symptom scale the best way to do this weather bell, which is known for their weather models, has put out a criteria by proprietary criteria to model these kind of storms with categories. I think the snapper system is great in the sense that we've been using it for such a long time that it makes it easy to compare storm the storm, But sometimes when you got your storm surge, it's like a category five, but your winds are like a category one. What you know, you're going to see category one, but wasn't really a category one. That's my thought. And Sean, going off your point about the the forecast accuracy, I mean, this time in particular, the track forecast was pretty incredible. I looked back and the first forecasts that the National Hurricane Center issued, now, the intensity was off there only at the time of forecasting, I think it was a category one hurricane at landfall. And that was the one thing that did change in this forecast was the intensity. And it looked like, oh, wait a minute, this is going to be stronger and stronger and stronger. So intensely. Forecasts getting better, but has room for improved. But there was very little improvement for the track forecast because actually the national Hurricane Center's first forecast five days out was only ten miles off. And where landfall actually happened, landfall happened at Keeton Beach. And the first forecast was picked to make landfall just ten miles west of Keaton Beach. And that is remarkable how good that track forecast was five days out. And there wasn't a whole lot of shifting. One thing, if you're comparing Italia to Ian, we did see that shift in the track forecast from north to south. With time. This forecast didn't really shift that much. Again, the cone was wider five days out and it got narrow, narrower, but it didn't shift much. You know, if you look at all the different forecasts, it kind of bounced back and forth a little bit west to east. But there was no dramatic shift. Like the focus was always on the big bend for the worse impacts, and that's where the worst impacts was. And the track forecasts just continue to get better and better. The intensity forecast is lagging behind some, but that's getting better as well. But there's definitely a difference between the track forecasts and the intensity forecast. And I think when it comes to intensity forecasts, I mean, we just keep seeing this happening over and over again where the models tend to under do how quickly these things can intensify when all other conditions are right, when you don't have any wind shear, when there's no dry air, when those waters, as they are in the Gulf, just keep getting warmer. Warmer and you have above average sea surface temperatures, which they always are. Now, every year we're talking about above average sea surface temperatures in the Gulf. When the conditions are ripe for intensifying, the models continue to reduce under do it. And so a lot of these models were peaking at category three, but it ended up reaching Category four. Now ultimately making landfall because it went through an eyewall replacement cycle right before landfall as a Category three to reach Category four, which is higher than what the models were indicating. So I think, you know, from a forecasting perspective, since we're still useful as meteorologists, the models are just a tool. I think being more aggressive in the intensity forecast going a little bit higher than what the models are saying is probably the best track when you know that the wind shear is going away, there's no dry air, the water is really warm. Go ahead and be a little bit more aggressive in that intensity forecast. Maybe think about you know, if the models are saying 110 mile per hour winds, go ahead and forecast 120 mile per hour winds because this keeps happening, these intensification events and these storms overachieving. So I think that's a good strategy moving forward for intensity forecast. So speaking of intensity, I'll kind of Segway next to I think the stat that stood out to me was that there have been 11 named storms that have been retired. And a lot of that has to do with the time of year that they usually happen, right? I mean, when you start going down through the alphabet, usually get to an eye around peak season. But it's since 2001, there's been 11 of them. And so in Ian, of course, was the last one last season Of course this won't they will come out with whether or not this one is retired until the end of the season but I'm sure that it'll probably be put on that list as well, given the intensity of it, but I don't have thoughts on that. Yeah, there's something about the ice storms. You got to watch out for these ice storms. It is getting a little bit ridiculous. Like how many times the ice storms have been bad. I mean, you got Ida and Irene and Ian and how many. We have retired and let's be honest, there's just not a lot of names. We have to come up with a new name every time we retire. Name? Like what name are we going to come up with next? I think like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel here. It's like, Well, I mean, fortunately it's an international name with the World Meteorological Organization comes out these nameless. And so it's not just English names. I believe it's English, Spanish, French. Are those are the three. Those are the big three. There's my understanding is that, you know, the WMO World Meteorological Organization kind of does this. You know, those are the three languages that are spoken the most in this part of the world, English, Spanish and French, especially for for the folks in Haiti and Martinique in the in the Lesser Antilles. So that's why those names are dominant. But you're right, man. It's going to run out of names. You are along the coast and you start creeping up and it's like getting up there in the alphabet and you've got an eye coming at you. I feel like the chances of you having a stronger storm freaked me out. But, you know, that's just that's just being nervous about it, I guess. Better watch out for the next ice storm now. Well, and I think, you know, if you're wondering, like, why ice storms, I think it's just because of the placement. You know, we tend to get our strongest storms this time of year, late August through September into early October. That's tend to be when the major hurricanes occur. And so we usually get some small storms that aren't much of an issue. Of course, there are certainly been exceptions. Andrew certainly stands out as a major hurricane. That was the first storm of the season. But it just seems like oftentimes we get a lot of little baby storms. If you want to call them that. Storms that are out in middle Atlantic don't hurt anyone. And so we it just so happens that we often hit the ice storm when hurricane season is peaking. And so, sure enough, these ice storms tend to be stronger ones, that the stronger storms tend to occur near the peak of the hurricane season. So I just think it's EIS placement on the list. We just work through the names one by one and it just so happens that we tend to get our strongest storms and we hit the name. And looking ahead to 2024, if you're wondering what the name is in 2020 for this year it was a female name. So next year it's going to be a male name. It is Isaac. Isaac It was a storm as a C Isaac in 2024. And then we've got again, there are actually six nameless that we do so again in 2025. It's Imelda 2026. It's it's a year which I remember that one being that one has come up before it was not retired. So it's still on the list. Then in 2027 it's Imani, and then in 2028, that's as far out as we go. It's Idris. And so then theoretically it's Aliya would come up again in 2029 unless it's retired. And I think there's a pretty good chance that it's going to be retired, not as devastating a storm as in overall the economic impact, the number of lives lost. Fortunately, it looks like it going to be lower. But still, I mean, the images coming out just still overwhelming. You can just see like, you know, there's again, average we see after every major hurricane landfall. But the images of devastation that come out, it's really, really saddening. You know, it was pretty interesting. I was watching the Weather Channel on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Jim CHANATRY, the legend at the University of Florida Research Station in Cedar Key. And you just saw the water just moving ashore. And I'm looking at it and I'm like, yeah, Moore is moving to shore and it's bad. But then like, kind of like, put yourself like you have a house there and you're seeing like, imagine your street. Like even if you don't live at the coast, imagine your street. You got three feet of water just moving down the street. It's not going away, Right. Like, that's pretty terrifying to see, really. You know, it's such a hard this comes back to like something I think we've talked about in the past, like it's so hard to conceptualize something you haven't seen before. Yeah. And if you're in Cedar Key and that's an area that hasn't had a direct hit from a hurricane, I don't think ever in recorded history. Going back to the 1800s. Yeah, it's tough to put yourself in that spot, but to see like three feet of water or four feet of water or whatever it was is is towering. I had a friend of mine who lives in Saint Petersburg, and he had he says he's lived there since 2017. He says the worst flooding he saw on his street in Saint Petersburg. And one of his neighbors said they lived there for like 23 years and that was the worst they had. And they had the whole street was covered and it was about anywhere between 6 to 18 inches, which isn't you know, six inches isn't going to get to your house, but 18 inches good. So that's another takeaway from this storm. Also a question for you guys. Have you guys ever read the book Isaac's Storm, speaking of Isaac? Yes, I have. And it's a fantastic book. If you are a meteorologist or anybody who's interested in whether that is a must read, a must read, a young Joe read that book back. Back in the year 2000, it was about the 1900 Galveston hurricane. It was a nonfiction book by Erik Larson. So good read. It just shows you, you know, if you have any doubts about, oh, those meteorologists there, they're always wrong. It's like when you read that book, you realize how far we've come and the fact that, you know, the death toll looks like it's going be as low as it is from this storm tells you how far we have come, because in that Galveston storm, over 8000 people died when a Category four made landfall and this time almost a Category four made landfall. You know, granted not right over a highly populated area. That obviously helps. But the fact that death toll may end up being less than a dozen people, It tells you that we so far in being able to forecast these things because that's what happened in Galveston. They basically had no idea it was they were about to get slammed by a Category four hurricane. There were a few reports like there's a storm in the Gulf that was it was like ship reports and they didn't know exactly where it was going. So the fact that we can track these things with satellites, keep an eye on we have planes flying out and getting the latest conditions, the the computer models that we have now gotten so good at forecasting where these things are go. The science in meteorology has advanced so much so that hopefully we will never see a death toll like that from a hurricane again. You know, I, I think it will be tough to do because we've gotten you know, there's always room for improvement. The forecast can definitely get better. The communication get better. I think we've reached a point where we can communicate it well enough that we can get the vast majority of people to a safe place and avoid the worst of the storm. So on that note, I'll take a short break, but don't go anywhere. And we're going to continue talking about this storm and look ahead to the future. What can we learn from Dallas or better prepared for the next hurricane? We'll talk about that right after this break. And welcome back to Across the Sky. Continuing our discussion and recap of Hurricane Italia, I really want to dive into the community ocean now and how can we better communicate? We always come back to that. We talk about how the forecasts keep getting better and better, especially the track forecasting. The intensity forecasts are showing improvement to, but it's useless if we can't properly communicate and talk about how people outside the cone are going to feel impacts as well. And what are those conditions going to be like, where the worst occurs and so on. You're watching the Weather Channel and something stood out to you. Yeah. So, you know, I've got on another screen, I've got the Weather Channel on and I've been watching Cantera do this thing ever since I was an undergrad back in the and the day when I said in, in the 19 something something and look I can talk. He is great. I love his passion. I love what he brings. He is very real and and I love the way he covers stuff. And he's he's obviously been around the block more than once, but he was talking to a guy who owned a condo there at Cedar Key and and wondering why he didn't evacuate. And and he made the comment. CANTOR He made the comment right there on on camera that we need to do a better job of communicating what the risk is. This guy didn't leave even though the forecast storm surge was on the order of 10 to 14 feet. And I think it came up to about seven or eight feet. So the guy was his condo was elevated. So obviously the water rushed underneath of the condo and he was okay because the thing made landfall at low tide. If it had come in at high tide, well, now we have a much different issue. Right. And that dude might not have made it. So how can we do a better job of communicating that risk to encourage these homeowners to leave? I mean, and to look to his credit, Cantor, he didn't say a bad thing about this guy because this guy, it was fine, right? He was fine. And he did what he thought was right. But he was only two or three feet of water away from probably not still being with us. So I think we've done a very good job at timing and intensity of the storm. But now I guess the next frontier of this is, yes, communication. But then what we in the business called the mesoscale impacts. Right. How how high what time is that? How far inland is that surge going to go? How how good can we make that part of the forecast? It's it's admittedly not not awfully difficult to say, okay, in the big bend area, there's going to be a 10 to 14 storm surge. I think any one of us can do that without a lot of fuss. But then it takes more time to say, okay, this point on the big bend at this time, we'll have six or eight or ten feet of storm surge because the tide level is going to be this at this time, because a full moon and all of that other stuff. That's another whole thing to do. Right. Of course, that's also and I'm going to give credit here to the local weather service officers. That's what they do. Right. And they do that especially well. So, you know, we could sit back, the hurricane center can sit back and give those larger scale things. But man, we a lot of what needs to be done is communication and understanding of what these smaller scale impacts are going to me, you know, where precisely is the eyewall going that's going to bring that 100 mile an hour gust because of all of y'all have done this. You've talked about hurricanes with the public and the people say, well, I've been through a hurricane and they might have, but they didn't go through the eyewall. So they don't think it's that bad. You know, obviously, we all know that area around the eye, the eyewall is where it's the worst. And if you go through that, you're not going to forget it. Those kinds of things. What Cantore was talking about earlier today there on the big bend of Florida is what kind of sticks with me going forward. Yes, Sean, I saw that interview as well. And the one thing that stood out to me, one of the reasons the guy said that he decided to stay is that initially Cedar Key was in the cone, but ultimately Cedar Key was removed from the cone. And so once he wasn't in the cone anymore, he had that sense of, oh, it's going to be okay. Even though they were still communicated. When you saw the forecast slide, Cedar Key is still going to have huge impacts. There's still going to be the landfall is not going to be a Cedar Key. Okay. There are absolutely impacts. Cedar Key, a tremendous storm surge, tremendous winds. Still not the worst of the wind. No, but still very strong winds and a life threatening storm surge situation in particular. So