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cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at UW Madison's Biotechnology Center. I also work for the UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Last week we had a talk on the visible scientist. This week we have two visible scientists. A visible scientist is somebody who's a researcher who's also out there helping to share science with the general public. Tonight it's my pleasure to be able to introduce The Weather Guys. They are here togetherwise. It's Jon Martin with Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and Steve Ackerman, also from that department and the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Science... >> Satellite. >> Satellite Sciences. Ah.

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Okay, so I'm going to give a talk next week on acronyms.

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Please join me in welcoming Steve Ackerman and Jon Martin to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

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>> You know, it's funny, Tom, when you say acronyms, you ought to hear Ackerman say that word.

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That's kind of the way that it is in Long Island. Things are a little bit funny there, lingually. >> Like Boston's any better. >> We speak the king's English. Only place in the country that does. But anyway, let's go on.

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What a day it is today to be here and talking about the weather, and what we're trying to do, actually, is simulate the way in which our radio show works. Steve's going to tell you some of the details about how it actually does work in sort of a mechanical way, but what I'm going to provide by my own choice, I get to choose whatever subject I want to talk about, is exactly what Larry Meiller does for us. Several days before the show goes on, they will actually get a list of questions that we're going to probably entertain if there's spots during the show where nobody's calling or something. So I'm going to try and give you about five or six minutes of presentation material that will get you thinking about something. You don't have to ask questions about this when we get to that later on, but it might prompt you to start thinking about some things that maybe otherwise you wouldn't have thought about. Here's a picture of Chicago from January of this year, 2014. And there's so much in this picture but so little time. This is from early January when it had one of its coldest days from the whole winter. And I don't have to tell any of you if you lived here over the wintertime how desperately and persistently cold it was here all winter long and really remarkably so. I think we had 39 days, calendar days, on which the temperature was at least at some point during the day below zero Fahrenheit. And that was not quite an all time record, but it came awfully close. I think it was third largest number of such days ever in Madison's history, and that goes back to about 1870, weatherwise. So here's some ice flows in the edge of Lake Michigan, fog, steam fog on top of the lake, and you can see even steam coming out of the big buildings in Chicago and bright blue skies because it's bitterly cold. Awesome. So we heard a lot about this. "Polar vortex sends shivers across the US." For much of the winter people were saying, what is this polar vortex? Is this a new thing invented by the media? It's a word that you can trace in our literature, in our science back at least to the late 1940s, probably earlier than that. So it's not a new idea. "Cold snap prompts wave of energy bills." The congress actually decided to do something this year, and it was in response to the weather.

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And they didn't even succeed, as it turns out.

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"Brutal cold continues. Second day of school closings cut into planned snow days." This is from the Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee. So there was all kinds of ramifications for this.

And here's one

"Frosty weather keeps Ohio State closed for second straight day." I put it on here even though I'm not sure that's something that's actually bad.

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And here's one

There may be people have a divergent opinion on that.

