Dr. Kim Wood

There's a couple complicating factors here.

So you're going to have widespread trees falling on roads, power lines down.

All kinds of infrastructural elements that we rely on for day-to-day life has been thwacked.

And often these places, you know, waters may have receded, but then you've got all these damage soaked places, mold issues, all kinds of things.

So like the impacts are felt far and wide for a long time.

So the water can be bad from that perspective, but like kind of in the moment, the power of water cannot be underestimated because water,

One foot of moving water can knock over a person.

So, you know, just add feet and you're adding impact.

You've got the winds on top of that.

So it's hard to kind of differentiate the water from the wind in that context, especially if you also get hit with a tornado warning at the same time.

Because getting away from water, you go up in a house.

Getting away from a tornado, you go down in a house.

Well, what do you do when you have both?

That's one reason why evacuation can be encouraged for some of those most vulnerable areas.

But not everyone can evacuate.

But then you have a situation like Hurricane Florence in 2018.

where it dumps a lot of rain.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

So it really is a multifaceted hazard, highly dependent on where you're located.

Harvey demonstrated that with its ridiculous five feet of rain record.

Yeah, yeah.

So I try to meet people where they are.

You know, if I'm having a conversation with somebody about something that they clearly really care about and I have information that might change their perspective on what they're thinking about, such as retiring on a beach, I try to highlight, like, these are the things that you want to think about.

So I shouldn't throw them under the bus, but my parents were thinking about doing something like that.

And I was...

pretty emphatic about the things they would need to consider if they wanted to live in a place like that.

And they ended up retiring to Phoenix.

So a different set of problems.

But yeah, it's tough because I understand the call of the water.

There's something special about having easy access to a beach.

But everyone needs to assess their own personal level of risk and what they're willing to take, you know, based on their financial resources, physical resources, time resources, that sort of thing.

And so when people are thinking about building something really cool in a risky place, it's like

If you're going to do that, think about these, you know, unlikely but increasingly risky scenarios.

Yeah.

So that you go in with both eyes wide open.

And if something were to happen, hopefully you've got plans in place so that you can get out of there alive because that's what matters in the end.

Choosing a place to live is hard.

Packing up all your stuff is hard.

You know, I never want my advice to be, oh, just move, because it just it doesn't account for the lives people are actually living.

So when you live in a place that has a risk of hurricane impacts and I say hurricane, but, you know, in general, tropical cyclone impacts.

The things to be thinking about are who do you pay attention to?

Identify a couple trusted sources.

Yeah, you can check the National Hurricane Center page on a daily basis for updates.

That's great.

But it's nice when someone translates that, especially the cone of uncertainty, into something that is relevant to where you live, especially from a timing perspective.

The watches and warnings start coming up 48 hours out.

And so we want people to have taken action before those winds get to them.

So that's why things will often be listed as a warning, even though the center of the storm is still pretty far away, is because the center is the worst part.

You want to be prepared before the worst part gets to you.

Duly noted.

So take pictures of everything in your house.

Have your insurance documents ready, if possible, because it depends on people's ability to prepare ahead of time.

Have your prescription medications stocked.

Think about ways to partner up with other people who may live near you if maybe you could carpool.

know if you're in a flood risk zone.

I'm listing all these things off and that's a lot of responsibility placed right on the person who's like, I don't even know what a hurricane is.

Kim said, So many folks who live in these areas are already barely getting by.

And so to assume that they have enough resources to put gas in their car, to have a car, to, you know, you've got folks who may use wheelchairs, you have folks with pets, you have folks with medical conditions, children, elderly relatives, there's all these different factors that folks need to consider for their own personal risk and risk management.

And so

When it comes to our agencies, whether it be at the local to federal level, giving us advance warning, the NHC works super hard to make sure information is getting out as best they can, as far out in advance as they can.

And right now, current decision trajectories are actually hindering us in being able to do that.

Matt echoes that.

Unfortunately...

When it comes to trying to control something like a hurricane, it is massive.

It is releasing so much energy, and it is already interacting with the area around it in, I would say, organized chaotic ways.

But the stuff that's happening in the storm can be occurring on really small scales.

Like, if you look out and you see a single thunderstorm cloud, and then you think about all the processes happening within that, that's all happening inside of a hurricane as well.