that was still communicated. But because Cedar Key was not in the cone in his mind, he was safe, even though it wasn't as safe as he really thought. And so I think, again, it comes back to how much focus people put on the cone. And this storm was a great example of how there are impacts well beyond the cone. Look at what happened in Clearwater Beach in Tampa and San Pete. You know, everybody, you know, at first there was the possibility that, yes, maybe it would hit there. But pretty early on they were removed from the cone. It's like, okay, look, Tampa and Clearwater, they get lucky again. But there were impacts. In fact, record storm surge in Clearwater Beach, four feet of storm surge. It actually still flooded homes and they were not in the cone, but they absolutely felt impacts from this storm. I think this was a good wakeup call for the Tampa Saint Pete area because we saw what happened when a storm made landfall 100 miles away. Can you imagine what it had been like if this storm actually made landfall and Tampa and Saint Pete and how much worse it would have been? We just got a preview of this record storm surge for Clearwater Beach. But imagine if that storm had been a lot closer, how bad it would have been. So I think this is a wakeup call for the Tampa Bay area about get ready. This was another close call. One day your luck is going to run out, though, and things are going to be worse. And again, but coming back to the original message, they weren't in the cone, but they absolutely felt impacts. And how do we communicate to people outside the cone what it's going to be like, Don't let your guard down. This is what you need to be prepared for. That still seems to be the big challenge. You know, we've been talking about communication forever, really, and I think Katrina was the maybe the genesis of a concentrated effort for those in the weather community to really hunker down on the messaging, you know, as far as evacuating and people not evacuating. I mean, you know, it has to do with one, you know, you think your home is invincible, you're in it all the time. Nothing usually happens to your house. So that's part of it. It's also the oh, that won't happen to me mentality, too, you know, And a lot of this has been studied by by, you know, psychologists and sociologists over time, you know, and it's hard when, you know, you do evacuate and then not much happens at your place. You're not as likely to evacuate, you know, in the future. I'm assuming the area in the big bend of Florida, I know it's not very populated, but there's probably a good amount of people who live there, you know, seasonally. And, you know, if they are there in August for whatever reason, and they live in, let's say, Kentucky or Pennsylvania or whatever, you know, they don't have to deal with this. So this is a new experience for them, too. I think also some people just like, you know, it's a thrill, right? Your you against man against nature and people just like that. Right. That's that's that's probably how we invented fire in some ways more so you know there is that human element to it but but you know where we have fire now, you know we have fire. We've done all that. You know, we're advanced enough where we can evacuate, you know, when we're told to. But it is a tough choice. It's a personal choice. I mean, it is. It's it is it's tough for for a number of people. I understand that. Yeah. The other thing with me thinking about Katrina, think of the the economic situation in a lot of those areas. Some of those people just couldn't leave and they did not have the means to leave. And that's one of the things that I wasn't even cognizant of, you know, many years ago, is to understand that there's a lot of people who can't they just can't they don't have the means, much less some place to go. And that's another thing that I think a lot of us doing. Weather communications have had to come to terms with. But what stands out to me is that nowadays it used to be an issue is like, do the people know this storm is coming? Were they notified? Did they have any idea? And now most of the people who do stay behind and survive, like this guy in Cedar Key, he knew what was coming. He knew the storm was going. It wasn't like he didn't have any way. He had not read it in the paper. I mean, now there's so many ways you can get the information if you're on the Internet, your local newspaper, TV. I mean, it is hard not to be notified about the storm. So very rarely do you encounter someone who is literally off the grid and has no idea that storm is coming. They know the storm is coming, but they don't have a good idea of exactly what's going to happen. And then we get into the other reasons of why people even another reason that comes up is people. You know, there are shelters that open up for these storms, but they're concerns about what's available in those shelters. What if they have a family member with special medical needs and are they going to have the equipment in case they have a medical emergency at that shelter to be taken care of? And is it a shelter that allows pets or not? Because a lot of people do not. They consider the pet a member of the family and they do not want to leave their pets behind. They want to bring the pets with them. But there's concerns about, well, are they going to accept pets at the shelter? And so then that might be a hesitation. And then finally, it's getting the information. I think that maybe the what needs to happen is like the shelters being very clear about where the shelters are, what we have available, what we are going to allow and not allow. That might help if there's some communication, like maybe, you know, we're getting better at the forecast communication, people being aware of the storm, but maybe giving telling people, well, what should I do? Maybe that's where the breakdown is, like, where can I go? Because some people may not have a family member. They can go to, you know, just a couple of hours away. There's some people it's like, I don't have any family anywhere close or friends anywhere close. I have nowhere to go, so I'm just going to stay. So maybe getting the word out about where people can go to be safe from the storm. Maybe that's what we need to do better off. Yeah, I agree. I think the I think the communication of a storm approaching is obviously not what we're lacking on any of this. I think everybody's well aware of that. I think it's just as you all touched on, I think it's just people thinking they can ride it out and just the unknown. And I hate to say that that, you know, it just it takes having to go through something like that to realize it. That's, you know, maybe next time I'd be a little bit more cautious or thoughtful on on my actions and whether or not I, I evacuate or not. But yeah, it's just something we're probably going to continue to battle, I guess, is meteorologist and then emergency management is going to have to you know, it's something they have to battle as well. And I think also, you know, where there still can be continued improvement is places that are in the cone, but not at the coast. So much focus is what's going to happen at the coast, and rightfully so, because of the storm surge. Right. You have that added threat in addition to the rain, in addition to the wind. I think sometimes we may just get too carried away. It's like where's the worst going to be? Which is always like, where is it going to be on the coast? And we saw big impacts in Georgia and South Carolina and North Carolina as well. And though those were covered and I think they were communicated, there was still not as much focus. A lot of people being and back again. So many more people feel secondary impacts. Not the worst of the storm. They're still building impact from the storm, but not the worst. And sometimes we get so caught up in how bad is it going to be at this one specific spot we forget to like keep remembering, especially in the national conversation. I think, you know, at the local levels, there's a little bit different conversation. You know, the local meteorologist talking about how it's going to impact this local area. But from the national media perspective, I think there's sometimes a little too much focus on where is the worst going to be. I don't think there was enough in the national conversation about what the impacts were going to be in Georgia and South Carolina and the tremendous amount of rain they were going to see of so many places just seeing six, seven, eight. I think the the the the highest total so far, just a little over nine and a half inches of rain and is absolutely going to cause flooded roads. And this where this occurred was an inland area, nowhere near the coast, but there was absolutely flooding, inland flooding away from the coast. So many flooded roads that impacted travel. And the tornado threat. The most incredible video I saw from this storm so far. Oh, yeah, video out of South Carolina of a tornado crossing an interstate, picking up a car and flipping. I mean, just Google, South Carolina, Italia, tornado, and you will come across that video and it is absolutely incredible. It's amazing those people did not die. I mean, the way that car flipped was literally picked up and partially landed on another car. It is amazing. Those people were not even seriously injured. From what I gather. They were injured, but not seriously. And the fact that they even survived is remarkable. So we sometimes forget about the tornado threat with these hurricanes, too. Again, so much focus on the storm surge, on those strong winds with these hurricanes. But don't forget, usually these hurricanes generate tornadoes as well. And no, they're not yet. Four EF five tornadoes still, you have zero. You have one tornadoes, 100 mile per hour winds, especially when it's just a tropical storm. And so the winds are coming down. It's like, oh, the wind threat's going down. You still got to watch out for tornadoes because those can be deadly as well. If you get hit by the F0, if one tornado crossing a highway, those people got extremely lucky. So we can't forget about the tornado threat as well. The tornado, you know, that we did have across the area, you know, we've seen this a couple of times. You know, where, you know, on it's always on the east side, the storm with the tornadoes, you know, that we do see. And then in terms of the impacts, you know, with the you know, you have the surge and you have the tornadoes and you have the flooding and you have the wind, you know, it's a multi impact storm. I know. We'll I know again, go back to Sam, for instance. Yeah. We talk about the winds alone. But in terms of the storm, it's really a multi impact event. And again, it's when you have a tornado, it just adds to the complexity because sometimes, you know, sometimes you get storm surge and a tornado warning at the same time and you need to figure out where the best place to shelter is. And sometimes being low isn't good and sometimes being high isn't good either. You know, if you have balls going on at the same time. So it's a game, like I said, sometimes a multi impact event. Otherwise, that's all I have here for, for the storm. Yeah, I think this is just a great conversation to have, like getting a group of meteorologists together after a storm like this and just having a conversation and bouncing ideas off of each other. You know, what went right, what went wrong, What can we do better? You know, what did we see with how the models performed? Another thing that stood out to me, the good old battle between the European in the GFC is another example. There is this is another example of the European beat out the GFC. Now again, the GFC has gotten better and this is not does not happen every time, but a so many times during these high impact forecasts it gets so much attention. Oftentimes the European keeps beating the GFC that keeps coming up. And I just got to wonder, it's like, why have we made the GFC model better? The European is not a perfect model. It's not right every time. And there there are still examples where the GFC beats the European. That's why we look at all the models. But it, it just continuously comes up in European versus the GFC. And once again the European has a tendency to wind out, it says what can we do to make the GFC better? It is absolutely fair to say that the European model was able to latch on to this signal that there would be something a good 24, almost 48 hours before before the GFC was able to to lock on to that signal and my understanding, I'm not a numerical weather prediction, dude, but my understanding is that, you know, the data assimilation is just simply better. There. First, gas field is just better because they they put more resources into it because the European Center only has to do one kind of market. Whereas here in the states, you know, we have the global forecast system, we run the triple R, there are all these different resolution models for air dispersion and pollution dispersion. So I don't want to be one of these people. I don't want this to devolve into like bashing Noel because that's not fair at all. They have they are much more on their proverbial plates than than the Europeans do. But yeah, you would want to. Your point is exceedingly well taken. We still need to do better in our in our modeling system, especially for these high impact tropical events for sure. Yeah. I mean, that's what we're always striving for in meteorology. We want to be as accurate as possible. I feel like, you know, some people are always the butt of jokes. It's like, Oh, you can just be right 50% time, but we're not. We're much more accurate that and we're always striving to be better. We realize there's room for improvement. We're always trying to improve. And I think it's conversations like that where we get that improvement. What went right, what went wrong, how can we do better? And so that's why we're having the conversation. It was a great conversation. Obviously, this is a story that's not going away any time soon. And with that in mind, we want to reach out to you, our listeners. Were you impacted by Dalia? Do you have friends or family who were impacted? If you have a story about this storm or just a comment or thought, share it with us. Send us an email at podcasts at Lee Dot Net or leave us a voicemail by calling 6092727099. Again, that email is podcasts at Lee dot net and the phone number is 6092727099. We'd love to hear from you. And finally, before we wrap up, you know, looking ahead, a lot of good episodes lined up. We're going to be talking about how weather impacts fantasy football. Phone companies, Bounce houses. Yes, bounce houses. Those things that kids jump in at birthday parties. You would be shocked how many times the wind has blown those things over. So we're going to do a whole episode about that. But next week we're sticking with hurricanes and we've got an interesting topic lined up. Joe, do you want to tell folks more about this one? Yeah, we're talking about how hurricanes, after they pass through an area in the ocean, they actually warmed a deep part of the ocean. It's common knowledge in the weather world that when a hurricane passes through an area, the surface water temperatures cooler. But we never really looked at what happened deep in the oceans. And yes, the warming in the deeper oceans does have an impact on what happens throughout the rest of hurricane season. So We're talking about that with Sally Water from Brandeis University in Massachusetts. And we also have Noel Gutierrez as well from UC San Diego. You guys won't be able to actually you know, we're an audio only podcast, but Noel, I think, had the best, most awesome looking backdrop in Across the Sky podcast history because he's just shown in San Diego. But we will be chatting with them and that will be our episode coming out on Monday September the 11th. Yes, it was a great background and a fascinating conversation, so looking forward to it and I think that's going to do it for this week's episode of Across the Sky. But if you enjoy the show, please like great share subscribe. I know you hear it from everyone producing digital content, but it really does help us out. So thank you for taking the time to do it for LA Enterprise and my fellow meteorologist Joe Martucci in Atlantic City, Sean Sublette in Richmond, Kirsten Lang in Tulsa, I'm Matt Holiner in Chicago. Thanks again for listening, everyone. And we'll talk to you again soon.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tropical Storm Idalia is expected to affect the Tampa Bay area, before landfall north of Tampa. We speak with Jamie Rhome, deputy director, National Hurricane Center.