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And here's one

So anyway, this was a really substantial, persistent, remarkably long period of cold weather. Very few all time record lows were set, but it was one of those winters that people will remember for a long time. Here's another way to measure it. This is Great Lakes annual maximum ice coverage. So we're talking about the day or the time during a winter season when the ice over the five lakes was at its maximum extent. And so you can see the highs and lows since about 1973. 1979, that was a cold winter too. 94.7% of the lakes were covered with ice at least on one day during that winter. And then we had years like 1998 where only 11.5% was covered. And 2002 was the all time minimum. Less than 10%. So I end with 2013, which was 38.4%. Wow. 2014, that means winter 2013-2014, 91.0%. Second all time to 1979. So we had a really remarkable amount of ice on the lakes for a long time. In fact, I just heard today when we were beginning the presentation, Steve told me that he was informed that Lake Michigan's lake temperature right now is 10 degrees Celsius below normal. That's 18 degrees Fahrenheit right now. So if you had planned to go up to the Door County peninsula and swim on the lakeside at the great sand dune whatever beach that's called, you're going to be unpleasantly surprised. The water is really cold. And that's a consequence of this long, persistent winter we had. So, how does the winter we had here stand up against what was going on around the rest of the hemisphere? How do you even measure that? Is there a reasonable way to do that? Here's a picture of, a beautiful picture of the northern hemisphere from many winters back, 1984. I just had this picture laying around so I brought it in. And what I've colored in with blue, with the blue boundary around it, is air that's colder than minus five degrees Celsius, which is about 23 Fahrenheit, at a level in the atmosphere that's about one mile above the ground, 850 millibars. This is a reasonable place to look to get an idea of what the temperature in the lower troposphere is. Not the surface but just above the surface. And when the hemisphere is really cold in the depths of the winter, it has this beautiful look to it. It's like a giant sort of maple syrup coming over a giant spherical pancake poured down on the pole. And when it gets really cold around the hemisphere, of course the area that that air covers is going to be bigger on day when it's cold in a lot of place than it will be on a day when it's cold in only a few places. So here's just an example looking at the same type of thing a different day from a different view. This is a flat projection, a polar stereographic projection, and the blue area is once again air where the temperature is at or below minus five degrees Celsius at the level about a mile above the ground. And you can easily calculate the area that's enclosed in that blue line, including the little pieces that are kind of cut off of it on the border of Saskatchewan and British Columbia or Alberta and British Columbia. And if you calculate that area, we have data that allows us to do this four times a day all the way back to January 1, 1948. And it's kind of interesting to see what happens when you calculate the area of this cold air in every day December, January, and February for the last 66 years. Here's last year. The blue line in the middle surrounded by the gray shading is the average for each calendar day. So I've got 66 different winters that I'm using here, and I can take the average of every single December 1st and then the average of every single December 2nd and just string them together in a line. And that's the blue line in the middle. So that's the long-term average. The red line is the day to day variation from last winter. So the red line on the far left is December 1, 2013. And the red line at the end is February 28, 2014. And so almost, and this is the whole northern hemisphere now, so we're not looking at just North America or just Eurasia. This is all of northern hemisphere. Almost every single calendar day last winter was warmer than normal by this measure across the hemisphere. Almost every single day. And in fact, if you go across all 90 of these days, and I have 66 such maps I could show you, I'm not going to, but if you take the distance between the blue line and the red line and if the red line is below it, it's a negative distance. If it's above it, it's a positive distance. Add up all those numbers, 90 of them, you get an aggregate departure from average for the winter. This winter was the warmest winter by this measure since 1948. And in fact, it blows the other competition out of the water. And yet we were incredibly cold for a very long time to a point where you can't even go swimming in Lake Michigan right now and expect it to be comfortable. Interesting. Here's the long-term average. The top line, the top set of dots is the one that corresponds to minus five degrees at this level one mile above the ground. Every one of those dots represents 90 days, four areas calculated each of those days. So it's an average of 360 calculations of the whole area over the northern hemisphere that's colder than that. And then I put them all together in a time series by year. And the blue line indicates that that slope, the trend line is going down, that the planet is warming up. This is the first time anybody's really said this about mid to lower tropospheric temperatures. So this is kind of a brand new topic that we're working on. I'm confused right now about how to write the paper to be quite honest with you. But this is the important nugget. The planet is warming up, and you don't have to adjust surface thermometers and worry about where cities are and where the thermometers are put. You can just look at temperatures above the ground. A mile above the ground it says the same thing. And that's the end. But we're regionally freezing cold all winter long. That was delivered to us by weather. The background climate is completely in the opposite direction. So it's really interesting. That's what we're trying to wrestle with in our science right now, is trying to figure out how do you separate weather from climate in an intelligent, scientific way. Very important problem. So that's what I have to tell you. To get you thinking. >> So if you have questions... Is my mic dead? Did I turn this on? >> It's not on. >> It's not on? Is it on now? Can you hear me now? There you go. All right. So if you have questions, hold on to them and write them down because you're going to have an opportunity to ask Jon questions about this if you want to. What I wanted to do now, as Jon said, is talk a little about the show and how the show is structured and who the cast members are. And so this is us in the studio from Wisconsin Public Radio. It's the Larry Meiller show, and you can see Larry's mark there. He's the host. He does this routinely. He's done this for a very long time. I don't know how long, but a lot longer than we've been doing it. And we're very happy to go onto his show. There's me and there's Jon, and then in the booth, you can't see it, is Judith. Judith is the producer. And prior to Judith there was Jim Packard. Some of you might have heard his voice on the Michael Feldman show, for example, as well as Wisconsin Public Radio. We've been doing this since 1998, and now we pretty much do it the last Monday of every month. Larry's show is an hour and a half.

