Matt Lanza

There's one warning that gets issued by local National Weather Service offices when you have a particularly strong hurricane come ashore, and it's called an extreme wind warning.

And they'll post that when the eyewall of a storm where the strongest winds are starts to move into a particular place.

It doesn't have to be urban.

It can be rural, suburban, whatever.

But whenever those winds are like 120, 30, 40 miles an hour,

you're going to get that warning.

And that's basically the moment where you have to say, you got to be in the safest place humanly possible, and you just stay there until it's over.

Yeah, it's really kind of fascinating when you deal with this.

So one thing that's very common, this is extremely common.

What will happen is you get like a really strong hurricane that goes through, like, say, the Caribbean.

You've got a lot of like exotic birds down there.

And they'll get caught in the middle of the storm.

They'll get caught in the eye of the hurricane.

You can even see it sometimes on radar.

If you look on radar at a hurricane, you'll see what we call ground clutter.

But it's actually biological, what we classify as biological material because it's birds, it's bugs, it's all this different stuff.

And they get caught in the eye.

And so what happens is, you know, the storm, let's say hypothetically, a storm goes through the Caribbean, comes up through Florida into the southeast.

And all of a sudden, like in North Carolina, you start getting reports about these ridiculous birds that they've never seen before that have just shown up.

It's because the hurricane left them there.

So, you know, it's a fascinating thing.

Like, I can imagine, like, the sea turtle situation is either because the surge brought the turtles so far inland that, you know, something like that, or it just got picked up because the winds were so strong.

Milton was a huge storm.

You know, you could get a mini-scale sharknado if you have, like, a strong enough tornado over water that's able to pick something up into the air.

The reality is that people think about Twister, the original Twister, and, you know, the scene where the cow goes across, and the cow goes across again.

i gotta go julia we got cows um yes theoretically sure that could happen it doesn't usually happen no it's kind of crazy but yeah i mean theoretically something like that could happen on a small scale hurricanes reshape

they reshape the ecology, they reshape the topography, they reshape the landscape.

They're just extremely powerful forces of nature that have been on Earth since the beginning of time.

They're part of the system of how things work and what kind of, frankly, makes the Earth awesome to some extent.

If you can look past the life and property element of it, obviously it's tragic to see that, but

In the grand scheme of things, it's part of the world and always has been.

Yeah, the first thing that I think a lot of people don't necessarily think about is where do you live?

You live in a place, but what's your risk?

What is your actual risk there?

Do you live in a floodplain?

Which bayou, which river, which creek drains your land?

So do you have to worry about flooding from that thing?

Understand the history of a place that you live.

Talk to your neighbors that maybe lived there for a long time.

So understanding what your neighborhood is like and what people have been through I think is really important.

Everybody that lives in a hurricane prone area should be prepared with a kit

You can go online, go to your local municipal emergency management agency, county, state, local, whatever.

They will always have a hurricane checklist.

What do you need to do ahead of a hurricane?

And it'll tell you.

I mean, it will lay it out for you what you should have, what should be in your kit.

What do you need to think about?

I always tell people, you know, aside from all that, pay really close attention to, you know, if you have pets, what are you going to do with the pets if you have to evacuate?

If you have to evacuate and you've got to make a really quick move, you know, this can go just beyond hurricanes, this can go to like wildfires and other catastrophes as well.

What are you going to do about childcare?

What do you do if your partner's at work?

How are you going to do this stuff?

What route are you going to take to get out?

All these different things.

You should be mapping all this out ahead of the season so that when the trigger gets pulled and it's time to do things, you've already got that plan drafted and ready to go and you know what you have to do.

I think when I first moved to Texas, one of the things I did was I mapped out an evacuation route from my house to my home.

Dallas, but it was like on all county roads.

Because I had heard the horror stories during Rita of, you know, more people died during Hurricane Rita in the evacuation of Houston than in the actual storm.

Because it was just a mass exodus.

Nobody was prepared for it.

It's a lot different today.

There are plans now.

There's a lot more preparation, a lot more rules.

It should be less chaotic today than it was, you know, 20 years ago.

But, you know, these are all different things you got to think about.

It's just about being and understanding your risk about the place that you live.

And it's not always made easy for people.

I always think like the example, like the single mom that's working three jobs, that's got two kids,

doesn't have time to go through all these things.

So I think it would be nice if communities had almost a welcome to the town packet.

Here's what you need to know.

And it would include things like that because all the time we're always talking about how great a place is to live.

But the reality is that there's always going to be something.

There's always some threat.

It's a blizzard, it's a hurricane, it's a wildfire, it's an earthquake, whatever it is.

Yeah, but you bring up an important topic because insurance industry are the ones that are starting to, they're the market signal that climate change is a problem.

Because everybody's insurance rates are going up.

And it's not just because of wildfires in California and Colorado.

It's because of hailstorms in Texas.

It's because of hurricanes in Texas and Florida and the Carolinas.

It's because of flooding.

And there are now a lot of insurers that are no longer insuring in hurricane-prone areas.

They're out.

They're done.

Because they know it's too much risk.

You talk about money and what gets Americans motivated seems to be money.