The new director of the National Hurricane Center, Mike Brennan, joined the weather team this week for an in-depth discussion on all things hurricanes. From the biggest concerns, the latest forecast and communication improvements, to the impact of climate change, it's everything you need to know as hurricane season 2023 gets underway. We want to hear from you! Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode! About the Across the Sky podcast The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team: Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Hello, once again, everybody. I'm meteorologist Sean Sublette. And welcome to Across the Sky, our National Lee Enterprises weather podcast. Lee Enterprises has print and digital news operations in 77 locations across the country, including in my home base in Richmond, Virginia. I'm joined this week by my colleague Matt Holiner in Chicago. And both Joe Martucci and Kirsten Lang are taking some time away from the office. Matt, we've got a great yes. This week, National Hurricane Center director Mike Brennan, we're going to talk all about not just what's upcoming this hurricane season. We talk about trends. We talk about communications. Man, there's a lot of stuff to get to today. Yeah, we really did cover a lot of them because we were so happy to actually get him on the podcast. I mean, this time of year he's doing so many interviews in preparation of hurricane season. So we're like, Yes, we got him. And so for the short amount of time that we had him, the 30 minutes, we throw as many questions as we could at him and really did cover everything. And, you know, he just took over the job recently in April. So, you know, it's a bit of a learning curve for him. But he has been with the hurricane center for years and it has been working with him. And you can tell that he's he's just filling right into the role and got all of our questions answered. So it was a fantastic episode. Absolutely. So let's get right at it with National Hurricane Center director Michael Brennan. And we welcome Mike Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center in South Florida. Shortly after getting his Ph.D. at NC State and his time at the NOAA's Weather Prediction Center in suburban D.C. He began as senior hurricane specialist at NHC in 28 and was selected as Hurricane Center director earlier on this year. Dr. Brennan, thank you for joining us and congratulations. Thanks, Sean. Great to be with you. Now, before we talk about the upcoming hurricane season, step back a little bit. Tell us what got you excited and into the weather in the first place. Yeah, I think like most meteorologist, pretty well bitten with the weather bug at a pretty early age. Something I've always been interested in. I grew up in southwest Virginia, a place with lots of interesting weather, you know, all four seasons at winter weather. It was pretty interested in that, you know, very flash flood prone area, heavy rainfall, remnants of hurricanes, severe weather. So it was a pretty interesting place to grow up. You know, I think one pretty formative moment was a 19 November, 1985, the flood of record in the Roanoke Valley in southwest Virginia. Still, the flood of record, the remnants of a tropical storm that made landfall on the Gulf Coast came up. It rained very heavily for several days, had five or six inches of rain on, I think it was November 5th or sixth that year. And the whole hydro system sort of went into flood and my grandmother lost her home in that event. So it was pretty, pretty impressionable. I was about eight at the time. So, you know, and I think as I got older, I sort of dawned on me that I could actually make it. Yeah, there's a there's a career to have in meteorology if you want to want to do that. I think probably by the time I was 11 or 12, I sort of recognized that and just decided to pursue it from there. Well, we're glad to have you and very happy that you're there at the Hurricane Center. Looking forward to this coming year, whatever it may bring. Can you talk a little bit about what kind of changes have any regarding public and experimental products? I might be coming out of the Hurricane Hurricane Center for for this season? Sure. Yeah. Probably the most notable one is our tropical weather outlook, which is sort of our flagship situational awareness product that we issue every 6 hours to talk about systems that could go on to become tropical depressions or tropical storms in the Atlantic. The period that we cover in that product is now extended out for seven days under the future. It's been five days for for many years we've been experimenting with seven day Genesis forecasts for the last three or four seasons. And they're they're pretty reliable, which means that if over the long term, if we say a system has a 70% chance of development, about 70% of those systems go on to develop so that they're statistically reliable. And so this year we pushed that time window out to seven days. So to give people just a little more heads up, a little better situational awareness that, hey, this is a system, the Hurricane Center is watching, that what could go on and become a tropical depression or tropical storm during the next week. Not every system is going to be in the outlook seven days in advance, though. We still have systems that are difficult to forecast formation, especially when you get out of the deep tropics. But for those systems are more competent and we hope to be giving people more lead time this year going back to those outlooks than once something gets developed into the Atlantic Basin, Gulf or the Caribbean. Talk about how track and intensity forecast have improved over the last 20 years because most of the metrics I've seen show that the track intensity, the track forecasts have just become stellar. But we still have some work to do with intensity forecast. How is that kind of gone last last 20 years or so? Yeah, if you go back and look, say, since the year 2000, our track forecast errors, say for example, at three days or about 65% lower than they were at that time. So you can see our three day track forecast error is now below 100 miles, which, you know, if you would've told somebody that it was more like 250 miles back in 2000. So that's been a tremendous improvement there. And we have for many decades, we've seen the track forecast steadily improving all the way from the 1980s and nineties up till today. And we still continue to see that improving. On the intensity side, that's the story for many years was that the tracks are getting better, but the intensity forecasts are not. But that's really not true anymore. We've started to see significant improvements in our intensity forecast here. And if you look just at our three day intensity error now compared to 2000, it's about 50%. It's about half of what it was then. We're down below ten, about ten knots. Used to be around 20 knots. So we're making progress there. That's pretty much new in the last 10 to 15 years. And we're also making progress in rapid intensity events where we cut our 24 hour forecast error in half for rapidly intensifying systems just in the last like four or five years. And Mike, with the tropical weather outlooks going out to seven days, I think that raises the question, are we at the point where we're going to expand the forecast cones when we have an active storm out to seven days? Is that happening this year? Are there any plans in the future? Not this year, but it's something we've been experimenting with. We've been making six and seven day track and intensity forecasts in-house for the better part of the last four or five years in evaluating them, trying to see when we're going to be ready to make those public. You know, on average, the average errors are pretty good. They're they're pretty close to what the average five dayers were or better than the average five dayers, where we reduce the five day forecast back and I think 2003. But the challenge with seven days is you get about 10% of those cases where the errors are really, really big. And you know, you think of a system where you it's forecast to recur, but it doesn't recurve or you can end up with errors of six or 700 miles a day, seven. So we want to try to be very careful about introducing those forecast and even more careful about how we convey them in a graphical way. I'm not sure we want to just extend the current cone out to seven days. You know, maybe we do something different. So we're working with the social science community on sort of what the cone graphic might become in the next few years, and that'll probably be part of how we go on and convey the six and seven day forecast information at that time. Yeah, Mike, I know there's been a little bit of a buzz to have more of a dynamic statistical cone, if you will. In other words, you know, there's always been, well, this is what our average era is. So this is where the cone is. Yeah. But that that doesn't always work the best. How how is that discussion going along? Yeah, you could tell us about that. I think that's part of a broader discussion we want to have about, you know, what's driving our probabilistic products, not just the cone, but the probabilistic storm surge information and the probabilistic information about tropical storm and hurricane force winds. Right now, you're right, they all use basically historical errors over the past five years or so. You know, what are the typical errors at day one, two, three, four or five in terms of track intensity, How much does the size of the storm vary? We want to start moving towards incorporating real time uncertainty information from ensembles into those into those products. So that's that's a goal that we want to try to work toward. I think it'll probably come first for track because that's where we have the most reliable ensembles. Now we can use global ensembles from the European that GFS that can can start to capture the uncertainty in the track forecast. They're not perfect, but we probably have and we have information we could extract from them getting to the intensity and the structure. Information is going to take more time. We're going to have to have a, you know, a bigger and right now we don't really have a dynamical model hurricane ensemble that really can, you know, capture the uncertainty and the structure and the intensity of the storms. That's something we need to work towards. But my guess is it will be a gradual process over the next several years, maybe 5 to 10 years, where we start to phase in more dynamical uncertainty, information into those types of products there to be able to convey, you know, what the uncertainty is of this particular forecast case. And Mike, I know a lot of people are familiar with the National Hurricane Center, at least hearing the name, but I don't think they know a lot of the details about the hurricane Center. So how many people work at the National Hurricane Center? And then does the staffing change based on during hurricane season and outside of hurricane season? And then if you have multiple storms in the Atlantic and Pacific, does your staffing change even within hurricane season? Yeah, well, certainly the staffing changes on a given shift depending on the levels of activity. But we have about 50 federal employees that work at the hurricane Center. We also have some contractor support. We also have folks from FEMA and from the Air Force that work in the building with us to help coordinate emergency management messaging on the femicide and also help coordinate all the aircraft reconnaissance tasking from the Air Force and Noah, from our Air Force employees that work in the building. So we also have a year round operational Marine forecast branch called Taffy, the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch, which issues high seas forecasts, Marine forecast and warnings year round 24 seven Inside and outside of hurricane season. And then we have the hurricane forecast operations that pretty much are running from May 15th to November 30th. But you're right, the level of staffing, especially on the hurricane operations side, is pretty variable because it's it's sort of a activity dependent workload. You know, sometimes we have quiet periods where there's no storms. There might be one storm. We typically have two people scheduled for every shift, regardless of activity. But then we can supplement that staffing when we do get the three or four storms or we get to a big, you know, land threatening storm internationally or in the United States, the workload goes up a fair bit because there's more data to look at from aircraft. There's more coordination to do in terms of international coordination for watches and warnings, internal coordination with the National Weather Service for U.S. threats. So, you know, sometimes we have it can get really, really busy. We have a storm surge unit that activates when we have storm surge threats for the U.S. and internationally as well. So they sort of have an operational piece. So it's not, you know, for a big U.S. landfall threat, we might have five, six, seven people out on the ops for, you know, doing all the different parts of the job which go from data analysis, somebody doing the forecast, doing the coordination, doing the messaging and getting the word out to everybody. So back to that point about what you do during the course of the hurricane season, I think when I was still an undergrad in I believe it was Bob Sheets was the director at the time, once told me that you're actually busier outside of hurricane season than during hurricane season. Is that still the case and why? I think we're as busy, at least, you know, because the off season is is where we do all of our outreach, all of our training for emergency managers, for meteorologists. We have go to hurricane conferences. It's sort of where we do the the yearly run up to the hurricane season. Some of it's just reminding people we have a hurricane awareness tour where we take hurricane hunter aircraft out to different parts of the country. You know, it's it's interesting. This has sort of been the first year where we've gotten fully back into our in-person outreach and training post-COVID. But we still are keeping a lot of the virtual stuff we did during COVID. So we're adding on more and more outreach that we, you know, really wouldn't been able to handle before because there's only so many people to go around. There's only so many weeks, there's only so much travel. But when you have an ability to do virtual outreach, that sort of really expands your your reach and your scale. So we have you know, it's you know, we have outreach that's going to go all the way into even into early parts of the hurricane season. Now, the the the effort to reeducate people, remind people of the threats is constant. We have people moving to hurricane prone areas every year from areas where they don't have hurricanes. Other hurricane prone areas haven't had significant impacts in a long time. But people forget pretty quickly what the what the