We're on there from 11

45 to

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30, and, as you can see, we even have a little logo now that was written not so much for radio because you can't see anything on radio, but we also do now a column in the Wisconsin State Journal, an "Ask The Weather Guys" column. So if you can't get on the radio show, you could also go in the newspaper and email in or write in a question, and then we'll answer that if we know the answer.

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>> If we don't, we'll make one up.

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>> We make them up for the radio show. >> Yeah, that's true. >> But when you have to write it down, then you don't make it up.

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>> Good point. >> So here's the general format. The producer often will get what's interesting, what's the topics. She'll get some from us, she'll go and do her own research and gather some things, and that will often be used to set the stage, just kind of like what Jon did here. To get listeners thinking about weather issues related to Wisconsin. And we'll do that, and we'll talk about that anywhere from five to 10 minutes. We'll just chat, kind of get things going until the calls start coming in. Once the calls start coming in, then Larry starts to feed them, field them. The things that's changed in the last couple of years is that also questions can now come in via email, they can come in via Facebook, as well people now send in pictures and then ask us to explain it, which is kind of interesting since it's a radio show.

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Wow, that's a really cool picture.

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>> And that doesn't always serve as an explanation. >> Right.

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And so actually the first time they did that, I don't think we knew about it. It was just like, oh, look at this picture, explain it. And so we started to explain it. Wow. Because they are really interesting. And then when I got home, Ann, my wife, was saying when you talk about pictures you've got to kind of describe them.

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Because we're listening to the radio, we can't see them. Oh, yeah. And also, webcasts, I didn't realize this, this was a couple of years ago where somebody called in and asked the question about the ozone hole and they had a Boston, Massachusetts, accent and said he was in Massachusetts and he asked this question. And I remember asking him, I said, I'm sorry, are you from Massachusetts or are you in Massachusetts? And he was just like, no, we're in Massachusetts. We just do this webcasting. I was like, oh.

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So people from all over the country can call us now? That's kind of scary.

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That's when I gave up trying to prepare for the show. There's now way we can know anything. And so, yeah, the questions come in. At about noon there's a 12-minute news break. So they go to NPR, Wisconsin Public Radio news, and the news goes on and then we kind of chat again and find out how Larry's golf scores are going or what we're doing and what's going on. So on average, the show, even though it's a 45-minute show, if you listen to the questions, and I went through 10 years of listening to our show and timed out just how long does the show actually take, and typically it takes about 33 to 36 minutes. Okay? We're going to want you to remember that for later on. It's not a 45-minute show. I also went and listened to all the, categorized how many callers came in, what kind of questions they asked, what was the topic, trying to understand what's going on with the show. It's kind of very interesting. You can see, on average, we get 13 callers, on average. This is data from '98 to 2009, so about 10 years. I don't think it's changed in the last five years since 2009. You can see the minimum was about nine callers. That was in 2009. We have a new record for a minimum number of callers. Anybody want to guess what that is? >> Four. >> Zero. >> Oh, yeah. >> Because the phone line, the producer wasn't there so they had a substitute producer and phone calls were coming in and getting put on hold.

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>> That's right. >> So nobody noticed. So we went through the whole show and Larry was saying I can't believe we didn't get any call-ins. >>

INAUDIBLE

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>> So other than that, though, it was about nine, other than that problem. And the maximum is 19, I think is what we got up to. And I don't think that's changed probably. Usually I keep track of how many people are calling and where they're calling from when we're doing it live. I didn't do that on this thing. You can also see that the number of topics that we cover is greater than the number of callers because sometimes callers have more than one question or sometimes callers, when they call in for their question, before they give the question they'll comment on the previous caller. Or they'll correct us.

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>> Yeah, right. >> Just say, no, you're wrong.

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It's a lot colder or whatever. And so I counted those. So that's kind of how the show goes. And I think that's what I want to do. So now are there any questions about the show format? >> How long does the average caller have to ask a question? >> So if the show lasts 33 minutes, 36 minutes totally, we get an average of 13 callers, okay, what's the division of that? >> Two and a half minutes. >> Two and a half minutes, roughly. But you actually have, and that's to get the question in and do the answer. But actually you have to do less than that because at the beginning Larry's talking and we're chatting. So it's really like 13 into 26. So to ask the question and to answer it has to take less than two minutes. Okay? What Larry's really good at is that if somebody asks a question and goes on and on and on and on and on, Jon and I look at each other and go, oh, geez, what the heck is the question here, and then Larry is very, very skilled at getting to the question. Like saying, stop giving all the background. Tell me what your question is. Get to it. Which is probably a lot better than what Jon and I would do because we would be like, come on, give me the question.

