Matt Lanza

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.