risk might be. So there's a continual education effort to that that we undertake in the off season. It's not just that, though. We're doing the post analysis from all the storms from last year, writing up all the tropical cyclone reports, working with the modeling community to improve our forecast models that go into effect for the next year. So there's always a continual focus on improving the products and services that is heavily, you know, heavily skewed toward the off season or the outside hurricane season time. And then sticking with the staffing theme, you know, one of the buzzy things that just keeps getting brought up and brought up in so many different aspects of society these days is artificial intelligence. So I'm curious, is the Hurricane Center currently using any artificial intelligence? Are there plans to implement it in the future? We're starting to dabble in it a little bit. We have some some intensity models that are using things like neural networks to try and, you know, pull in different sources of information and come up with different ways to create consensus forecast for tropical cyclone intensity. But I think, you know, that's an area where we're going to have to move going forward into the future simply because the human forecasters ability to absorb information in the time that you have to do the forecast is somewhat limited. And as observations continue to increase and especially model output, you know, you could imagine five, ten years from now we're going to have orders of magnitude more models for forecasters to look at. You're going to have to have some sort of tools that are going to be able to synthesize that information, give you different clusters of solutions to look at, figure out how the human is going to interact with all that data going forward. So I think I could certainly be a part of that as we move into the future. I imagine that's a tool unlike any tool that could be used very well, and sometimes it could be used not so well. So we'll we'll see how that goes. I'm going to take a little bit of a break, then we'll be right back with more with National Hurricane Center Director Mike Brennan on the Across the Sky podcast. And we're back with National Hurricane Center Director Mike Brennan on the Across the Sky podcast. And we're getting into hurricane season on the 1st of June, and there's a lot of buzz, as there always is, about what kind of the season we're going to have. Now without getting too specific, You know, Mike, in general, when we have a positive insight or an El Nino that tends to inhibit tropical cyclone, a hurricane formation, that's that's kind of a baseline. Yeah. But what other kinds of things are out there in terms of clues to what kind of a season we may have in the Atlantic basin? Yeah, and you're right, El Nino and La Nina are two of the biggest is one of one of the biggest factors we see and sort of modulating overall activity in the Atlantic, especially in the deep tropics. But there are a lot of other factors. The Atlantic basin is very warm this year, which would normally be indicative of a potentially busier season. We've been in this active area for many years now, going all the way back to the mid 1990s, and we don't see any signs that that active era has come to an end, certainly based on the last few years of activity. So what we're likely to see this year is just competing factors. Yeah, we don't know how El Nino is going to evolve, how quickly it's going to strengthen, you know, does it does it come on quicker? Does it come on slower or how strong is it going to be? How does that interplay with these other factors in the Atlantic basin in terms of seas and other factors that might be more favorable for an active season? So I would emphasize that, you know, we don't know what the season is going to look like, but we've had plenty of hurricane impacts in the United States and El Nino years and otherwise less active years. We've had major hurricane landfalls, the biggest killer in the last ten years, and tropical storms and hurricanes in this country, as is rainfall, flooding, which has very little to do with how strong storms are. So even if you get weaker systems that don't go on to develop or even become a hurricane, you can still have significant rainfall, flooding impacts. So again, we try to keep people focused on the hazards. And, you know, we always say that it only takes one storm affecting you to make it a bad season where you are. And that's the message we put out there, regardless of what any seasonal forecast might say. And best that we can, we try to re-emphasize that message as well. Yeah, only, you know, I think run from wind, hide from water. I believe it's something along those lines the other way around the run from the water. I hide from the wind. That's it. That's kept me. Thank you very much. But yeah, the water really is is the long term threat. Regarding the outlooks, as you said, it only takes one. So a lot of people have asked, you know, what's what's the value in doing these outlooks? Yeah, I kind of say, well, it's a good exercise and in understanding the right and I imagine there there are other, you know, partners, if you will, that benefit like insurance companies. But who who else may benefit from doing these types of outlooks? Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, there certainly it's a valid scientific effort because, you know, the more you understand about how the basin scale activity works on a season, you know, that may lead to better understanding of how things work on an individual storm scale. And then certainly, you know, utility in trying to predict these larger longer term seasonal the sub seasonal trends. Yeah, there should be a tremendous amount of interest and overall hurricane activity in the basin from insurance companies to the maritime shipping industry. There's so much commerce that moves around on the waters that, you know, are affected by potentially all hurricanes, whether or not they, you know, ever make it to land or not. So, you know, in just general situational awareness, you know, there is benefit in saying, hey, hurricane season is about to start. Here's what here's what we're looking at for this season. It's again, it serves as a really good reminder and sort of a big messaging boost to say, hey, hurricane season is coming, here's the outlook, here's how you can use the outlook, here's how you should use the outlook. You have to get into the details, use it the right way. I mean, looking beyond the outlook, is there something in particular from a preparation standpoint that is concerning for you and this season in particular? Oh, every season you're you're worried about people being complacent. I think again, we've seen a tremendous migration of people in this country moving around the last few years. During COVID, after COVID, we've seen a lot of people moving to hurricane prone states from other places that may or may not be hurricane experience, may not know what the risk is. I mean, I think that's that's always my biggest concern is that you go into hurricane season and people don't know what the risk is, especially if you live in a storm surge prone area. If you don't know, you live in a storm surge area and you might be asked to leave your home, then your whole preparation plan doesn't work. You know, you have to know now if you're going to be asked to potentially leave your home in advance of a storm. So you can make that plan. Now, figure out where you're going to go, how you're going to get there, what you're going to take with you, all those types of things that you need to figure out now. And I think just again, the complacency and the focus on potentially too much focus on how strong the storm is from a wind perspective now, you know, we think we can have tremendous storm surge events from so-called weaker hurricanes that they're big and slow moving, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, but also in other places. The rainfall threat, as I mentioned, has almost nothing to do with how strong a storm is from the wind perspective. And those are the hazards that that really are the deadliest. And what we want to try to hit on as hard as we can. Yeah. Have you noticed any other kinds of long term trends in tropical cyclones slash hurricane development? And, you know, there's a little of the research I've seen that shows that, you know, they're holding their strength that farther north, their latitudes, perhaps that their their forward speed is beginning to slow down in the mean, which also lends itself to heavier rain and flooding. Right. Do you see some of those trends even operationally? Or what could you speak to to those longer term trends? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in a warming climate, I think we're most concerned about increasing risk from the water hazards we know that with sea level rise, we're going to see more storm surge, worse storm surge and storm surge in addition, occurring and moving into places where it hasn't been experienced previously. And you think the sort of the best consensus now is that by the year 2100, in some places, storm surge in a nation will be 2 to 3 feet higher than it is now. So you're going to have an increasing risk from surge, which puts more people in evacuation zones, which means you have potentially more people you have to move out ahead of a storm. And the other thing we're seeing is the heavier rainfall. We're already seeing that in hurricanes and in non hurricane, extreme rainfall events are getting worse. They're getting more frequent. We know a warming atmosphere holds more moisture. And it really has to do with how hot, how fast that rain falls in a given area and what the previous, you know, soil moisture conditions are, how that runoff, you know, plays into effect. And we know that that's going to be driving an increasing risk of rainfall, flooding as well. And again, rainfall, flooding is sort of the equal opportunity hazard. It can happen. And everywhere, you know, not just landfall locations, but hundreds of miles away, days after landfall and topography and urban areas. So that risk is is somewhat concerning. The other longer term trends are really less certain in terms of changes in storm intensity. You know, how that will evolve in a in a in a changing climate. So we're trying to keep the focus on those those particular water hazards where we are more confident in how those trends are going to play out. And Mike, as you look ahead at the next five, ten, 15 years, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing the National Hurricane Center looking forward? Well, I mean, I think we've got a few things. We've got an increasing risk and we have, you know, increasing population in hurricane prone areas so that even as our forecast are improving and they are the pace of growth, the number of people that we have to move, the amount of infrastructure along in hurricane prone areas is also increasing maybe even faster than the forecast or increasing. So so we're in a race, you know, against population trends and exposure. That is that is that we're trying to keep up with. I think a lot of it is is again, messaging how do we get through to people about what the hazards are, How do we get people to take action? Because in many cases, the forecasts are good enough now with enough lead time for people to try to generally take protective action. But we see that there are people you know, we know from social science, there are groups of people that are really hard to get to move. And, you know, when we see that play out in every event, you know, one of the great ironies is that the forecast information is so much better now, but people's but the way people consume information is so much more complex. We don't know what messages they're getting or they're getting conflicting messages from a variety of sources. So we have to stay active in that space in whatever emerging communication trends and communication platforms that come up. And we can't leave the old ones behind either. People still watch local television, people are on social media, people are on Twitter, Facebook, other platforms. We have to meet them where they are and we have to keep expanding into those new areas so that we can keep our voice out there and help sort of the hurricane community, you know, have everybody focused on the same message. And and I think those are some of the challenges we face going forward. Yeah, communication is such a huge part of the story. And before we wrap up, just stepping back a little bit, you know, I think for many meteorologists, I know we have a lot to listen to this podcast. I think a lot would say that perhaps their dream job is to be the director of the National Hurricane Center. So was this your dream job and how can you describe the experience that you've had over the last while taking over this role? