Tempestology (HURRICANES) Part 1 with Matt Lanza & Dr. Kim Wood

Hurricanes. Typhoons. Cyclones. Tropical storms. Tropical depressions. What does it all MEAAAN? Let’s dive in. Career meteorologists Dr. Kim Wood of the University of Arizona and Space City Weather’s Matt Lanza join for a two-guest two-parter to address the “deadlier” female-named hurricanes, why hurricane season happens, the category system, where hurricanes come from, why they have eyes, and how we track cyclones’ paths so we can stay out of them. Next week we’ll be back with Kim and Matt to chat about climate change, emergency preparation – for any disaster occasion –, the latest on the government funding drama, if you should trust a waffle house more than a weather person, and literally what is on the horizon in the future. Also: cows.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

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• 0:42Alie Ward?

  Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It makes you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit mazdausa.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Your body has a lot going on. Sleep, stress, recovery. You would be surprised how connected it all is. Aura Ring tracks more than 50 metrics from your finger, and the Aura app brings that information together to help you see patterns across your sleep, and stress, activity, and more.

• 1:26Alie Ward?

  So you can start connecting the dots and figure out what works for you. Learn more at auraring.com. Wear your best life with Aura. Oh, hey, it's your ex-boyfriend, who pretended that he didn't know how to wash the cast iron right, so he just didn't. Hallie Ward, this one is a smooth sail through rough weather. Friends, we got hurricanes. You got hurricanes. Maybe you have typhoons or cyclones. Let's hear about the differences. Let's hear how fast they go, how many we might have, and some real historical whoppers and more with not one, but two tempestologists. So tempestology, it's a real word. It describes the study of cyclones and hurricanes and other extreme weather events. And the word tempest, I just found this out,

• 2:12Alie Ward?

  it comes from the Latin root for temporal, meaning time, which morphed into seasons, which morphed into weather and storms, which is apt, because now is definitely the time on Earth to hear about hurricanes. Who Nellie is it? So the first ologist we talked to studied physics and geophysics at Oregon State University and then got a master's and a PhD in atmospheric science at the University of Arizona. They're now an associate professor in the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona. And they teach about tropical meteorology and their research of these giant storm systems. So a shoo-in. And because they both came so highly recommended and I couldn't choose, we also have a Rutgers-trained

• 2:56Alie Ward?

  forecast meteorologist in Houston and a writer and editor for Houston's highly respected meteorological outlet, Space City Weather. This guest is a co-founder of the website, the I-Wall, too, which keeps an eye on developing storms. And it tells you, without a lot of hype, just straight up what to expect. So both of these experts, they're so passionate about hurricanes and relaying info to the public. And I chatted with them both and I heard so many stories that stuck with me. I got so much valuable info that we had to make this a two-parter. But before we dive in, thank you to patrons of the show who make Ologies possible. You can join for $1 or more a month in sending questions to the ologists via patreon.com/ologies. Thank you to everyone out there and merch

• 3:40Alie Ward?

  from ologiesmerch.com. Thank you to everyone who leaves a review for me to read, which helps keep us up in the charts. And I do read all of them, like some weird old-timey man with a candle and a monocle, such as this one from the elegantly-named Hot Dog Harriet, who wrote, "What do you want to know? Anything. If you want to know about anything, this is the pod for you. When my family or I have a question about something, one of the things we do now is check to see if there's an episode of Ologies to answer that question or dig deeper." Hot Dog Harriet, thank you for digging into my archive. And if you, too, want to know which 400-plus episodes we have just waiting for you, go to ologies.com. It's all neatly sorted into topic. Also, if you do not like swear words, we have a spinoff show called Smologies, and you can subscribe wherever you get your

• 4:23Alie Ward?

  podcasts or at the link in the show notes. Okay, tempestology, bat in your hatches for a part one all about cyclones and hurricanes and typhoons. Oh, my. Where hurricanes come from, what your news meteorologist even means by high and low-pressure systems, why hurricanes have eyes. The bizarre history of the category system, the also bizarre history behind the naming system. If lady names mean more deaths? How we figure out the GPS of a big old storm of ruin? And next week, we're going to be back to sort out the best ways to prepare for storms like this, what is happening with climate change, the latest on this year's forecast, the latest on the funding drama, if you should trust a Waffle House for your news,

• 5:07Alie Ward?

  and literally what is on the horizon as hurricane season rears at the gate of its busiest time. With two meteorologists and hurricane experts and tempestologists, Dr. Kim Wood and Matt Lanza.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I'm Kim Wood. I'm an associate professor at the University of Arizona. I specialize in atmospheric dynamics, and my pronouns are they/them.

• 5:48Alie Ward?

  Now hurricanes in Arizona, are there any?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Technically, yes, but the leftovers.

• 5:54Alie Ward?

  Oh, okay.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Because the storms don't like moving over land. They tend to fall apart when that happens. You're not going to still have a coherent, quote unquote, hurricane by the time it gets to Arizona. But the leftover moisture plume will come in and potentially drop quite a bit of rain. In 1992, Hurricane, then Tropical Storm Lester, came right over Tucson. But it coincided with a slightly bigger news story of Hurricane Andrew hitting Florida as a category five. So it's a bit less talked about than the devastating Andrew.

• 6:30Alie Ward?

  And yes, that was late August 1992. And I will happily deal with any ides of any March. But when it comes to late August, you're going to catch me away from a coast. But from the category five Andrew to Matt.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  I am Matt Lanza, he/him.

• 6:48Alie Ward?

  And a meteorologist, yes.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  I am a meteorologist, yes.

• 6:52Alie Ward?

  And I found this out, a tempestologist.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 6:56Alie Ward?

  It's a thing.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:58Alie Ward?

  Did you know that, that tempestology is hurricanes?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  No, I did not know that.

• 7:02Alie Ward?

  And it's the study of cyclones, yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:05Alie Ward?

  Isn't that cool?

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Well, I feel even cooler now.

• 7:09Alie Ward?

  And, you know, we're in it, we're here in the US and we call them hurricanes. But I understand they are cyclones, other places, tropical cyclones.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  So tropical cyclone is what we'd call the generic term for all of these systems. They then get more specific names depending on where they are. So if they're in the North Atlantic or Eastern North Pacific, they're hurricanes. Once they reach 74 miles an hour.

• 7:33Alie Ward?

  So the North Atlantic, those are the hurricanes that hit the Caribbean, the east coast of North America and the Gulf Coast. Now, the Eastern North Pacific, that took me two maps to understand, but it is the area to the west of Mexico, like near the Baja Peninsula. And the Eastern North Pacific, this region, it is a very overlooked basin. People, I live in LA and I just found out about it now. But yes, those storms are all called hurricanes.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  If they're in the Western North Pacific, they're typhoons. And then in the Southern Hemisphere, they tend to use the broader term cyclone. Sometimes they'll say severe cyclonic storm. I think that's in the Indian Ocean. But broadly speaking, if it's a tropical depression, tropical storm, hurricane, typhoon, they're all categories of tropical cyclone.

• 8:26Alie Ward?

  And then what about a tornado? Is a tornado a cyclone of any kind?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  It is a cyclonic system, but it is very, very, very tiny by comparison. A hurricane can produce tornadoes.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Yikes.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Tornadoes cannot produce hurricanes.

• 8:41Alie Ward?

  Okay, and do hurricanes have more moisture in them than tornadoes? Or what makes a hurricane a hurricane?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Oh, uh, do you have a semester?

• 8:52Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  What makes a hurricane a hurricane is they're a type of cyclone and they have a low pressure. So they're lowering pressure at the center compared to on the outside. And they have something called a warm core.

• 9:08Alie Ward?