And that's going to be a thing.

Extreme frustration and outrage, to be quite honest.

It's so petty.

It's so stupid.

It's such a distraction from the actual concerns.

What I loved was the National Weather Service in Birmingham kind of stood up for

Really, they're people, to be honest, because they didn't want their people to be scared and they didn't want to panic on their office.

They were like, no, this isn't going to happen.

This is not a concern for us.

And they did a great job of kind of rebuffing that and standing up and doing such a good job.

But it's interesting you bring that up because literally today, Andrew Friedman, who is climate writer for CNN,

He came out with an article that said that two of the NOAA agency employees that led the review into Sharpiegate and the discipline review were put on leave today.

Yeah.

And that's what we're up against right now.

Yeah, so the climate change factor is just a kind of a layer of complication that's just added to everything.

And that can be said for everything beyond hurricanes too.

But from a seasonal forecasting perspective, when you're sitting in the beginning of hurricane season, you're like, all right, how bad is this gonna be?

you're looking at what are water temperatures doing?

Are they really warm?

Are they really widespread warm?

Are they just warm in a certain area?

You wanna get a sense of, is the fuel gonna be there to get these things going as the season goes on?

And in recent years, it's been kind of crazy, actually, how warm the oceans have been.

Like your initial thought is like, here we go again, another hurricane season here and this is going to be bad.

Then you just do have to think about climate change as well and how that layers into everything.

There's a whole body of research on climate change and hurricanes and how they're impacted and it's complicated and frustrating and not great overall.

So, you know, you're just trying to, I think we all pad a little bit on top of where things are just because the world we live in today.

I thrive on gallows humor.

So that's the only way you can in this, in this industry, I think.

Yeah, we're seeing more cases of storms that intensify rapidly, and it's happening right up to landfall now.

It used to be the conventional wisdom, particularly in the Gulf, was a storm would peak in intensity as it approached land, it would start to level off a little bit, and you'd have a bad storm, that's that.

But what we've seen so many times in the last six, seven, eight years is these storms that just

throw on the accelerator, they slam on it, and they never hit the brakes until they hit land.

And so you're getting all these storms that are coming ashore at their maximum intensities.

And that's why we've seen category fives, category fours litter the whole Gulf Coast since 2017.

The research kind of backs this up.

This is not something that should be considered out of line going forward, that this is going to become kind of more the rule than the exception, I think.

And...

Yeah, it's really... Ugh, what the... Yeah.

You know, and it goes beyond that.

Yeah, it just is.

It's something.

I don't know what.

Yeah.

No, but in all seriousness, like, you know, we're recording this in late July.

And I mean, like tomorrow, something could come out, some edict, and the whole thing changes.

So

As it stands today, there have been a number of cuts throughout the course of the year.

We had basically like not forced retirements, but heavily encouraged retirements with scare quotes.

We've had people that have left early.

So number one, you've lost a whole heck of a lot of

experience from the National Weather Service.

You've lost, for the younger people in NWS, now they've lost mentorship and things like that, things that will help them to get better as time goes on.

So that's unfortunate.

And that ship's sailed, right?

So that's done.

Because of the staffing cuts, they can't launch weather balloons as frequently in some parts of the country.

That's a problem because then you lose some of the inputs to weather model data that are really important.

And like you think about what's 2025, we're still launching weather balloons, but the reality is that's one of the most critical inputs to weather models is getting this truth from the upper atmosphere.

You know, you launch a weather balloon, you take all these readings and all that stuff kind of gets ingested into models and the models do better.

They're based on what the atmosphere looks like in a 3D perspective, and that's what helps.

because no one lives 20,000 feet up.

The issue is that the proposed budget for 2026, I mean, it just took a machete to NOAA.

And what people don't realize is that all this research is so critically important to our understanding of weather and our understanding of weather forecasting related to hurricanes.

One of the proposed cuts was to eliminate the Hurricane Research Division, which is run in Miami.

And you do that, and your forecasts aren't going to get any better.

They may even regress.

So.

It's it's it's counter everything.

Now, here's the good news.

The good news is that Congress, sometimes they can be the grownups in the room.

And weather generally is a very bipartisan issue.

Weather affects everybody.

They don't care who you voted for.

Everybody in their district doesn't want to be accused of cutting something that impacts weather forecasts that leads to a tragedy in their town.

So the Senate came together and said, no, we're not going to do these cuts.

Sorry.

In fact, we're going to actually increase funding to NOAA a little bit.

And we're going to keep all these agencies that you want to eliminate, all these research agencies that you want to eliminate.

Yeah, we're going to keep them all.

Okay, good.

But the House actually came back and said, yeah, actually, we're going to increase the funding.

So the hope here is that eventually, when all is said and done, this will be a moot point, the funding levels will hopefully be at least the same as they've been, if not a little bit higher, and all is hunky-dory and well with the world.

But hope is not always a strategy.

It even remains to be seen whether or not the administration even wants to play by the rules and do what Congress tasked them with.

We're living in an interesting time.

I don't want to say we're screwed because I think that that's a little strong.

Okay.

But suffice to say, I and most other meteorologists I know, we're all concerned, deeply concerned and troubled by what's been happening.