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a job I've been interested in for a while. So, you know, I'm not sure I ever thought I would get here. You know, when you start your career, you have no ideas about where it might go. And but, you know, things things worked out well for me. And I was in the right, you know, a lot of it just being having the right experiences and having being in the right place at the right time to to take advantage of opportunities. But yeah, I mean, I'm just so excited to step into this role. There's so many things that, you know, I'm so proud of the staff that I lead at the hurricane Center. We've got just got immensely talented people that work there, and they're so dedicated. I think, you know, I think the National Weather Service in general has the best mission in all of government to protect lives and property. It doesn't get any clearer or any more motivating than that. And I you know, the Hurricane Center has such a huge piece of that when it comes to tropical storms and hurricanes. And we've seen that play out. So many times over the last few years. And, you know, we learned lessons. Things aren't perfect. You know, there are challenges. But I think we've seen our role make a difference so many times in these multiple landfalling events in the last few years. You know, it's just a reminder of how important the work we do is. And that's really motivating and inspiring and carries us forward into into the upcoming season. Yeah, no question about that, especially in this day and age with information all over the place. You know, the staff of the hurricane of the Hurricane Center has been very consistent over the years. And I know as a member of the of the weather and climate enterprise, we're very grateful for for the work that you and all the staff do there at NHC before we let we let you go because we know you're busy, are there one or two other key messages you really want to drive home to the public, not just about the hurricane season in general, but things they really need to remember when they're taking in a product from the hurricane center. I've tried to tell people the cone is important. Yeah, but look beyond the cone cone is that everything? There's other things going on. What other kinds of messages do you want to be sure to get out there? Yeah, that's a great one. The cone is kind of like the cover of a book. It's sort of a high level overview of where the center of the storm's likely to go over the next few days. But it's not going to tell you about your risk from storm surge or rainfall or even necessarily tropical storm or hurricane force winds. There are lots of hazards associated with hurricanes. They're complicated events and that's what makes them challenging to communicate. You have different hazards occurring in different places at different times, and the scale and scope of those hazards can evolve during a storm. So focus on the watches and warnings. Focus on what your local emergency managers or government officials are telling you to do in terms of evacuation and preparation. Listen to your find your trusted sources of information through the media, your broadcast meteorologists, your other, your other folks and the weather enterprise that you that you trust and make sure you're connected to them. The other thing I want to touch on is after the storm safety, we lose almost as many people do, fatalities that occur after tropical storms and hurricanes as we do during the storm itself. A lot of these are due to accidents, electrocutions, heart attacks, carbon monoxide poisonings from improper generator use, you know, power issues, heat related fatalities. So when you're asked to evacuate in advance of a storm, it's to keep you safe generally from storm surge, but it's also to help keep you out of an area that might be completely devastated for weeks after where you're not going to have emergency services, You may not have power or water or medical equipment to to take care of yourself. And a lot of these indirect fatalities disproportionately affect older people who may have mobility or health issues that that make them less resilient in the face of the aftermath of a significant hurricane. So we want people to stay safe after the event. We don't want to lose them. And in those days and weeks after the storm, for sure. Mike, thank you so much. Before we let you go, working people find the hurricane Center online. Get real easy. Hurricanes, dot gov. That'll get you to the National Hurricane Center. If you go to Weather.com, that'll get you to your local National Weather Service office that we partner with to get the messaging all the way from the storm scale down to your community. So that's that's where you can start to to search for information. Thank you, Mike. Good luck this season and good luck with everything out there today as well. And take care. Thanks, John. Think about wow, that was a lot to get into. And we did it in less than half an hour, which is a small miracle. But I'm so glad he was able to touch on the communications aspect. He was able to talk about why these hurricane outlook outlooks are important. You know, the climate impacts, the real world impacts of the storm. And, you know, and this is something I hadn't thought that much to to discuss in my external communications map. But after the storm, how many people get hurt after the storm? I you know, I guess one of the things I thought of intuitively, but but I don't talk about. Well, yeah, you know, I think there it often does get overlooked. So it doesn't surprise me that you brought that in because, you know, we get people we so we're so focused on getting people out of the way of the storm. And then after the storm passes, a lot of people who did get out of the way are very anxious to go back home, see what the damage is. You know, what is the state of their house, get back there. But rushing back in after a devastating landfall or a hurricane or even if it's not that big of a hurricane, technically, maybe it's just a tropical storm that was over the same area and a lot of flooding. Think of all the flooded roads that are left behind. You really don't want people rushing back in because it does lead to injuries. It does lead death. So, yes, it's the aftermath and the recovery from it as well. You know, the one thing that that stood out to me and I thought it was so great, you know, with the discussion about the forecasts going, the one comment he made is that the forecast cone is the cover of the book. And I thought that was that was just a perfect way to phrase it, because the cone is not everything. Yes, it's probably the biggest thing. It's what you see the first and what everybody wants to see. But boy, there are a lot more details when you even just just glancing at the cone, there's a lot of details just on the cone. But then it's really going beyond the cone and all the impacts that are not explained on the cone. And so really, that's why I don't want people just to think they see the cone and All right, I know what's going to happen. It's like you need to get into the details and find out all the information because you're not going to get everything from the cone. There are a lot of details that need to be ironed out. So it's always like the cone is just part of the story. Make sure you get all the details. Yeah, I'm probably going to start to steal that line from him that it's that it's like the cover of the book. And you can't judge the entire book by the cover. There is so much more to dig into. I think that is something we're going to see more and more as we go in the decades to come is as our forecast ability does get stronger to be able to resolve these finer structures within the hurricane. Because as you know, and we saw this with Ian last year that are one side of the hurricane, even if you're within ten or 20 miles of the eye wall is very different than the other side of the hurricane. You know, you've got an offshore wind versus an onshore wind and the impacts are very, very different. So we have to remind people it's not a point. All the impacts are not within 20 miles. It's a beast. It is just the cover. This is just a starting point. We pay attention to all the impacts that come with storms like these, you know? Well, you know, the other thing I think that's worth mentioning is that the 2023 hurricane season is already underway because there was a storm in January. It was just re identified. They did a post analysis, the National Hurricane Center identified a storm on January 16th that actually impacted Newfoundland and Nova Scotia with 60 mile per hour winds. Well, it turns out that was a subtropical storm. So we've already even though it didn't get a name, it's already our first storm, the season. So we're already sitting at one storm watch already. So our first named storm is going to be Arlene. But technically when Arlene comes around, it's going to be the second storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. So it's no more about, well, when hurricane season starts. No, it has officially begun. We've already had one storm. Yeah. And we remind people that even though hurricane season season starts on the 1st of June and goes into November, they can and do occasionally come outside of the season. But the core of the season is mid-August to mid-October. That's when you really need to to bring your awareness up to its its highest level is during that 8 to 10 week period there in late summer and early fall. Okay. So with that, we're going to close up shop for this week. Big thanks to Michael Brennan for taking time with us, the director of the National Hurricane Center. We've got a few more things coming up in the pipeline. I know Joe's not here, but I got to plug his dog eating contest. So we've got that working. We also talked to Mike that is here in Richmond about sports betting and and especially baseball to a lesser extent football weather. We're working on a couple of other climate e things I'm hoping that will come through more on those coming up hopefully next week or two but for right now Matt Holiner is in Chicago, meteorologist Sean Sublette in Richmond, Virginia, thanks for joining us for the Across the Sky podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season doesn't begin until June 1, but we're already getting some early indications of what to expect. The first hurricane forecasts of the year are coming out.  In our hurricane season preview, the meteorologists discuss the factors that will impact the number of storms that form this year, including El Nino, La Nina, Saharan dust, and water temperatures. Wonder what names the storms will be given? The team reveals those as well, plus what happens when the initial list of 21 names gets exhausted. They also discuss how to better warn people as the storms approach the coast and share their most memorable hurricane stories.  Related episodes In the sky with a hurricane hunter: Part 1 In the sky with a hurricane hunter: Part 2 Hear from the man who's been on 70-plus hurricane hunting flights Uncovering the mysteries of ancient hurricanes Hurricane Sandy: Looking back at the superstorm 10 years later What went right and wrong with Hurricane Ian: forecasts and communication About the Across the Sky podcast The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team: Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Across the Sky, our Lee Enterprises Weather podcast. I'm Matt Holliner, covering weather for all of Lee's Midwest websites, apps and social media accounts. And I'm joined by my fellow meteorologist Joe Martucci with a press of Atlantic City in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Sean Sublette with the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Richmond, Virginia. And for this episode, guess it's just April. Hurricane season does not begin until June 1st, but we're starting to get some indications, some early signs of what we might expect this hurricane season of course, we've got to get through severe weather season first, but we know there's lots of interest once we get to this time of year and we start to get warmer temperatures, even in the Midwest where I am, my goodness, 80 degree weather. But then you start thinking, wait a minute, with warmer weather, so comes warmer sea surface temperatures and you start looking to the Atlantic. And when we get an early season surprise this year and then what about the peak of Atlantic hurricane season? So we're going to start to share some of our thoughts. What's going to help this season, what's going to hinder it, and what are we ultimately going to get? So, guys, what are some of your initial thoughts as we look ahead to hurricane season? Of course, with you guys being closer to the coast, the impacts a little bit higher as well. Yeah, I mean, you know, we are the press of Atlantic City. Atlantic City is smack dab on the Jersey Shore here. Many of us, you know, very, very cognizant of Superstorm Sandy, which I just can't believe. But it was 11 years ago here, you know, looking at the Colorado State University forecast, they're kind of like the gold standard, along with the National Hurricane Center for these forecasts fairly average for this compared to climatology. So, you know, 13 named storms averages 14.46 hurricanes. The average is 7.2 major hurricanes. That's category three. Four or five hurricanes is a to average is three. I think we can certainly take, you know, a little bit of a sigh of relief that we're not being forecasted to be above average, especially over the past couple of years. You know, I think El Nino is really the player for this. You know, after three winters in a row with a La Nina and we talked about that in our winter forecast episode back in November, you know, we're transitioning into an El Nino that's warmer than average waters along the equatorial Pacific, basically to tell people to go off the coast of Peru. And your temperatures are above average. That should stifle some tropical development. You know, at the same time, waters generally in the North Atlantic are above average. That's been the trend for the past couple of decades. We don't see that going away any time soon. So that can really help to fuel some storms. You know, to be honest, not you know, for us at the Jersey Shore, I think, you know, Sean would say something similar. We never let our guard down. That being said, you know, it could definitely be in a more impactful area like the Gulf Coast or Florida. Yeah. I mean, to that point, you know, anywhere in the Middle Atlantic and southeast coast always needs to be mindful during hurricane season. And, you know, these exercises and the folks at Colorado State have been doing this for 40 years now. These exercises in seasonal hurricane forecasting are very important so that we get a better understanding of how the ocean and the atmosphere kind of react in this way and what kind of seasons do they produce. You know, I, I don't know if you guys get this, but I still get a lot of like, well, why bother doing this if it only takes one? Why do you care? Well, one thing we need to understand the ocean and atmosphere better, too. Insurance companies are really interested in this kind of stuff, you know, even if just an individual homeowner or an individual business owner may not care that much or this might not change their preparation to beginning of the season, it's still important in the longer term understanding and ultimately for business impacts as well. Right now we like to tell people no matter what the outlook is, if one hits your backyard or you get flooded out or whatever, then it's been a bad season for you. I think the classic example of this is Hurricane Andrew in 1992, when that was during a very otherwise relatively quiet season. But obviously, Andrew, the impacts of Andrew in South Florida are still being felt today, which is, you know, 30 years later. So that's I think the key here is that this is important. It shouldn't change preparation, I think, for anybody. But it is nice to see, you know, for me, I'm really curious because as you said, you were coming off of three consecutive La Ninas. Now we're all the numerical guides is just screw seeming like we're going to get an El Nino. And that tends to inhibit hurricane development, doesn't prevent it, but of course, it backs it off a fair bit. But at the same time, we've got very high temperatures with respect to normal of the water and the Atlantic. So there's also this kind of academic idea in my head. So which one of these things is going to win out? You know, and I think to make sure that we're clear for people who aren't familiar, you know, when we're talking about El Nino, we're talking about above normal sea surface temperatures in the Pacific. But we're also seeing above normal season temperatures in the Atlantic. But what the thing is, the Pacific being a larger body of water, when you get those above normal sea surface temperatures and I'm sitting right now, we're in a neutral phase, to be clear. We've come out of landing and we're in a neutral phase. But already we're seeing a warming trend like the Pacific is getting ready to transition to El Nino. I think