  Okay, this is fun, and I did not know this, but a low pressure system means that this column of air is rising, kind of like getting sucked up into the sky in a vacuum. And low pressure systems are rougher air, clouds, precipitation, and all that unstable air is what can cause turbulence in a plane and what drives hurricanes. Now, a high pressure system, by contrast, is like a hair dryer blowing down toward the earth. And high pressure systems tend to bring calmer weather. And some meteorologists have this casual shorthand that high pressure is happy weather and low pressure is lousy weather. But that depends on your preference for rain. Personally, I'd flip that. But yeah, hurricanes, low pressure.

• 9:52Alie Ward?

  And Kim describes it first by what it doesn't do. Like, let's say someone hose you off and it just, it felt delightful. That's because the water on you is borrowing your body heat.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  You know, if it's really hot out and you get some water on you, you're like, ah, you're finally cooling off. Well, that's evaporative cooling. So, energy is being taken from your body to convert that liquid water into water vapor. Well, when it goes the other way, when it condenses from water vapor into liquid water, that heat is released into the air around it, and that helps drive those billowing clouds that you see. And a hurricane is also powered by that kind of what we call moist convection. And that latent heat release. And so that latent heat release contributes to the center of the cyclone being warmer than the air around it. And so that's why we call it a warm core. And physics dictates that when you have a warm core system, the strongest winds are

• 10:48Speaker 01

  closest to the surface, which is where we live, which is not great. But that's also how we measure how strong a storm is. Is what are those wind speeds closest to the surface, closest to the center?

• 10:58Alie Ward?

  And that's closest to the surface of the earth.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:00Alie Ward?

  Closer to where it intersects, the sky intersects land and then where the houses and people right on that meridian.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. Uh, it gets slowed down a little bit because of friction, but that's why if you see reports from a hurricane hunter flying through a storm and it's like, oh, we measured winds of a hundred knots, but at the surface it was like eighty-five. It's not because the storm's quote unquote weaker or something. It's because friction slows down winds and the closer you are to the surface, the more friction is going to slow those winds down.

• 11:30Alie Ward?

  What's up with those hurricane plane hunters?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Damn.

• 11:35Alie Ward?

  Because I've seen video of things that look like a nightmare.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Good God.

• 11:41Alie Ward?

  And who goes in those? Why? What do we learn? How do they not die? How do they not fall out of the sky?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Well, they might have fallen out of the sky back in the nineteen forties.

• 11:53Alie Ward?

  Okay. So Kim is not kidding. Between nineteen forty-five and nineteen seventy-four, there have been at least six crashes. There have been at least six crashes from hurricane hunter missions. And Kim explained that because those low pressure systems are what they're flying into, flying too low into it means not enough air to fly on or reduced lift and a lot of turbulence. Nowadays, though.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  But these hurricane hunters, if you hear about the Air Force or NOAA, they're flying at about three kilometers above the earth's surface. And so they're low enough that they are getting really into the heart of the storm as far as vertically where the strong winds are, but they're high enough that, you know, they're not going to run into the ground. So they are well-equipped with radar and other instruments they can navigate. They've got expert pilots onboard. They have expert scientists onboard and all sorts of folks with experience in running these instruments, dropping dropsons, which are the opposite of what we put on weather balloons. They get a little parachute, they drop out of the plane and then they take measurements as they fall down to the ocean surface below. But.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  The folks on there tend to be a range of veterans with lots of, when I say veterans, like having many years of piloting experience, but also meteorologists who have spent a lot of time in the classroom and beyond, studying how hurricanes work.

• 13:16Alie Ward?

  That is so amazing. I would never want to do that. What about Kim?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Back in 2010, I got to do that on the NASA DC-8. So we were at way up beyond 30,000 feet, so way above like the level that you would fly in a typical hurricane hunter. But I flew through Hurricane Carl in 2010 as it was rapidly intensifying. And yeah, it's bumpy. I was very happy to have a four-point harness kind of seatbelt.

• 13:41Alie Ward?

  What is it like? Like, what happens to that turbulence? Does it reduce the closer you get to the eye of the storm? What's the mood like on one of those?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Well, I would say the mood's pretty excited because we're flying through a hurricane. Like, we're scientists, but we're also nerds. And so like, we're just excited to learn all these things. And they'll often put instruments on these planes so that we can learn more about how they operate before we try to put them in space on a satellite, because getting them into space could be hundreds of millions of dollars. But anytime you go through an area with a strong updraft, so that's what's driving upward, those thunderstorm-type clouds, you can get some real, real interesting experiences, like an updraft-downdraft couplet where you're very briefly weightless.

• 14:26Alie Ward?

  Oh, God. Oh, what a bucket list item to check off for a weather nerd.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:31Alie Ward?

  You know, like, that's just as cool as it gets. But have you always been kind of a weather person or a space person? Or when did you become like Atmos, Kim?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  So one thing I want to preface this with is there's kind of this stereotype that weather weenies are into weather from like as soon as they could walk. And I want to encourage anyone who might hear this. If you're interested in weather and it starts when you're like 50 years old, we welcome you to it. You don't have to be a weather weenie when you're a kid to be a weather weenie as an adult. That said, I started getting interested in clouds when I was like eight years old. But then, when I was a teenager, I went to a local airshow and they had a hurricane hunter crew there as like one of the exhibits. And I wandered the plane and talked to the flight meteorologist. And I was just like, this is so cool. I'm gonna go study physics and then

• 15:26Speaker 01

  atmospheric science. And I'm, I guess I'm gonna be a professor and teach other people about this, too.

• 15:30Alie Ward?

  Myself included. Okay, let's meet Kim's friend and colleague, Matt Lanza, who is a Houston-based meteorologist who quit a career in broadcast meteorology to help provide residents in storm-prone areas with some, quote, "hype-free forecasting," as he calls it. He runs Space City Weather alongside fellow meteorologist Eric Berger. So how valuable are they to public weather knowledge? They received the Houstonians of the Year Award in 2024. That's how much. We are recording this July 25, 2025. And around the corner, August is when, at least in North America, things start picking up, right?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. The peak of hurricane season is August and September. Usually, the last couple of weeks of August and the first couple of weeks of September are usually the most frenetic.

• 16:23Alie Ward?

  You are on the Gulf Coast, which is like, woof, right?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  I grew up in southern New Jersey, just outside of Atlantic City. And I remember when I was three years old, we had Hurricane Gloria come up the coast. This was 1985. And we had to evacuate my grandmother, who lived in Atlantic City on a barrier island, to bring her onto the mainland. And just something about that moment, I think, triggered, you know, my interest in meteorology and hurricanes. And, you know, I guess it's kind of fate that I'm here in Houston now.

• 16:52Alie Ward?

  And now Houston gets walloped as well, yes?

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yes, regularly, by everything. Not just hurricanes, but all sorts of weather. And hurricanes just are kind of the, the top of the pyramid for us in terms of threats.

• 17:05Alie Ward?

  Have you been in one?

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Yes, last year Hurricane Barrel 2024 was, I'll use scare quotes, only a category one, but it was a nasty category one storm. Did a lot of damage, knocked out a lot of power. It was interesting to go through because I had actually not been in an actual hurricane. I've been in some tropical storms before, but going through a hurricane was was kind of a whole other experience, not necessarily one I want to go through again.

• 17:35Alie Ward?

  Yeah. What was the most surprising from being an expert in this and studying them versus being in it and seeing it right outside your window? Did you feel any different or did it feel like, oh, yep, this is exactly what I expected?

