Ángel F. Adames-Corraliza

Maria was a life-changing experience.

Like, I was not able to contact my family for weeks.

It was kind of like a grieving moment.

Like, nobody in my immediate family passed away from Maria, but it almost, it was like something died.

I was already like a dedicated tropical meteorologist trying to understand how humidity, circulation and rain interacted with one another.

But I felt like this bigger desire to really want to understand what are the big driving forces?

What is it that causes?

tropical weather to tick.

And so I felt this drive to serve my community even more.

Like I wanted to be able to go back to Puerto Rico or go to any other community that's in the tropics and be able to tell people like these are the things that matter.

These are the things that drive weather and climate in the tropics.

These are the things that you need to pay attention to.

And then my brain just completely melted and I don't remember anything else from the call, to be honest.

You know, coming from Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico is a small island.

We do have our contributions to society.

We're kind of known for the arts and for like music, for example.

But we don't often get recognition for science, especially in my discipline.

You know, like as a community, we've been invisible.

And to be able to receive this award where somebody comes out to you, in this case, the MacArthur Foundation, and they tell me, like, no, we see you, you know, and we see what you're doing and we think that what you do matters.

It's not just what you're doing, but what your community is doing.

To me, this is everything.

Yes.

Yeah, it's most of Australia, like a good chunk of Australia, New Zealand, this very southern part of Africa and kind of like the southern half of South America.

And almost the entirety of like first world countries in the northern hemisphere, which is something that is relevant to the research that I do.

Okay.

The majority of the developed countries, they're used to the stuff that I see here in Madison, Wisconsin, which is like it gets really cold some days, some days it gets really warm.

Weather is very, very changing.

Temperatures change very dramatically.

It can be really, really, really dry.

Got it.

So there was a lot of common knowledge.

For example, the indigenous populations of the Caribbean knew about hurricanes.

So the Taino, for example, they had the Semí, which is kind of like their, you know, entity of destruction is Huracán.

That's where the hurricane name comes from.

And so there was knowledge of these things, right?

And then same with the Peruvian natives.

They knew about El Niño.

So local communities did know about the major phenomenon, maybe not necessarily what drove them, but they knew about their existence.

But of course, the mid-latitude countries that were actually pushing the research, they didn't really know much, right?

And so there was knowledge in India, China and other communities as well, but there wasn't that much conversation.

So it's actually, I don't think it's incorrect to say that people in North America and Europe knew nothing about the tropics until World War II.

So World War II came, and what happened was that the U.S.

and the allied countries got into war with Japan.

And Japan had taken over a lot of islands in the Pacific.

So a lot of the war actually happened in the tropical Pacific.

And early combat was actually kind of catastrophic.

Because typhoons, actually, a typhoon came and sank a Navy ship, for example.

Before all this happened, people had just assumed that the tropics were kind of like this paradise.

It was just sunny and beautiful all the time.

And then maybe every now and then you'd get a hurricane.

But then people started realizing, oh, oh, dang, weather in the tropics does actually change at a substantial scale.

And this is all summarized in the first tropical meteorology book ever written by somebody in the northern latitudes by Herbert Real in the 1950s.

So his first paragraph of the book is like, oh, we didn't know that this was serious.

And then we realized that it was serious in World War II.

It's super different.

So the first thing that's like there are some really guiding principles for the mid-latitude dynamics that we teach in the classroom.

For example, we have this thing called.

this very important balance that's called geostrophic balance.

So if you look at the major weather patterns, you have the jet stream, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So commercial aircraft take advantage of the jet stream, and then they fly along the jet stream to make the flight faster, but then they have to fly against it on the way back, so it is actually slower.

Right.

So we know that these currents exist, and they're actually in a very, very elegant balance.

The winds want to accelerate to the poles, but then the Coriolis force, which is the bending effect that you get from the planet being in rotation, it bends it the other way.

So it causes all the combination of these forces creates the jet stream.

And the jet stream goes from west to east.