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We're already into a minute and a half. We've only got 30 seconds left to answer it. So other questions about the format? Because what we're going to do now is we're going to simulate the show. Okay? And you all are the callers. That fellow over there, Tom, who did the introducing, he has a mic in his hand, he's going to be kind of like the producer and Larry combined. >> Tough job. >> He's got a tough job to do. So he's going to go out and he is going to get the questions from you, the audience. And then Jon and I are going to answer the questions, maybe not correctly, but we're going to answer the questions.

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And so we'll do it that way. And so here it goes. It's coming across right now. If you want to really experience, let me ask this first before you ask your

question

how many people have actually heard the show? Raise your hand. Oh, a lot. Maybe clap.

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So a number of you. How many of you consider yourselves real weather geeks? Raise your hand. Okay, and then clap.

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Okay. All right, good. Just getting a sense of who it is. All right, so here we go. The show has began and you're just going to give it to them? You're not going to do a little intro like Larry might do? Make up a caller. Mr. Red Shirt from... >> I apologize for my shortcomings. We have a caller.

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>> That's smooth. You showed in one of the slides that the coverage of the Great Lakes was the coldest, maybe that's not exactly the coverage we were talking about there. >> It's the ice coverage, yeah. >> The ice coverage. >> Of the lakes. >> It's the second. In this particular year, it was attributed, the weather was attributed to a polar vortex. In the previous year, the previous in the '70s was it? >> '79, yeah. >> Right, '79. Was that also caused by a polar vortex, or is there some other kind of weather pattern that was causing that ice coverage? >> An excellent question. Undoubtedly, to get really cold to produce that kind of extensive ice coverage over the lake you can't just be cold for a couple of days. You have to have a prolonged period of cold, and the only way that's going to happen is if some large scale circulation anomaly in the atmosphere is present over you that delivers cold air and allows it to stay. So my guess is yes. I'm saying guess because I don't know. It's a really good question, and one could easily go back with data that we have and find out what did the circulation look like in January 1979 compared to January 2014. And I suspect you'd find that there's a lot of similarities regionally. Another interesting question from that might be, how far afield do those similarities exist? It might just be that you get a regional anomaly that's similar but the rest of the hemisphere is not similar, and that of course begs a lot of other questions about what's driving that set of circumstances. So you can see how this is really an interesting sort of fractal problem. You can't keep on going to the next level of questions. They look a lot like the ones you just looked at, but they're slightly different. And this is one of the research topics that Jon's doing, and that's the other exciting part of doing this radio show is you get to talk about your research. >> That's right. >> When it's appropriate. >> Yeah. >> When. >> Thanks. It seems to me, just watching day to day on the computer displays and so forth, that it seems like in recent years the fronts have been moving, stalling out more often. They seem to, you'll get a front that comes down and sort of sits there and funnel storms along a particular path time after time. Is there any truth to that, or is it just my impression? >> Are you referring to summertime storms probably? >> Yeah, mainly those. >> Some sort of stationary boundaries that are more stationary now in certain geographic regions than they used to be? >> Yes. >> As far as I'm aware, there's no particular evidence that points to that. And one could study it by perhaps taking a region of the country, maybe a region of the state, and just looking at the statistics of boundaries that you can identify in a certain objective way and see whether or not they do seem to persist for longer periods of time now than they used to. I think the answer is no, but that's an open topic. >> And I would only add to it that when we asked who were people who are really into weather and are weather geeks, you raised your hand. Oh, you didn't. Oh, okay.

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Because I would have bet that you really just want to see those storms. A lot of people like to see those storms.

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>> That's right. >> So when they go around you, they're like, oh, no, it's the Dane County effect again or the Madison effect. >> Yeah, right.

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>> It's really like no, it's want, and you don't your candy and therefore you're upset. >> And we have a caller from Boston. >> From Boston? Oh. >> I remember the winter of '48 in Boston as being particularly snowy. >> I remember that too.