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it it felt different. You know, when you think of a hurricane, like you think of it's just a constant ferocious wind that's like continuously coming. And it wasn't that, like there were gaps where it was calm. And then all of a sudden you would just get these nasty wind gusts. And that's what knocked down tree branches and limbs and things like that. And you kind of know that as a meteorologist that that's kind of how hurricanes go, but to actually experience it, give me a newfound appreciation for what it's like to just kind of sit through it. And it's a grind, right? You're just kind of, as soon as you think it's done, you know, another round of gusts come and you're like, oh, here we go again. It was fascinating in that regard.

• 18:36Alie Ward?

  Okay, so we usually do Patreon questions after the break. You might be used to that, but kind of like a windsock and a tempest, we are all over the place format wise for this one. I have confidence you can handle it, but let's keep on the theme of things being fascinating. In terms of formation, Heather Crane wanted to know, I've always heard that hurricanes start as dust storms in Africa. How true is that?

• 18:56Speaker 02

  It's kind of actually fascinating. You know, we always think about the storms come off Africa, they go across the ocean, they end up hitting land and all this stuff. So first off with the dust, the Sahara Desert in Africa is obviously going to be a massive source of sand, dust, et cetera. And during usually the early part of hurricane season, June and July, typically what happens is everything flows from like Northern Africa, across the Atlantic, into North America, into South America, all that. So what happens is you get all this dust from Africa that gets picked up from the Sahara and blown across the ocean and places like Houston, Miami, New Orleans. During hurricane season, you'll see frequently just dusty skies, like the sky turns like a little

• 19:41Speaker 02

  bit of like a milky gray color. And this is all Saharan dust that's been transported halfway around the world.

• 19:46Alie Ward?

  Oh, oh, my God.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, fascinating. And they deal with this a lot, like Puerto Rico and in the Caribbean Islands as well. And what's really cool about it is it's a huge part of the planetary ecosystem. It ends up helping to enrich soil on this side of the world.

• 20:03Alie Ward?

  What?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  It's like they've found evidence in South America that I think in the Amazon, there's a lot of fertile land and a lot of it ends up like almost being seeded by the dust that comes off of Africa to help make it more fertile.

• 20:16Alie Ward?

  What?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so cool. But what it also does is it inhibits hurricanes because hurricanes need moisture. They need moisture and dry air is dust. Dust comes from the desert, desert's dry, that's dry air. Hurricanes don't like that. So that explains a lot why the first part of hurricane season is usually typically quiet because we're often seeing, you know, all this dust come off Africa and basically limit the development of storms. So that's a really cool feature. So as we get into August and September and things start to ramp up, you get these thunderstorm complexes that start to form in Africa and they move all the way across the continent. In a similar vein, kind of what we see in Central America during this time of year, parts of South America, where you get, you know, thunderstorms

• 20:59Speaker 02

  blow up during daytime heating, you know, you can almost time your clock to having thunderstorms and they move through and that's that.

• 21:05Alie Ward?

  And these complexes or storms form and they dissipate. And when they travel over the ocean, they are called, very confusingly, waves, but waves of air. I don't know why of all the words, they didn't think of another name, but I'm not the boss. Now, quick note, remember that we call these cyclonic storms typhoons when they're in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. Those are the coasts of Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, and that is known as Typhoon Alley, which sounds like it could be the absolute worst dive bar in San Diego or something. But activity in Typhoon Alley, that can depend on whether we have a warmer El Nino year or a colder La Nina.

• 21:49Alie Ward?

  And remember that they are measured differently, but essentially, anything over what we would call a category four is called a super typhoon in that northwest Pacific basin. Now, as for the Atlantic hurricanes, El Nino, for warmer weather, means potentially fewer large cyclonic storms. Now, for the northwest Pacific basin, again, that's Typhoon Alley on the coast of Asia, El Nino means more and bigger typhoons. Now, sometimes in North America, Matt told me, we may have a Midwest storm that just goes and takes a dip in the Gulf of Mexico, picks up water, and then becomes a bigger storm and then Bama hurricane.

• 22:30Alie Ward?

  Also, let's not forget about storm systems off the coast of India and in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, which are just called cyclones. We don't call them typhoons. We don't call them hurricanes necessarily, we just call them cyclones. Now, 1970s Bola Cyclone, which formed in the Bay of Bengal, which is east of the Indian Peninsula and west of Thailand, it made landfall in what's now known as Bangladesh. And the flooding into the Ganges River Basin caused an estimated half a million deaths. It was the worst natural catastrophe in recorded history. And the fallout from it helped spark 1971's Bangladesh Liberation War, which led to

• 23:13Alie Ward?

  the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Bengalis and up to 3 million deaths. Now, for more on genocide, including recent events in Gaza, we have a genocidology episode with expert Dr. Dirk Moses, and it's linked in the show notes. But on the topic of depression, let's back up a skosh. But when it comes to hurricanes, for those of us who are lucky enough to never have had to hide from one, I think we hear like it starts as a tropical category one tropical storm or tropical depression. Like, where's the spectrum of when it becomes a hurricane and then becomes not a hurricane? Or a typhoon or a cyclone?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely great question. So, the spectrum of what constitutes a tropical cyclone encompasses pretty much everything you just listed. So, let's traverse sort of a typical life cycle of a storm that might brew in the Atlantic. So, over Africa, we have these systems that are called African easterly waves, which is a fancy name for globs of thunderstorms that are relatively organized. They spin up off of the Instability that happens between the moist tropical latitudes over equatorial Africa versus the hot, dry Saharan Desert. But the energy that feeds them when they're over Africa, well, it's a little different once they're over the ocean.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  You know, if they can start feeding off the energy of the ocean and instability in the atmosphere over the ocean, then they can start to consolidate around a center and spin up into a cyclone. So they're called cyclones because they're spinning around a particular point. At that stage, they've gone from a disturbance that we're keeping an eye on to a tropical depression.

• 24:54Alie Ward?

  So a tropical depression is a low-pressure system, but with much weaker winds, just like the most mellow kind of hurricane. Just think depression, think like slow, like.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  So, once they get that tropical depression label, they are considered tropical cyclones. On the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, we don't use that scale until they've hit 74 miles an hour.

• 25:17Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Which is a category one.

• 25:19Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  So, a tropical storm is 39 to 73 miles an hour, which sounds kind of arbitrary, but like, that's the range that we use. So that means a 70 mile an hour tropical storm is only slightly weaker, so to speak, than a 75 mile an hour hurricane.

• 25:38Alie Ward?

  Ah.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  But we start paying attention when it flips that category from a tropical storm to a hurricane. And we also pay attention when it goes from category two to category three. They're major hurricanes.

• 25:52Alie Ward?

  So, the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, it comes on the scene in 1971 after a guy named Herbert Seymour Saffir, a civil engineer, was tasked with figuring out how to build low-income housing that wouldn't blow away in a storm. He's like, "Well, how strong a storm, people?" So he teamed up with a meteorologist and hurricane hunter, went up in those planes, Robert Simpson, to come up with a scale. Now, when you hear about the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, that's some great background. That's how it started. Oh, while I've got you, let's talk about Herbert Seymour Saffir, whose legacy in the hurricane. World is so great that history has pretty much forgotten that in his youth,

• 26:32Alie Ward?

  he was hired as a bellboy on this opulent wood panel and silk interiured cruise ship called the Moro Castle. Now, in September of 1934, Herbert would later recount, "I was sleeping at 4 a.m. when I suddenly was awakened by the bells." The Moro Castle that he was working on was engulfed in flames, partly because of bad wiring and partly because the wood paneled interior was adhered with flammable glue, and partly because a lot of the crew didn't seem to give a rip about fire safety protocol. Also, the ship was sailing into a storm, which literally fanned the flames. Now, half of lifeboats were incinders, but 85 people aboard managed to get in them, and they were

• 27:15Alie Ward?