And in this jet, you get these waves.

So you get these undulations.

And these undulations are the troughs and ridges that create our day-to-day patterns.

So that's why temperature fluctuates a lot.

The colder side of the jet is really cold.

The equator one is warm.

And the jet is waving all the time.

So you just get days that are warm and days that are cold in alternation.

Right, right.

It is not like this at all.

So the tropics are pretty warm year-round.

So you don't really see that temperature variability that you see here in the mid-latitude.

So things like cold fronts and stuff, that barely exists.

In the tropics, you don't really worry about that.

But yet you still get these periods where it's really, really rainy and alternating with dry periods.

So instead of thinking about temperature variability, it gets really cold or it gets really hot.

In the tropics, it actually gets really humid or it's really dry.

That's really kind of the big thing that drives weather patterns.

It is about the moisture, yeah.

There's other things that matter too, right?

Because it's always more complicated than that.

But if I go to a classroom and I teach people what are the things about the tropics that make the tropics different, that's going to be one of the things that I'm going to mention.

Probably the thing that I'm going to mention.

So...

I don't think we still have a comprehensive theory of the tropics.

At least when you compare it to the mid-latitudes where we have multiple textbooks, we have mature theory, the vast majority of weather forecasting models were initially built to tackle mid-latitude weather, not tropical weather.

And as a result, forecasting weather and climate events in the tropics is more daunting to the detrimental to people that live there, right?

So in Puerto Rico, we cannot evacuate from hurricanes because we're on an island.

Because sometimes you do get extreme events like floods, heat waves, and things that actually are very costly, not just in infrastructure, but in life.

and they're not very well predicted, you know?

And so that's the big thing, right?

Like ultimately it is a problem of human safety and wellbeing that we cannot forecast things in the tropics as well as we do in the mid latitudes.

Yep.

Right.

So the MJO is actually the most important tropical phenomenon that you don't know, that people don't know about.

So we had to kind of weather the hurricane.

That's the way that I would like people to think about.

It's comparably as important as El Nino.

Okay.

And it has not just massive impacts in the tropics, but it has impacts throughout the globe.

It actually modulates weather in the Mid-Atlantis.

For example, atmospheric rivers that cause flooding in California are modulated by the MJO.

So it's a global phenomenon.

It's rooted in the tropics.

It starts in the Indian Ocean.

It is about the size of Russia.

So we were up all night and I just remember the winds roaring and the house shaking.

So it's huge.

And it propagates eastward pretty slowly.

And in that movement, it modulates hurricane activity.

So when the MJO is active, hurricane activity increases and so forth.

When I started studying it, I started kind of learning about the importance of water vapor in tropical rainfall.

And then after that, I started realizing how all these insights

about the MGO translate to all sorts of other tropical phenomenon.

For example, when it's humid, it starts to rain, but then all that rain actually changes the wind patterns.

And the wind patterns then change in such a way that the movement, that moisture gets moved around.

And so the moisture gets moved around, and so the rain moves with the moisture.

So all these three things get coupled together.

My family had to put these like wooden panels to protect the windows and the doors.

The moisture, the rains, and the winds, they couple together.

Yeah, they play off each other.

So they feed back on each other.

And so that causes the MGO to move, you know, or according to

Right.

I would like to see a role in which when we're making climate reports and when we're making forecasts that everybody is being equally represented and that everybody's being done justice.

And I remember like the wind just hitting those those doors.

Because at the end of the day, everybody deserves to have the best possible weather forecast.

Everybody deserves to know...

to the best degree possible what's going to happen in the climate in their region right now.

And right now we don't.

We don't equally have the knowledge about climate and the atmosphere for everywhere.

I think that speaks volumes to where we are right now and where we should be is a place where everybody knows the same amount about everywhere.

Thank you.

And that really left an impression on me.

Thank you so much.

I was 10, so I was a child.

I couldn't believe that something so powerful and destructive was in nature's arsenal.