that's the question is how quickly does that occur? Because when you get above normal sea surface temperatures in the Pacific, what happens is there's increased wind shear across the Atlantic. And when there's more wind shear across the Atlantic, higher level winds that tears up these storms and makes it harder for them to form. So typically when you have El Nino, you see reduced tropical activity in the Atlantic and it's the opposite. La Nina and the Pacific causes enhanced tropical activity in the Atlantic because of the reduced wind shear across the Atlantic. So it's an opposite effect. LA Nina enhances Atlantic hurricane season. El Nino causes it to typically be lower. But the catch this year is we're seeing above normal sea surface temperatures in Atlantic. So you're absolutely right, Sean, Which one of these is going to win out? And I think what it's also going to come down to is how quickly does El Nino form, if it holds off a little bit and doesn't get going? You know, we don't really see a true El Nino set up and that increased wind shear until September or October. You know, watch out for July and August. I think, because the water is definitely going to be warming up and there's not much wind shear and then we could get some activity. No, it was remarkable how quiet August was last year. I would be surprised if we had the same results again this year. So, you know, for people who are or who are going to continue to monitor this in the months and weeks ahead, and it's how quickly do we get El Nino to actually set up in the Pacific, the sooner the better, because that will increase the wind shear and make it less likely that hurricanes will form. But if it takes longer, then I think we have to watch out. You reminded me mad about how quiet we were for a while here with our tropical systems. I believe we went and here we go again. Now, from July 2nd to September 1st, we had not one storm. And typically August is when you really ramp it up. We had nothing. We ended up calling on the second. Then we had Danielle in September. I believe at that time I believe I believe maybe you guys know, was it the only time we in Tropical history we were without a named storm in August? They remember that. I feel like that was a nugget that seems to stick in in my head, at least in the modern era, at least in the satellite era. I think that's the case. Again, like you said, I'd have to go back and look it up. My sense and see if you all remember this. The way I do it was that there was a little more Saharan dust in August, the window and or we were in a phase of the Mad Julian oscillation, which also did not favor tropical development. And that's just off the top of my head. I can't remember that for certain, but I think those two things kind of put a little squashing on the activity in August of last year in a time that would otherwise be fairly act. No, you're 100% right on the dust, Shawn. And I remember that not only for the reason you said, but Florida. There was a lot of there was a haze in the sky from Florida, from some of that dust as well. And I'm actually looking at the it's called the United States Drought Monitor. And you'll look at Florida. I do believe some of the reason why Florida is in drought right now is because of that dust last summer, which really helped to dry things out. And they didn't get a lot of rain starting back to last year. And I'm looking at now a year ago, 21% at this time Florida was in drought, now it's 66%. And there was that increase throughout the summer and fall of last year, which got them to that point. So, yeah, I mean, and again, you know, that that was good, that we were that we were quiet, you know, relatively quiet through August. But then we went to September, got to made up for that really quickly because we had Danielle, Earl, Earl, Fiona Gaston in her mean, we even had a tropical depression in there. And Ian of course that that's that that's pretty close to the Mount Rushmore of most significant hurricane impacts you'll see And what is it with the ice storms, by the way? I mean, we've noticed this, right? For some reason, the ice storms tend to be the have whether it's just a statistical freak or whatever. But the ice storms, I think, have been more retired than any other storm. You know, when we go through it alphabetically, you know, we have we have these lists of storms. You know, it's repeated every six years or these six list because people like where do they name these things anyway? Well, there are six main lists for the Atlantic hurricanes. So they're you know, they're repeated every six years. And every once in a while when a storm is especially bad, causes a big loss of property and or there are fatalities. The name is retired because it's such an impactful event. The name doesn't want to be repeated. And that's done by the World Meteorological Organization. And Ian was retired from last year. And do y'all remember what was the other one that was retired last year? Yeah, that was Fiona. Diana. Yes. Yeah. Which was just like two weeks before Ian did a lot of damage in the Canadian Maritimes of all places. Yeah, Yeah. I think it was the most costly storm to hit Canada. If I recall. Right, and that's a big reason why I was being retired. It was also damaging in the Caribbean, not really an impact to the U.S., but they don't get you. Typically the cold water kicks in and these things dissipate before they actually make landfall in Canada. But that one did not happen. It was moving fast and came in, I think only as a category one, but a category one in Canada is a big deal. And so I I'm pretty sure I read that it was the most costly storm. Yeah. And to your point, we always have to be careful about saying only quote unquote category one, because there's still so much water with these things as well. You know, this goes back to the we could speak for like three or 4 hours about the surfer Simpson scale, right. About impact. And don't don't get so locked in with the category when it comes to impacts because they can rain like like crazy and be quote unquote only a cat one and they could do massive amount of flooding, even though it's only a cat one. I mean, Sandy was a cat one transitioning to an extra tropical cyclone as it came onshore, the Jersey Shore. And you know, all this I mean, Joe, you know about this way more than I do, buddy. But yeah, yeah. These things, no matter what their category, they do damage. You know, Sandy, of course, was well, it wasn't technically a cat one at landfall as opposed tropical cyclone. Just to speak on behalf of my New Jersey brethren, our last landfalling hurricane was back in the 19 tens. We have not had a landfalling hurricane since then. Going back to that, I though, Sean, we've had 13 ice storms retired. That is the most and we had three this decade in Aida, which was the year before. And then Iota. Oh, yeah. Do you want to. Yeah, I don't think we should count that though. Because of what? Because it wasn't the ninth one. Because that whole weird Greek alphabet thing. Wow. Yeah. I mean, do we want to go down that rabbit hole? Well. Well, the other thing is that we don't, you know, we don't do the Greek alphabet anymore. If we run out of names, there's a new. There's a second debris list. So if we run out of the primary list, we don't do this alpha, beta gamma stuff anymore. Yeah. Which I think is probably much better, but I think people got a little too attached to the Greek letter, like, Oh, we're going Greek, you know. You know, all the fraternity memes come out on Twitter with with the hurricanes and all that good stuff. And then a serious point, You know, what do you do when you have a Greek alphabet storm that was tremendously impactful and, you know, it gets brought up for a vote to be retired because there's no other Greek letter. I think that was part of the impetus for doing it. If it was. Yeah. Why do you suppose the original impetus, the impetus that's a good that's a good vocab word for it for our Across the Sky podcast listeners, I think with that that was such a great word, Sean. I think, well, we'll take it. That also starts with I know, yes it does it also, but I will retire for a little bit after that. I and we'll come back in just a minute. Everybody here, thank you for listening. And we've got to in just a second on the across the Sky bond. And welcome back, everyone, to the Across the Sky podcast. Come out with new episodes every Monday. And we do thank you for listening. You know, we have seen our audience steadily grow. We just had a meeting about how things are going with the big bosses and they were happy with the podcast, so we do appreciate it. If people weren't listening, we would have been canceled. We have not been canceled. We are continuing and if you enjoy the podcast, also give us a wherever you listen to your podcast, give us a review, give us a rating that helps as well. So do thank you for tuning in and this week's episode all about hurricanes. And the main reason we decided to do a hurricane themed episode, even though it's April and kind of get into the peak of severe weather season, is because Colorado State usually comes out with the first forecasts for the Atlantic hurricane season every year. And they just came out with the one for 2023 and we mentioned it at the top of the episode. But to recap their forecasts for this Atlantic hurricane season beginning June 1st, 2023, and going through November 30th, they're calling for 13 named storms. And of those 13 named storms, that includes tropical storms and hurricanes. Of those 13 named storms, six becoming hurricanes and two becoming major hurricanes. And compare that to a normal year, we typically see 14 named storms, seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes. So they're basically going one number below the average. And in their reasoning for it, they're conflicting issues with the forecast. So we do expect El Nino to form and wind shear, more wind shear than usual across the Atlantic. So that should hold down activity. But the problem is we're seeing above average sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic. So which one wins out? And because we're thinking maybe El Nino could end up setting up actually this summer, even before the fall, where they're leaning with El Nino running out just slightly. Just slightly. So basically a near-normal season. But I guess that is better compared to what we dealt with in 2020 and 2021. Now, 2022 was actually near normal, but it was looking like it was going to be above normal season. I think everybody definitely had some PTSD after 2020 and 21 to blockbuster years, so we kind of caught a break a little bit. But I tell you what, people in Florida, I don't think they caught a break last year with Ian coming through. So again, that was another example of how, you know, it was especially we went through that quiet August and nothing was going on and then, boy, did things change. So that's why you can't let your guard down, even though it's technically being forecast right now. And there are other forecasters come and we'll see how this all plays out with still, when you're talking about a near average hurricane season, that does not mean you need to go through the motions of not preparing for a hurricane, because we could absolutely have multiple landfalls in the US, you know, and that's the thing we can't forecast is where these things are going to occur. Are they just going to be out in the middle of the ocean or are they going to make landfall and we can't say that this far out. So, guys, what else are you thinking about this upcoming hurricane season? I'm thinking about some of the the changes that the Hurricane Center has put out every year. They put out this this memo that says what's new and what's updated for the season. And, you know, in terms of the forecast cone, I think that's always the the the sexy one. That's the one that that we think about the most here. Not much of a change with that forecast cone. There's been a little bit of an adjustment towards a narrower cone 60 and 72 hours out. But we're really talking like a matter of like miles. And then at 96 and 120 actually expands like three miles at 96 hours, five miles at 120 hours. And that cone and I love to talk about this because I feel like it's time that we need to change the definition of the cone. Right now. It's where the center of the storm is with 66% confidence. And I just think we're so good at forecasting the track and even the intensity of hurricanes, we can make that 75% or something higher. You know, I, I think people believe that that forecast cone is 100% certainty and it's not. So I always like to get on on that. I think we do such a good job. I think it's time to become a little more confident and expand it. I think there's a lot of merit to that argument. Joe. I think know, after last year and what happened with the end, there was a lot of people revisiting the cone and what the cone really meant. And we realized, I think we always realize this to a point that people misunderstand the cone. They just don't understand it the way we think they understand it. There's certainly a lot of value in there, but I try to tell people it's an important thing but is not the only thing. I mean, if you think about the last ten or 15 years since the cone has really been very highly visible in forecasting your public facing forecast, I mean, we push the cone out all the time and we haven't done a good enough job. I mean, not three of us, but I think the community needs to do a better job at saying impacts are not limited to the cone. Sing along if you know the words, the impacts are not limited to the cone. All right. This is our best guess of where the center is going to be. And yeah, near the center, that's where the wind is going to be. The most ferocious. But impacts extend far away from the cone, especially storm surge. Especially storm surge. I think this is kind of what we need to to drive home even more. You know, we keep working. It's a work in progress. Right. But back to your point about the historical probabilities, Joe, I think we have reached a point where we can do something that's a lot more dynamic. But this is where we feel with 75% confidence or whatever percent confidence, this is where it's going to be in this timeframe. You know, the other thing I'd like to see this is tougher, but start when we were Hurricane center puts these things out. And of course we've got a new hurricane director, Hurricane Center director from Virginia, which is, you know, cool for out here guy from from Cape Spring, which is where I used to work many moons ago anyway, to to put some place on a map that is clear. Like we know it's not going here. You plop a big map of the Gulf Coast and you put like, I don't know, let's say New Orleans to Brownsville. That's green. We know absolutely it's not going there. We know that or incorporate something like that. Because one of the things I think a lot of the social science is teaching us as people want to know when they can