  mostly crew members who were like, "Hurry, before we get swarmed with the dying people." And at this point in my research, I despised Herbert Seymour Saffir, even though this was when he was young and he later made the hurricane scale. But then I read further to learn that Herbert was not in a lifeboat during the shipwreck. He was trying to help passengers get to safety, and their only avenue was jumping five stories off the deck of the flaming Moro Castle into the water. Now, the life vests, they were difficult to wrangle, and some people's necks snapped as soon as they hit the water. Now, in total, it's estimated that up to 137 people died in this shipwreck. But Herbert Seymour Saffir obviously survived because he created the hurricane scale later. He survived the fall

• 27:58Alie Ward?

  with this great gash to his head, and together with these two other passengers, an Italian couple from Detroit, they clung together like a clot in the sea in the waves for seven hours until the Coast Guard found and rescued them. And Herbert Seymour Saffir was so injured and weak, he almost accidentally drowned the woman he was clinging to the whole time. He kept choking out the words, "I'm sorry," which seemed so polite, and then he was resuscitated at the shore. And he survived to become a civil engineer and a co-establisher of the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. Now, poor Simpson of this duo, he must have had like a super boring life. And then I remembered, well, he was a hurricane hunter. And really like, no one's life is boring when you dig into it.

• 28:41Alie Ward?

  And then I did some more digging and I found out that Robert Simpson was married to the illustrious and highly lauded Joanne Simpson, who was the first woman to earn a PhD in meteorology. And so Dr. Joanne Simpson, fellow meteorologist, very much a Banff in the space. She actually had three husbands in short succession. The first one, also a meteorologist, and another, a mathematician who worked on the physics of meteorology. And finally, Robert Simpson of the Safer Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, who she met before she met her very first husband. And I suspect they were in love with each other the whole time. If they weren't, I'm sorry that I imagined it. But Doctors Robert and Joanne Simpson stayed married until death did them part.

• 29:26Alie Ward?

  And on their joint tombstone in Washington DC, right between their two names engraved in stone is the shape of a cyclone. So yeah, the Safer Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Let's get to it. If you've got a tropical depression, all right, lowest on the scale, then it gets upgraded to a tropical storm. Then category one hurricane gets you the hurricane badge. Seventy-four mile an hour winds, that's 119 kilometers. Category two starts at 96 miles an hour or 154 kilometers. This is called extremely dangerous with extensive damage. Category three starts at 111 miles an hour or 178 kilometers. This is classified as devastating damage.

• 30:08Alie Ward?

  Category four hurricane, 130 miles an hour or 209 kilometers. This is called catastrophic. Category five hurricane, 157 miles per hour or higher or 252 kilometers an hour. Again, catastrophic. So tropical depression, tropical storm, and then hurricanes, categories one through five.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  And then, of course, there's the elusive category five, which there's not much difference between a category four and five. If you actually go to the Safer Simpson Hurricane Scale description, Hurricane Wind Scale, it is. Just labeled as catastrophic damage. So, you know, category five grabs attention, but it's not so much more damaging than a category four. Category four is pretty bad, too.

• 31:01Alie Ward?

  Does it depend more on where they make landfall? When we're talking about catastrophic, I imagine we're doing that from a human lens, like, how many airports are we going to lose? How many homes are going to flood? Or does that not have to do with humans?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Originally speaking, we associated the maximum wind speed with the damage because we wanted people to be prepared for if you got hit with that maximum wind speed. But a hurricane has multiple hazards. We categorize them by their maximum wind speed, but their maximum wind speed is estimated over water and water delivers less friction than land. So you almost never see those strongest wind speeds of its category actually measured over land because it's just somewhere in the storm. But also, a hurricane delivers heavy rain. It delivers storm surge along the coast and has the potential to produce tornadoes because why not add insult to injury?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  And so when we're talking about hurricane hazards, the challenge often comes from we are using this wind scale to categorize them.

• 32:08Alie Ward?

  Kim mentioned 2019's tropical storm Emelda, which although was not a hurricane, it did dump 41 inches of rain over southeast Texas, which is just about 85 miles from Houston, which just two years earlier got smacked with a category four hurricane Harvey. Now Harvey caused $125 billion in damages and it took over 100 lives. Tropical Storm Emelda still caused seven fatalities and $5 billion in damages. So you're not off the hook on a tropical storm technicality, Emelda.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  And so just because it was a tropical storm doesn't mean it isn't capable of delivering outsized hazards that will bring all kinds of harm and infrastructure challenges to the people in its path. And so when it comes to category, it's one of those things where the categorization is useful. But to a point, because then all of us who work in this area need to add that nuance. And that's where local meteorologists trusted by their communities come in so handy is they can personalize the information about what a storm could do.

• 33:15Alie Ward?

  Okay, but Valby listening wanted to know, are they considering adding more categories for hurricanes? Curtis Dog wanted to know whether or not there's going to be like more four and fives than ever before. And then Brienne Roberts wanted to know, how likely are we to have a higher category? Like turning something up to 11. Sarah Beth actually is a disaster researcher, wrote in all caps, let's banish the hurricane categories.

• 33:40Alie Ward?

  The scale isn't a great tool for capturing how bad it is because it only accounts for wind speed. So yes, categories, do you think they'll change? Do you think that they're a good way of warning the public? Do you think they get overblown in TV meteorology? Like, how do you feel about them? A lot of questions.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, no. But they're all hitting on a very, very important topic. We know hurricanes are complicated. They're more than just wind. You know, it's wind, it's surge, it's rain, it's tornadoes, you know, it's all these different things. And the Saffir-Simpson scale, which is the scale that we use to rate hurricanes, one to fives, you know, based on their wind speed, is like you said, it's wind only. That's the only thing that goes into it. You could have a storm that's a little itty bitty hurricane and you have 160 mile an hour winds and it's going to impact a small patch of land. But it's still a category five hurricane at that point, right? The impacts are going to be very limited to a very small area. And, you know, if it's like far south Texas,

• 34:38Speaker 02

  where like almost nobody lives between the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi, I shouldn't say nobody, very, very, very few people live between the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi. You get a storm that goes in there, it's mostly pasture, that's what gets hit. And, you know, then it's no big deal.

• 34:54Alie Ward?

  Or less of a big deal, unless you're a cow. And yeah, I went down a whole Badger Borough on what kind of pastures they got out there. And I found out there's one ranch called King Ranch that's bigger than the country of Luxembourg at nearly 1,300 square miles. A guy bought the land for $300 in 1853. And I'm thinking by now, they've probably even made a profit. And if you think Yellowstone is a thrill ride, wait until you hear how one of the co-owners of the King Ranch was a guy named Captain Gideon K. Legs Lewis, who was having an extramarital affair with one Ann Marie Purley. But Ann Marie Purley was married and her husband, Dr.

• 35:33Alie Ward?

  J T Yarrington, had killed a guy in San Antonio in a gunfight a few years earlier, but he got off. Now, when this already known killer, Dr. J T Yarrington, found out about his wife stepping out on him with an East Texas cattle rancher who went by the name Legs, he, being already a killer, was not happy about this. Now Legs Lewis tried to visit his lover, Anna Marie, to get back his love letters from her, when, according to obituaries, quote, "J T cut Lewis in half with a double-barreled shotgun." Anna Marie was granted a divorce from J T on account of the guy being a double murderer, and she lived a long life. Now, what happened to J T?

• 36:18Alie Ward?