Oh, boy.

And so...

When you think about how could humanity directly affect a hurricane, and we can't.

No, we can't nuke them.

No, we can't drag icebergs under them.

No, no, no.

We are indirectly affecting them by warming the climate, but we are not capable of directly affecting something the size of a hurricane.

They I have learned so much about nature, about.

geography, about engineering, about coding, about visualization because I study hurricanes.

I have connected with all kinds of people because I study hurricanes.

And the communities that build around these shared values of investigating fascinating phenomena and distilling that information in ways people can actually act on to make their lives better

Like the fact that I'm talking to you right now is an example of one of my favorite things about hurricanes.

Like 20 years ago, me couldn't even fathom that I would, you know, publicly speak in any way, shape or form, especially recorded.

People could listen to this again.

Like what?

But like the way, like just sharing science is so valuable and,

Because it's connecting humans to other humans over things that we don't have control over.

But by learning more about them, we can better control what we do in the face of them.

This might be the weirdest thing, but learn your way around a computer.

It's amazing how much data are out there that you could potentially put your own perspective on if you have a little bit of...

knowledge of computers, of accessing data and programming languages like Python that are open source.

All the visualizations I do are made possible because programs like Python are just, people just post their code to Stack Overflow or GitHub and they're like, here, take it.

And so I've started doing the same thing for other people.

And equipping yourself with a skill in pursuit of something you're passionate about

That skill can be used in other ways too, but you also have more fun learning it because learning is hard if you're doing it in pursuit of this really interesting thing.

And being able to visualize data, interrogate data, all that kind of thing, it can serve you well in so many ways and also just give you insight into how to interpret what other people are sharing.

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.

Technically, yes, but the leftovers.

So 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 5.

So it's a bit less talked about than the devastating Andrew.

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.

So the North Atlantic Cyclone.

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.

It is a cyclonic system, but it is very, very, very tiny by comparison.

A hurricane can produce tornadoes.

Yikes.

Tornadoes cannot produce hurricanes.

Oh, do you have a semester?

What makes a hurricane a hurricane is they're a type of cyclone and they have a low pressure.

So they're lower in pressure at the center compared to on the outside.

And they have something called a warm core.

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 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.

What are those wind speeds closest to the surface, closest to the center?

Yep.

Yep.

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 100 knots.

But at the surface, it was like 85.

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.

Well, they might have fallen out of the sky back in the 1940s.

Okay.

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 on board.

They have experts.

scientists on board and all sorts of folks with experience in running these instruments, dropping drop sands, 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

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.

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 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.

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 interesting experiences, like an updraft-downdraft couplet where you're very briefly weightless.

Oh, God.

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 air show 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 going to go study physics and then atmospheric science.

And I guess I'm going to be a professor and teach other people about this too.

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.

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.

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, which is a category one.

So a tropical storm is 39 to 73 miles an hour, which sounds kind of arbitrary, but 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.

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.

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 Saffir-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.

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?

Please don't.

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

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 community is coming so handy is they can personalize the information about what a storm could do.

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.

Let me have it.

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.

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.

Oh.

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 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 minute, three minute, or 10 minute.

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.

Like right now?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Honestly, what you just described is pretty accurate.

But there's 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.

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.

Oh, my God.

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

So there's a story here.

And are you familiar with the clue meme flames on the side of my face?

flames on the heaving burning the most yeah it's in my dna 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

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 the statistics show it.

And why does this even exist?

And so, you know, I still ask that question.

But yeah, it definitely got sensationalized.

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.

Actually, you.

So if you 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 naming.

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.

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

Oh, yeah.

Well, 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.

A storm does not have a gender.

But I mean, do they have like a Google Doc somewhere of like baby names for it?

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.

Oh, oh.

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.

I just have to give about that.

There's going to be like a Pepsi.

But how does it actually work?

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 is 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 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 is 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 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 is it going to 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.

It's a combination of both.

Okay.

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 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.

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 Stafford 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.

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.

And yes, the maximum wind speed went down, but the storm grew.

And so it put more people in the path of strong winds.

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.

And they're gusty.

So like 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 yeah is that what a sustained wind when they say sustained wind okay 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 oof oof