start paying attention. They want to know when it's safe, not just they want to know when the threat ends. They want to know when they're safe. And I don't know the best way to do that. That's again, that's a social science question, but I think there is some value in that. If we can do it the right way. Now, John, I think you're absolutely right about letting people know when you don't have to worry anymore, because oftentimes, you know, we start watching these things. You know, when they come off of Africa as a little tropical wave. And basically we have to tell everybody, look, this has the potential to develop, but we really do not know if this was just going to curve out in the Atlantic, if it's going to make its way in the Caribbean, maybe the Gulf. And so basically have to tell everybody, like the whole East Coast, it has to be on standby for this one. But that's very early on. And so people and of course, that gets lots of buzz on social media. And then, you know, especially once you do get a story, it looks like it's going to go into the Gulf. Then we have to say the whole Gulf Coast has to be on alert because there's still a lot of uncertainty where this is going to go. And so then everybody in the Gulf Coast gets all worked up and it's on social media and starts to get nervous. But inevitably, that's why you have to keep following the updates. Don't see one forecast, especially when it's five days out and think, Oh, that's it, it's going to change. They're going to be adjustments. There's going to be greater confidence in where that storm is going to go and wherever is the most likely past five days out, four days out. That is likely going to change. Unfortunately, That's why we give you a range of possibilities. But I think you're very right, John. At some point, as you get closer and closer to the landfall, the folks that are going to be feeling the impacts, the number does get smaller. And so letting people clearly know like this area, like Louisiana on West does not have to worry about this storm, like making that very clear, because sometimes I do think that gets lost because then people stop hearing about their location and but they're still concerned because they were never given the all clear. And until somebody hears that all clear, then you get an unnecessary number of people that are overly worked up anxious. They making unnecessary preparations. So yeah, I do think that just as important as messaging, who needs to prepare and who is going to feel the worst impacts, letting people know who is not going to be impacted. And you're absolutely right, that needs to happen as well. Yeah, and there's been a couple of options out there to change. You know how the cone looks. I've seen some like things where like the cone is like really dark in the where the best forecast is and then, you know, gets a little lighter as you spread out to show some more ideas of the impacts, you know, because anywhere in the cone is at the same you know, has the same you should be concerned anyone within that cone, even if you're not in the middle in the hurricane center, did a good job a couple of years ago. Maybe you guys remember what year it is. But removing that line, you know, that connects those dots. Now there's the dots sometimes like in my forecast, I don't even show the dots. I just show the cone. But but that was a good call. You know, it's a lot of social science stuff that we keep getting better at and really was triggered a lot by Hurricane Katrina back in 2005 year. You know, just just looking at some other updates to the Hurricane Center. And I just had it and then I lost it. Hold on. Give me one second, everybody. We're going to do this in real time. So for that, Joe, I think you know what's worthwhile and a big question that a lot of people get, you know, is this is our outlook episode for the upcoming hurricane season. One of the big questions that always comes up is what names are on the list? Oh, yeah, because remember, there are there are six lists that rotate. So if your name is does come up one year, you're going to have to wait six years for it to come up again. But we do have this year's list, so I'm just going to run down from a through W what the names are and see if your name is on the list number A And I know the problem is if you have a name low in the way down the alphabet, sometimes we never get to that name unless it's a really active hurricane season. So maybe especially if you have a w the W we don't want to get to the W storm, but we do have it on the list, so let's just run through it real quick. Most likely we will get an Arlene that is Storm one, number one. And also by the way, remember these these names alternate between female and male. So it's a female name then a male name, a female name, then a male name, and then next year and we'll start with a male name and go to a female name. So Arlene is number one, and then it's Brett. The sea storm is Cindy. Then we have Don, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harold, I believe it's e Dalia. I've got the pronunciation guide up here to the ice storm. So a little bit tricky one e dahlia Jose at Tia, I believe it's Katia is how it's pronounced. Lea Margot The end storm is Nigel. Then we have Ophelia, Phillipe, Rena, Sean We've got a Sean on this year's list. I hope we don't make it to the storm, but John as a possibility might use your name this year. Hammy events. And the storm is Whitney. You know, I actually like this this list this year because most of these are pretty easy to pronounce. There's some years where there are some that are real tough and there's lots of discussion. Exactly how do you say this? And I'm glad the Hurricane Center comes out the pronunciation, guys, because some years their names are a little bit tougher than usual. And this is an international list of names. It's the World Meteorological Organization. It puts together these names. So that's why it's not just us names. It is names from around the world. And that's why you sometimes hear some unusual odd names, and especially when it comes to the ice storms, because so many have been retired, sometimes have to go and find some rather unique names. But that is the list for 2023. If either one of you had your names retired, I don't think so. I think I haven't even looked at Hurricane Matthew. Yeah, Yeah. Hurricane Matthew was retired. Okay, That's right. So let's say currently Matt is not on. They probably haven't added Matt to the list. They probably like that die with Matthew. Yeah, but I don't know. There's been a similar Hurricane Joseph because I've got the list of all six years. I don't see Joseph up here. There's a Josephine Josephine. Yeah. And Jose. Yes. Very close which is going to be Jose's on the list this year is on a list for this year. So I was going to ask you, though, Matt, to have you guys covered those storms with your name and your career like Sean, have you had? No, because Sean came up because there was another storm that was retired and that name and I forget what storm, but there was an S storm that was retired, I want to say, six or 12 years ago. And then CNN was added to the list. I'd have to go back and look to see what names retire, but that hasn't been on the list that long. Would it be kind of odd to cover a storm with your name? I'm going to go. Yeah, I remember doing it with a hurricane, Matt. Now, to be clear, I was in Cincinnati, Ohio, at the time. I was working at the Fox station out there because this this storm occurred in late September, early October of 2016. And so I was in Cincinnati at the time. So I was not being directly impacted by it, but when you have a storm that's impacting the US, every meteorologist in the country is going to talk about it. So I was certainly talking about it. And I think what helped me is though, my my legal name is Matthew. Everybody calls me Matt. So it didn't seem that odd that say, Hurricane Matthew wasn't like I was directly repeating my name. And everybody was like, Oh, hey, Matt, what's the situation with Matthew? And so it sounded a little bit different. I think that that helped making that statement as as odd because of it being Matthew instead of Matt. And everybody called me Matt. So it wasn't wasn't too hot. And especially because I didn't have to talk about all the times, it hasn't directly impacted me. And I just looked up Hurricane Stan in 2005 was retired and then my name went into there, Sean. And so Stan knew it was Rick. Sandy was retired the Oh, you're asking and you said Stan was 2005. Sandy, of course, was retired too, but that was 12 was 2012. Yeah, right. So that 423 that doesn't cycle in. So it had to be Stan in oh five. Gosh. And I guess before we we wrap up this episode kind of go around the horn and talk about our most memorable hurricane experience. I know from again, they start to wind together after a while, you know, and I know some people that were, you know, directly impacted by storms. And I've covered, you know, so many, but most of them indirectly. But I would have to say my most memorable experience is one that actually I was covering blow by blow and actually experienced at the same time. And that was Hurricane Hanna in 2020 that moved over Deep South Texas. And again, that was a great example of it was just a Category one. But my goodness, were there some tremendous impacts now where it actually made landfall? Hurricane Hanna You know, I was in the Rio Grande Valley at the time, which is Deep South Texas, Brownsville, McAllen are by the most notable cities down there. Now. It made landfall north of there. Technically, the eye came in just north of the four counties in the valley. But what this storm did is after it made landfall, I took a dive to the south and west. So it did move over our viewing area and the Rio Grande Valley and the winds were incredible, even though we were technically again, it was already inland, but the winds of this thing was cranking and we weren't even in the most populated part of the valley. It wasn't even in the area with the worst winds. But how much wind damage there was from this was impressive. So I can't you know, it was hard to imagine, like if this had been a category four, Category five, I mean, it was already just tremendously windy. But I think ultimately, despite the wind damage, the amount of tree damage was done in roof damage. My apartment had shingles removed. There was actually a leak that developed in my apartment. You know, all these things that end up happening. But ultimately, again, it wasn't It it wasn't the wind that was the worst part. As bad as it was, it was the amount of rain, because what happened is the storm just slowed down and it basically almost stalled out just to the southwest down in Mexico and just kept rotating, though. And these rounds of rain kept coming in. And even in these rain bands, there were some embedded tornadoes like technically the hurricane itself that passed with these rain bands on the backside of it had some little weak circulations. Well, weak tornadoes popped up on the backside of it. And just the rounds of rain, the flooding that we saw, you know, until you go through a hurricane, you've actually lived through it. You realize how long they last oftentimes. And just all the different impacts and all the different things. I mean, that's why it's just the most fascinating weather out there, because you can have tornadoes within the hurricane and the flooding in the wind. It was truly an incredible experience. But one was enough. I hope I'm okay not covering with being through another hurricane. That was that was good. Good for me. Yeah. So for me, it goes back the first time I was in was a first verse incarnation of Hurricane Charley in August of 1986. We were scheduled to go on vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and and we knew it was coming. Of course, this is 86. All you had was television and radio, and we didn't even have the Weather Channel at my house in Richmond. So I remember this very well because we decided to go anyway, even though the hurricane was was coming in. And as we were going out the back door to get in the car to drive from Richmond into North Carolina, my mom's like, Should we still go? She looks at me. I'm six years old, weather geek. She looks at me. Should we still go? I'm like, Well, it's too late to decide now. Let's go. And we went. It was we made it. I mean, we rode it out. We got down there before. Before we had the biggest impacts that actually pushed back off shore. But that was a windy day for sure. We didn't go anywhere that day. And then the rest of the week, the weather was just kind of air, but that was the first when I was legit in in terms of a legit tropical system. And ironically, because I covered a lot doing through my TV days, I didn't go down to the shore. We always sent somebody else to go cover them at the coastline. I was doing most of the anchoring from the studio, so I haven't been in that many of them. But in terms of other impacts, Isabel is is also one of the the top ones here recently in Virginia. But, you know, all of our big flooding events here in Virginia are tropical systems. If you go back to Agnes Haight and Hazel, Hazel was big in the fifties, but Agnes Camille left over from one in 85. It's all about the water here now. Yeah. And for me, there's not one weather event I can think of that puts sometimes tears in my eyes. Then Superstorm Sandy. In 2012, we were without power for without a week. We knew some people who had power loss for more than two weeks. It was a storm, you know, famous for its left turn right into Brigantine, just north of Atlantic City here. And the destruction you saw on our barrier islands was tremendous. And I think the one part that separates New Jersey from other coastal states is that our whole shore is a barrier island and it juts out into the water. I shouldn't say the whole shore of a 90% of the shore. And the memories in the economy and all the good times you had were laying there in shambles. And that included where I went to a lot every year growing up, which was Seaside, which in many ways was ground zero for the storm. And you know, leading up to it, you knew for days it was going to come. And, you know, the weather geek society is really excited. You're like, wow, this is a once in a lifetime storm. It is coming right for me. And, you know, you balance that out with, well, jeez, people are going to die. There's going to be damage and there's going to be tremendous devastation. I was at Rutgers at the time. I was a senior then and I was in charge of our weather TV weather department weather watcher program at the time and, you know, planning coverage for that. And then I think I said this when we talked about our Superstorm Sandy ten year anniversary episode, I ended up getting into a bicycle accident where I ended up with a concussion and I lost teeth, banged up my nose a little bit, and I was literally, you know, just home was if you ever had a concussion with a very empty feeling and you