  Second killing? He got away with murder again, and he moved to San Francisco. He got a new lady, and they're buried together in Oakland, although both of their headstones are missing. Karma? Who knows? But yeah, if a hurricane hits East Texas, some cows will likely be in danger because they got quite a few cows out there.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  So when you're talking about categories, it's useful in the sense that it's nice to be able to scientifically categorize storms and understand trends in wind speed, things like that. From a public communication standpoint, frankly, it sucks. And it distracts, I think, sometimes from the thing. Because, I mean, think about it. Like, last year, we had Hurricane Barrel hit Houston. It was only a category one storm. A lot of people will kind of shrug their shoulders at a category one and be like, all right, that's a storm, but like, I don't need to go running for the hills because of that. And it comes in, it does billions of dollars in damage, does tremendous damage to the electrical infrastructure in a major metropolitan area.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  It was a category one storm, but it was rapidly intensifying up to landfall. So when you think about this, you have two different scenarios with hurricanes. The storm is either intensifying as it makes landfall, or the storm is weakening as it makes landfall, right? It's almost never like perfectly stable. So if I tell you a category three is coming, you're going to be like, oh crap, this is, this is bad. If I tell you a category one is coming, you're going to be like, oh, okay. Do I need to worry? Like, I don't think so. And the reality is, it depends on the type of storm. So that's where the category scale really becomes frankly useless at that point. And then you factor in rain. Hurricane Harvey was a big storm, did a lot of damage, was category four hurricane when it made landfall in Texas.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  But the worst element of Harvey was the inland flooding that it produced, and it was catastrophic. And the Stafford Simpson scale is going to tell you this thing's a tropical storm.

• 38:12Alie Ward?

  So Harvey made landfall and then slowed, was downgraded to a tropical storm, but despite the tropical storm name, this cyclonic system continued to fire hose Texas with the wettest North American cyclone on record. And again, over a hundred people died.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  But the problem is, people love the categories. Like, people still want to know, what is this? Is it one, two, three, four, or five? And you're telling them, well, no, maybe that's not the best way to do it, but no, no, I still want my number.

• 38:41Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  So you're kind of fighting that battle, too.

• 38:44Alie Ward?

  And what about in other countries? Like, where there are these typhoons? Do they have the same category numbers? Do they have different ways of measuring it or different warning systems?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  So each location affected by tropical cyclones will develop their own approach to notifying the public, that sort of thing. And categories do vary depending on what basin it's in because every culture is different. So. Time to get pedantic.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Let me have it.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  In the North Atlantic and East North Pacific, we use what's called the one-minute, 10-meter maximum sustained winds. So that means, over a minute, the wind speed, on average, was this value, 10 meters above the surface.

• 39:27Alie Ward?

  But as for the typhoons off the coast of Japan, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, again, these are the Western North Pacific typhoons.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And then if you go over to the Western North Pacific, where the Japan Meteorological Agency is in charge, they do a 10-minute average.

• 39:47Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  And that means a lower number. So they'll mention that they've got this typhoon, and it will be, say, the equivalent of 80 miles an hour. And we'll be like, "Okay, maybe not that bad." But we might dismiss it as, "Oh, that's just a category one." I don't dismiss category ones, but, you know, that's, it is the lowest on the hurricane scale. But because they're using that 10-minute average, if you did a one-minute, it would actually be a higher value. Which is real fun if you're trying to do a global assessment of tropical cyclones and trying to estimate them all the same way. Well, we don't. Depending on what basin you're in, it's one minute, two minutes, three minutes, or 10 minutes.

• 40:29Alie Ward?

  Oh. And where precisely does it become a hurricane versus a typhoon? Well, they decided it was once it crosses the human-made boundary called the international date line. Now, according to NOAA's National Hurricane Center, the majority of tropical cyclones occur in the northern hemisphere, and there are more typhoons in the Pacific than there are Atlantic hurricanes. Also, according to the 2022 study, "A Review of Ocean Atmosphere Interactions During Tropical Cyclones in the North Indian Ocean," the North Indian Ocean accounts for only 6% of the global tropical cyclones annually, but it accounts for more than 80% of the global fatalities from cyclones,

• 41:14Alie Ward?

  mostly due to coastal flooding. And in part two, we'll talk a little bit more about how economics factor into hurricane science and safety. So there are cyclones below the equator, but what about right on the waistband of the world? Well, several people wanted to know about the equator. Nikki G., Joshua, YYZ, Lucas, Chris Lipford, Evelyn Iomura, Az the Urologist, Wendy Miller, Pierre Rigor, Debra Tinas, and Light Brown Pillow wanted to know, in Nikki's words, "Why don't hurricanes cross the equator? Is there just like a stoplight that never turns? What's going on there?"

• 41:49Speaker 02

  So, the Earth rotates, right? As that happens, you know, you've got different forces acting on different sides, right? Different sides of the equator. So hurricanes always instinctively want to go toward the pole. You can't think of a hurricane necessarily as a living thing, but you know, that's what it's attempting to do. It's attempting to transfer heat from the tropics to the poles. And that's how the Earth kind of stays in balance, right? It's part of living on Earth. We always think of hurricanes as bad, but they're actually part of a well-functioning, normal Earth system. You'll see some storms get pretty far south sometimes. Like you can get storms that are below 10 degrees latitude in either hemisphere, but

• 42:30Speaker 02

  they either can't survive because there's not enough spin and not enough force to keep them rotating, or they end up just going toward the pole. And that's that. It becomes impossible for them to survive below a certain latitude.

• 42:43Alie Ward?

  Okay, but is that forever? Several people asked whether or not different parts of the world will have hurricanes in the future. Kelly Shaver wanted to know, "Are we going to start getting hurricanes in California as the climate keeps changing?" Madeline Fox, first time question asker, asked, "As climate change continues to shift our weather patterns, do we expect more hurricanes to move more inland?" Clement V. wanted to know if Europe is going to face hurricanes in the future under more progressed climate change. So, how far north or south? Lauren Cooper asked, "So, climate change, how fucked are we?" We're going to get deeper into that question in a bit, but...

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're going to see some changes. And I think we've already seen some evidence of that. Just kind of in recent years, we've seen storms, you know, show up that are in like the far northeast Atlantic. But we actually had like a technical tropical storm, I think, hit Portugal a couple of years ago. I think the California question is interesting because in California, they have been hit by tropical systems before. And I think as kind of the West Coast warms a little bit, you know, storms are still going to weaken as they come north out of the Eastern Pacific, but maybe now they just kind of linger a little bit longer, you know. So when we think about climate change, we have to think about it as a multiplier on top of, I always say like the cake's baked, right? You're going to have cake. Now

• 44:03Speaker 02

  you're just adding icing to that cake. You're increasing the number of calories. And that's what we get with climate change. So things that used to happen, you know, now we're just, we're getting more of it. There's not always going to be a glaring flashing red lights that this is climate change. It's going to be kind of quietly seeping into everything weather related, including hurricanes.

• 44:24Alie Ward?

  Now, what about busy time of year? Right now, we are in North America. We just had catastrophic flooding in Texas. I live in LA. We were evacuated for the fires. 2025 is already shaping up to be very big meteorologically. So it very much feels like a when and not an if, knowing that you're just going to get busier and busier. But what is the hurricane season like?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  So for the North Atlantic, that's June 1st to November 30th. That said, in the North Atlantic, the peak of the season, when you're most likely to see at least one storm active, tends to be in the August to October timeframe.

• 45:05Alie Ward?

  Like right now?

• 45:05Speaker 02

  That's right, right now.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  So even though the season officially begins June 1st, not seeing a lot of activity in June and even July is, on average, normal. Is anything about this year normal? No. But, you know, that's when we tend to see tropical cyclones because that's when seed disturbances, like what I talked about coming off of Africa, tend to be emerging and thus offering the opportunity to become a tropical cyclone. Because a tropical cyclone doesn't just pop out of thin air.

• 45:37Alie Ward?