If you are the most fiscally disciplined individual and you believe that we should be very, very fiscally conservative as a country, that's fine.

But you're saving literally next to nothing.

But the cost that you're incurring because of that is significant.

And you're risking, you're playing with fire, literally and figuratively.

And you don't want to do that.

The Waffle House Index is undefeated.

You have to go by that, right?

When you're making your mental forecasting ensemble of how things are going to go, you have to use the Waffle House as an input.

No question about it.

Oh, that's a good question.

The hardest thing, what I'm learning, is effectively reaching people.

You think you've got a method of communicating with people, but as a scientist, sometimes you assume people know more than they do.

Sometimes you expect people to know more than they do, and you've just gotta be so aware and cognizant of that.

So it's not just even thinking about the forecast and the weather and the science.

It's thinking about the lingo that you use to convey something because one word can be very different than another.

We are constantly learning, constantly learning how to deal with it and communicate to people.

And it's a fun process, but it's hard.

It's hard and you feel a responsibility to do it right.

So anytime you come up short in that or something gets misinterpreted, you feel kind of sucky, even if you did the best you could, but still.

I find it all so fascinating.

Hurricane Harvey changed me a lot because it was the first time that I had dealt with a forecast that I had made and it was for a devastating event and so many people I knew were impacted by it personally that it was a little hard to reconcile.

As a weather geek, a lot of times you can sit and watch these storms from afar and you're like, yeah, that's awesome.

That's so cool.

Because it's nature.

The reality is it impacts people.

really hard.

So that really kind of muted some of my enthusiasm, sucked the air out of the balloon a little bit, but I still am fascinated by it.

You learn how to compartmentalize all your emotions a little bit.

You go back to just appreciating the science for what it is.

And it's just, the power of hurricanes is incredible.

They are fascinating.

They are so impactful, not just at a human scale, but like we've talked about it, just every scale imaginable.

on the planet and they're just the most fascinating things that exist.

It emphasizes the power of nature over man.

And just constantly you're learning something new and seeing something incredible.

And I mean, even honestly,

With climate change, it sucks, it's horrible, it's awful, but I'm here now, I'm doing this now, and it's a responsibility to try and understand everything better because it is gonna get worse.

And it's an opportunity for you to do, to ultimately try and do good for people in a world that is not necessarily doing them good.

And at the end of the day, if you could say that you had a positive impact on helping someone prepare for and get through a storm, then great.

That's awesome.

I feel like I did something good.

No, I did not know that.

Okay.

Well, I feel even cooler now.

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.

I grew up in southern New Jersey, just outside of Atlantic City.

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 my interest in meteorology and hurricanes.

And, you know, I guess it's kind of fate that I'm here in Houston now.

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

Yes.

Last year, Hurricane Beryl 2024 was, I'll use scare quotes, only a Category 1, but it was a nasty Category 1 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 kind of a whole other experience.

Not necessarily one I want to go through again.

Yeah, 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.

It's kind of actually fascinating.

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 bit of like a milky gray color.

And this is all Saharan dust that's been transported halfway around the world.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

And they deal with this a lot in 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.

It's like they 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.

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 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 blow up during daytime heating.

You know, you can almost time your clock to having thunderstorms and they move through and that's that.

Like, how do you feel about them?

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 five, 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, 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.

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 and 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.

Last year, we had Hurricane Beryl hit Houston.

It was only a Category 1 storm.

A lot of people will kind of shrug their shoulders at a Category 1 and be like,

all right, that's a storm, but 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.

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 land.

fall, 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 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.

It was a Category 4 hurricane when it made landfall in Texas.

But the worst element of Harvey was the inland flooding that it produced, and it was catastrophic.

And the Saffir-Simpson scale is going to tell you this thing's a tropical storm.

But the problem is people love the categories.

Like people still want to know, what is this?

Is it 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5?

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.

So you're kind of fighting that battle too.

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 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.

We're going to get deeper into that question in a bit, but... 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, in 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 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.

Let's keep going.

We're gonna be down to zip code soon.

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.

Oh my God.

You're right.

Who the hell knows?

Not me.

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 a 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... I was going to say, how... Yeah, I'm already retired.

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, it hurts no one.

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 a fun run.

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 3 hurricane sitting in the Caribbean, they're going to launch the balloons.

They'll find a way to do it.

At least in Matt's world, that's what makes sense.

And sometimes Matt's world is kind of a fantasy sometimes.

But...

The reality is that, yes, weather modeling has gotten way better.

We have invested a ton of time, research, energy, funding, et cetera, since Hurricane Katrina to better predict hurricanes.

It remains a very broad bipartisan issue that needs to 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, like you look today, your five day forecast today is almost as good as like a one or two day forecast was 30, 40 years ago.

So, I mean, 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, you know, people that live on the coast.

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.

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 get an answer.

But I mean, I'll be honest, like last hurricane season, the AI models did a pretty good job on forecast tracks with some storms.

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 end up doing like a hybrid approach where you're trying to marry the two outputs and come up with an answer that's better than anything we've had before.

And I'm super excited.

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 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.