really couldn't you know, I really was just kind of out for the count during the storm. It was one way I was actually pretty good because classes were canceled for a week and I wasn't going to school anyway. I was concussed. But, you know, when you see the roller coaster that you've been on in the water and you know, you see the places that you used to go, go with with your family and friends, you know, be destroyed. And there was such a sense of unity among everybody in New Jersey to get this right and to pick things back up and to get us back in action. And, you know, I was I our Rutgers group, we went to Midway Beach, just south of Seaside Heights to participate in the cleanup effort. That's actually how in or in a small way, I'm married to my now wife. That was like our first kind of like really talked to each other event that we did with that cleanup. So a lot of memories from Sandy. And we talk about it to this day. And, you know, it was the biggest storm on record in terms of size and it's not the worst storm we could have had at the Jersey Shore. You know, we you know, in our circles here in Jersey, you know, our realistic worst case scenario is a Cat three three that really runs up the coast and provides a you know, it might not be as long lasting as Sandy, but a more powerful strike to the shore. So that's it for me. That's Sandy without a doubt. Yeah, that's quite the story. Joe, you know, I love hearing you just tell it because, I mean, you can hear the emotion in your voice. You know how impactful that storm was. I did realize that while you were up with that story, there's probably something that we should have mentioned at the beginning of the show that I think we were overlooked. Our fellow co-host, Kirsten, not with us. And I didn't even mention why at the beginning, but it's kind of a big reason because we also need to mention it because she's not going to be around for a while because as of just yesterday, April 12th, she delivered a baby boy. So she is this is her her third child. And so she's going to be on maternity leave and flexible leave late June. So she's going to be out for a while. But everything went fine. The baby is healthy. She is doing well. So all is good. We're so happy with that. Is that is in the books for every now and then. She also has some time off to enjoy, enjoy the baby. And she shared a picture and it does look like a cute baby. I'm going to be honest. I don't think all babies are cute. I most. Wow, you're fired. I think most babies are cute. But be honest. Not not all. Not all are. But but this one is. Sure. Since Baby Maxx, you know, obvious thing. So. But I'm just saying, not all babies are bad. I think that gets exaggerate a little bit now. You know, you can't say that to anybody. You have to tell everybody the baby's cute. But as honestly say, the Kirsten's babies get they get cuter the day after for sure. There you go. Yeah. No, congratulations to her. We were really happy for her and core part of this podcast. You know, without her, we wouldn't be doing this in a way in which we are. So she'll be back at the end of June, and I believe it's the end of June. And we're going to we're going to miss our next couple of months. We'll still chat with her, you know, three of us, but we'll have her back here and I'm sure with some some really good stories when we come back. But, you know, certainly congratulations to her. You can follow her on Facebook, Kirsten Lange and on Instagram as well. I believe it's Kirsten Lang one, if I'm correct with that, I think we're going to wrap, right? That. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. But just wanted to be clear, if you don't hear it. Curious to know she was not fired. She went make it very clear she's just on maternity leave enjoying some time with the family. But on that note, I hope you enjoyed this early look at hurricane season 2023. And of course, we will have other hurricane related episodes to come as we get closer to the season starting and of course covering all other topics. Weather related. And one other reminder, if you ever want, there's something you would like to hear us discuss. Contact us on social media. We're always looking for ideas we want to hear discussed. Email, contacts for social media and maybe a topic for next week's episode. But on that note for Sean Sublette in Richmond, Joe Martucci in Atlantic City. I'm Matt Holliner in Chicago. Thanks for listening, everyone, and we'll catch you next time.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hurricane Ian is set to reach Florida's Gulf Coast as early as this afternoon after days of dire warnings about its potential impacts. This morning, the national Hurricane Center said winds had reached 140 mph, strengthening to a Category 4.  More than 2 million people are under orders to leave their homes. Said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: “That doesn't mean you need to go all across God's creation to evacuate — just get to the higher ground and get into a safe structure.” And he's been the de facto decision-maker for the Senate Democratic majority, but after a week of holding the line, Sen. Joe Manchin had to admit defeat Tuesday — for now.  The West Virginia senator was dead-set on passing a permitting overhaul for energy projects this month, by tying the legislation to a must-pass spending stopgap. Manchin world was convinced the time was right for action, with fresh buy-in from Democratic leaders, combined with long-standing support for the notion of permitting reform among Republicans. Subscribe to the POLITICO Playbook newsletter Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing. Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

Join FOX Weather's Hurricane Specialist Bryan Norcross and Acting National Hurricane Center Director Jamie Rhome. Bryan and Jamie talk about what's new this season at the National Hurricane Center, challenges in forecasting and communicating storm surges, the tough calls Hurricane Center forecasters have made recently, and more.

​Satellite & radar above show severe storms in Dakotas headed for the Upper Midwest today/ Grace is moving toward Mexico. Henri..still a tropical storm off the Carolinas...will become a hurricane and move north and likely make landfall over se New England Sunday. That would be the first hurricane to make landfall in New England since Hurricane Bob - 30 years ago. That area is a very large vacation spot right now and this storm should not be taken lightly. We expect The Hurricane Center to begin issuing watches and advisories shortly. It also comes at a time with astronomically high tides. Below - current Atlantic basic map - track of Henri - and track of Grace. Your Robin Hood Radio Tri-State Forecast TODAY – PARTLY CLOUDY- HUMID- MID 80S TONIGHT – CLOUDY- 70 SATURDAY & SUNDAY – SOME SUN, HUMID – THUNDERSTORMS POSSIBLE – 80-85 MONDAY – HAZY- HUMID – SCATTERED THUNDERSTORMS – 85-90

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It’s the first day of the 2021 hurricane season. It could get just as nasty as last year, which set all sorts of records in the Atlantic basin. Also on today’s Sunrise: — The official prediction from the National Hurricane Center is similar to 2020, an above-normal number of storms. While we count on the Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service to give us adequate warnings when a storm heads this way, they rely on us to be prepared. — One good thing about the new season: You can forget about storms named after letters in the Greek alphabet. Turns out there was confusion last year when storms were named Zeta, Eta and Theta. — Speaking of confusion: There’s uncertainty in the cruise ship industry as they try to get back to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the vast majority of passengers and crew should be vaccinated before they set sail, but Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an edict that no one has to show proof of vaccination, and convinced the legislature to make that a law. The Governor also filed suit against the CDC to block any requirement for vaccine passports, so DeSantis is hoping they won't have to fine the cruise lines $5,000 per passenger. — But even if he loses, DeSantis says he's not backing down on the fines for cruise ships that ask for proof of vaccination. — Florida Man Matt Gaetz is at it again. The Panhandle Congressman suggests conservatives who oppose the liberals in Silicon Valley should do something about it … with guns. — And finally, police are accusing a Florida Man of stealing ventilators that were supposed to be shipped to critical care patients in El Salvador last year.

Hurricane Dorian caused limited damage in the northern Caribbean as it left the region and gathered strength late Wednesday, setting its sights on the U.S. mainland as it threatened to grow into a Category 3 storm.Power outages and flooding were reported across the U.S. Virgin Islands, the British Virgin Islands and the Puerto Rican islands of Vieques and Culebra after Dorian hit St. Thomas as a Category 1 storm."We're happy because there are no damages to report," Culebra Mayor William Solís told The Associated Press, noting that only one community lost power.Meanwhile, Dorian caused an island-wide blackout in St. Thomas and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and scattered power outages in St. Croix, government spokesman Richard Motta told the AP. In addition, the storm downed trees and at least one electric post in St. Thomas, he said, adding that there were no reports of major flooding so far."We are grateful that it wasn't a stronger storm," he said.There were no immediate reports of damage in the British Virgin Islands, where Gov. Augustus Jaspert said crews were already clearing roads and inspecting infrastructure by late Wednesday afternoon.Dorian had prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to declare a state of emergency Tuesday night and order federal assistance for local authorities.At 5 p.m. EDT, Dorian was located 45 miles (70 kilometers) northwest of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said it had maximum sustained winds of 80 mph (130 kph) while moving northwest at 14 mph (22 kph).The Hurricane Center said the storm could grow into a dangerous Category 3 storm as it pushes northwest in the general direction of Florida.Dennis Feltgen, a Hurricane Center meteorologist in Miami, said Dorian may grow in size and could land anywhere from South Florida to South Carolina on Sunday or Monday."This will be a large storm approaching the Southeast," he said.People in Florida were starting to get ready for a possible Labor Day weekend strike, with county governments along Florida's east-central coast distributing sandbags and many residents rushing to warehouse retailers to load up on water, canned food and emergency supplies."All Floridians on the East Coast should have 7 days of supplies, prepare their homes & follow the track closely," Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a tweet. Later Wednesday, he declared a state of emergency for the counties in the storm's path.A hurricane watch and tropical storm warning remained in effect for Puerto Rico, with Dorian expected to dump 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) of rain with isolated amounts of 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the eastern part of the island.However, Puerto Rico seemed to be spared any heavy wind and rain, a huge relief to many on an island where blue tarps still cover some 30,000 homes nearly two years after Hurricane Maria. The island's 3.2 million inhabitants also depend on an unstable power grid that remains prone to outages since it was destroyed by Maria, a Category 4 storm.Ramonita Torres, a thin, stooped, 74-year-old woman who lives by herself in the impoverished, flood-prone neighborhood of Las Monjas in the capital of San Juan, was still trying to rebuild the home she nearly lost after Maria but was not able to secure the pieces of zinc that now serve as her roof."There's no money for that," she said, shaking her head.Several hundred customers were without power across Puerto Rico by Wednesday evening, according to Ángel Figueroa, president of a union that represents power workers.Police said an 80-year-old man in the northern town of Bayamón died on Wednesday after he fell trying to climb up to his roof to clear it of debris ahead of the storm.Dorian initially had been projected to brush the western part of Puerto Rico and the change in the storm's course caught some off guard in Culebra and Vieques, both popular tourist destinations.Earlier, Trump sent a tweet assuring islanders that "FEMA and...

We talked with Hurricane Specialist and Union Steward of the National Hurricane Center, Eric Blake, to discuss how the government shutdown is affecting him, his coworkers, and the Hurricane Center. This is episode 2 of our second season: Wrath of the Tropics. Sharing science through the human lens. New episodes every month. Follow us on Twitter: Twitter.com/elementspod

As the longest shutdown in U.S. history continues, closing the government has a ripple effect throughout the country. From food inspections to airport security to recovering from disasters to forecasting the weather, keeping people safe becomes increasingly difficult. Eric Blake from the National Hurricane Center and Steve Reaves from FEMA join meteorologist Kait Parker to share the impacts on themselves as well as those they serve from the ongoing government shutdown.

This week, Bryan and Luke Dorris talk about how the quiet end to the Hurricane Season COULD get interesting soon, and Mike Brennan of the Nat'l Hurricane Center joins the podcast to discuss where storm forecasting and warnings may change in the future.

Preparing for Hurricane Florence with CHS NWS + C.A.S. + Supplies + Live 5 First Alert Hurricane Center - Powered by Jackson Davenport Vision Center in Downtown Charleston

What's Up Wednesday: Preparing for Hurricane Florence with SCE&G + CHS NWS + Live 5 First Alert Hurricane Center - Powered by Matt O'Neill Real Estate

Ken Graham is the Director of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center located in Miami, FL. He joins the Podcast while in Montgomery, AL at one of the annual Hurricane Awareness Tour stops and discusses some of the things the Hurricane Center learned from the 2017 hurricane season and how the center is working to provide better information to save lives and property.

Ken Graham is the Director of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center located in Miami, FL. He joins the Podcast while in Montgomery, AL at one of the annual Hurricane Awareness Tour stops and discusses some of the things the Hurricane Center learned from the 2017 hurricane season and how the center is working to provide better information to save lives and property.

Representatives from the US-based Hurricane Center and the local Met Office give the latest update on Hurricane Matthew

Cliff Hughes and Michelle Thomas with the latest from the Met Office