  Well, it is a low pressure system. So I guess it does pop out of thin air. But then it rises and condenses to form pretty thick, wet air, I guess.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Something needs to be there to kind of galvanize it. But when it comes to looking at the upcoming season, we watch for things like what is the activity over Africa? Like, how many seed disturbances are coming over the ocean? Are the waters warm or warmer than normal?

• 46:05Alie Ward?

  And then there are factors like wind shear, which can lift or lower the storm system vertically, or it can shift the tilt horizontally. And the greater the wind shear of that column of air, the less likely it is to make a cyclonic storm. Because it makes that swirling bit kind of wonky and the storm gets like discombobulated.

• 46:28Alie Ward?

  Basic question. Why a circle? And what's going on in the eye of a hurricane? Why is it so calm? What's happening?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  So there's some pretty complicated physics at play and two main contributors to the fact that an eye is present in the first place. So a storm needs to be a certain strength to even have an eye. You can start to see an eye wall, which is the really deep thunderstorms that surround the eye. You can start to see that form in radar when it's like a strong tropical storm. So it doesn't have to be at the hurricane wind speeds necessarily to start forming that. But to get the clear eye, it needs to be somewhat strong because you're dealing with a lot of balances of forces. You've got winds moving air in, but then you also have this sinking area because it's warm and clear.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And most of the air at the top of a storm gets evacuated out and away from the center. But some of it also comes back in. And when air sinks, it gets compressed.

• 47:31Alie Ward?

  Oh, and then is the eye of that storm calm? Again, never been in a hurricane, but I picture it being absolute hell on earth, chaos, terrible, terrible. And then, ah, and then this impending feeling of doom that it's coming back. Is that kind of how it is? Or is that just from the movies?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Honestly, what you just described is pretty accurate.

• 47:52Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  But there is a peer reviewed paper that talks about the ill fated flight into Hurricane Hugo. And usually, scientific writing is dry. It's written passively. It's just trying to state the facts and argue why their conclusions make sense. There's a paragraph in this paper that for scientific writing reads like poetry. Because it's talking about the experience of losing an engine while in a hurricane.

• 48:23Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  And they talk about how far they fell, how close they got to the surface, the white caps they could see on the ocean below because they were in the eye. So they kind of limped along, slowly gaining altitude back up on their remaining engine, until another plane could come in and guide them out.

• 48:44Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 48:45Alie Ward?

  Little goosebumps.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  And I'm like, why isn't this a movie?

• 48:49Alie Ward?

  Yeah. And while you are sketching out a screenplay, or you're finding your umbrella, we're going to take a quick break. And after that break, you will hear all kinds of info about hurricane names, masculine, feminine, advice on preparing a storm, what's going on exactly with federal funding, and if you can stop a hurricane in its tracks yet. And some of that continues into part two for next week. You definitely want to hear that. But let's hear from sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of the ologist's choosing. And this week, we'll go with Matt's. He selected the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country's Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, which supports urgent relief and long term rebuilding after the devastating floods of the Fourth of July, 2025.

• 49:33Alie Ward?

  So a donation will be made in his name. And thank you to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F O R H E R S dot com slash ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information.

• 50:15Alie Ward?

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• 51:39Alie Ward?

  isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy. We're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details.

• 52:00Alie Ward?

  Listen, sometimes you get out of your routine. That happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my Ritual Essential for Women 18+. It's a multi that I've been taking for years. And guess who landed in another country without them? Me. Didn't feel right. They contain nine key nutrients, two delayed-release capsules designed for optimal absorption. But Ritual, why do I love them so much? They have a team of scientists. They poured over thousands Study is to figure out what are common gaps that people need in their diet, but they don't actually consume. It's also designed to be gentle on the stomach. You can take it with or without food, which I love. Plus, I like that it looks like a tiny lava lamp. I tell you that every time, but it has these beads and oil and it tastes like mint. Easy down the hatch. I usually take them in the morning.

• 52:44Alie Ward?

  And the reason why I've stuck with Ritual for so many years is because my schedule is all over the place. Sometimes I'm eating breakfast. Sometimes I'm running through an airport with one shoe. So instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com/ologies. That's ritual.com/ologies for 25% off your first month. Every time I record a Quince ad, I'm like, look at me wearing head to toe Quince. I feel like this is enough of an ad. I can just stop here. But if you're like, huh, what is that? Quince sells clothes and shoes and bags, even stuff for your house that are classic, well-made and priced at 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they cut out the middleman. They work directly with ethical factories.

• 53:28Alie Ward?

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• 54:11Alie Ward?

  And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, just let them know it was Ologies. It's the best way to support the show.

• 54:18Alie Ward?

  Okay, we sprinkled in your Patreon questions throughout the episode, but let's stir up some more answers. You know, speaking of a lot of things in pop culture and what we hear about hurricanes, there's this adage, I don't know if it's flim flam, but if it has a female name, people don't pay attention to it and then more people get killed because they don't hide from it. And I don't know if this is flim flam, I don't know if this came from like a Malcolm Gladwell book that everyone forgot about. What is the deal with this?

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Ah, so, there's a story here. And are you familiar with the Clue meme flames on the side of my face?

• 54:52Speaker 04

  Much. It, it, the, it flame, flames, flames on the side of my face.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Flame, heaving, burning.

• 55:04Alie Ward?

  The most. Yeah, it's in my DNA.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, when this paper first came out in a journal I respected until then, when I was double checking some things ahead of our conversation, I came across that again and just had that visceral reaction that mimicked what I saw a decade ago when it did first come out claiming that somehow female named storms are deadlier than male named storms. And what I was gratified to see in that quick search is that two, not one, two independent rebuttals came out in the same journal saying, no, this is not true. And this just show it. And why does this even exist? And so, you know, I still ask that question, but yeah, it definitely got sensationalized.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  And it also got scientifically debunked. So, no, there is no statistical correlation between the perceived gender name of a tropical cyclone and its impacts.

• 56:03Alie Ward?

  So, the article in question was the 2014 paper titled, "Female Hurricanes Are Deadlier Than Male Hurricanes", in the journal PNAS, which Kim told me is no joke sometimes called penis. Unfortunate. But this paper asserts that US hurricanes used to be given only female names, a practice that meteorologists of a different era considered appropriate. Due to such characteristics of hurricanes as unpredictability. Also, male scientists named them after girlfriends and wives because penis. Now, the guy who started the lady naming was one 19th century British meteorologist.

• 56:44Alie Ward?

  His name was Clement Raggy, who is described as having an iron constitution, a mop of flaming red hair and an explosive temper to match. Now, his villain origin story is that he was like very sadly orphaned at age five when his dad fell off a horse, but it also sounds like he was left with like a hefty trust fund and rage issues and a lot of enemies. So he started naming storms by Greek letters of the alphabet and then by Greek gods and goddesses. And then he moved on to naming the worst storms after those enemies, many of whom were politicians who would not fund his research, which it's interesting. It could be interesting.

• 57:28Alie Ward?

  Now Clement Raggy then moved on to naming hurricanes after women. And he thought that giving them exotic names could maybe influence baby names of the time. And they did, you know, after hearing these names of storms, there were more baby girls Eline and Lucia and Lila. But what's in a name? A drama, lots of drama. Just ask Clement Lindley Raggy himself, who was actually born William Lindy. Now Clement's wife's name was Leonora and they had a daughter, also Leonora, later renamed her Emma. Clement's dad was named Clement and so was his cousin. And Clement's first male child was also called Clement. And when Clement and Leonora, not the kids, but the parents split up,

• 58:13Alie Ward?

  Clement found another lady named Louisa, who everyone called Idris. So my point is that Clement Raggy had name trauma. And because of that, we have gender reveals in our weather forecasts. And it took so many decades and women who bravely wore pants in the 1970s to finally say, can we get some man names in the mix at least? I bet Dr. Joanna Simpson was one of them. Which by the way, I feel like gendered names aren't even really a thing that much anymore. Do you know what I mean? Like, uh, what? And it's actually very exciting too. I get to talk to a non-binary meteorologist, like, when does this get to happen? And I'm like, who's gonna have the hottest take ever? Actually you.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  So if you see, look back at the history of naming, it started in the 1940s. And so the story is that storms got named after the wives, sisters, or girlfriends of guys in the Navy. And so that started the tradition of female names. I think it was 1953, if I recall correctly, where the National Weather Service tried to do something a little bit more consistent using phonetic letter type names.

• 59:25Alie Ward?

  Like Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. But in the middle of that naming experiment, the international phonetic alphabet had to be changed because it originally had N and V as Nectar and Victor, but they sounded too close. So they ended up changing the alphabet. Anyway, a bunch of dudes in ties probably gathered around a big conference room, smoking over lowballs of whiskey and just said, fuck it, gents.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  So they went back to female names and then they started being more consistent and alternating between male and female.

• 59:56Alie Ward?

  Are they looking to like change that system at all? It's like not cute, you know? I don't know, maybe it's cute, but I'm like, this idea that it's like, we are having a baby. It's going to kill a lot of people and climate change is getting worse. You know what I mean?

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, it just as an aside, something that happens because we give them gendered names is we will call storms he or she. And I'm like, it's a storm does not have a gender.

• 1:00:22Alie Ward?

  That's so funny. And it's like, especially with like current discourse about what is gendered and what's not.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yep.

• 1:00:31Alie Ward?

  They're like, that storm's definitely a bull. Like, is it? Okay. But I mean, do they have like a Google Doc somewhere of like baby names for it?

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  There's actually a public document on the National Hurricane Center webpage of their six rotating lists. So as far as where the names come from in the first place, there are committees at the World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, where people get together to review, one, whether names should be retired when they have very high impacts or when the name itself is fraught with meaning that no longer needs to be used as a name. Two names that got retired in that regard were Alfred and Isis.

• 1:01:13Alie Ward?

  Oh, oh. Yeah, I thought maybe Kim meant to say Adolf here. And there was a hurricane Adolf in the spring of 2001, but it was spelled with a P H and not an F on the end. But I did check in later and Kim meant to say Adolf here, but you probably surmised that. So Adolf and ISIS off the list, horrible branding.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Uh, so those aren't used anymore, but those committees are formed of representatives of the countries in the regions affected by those storms. And so, but they alternate. So you may notice in the North Atlantic, if the A name is male, it'll be female in the Eastern North Pacific. So they like mirror each other that way.

• 1:01:52Alie Ward?

  And remember that, yes, the Eastern North Pacific coast off Mexico and Central America and the Baja Peninsula. And yeah, California can get hurricanes and tempestologists are always trying to get people to remember that underdog of the Eastern North Pacific hurricane basin. We care about you. But you know what? Given the way the world is, I feel like it's just a matter of time before it becomes like the Pepsi category five or like the crypto tropical depression. You know what I mean? Like, or it's going to be like Hurricane McHurricane face if we take it to a vote like. Maybe there are worse options.

• 1:02:28Alie Ward?

  Maybe it's like, you don't know until it's gone. What is Matt's naming forecast? In terms of naming, Meghan Ratcliffe wanted to know if you know why they're named after people names? And why not animals or fruits or literally anything else? Has there ever been a move to just name them something else? Like, you know how Apple iOS started out as like Tiger Panther? And then they're like, we ran out of cats. So now it's Cupertino and Napa and you're like, okay.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Let's keep going. We're going to be down to zip code soon.

• 1:03:02Alie Ward?

  Yeah, seriously.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  I've always joked that it would be kind of fun to like have storms that are like sponsored by corporate entities, you know? So like this storm brought to you by Lysol.

• 1:03:12Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:03:15Alie Ward?

  I just have to give about that. That there's gonna be like a Pepsi.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  You're right.

• 1:03:20Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God. So real. Oh, my God. Yeah, what's gonna happen?

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  Who the hell knows?

• 1:03:29Alie Ward?

  Not me.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  What they do now is, you know, it's actually really a formal deal is that the World Meteorological Organization, which is essentially like the UN for weather, gets together in Geneva annually. They go back through all the tropical systems that happened the previous year and the ones that were really awful, they retire the names of and they replace them with a new name. And what happens is like every country that's in a certain basin that uses that name list gets to submit a name that kind of reflects their ethnicity and their country and submits the name and then they pick one. But it's like a real formal, kind of a weird process. You know, I'm a Matthew. Matthew was.

• 1:04:07Alie Ward?

  I was gonna say, how?

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm already retired.

• 1:04:09Alie Ward?

  2016, right?

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Alie Ward?

  How did you feel about that? How did you feel when 2016, when they're like, eh, it's a Matthew? Were you like, yes?

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  No, I've never wanted it to be like a destructive storm. I was like, give me a Matthew that's a cat five in the middle of the ocean. That's like the coolest storm you've ever had to look at. And, you know, hurts Noah. So, yeah, it was weird. It was kind of like funny that like, okay, well, here we are. Matthew's on the list and it's gone. Retired. All right, cool. Well, it was, it was a fun run.

• 1:04:43Alie Ward?

  So Noah is predicting a banger of a hurricane season, above average and with possibly three to five major hurricanes. Now, some predetermined storm names you can look forward to in the news cycle are Dexter, Ferdinand, and yes, Karen, which I imagine will be dumping inches and inches of warm Chardonnay and uprooting Yelp pages with bad reviews. But before we can name these hurricanes, we have to track them and we gotta model them. And how does that modeling happen? Have you seen that modeling change just even in the last few years? I picture you putting a bunch of ones and zeros in a computer and then pressing a button. It goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And then it tells you the address that it's gonna make landfall.

• 1:05:27Alie Ward?

  But how does it actually work?

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  The workflow of what's going on is very complicated and requires a lot of infrastructure, all actually talking to each other, so servers not going down, satellites actually transmitting, that sort of thing. But initially, the workflow is, we're getting all these observations from weather balloons, from sometimes radar, radar's a little complicated in that regard, just because it's only over land. But also from satellites, because satellites get that bird's eye, well, bird in space eye, of what's going on in the atmosphere. And through a process called data assimilation, we bring all that information together to then give the computer model, which a whole bunch of talented scientists and engineers have worked

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  on to make sure it's as good as it can be for now, and then continue tweaking over time. And that model takes those initial conditions, and if a hurricane is currently active, or a tropical cyclone is currently active, and planes have been flying through or around it to take measurements, those will be brought into those initial conditions to help the model better capture the current state of the atmosphere, so that we're starting from a more accurate point to predict what it'll do next. And then, the computer model is running a whole bunch of physics equations, and making certain assumptions depending on how the model's set up, because we can't simulate at every single point in existence, it would never be done in time. So then, the computer model will produce these forecasts of what the atmosphere could

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  be like in six hours, 12 hours, so on and so forth. And those outputs help us identify things like, do we think the storm has certain potential to get strong really fast, something called rapid intensification? What might it do size-wise, is it getting bigger, smaller, that sort of thing? And then where's it gonna go? But if you're trying to visualize what could be making a storm move a certain way, it's the flow of the atmosphere around it. That makes sense. And the computer models are helping us capture that aspect, as well as what the storm itself is doing.

• 1:07:27Alie Ward?

  And yeah, in part two, we're going to chat about funding cuts and staffing layoffs. And literally as I put this episode out, those votes are still on the table. Every hour, it seems like there's new information. Also, we're going to have a lot of information on how to prepare, what to do in a hurricane, and how to know when it's time to get up and go.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the weather balloon issue is a big wild card in all of this. Because if we do lose some of this upper air data consistently, then it becomes a problem. It does start to infect the modeling. Modeling gets worse, things like that. So hopefully, as we go through the rest of hurricane season, we're not missing too much of that data. Some of the weather balloons have started to be launched again. There's still some that aren't. But I imagine if you've got a category three hurricane sitting in the Caribbean, they're going to launch the balloons. They'll find a way to do it. At least that's in Matt's world, that's what makes sense. And sometimes Matt's world is kind of a fantasy sometimes. But the reality is, is that, yes, weather modeling has gotten way better.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  We have invested a ton of time, research, energy, funding, et cetera, since Hurricane Katrina to better predict hurricanes. But it remains a very broad bipartisan issue that needs to be, continue to be addressed. 2024 was the best year on record for the National Hurricane Center in terms of their forecasting. They knocked it out of the park. They did a phenomenal job. Perfect, no, but way better than it has been. In fact, you look today, your five day forecast today is almost as good as a one or two day forecast was 30, 40 years ago. So, I mean, when you think about that for a second, think about how much, how many decisions get made in those few days before a hurricane by public officials, by companies, by anyone, people that live on the coast.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  And now you have the confidence that you can start making moves four or five days in advance that maybe 30 years ago, you could only do one or two days in advance. And so that's why we say all these improvements in forecasts have huge economic and sociological benefits to society because of that.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  So well, now with the advent of machine learning and AI, we're starting to see that, okay, well, maybe we don't need to model the physics of the atmosphere. Maybe we can say, hey, here's 50 years of weather data, what we call reanalysis data. It's basically all the past weather that's occurred over the last 50 years. Here it is. Take a look at this. Here's what's happening right now. Based on that history, tell me what's going to happen over the next 10, 15 days, whatever. And these AI models will be like, okay, sure, here you go. Press a button, go make yourself a sandwich, come back, model's done. And you can, you can get an answer. But I mean, I'll be honest, like last, last hurricane season, the AI models did a pretty good job on, on forecast tracks with some storms.

• 1:10:17Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  I was floored. And it was kind of a wake up call. We're still working with the physics based models. We're still working to improve them because we're not going to get rid of them. We're working into a world now where we're going to do, end up doing like a hybrid approach where you're trying to marry the two outputs and come up with an answer that's, you know, better than anything we've had before. And I'm super excited. Like, I really think that in the next five to 10 years, we're going to have so much more interesting and useful and valuable data. And as long, the caveat, of course, is as long as we continue to fund it, we will get better at this. And we'll never be perfect, but we'll get better, which is great. That's what we need.

• 1:10:55Alie Ward?

  Well, you know, you mentioned Hurricane Katrina and the anniversary too, the 20th anniversary is coming up this year. Was there something about Katrina that made it so devastating? Was it the category? Was it where it fell with New Orleans being below sea level? If hurricane and cyclone and typhoon risk is twofold, partly that we're getting more of them because of warmer weather and partly our interface with the coast and very vulnerable areas. If that's just increasing, like, is it where you live or is it how hard it hits?

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  It's a combination of both.

• 1:11:31Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  So the infrastructure we build in places at risk of hurricane impacts, ideally would be built with those potential impacts in mind. And they often either aren't, or they aren't consistently. So, you know, if it's been a while since a hurricane has hit, people might be like, oh, I don't need to invest all this extra money or time into making sure this house is exactly up to these standards.

• 1:11:56Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  And so it's like, who's going to pay the bill? And if everyone fights over who pays the bill, well, maybe it just doesn't get paid. And so the infrastructure element is a component of it and us building in these places that could be impacted. But the scope of the storm also matters. So earlier we were talking about the Safer Simpson hurricane wind scale, and that's how we categorize storms. Katrina was devastating as a category three. It did peak as a category five, but it was weakening on approach to land. And seeing the category numbers tick down does have a psychological impact to anyone who is associating those numbers with impacts.

• 1:12:38Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Another thing is structurally weakening storms do different things. So oftentimes you'll see increasing compactness of like the core of the hurricane as it's getting stronger. Well, when it starts to weaken, that core can expand. And sure, the peak wind speed is going down, but you're making the area over which there are winds bigger. So when a storm is growing in size, the part of the ocean that that wind is interacting with gets bigger. And so you're driving more water toward a vulnerable coastline. If you look at animations that follow Katrina's lifetime, the eye was compact and then it got big.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  And yes, maximum wind speed went down, but the storm grew. And so it put more people in the path of strong winds. Uh, something that's hard to think about, but is important to think about is a tropical storm is pretty strong. So if you get tropical storm force winds, that's sticking your arm out as you're going 40 miles an hour. If you're going 70 miles an hour, that's even stronger if you stick your arm out the window. That's a tropical storm. That's not even a hurricane yet.

• 1:13:55Alie Ward?

  I never even realized that you could stick your arm out the window of a car and that simulates how fast the winds are going. That never occurred to me, yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  And they're gusty. So like you'll, you'll get like the variance. So it's, you know, as they get stronger and stronger, it'll feel more consistently brutal. But you'll also kind of get these pulses where it's like a strong gust comes through and then it calms down a little bit, but it's still windy. So even if it's a persistent tropical storm force winds, sitting in 40 mile an hour winds for an hour sounds awful.

• 1:14:27Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Is that what a sustained wind, when they say sustained wind? Okay.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So that's a good way to contextualize, like for a minute at least, you're getting hit with 40 mile an hour winds. For a minute at least, you're getting hit with 100 mile an hour winds.

• 1:14:39Alie Ward?

  Oof, oof. So ask delightful people disastrous questions. And thank you both so much, Matt and Kim, for not being an indie electronic duo, but for being two of the finest tempestologists a person could chat with. So much so that we'll be back next week to cover how to prepare for a hurricane, or really any disaster that comes your way. What happens behind the scenes when a president marks up a hurricane map on TV? Where should you retire? And what is up with FEMA and NOAA and the National Weather Service? All that, plus some more weird history. So that'll be next week. And until then, you can follow Matt and Kim at their social media handles on Blue Sky. Uh, Matt is Matt Lanza, Kim is Dr.

• 1:15:23Alie Ward?

  Kim Wood, which are linked in the show notes or on our website at aliward.com/ologies/tempestology. We are Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm At Ali Ward with one L on both. Smallologies are those shorter, classroom-safe versions of Ologies classics available wherever you get podcasts. And you can sign up at patreon.com/ologies to send in your questions ahead of recording. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Avilene Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardewar is the website. Noelle Dilworth tracks our unpredictable schedule. Susan Hale oversees it all as Managing Director. And pilots of our always exciting and shaky flight to Hit Publish are Jake Chaffee and Captain Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music.

• 1:16:07Alie Ward?

  And if you stick around till the end of this episode, I tell you a secret. And this week, it's that, so Jake spells his last name C-H-A-F-F-E, but the first time I said it on here, I said Chaffee. And for some reason, in the year-plus he has worked on this show, we talk like every day, it's been like 50 or 60 episodes at least, I have to write his name in my notes with a Y in there because I'm so worried that I'll say Chaffee and not Chaffee. And I could say these credits in my sleep, and I know he sees my notes in the Google Doc, and I spell his name wrong every time but on purpose for phonetic reasons. And now I feel like it would be weird to spell it right, like it would throw me off. Also, speaking on the notes for this episode, the Google Doc, the working transcript for

• 1:16:52Alie Ward?

  this episode, which is all color-coded with sound effects and asides and all that, is 63 pages long. So yeah, you're getting a two-parter, my babies. We will see you next Tuesday, and I mean that in a nice way. Okay, bye-bye.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

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