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>> In fact, the snow was over my head. Of course I was shorter then.

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My question is, you've been talking about our hemisphere, would you define our hemisphere? Do your figures include data from anything north of somewhere in Ecuador, for example? >> The data that I have access to does, in fact. It's a global data set. I've restricted my attention and what I presented to you to the northern hemisphere only. And, in fact, 10 degrees... >> North of Ecuador. >> 10 degrees north and north of that is what I've looked at to this point, that's correct. >> Okay. And another caller. >> Have you looked at the southern hemisphere? >> Yeah, southern hemisphere has the same exact signal, a shrinking of the cold pool. It's just that it's much smaller to begin with because it doesn't really make its way of the Antarctic continent very far. But it does get off the continent a little bit. But nonetheless, it has shrunk in the southern hemisphere as well. We don't trust that data as much as we trust the northern hemisphere data for reasons that have to do with population centers and so on. >> My question has to do with water level in the Great Lakes, particularly Lake Michigan. The water level has gone up this past year, I understand, and is that a function of the weather or of the climate, or is it some other combination of those? And how does that fit with the really severely cold winter this year and the amount of ice there was? Is that causing the rising of the lakes? >> So the lake levels are complicated because it's a matter of how much water is flowing in and how much is leaving through both rivers as well as evaporation. And so when we started doing the show in '98, that was a La Nina year where we don't get much snowfall up in the Midwest. And the Great Lakes water basin is, in my view, shockingly small. >> It is incredibly small. >> It's nothing like the watershed of the Mississippi, for example. It's really a small watershed. And so a La Nina year means we didn't get a lot of snowfall, it didn't go into the lakes, and the lakes had been below normal by anywhere from a foot and a half to three feet for many years. And pretty much any time we would get on the show, that's one of the things I would look up is what's the water levels. And they were always a foot or more below level. And now they're up to almost normal or above normal. Part of that is the fact that there was a lot of ice on the lake for a long time, and that keeps evaporation from occurring and keeps the lake level up higher. But we've pretty much caught up to normal, and it didn't take very long. It took one winter to get there. >> It's really kind of surprising. >> It's interesting you ask that question when we have this graphic here in front of us. And we wouldn't have this on the radio, but if we had it on a Facebook page or something, we could refer to it, and I would do it in the following way. I'd say if you go back to the time we started the show, 1998, that was the second lowest ice cover ever for the winter, and then just four years later was the lowest. The number of dots below half ice coverage on this graph that I'm looking at far exceeds the number in that time period that are above it. There's only four times that there was more than 50% ice coverage during the winter since 1998. And that's, as you said, Steve, that's exactly what happens. You lose a lot of water by evaporation. If you cover it with ice, the evaporation game is all over and that water stays in there over the whole winter. >> And so that's one of the things with climate change looking into the future. If our winters are going to get shorter, then there won't be as much ice on the lakes, and that will increase evaporation and could lower levels in the Great Lakes. >> So it's a combination of climate and weather. >> I have a weather question about weather patterns. I like to ski and we always plan one day a week to go out skiing, and it seems like I see weather patterns of it snowing the same day every week for like weeks at a time. And this past winter, of course, it was always below zero on Monday and Tuesday and even Wednesday when we planned to go and then warmed up towards the end of the week. Is there a weather involved in that seven-day, eight-day pattern? >> That's a really good question. Around the turn of the last century, 1900s, when the Norwegian scientists in Bergen were first putting together some ideas of integrating a bunch of old ideas about weather systems, one of the things that helped them being to cobble a model together was exactly recognizing this fact. That it's about a five- to seven-day periodicity for what we now call mid-latitude cyclones. And if you live in Bergen, Norway, or if you live in Madison, Wisconsin, during much of the year, the wintertime in particular, weather systems come by on about that frequency. So you can, under certain circumstances, get locked into an every seven-day period for a while. And I've played softball here in town for years, and even in the summertime when those kinds of weather systems are not the prevalent type that deliver the weather for us, you can still find that maybe Wednesday night is going to be the night you get rained out seven times out of 10 and Friday night goes the whole season without a rain-out. So these things can happen, and it does have something to do with the underlying periodicity of some of the weather systems that affect us. >> And speaking of periodicity, I think I made a mistake or an error in saying La Nina means low snowfall, where it's El Nino means low snowfall. So for cross-country skiing, skiing this winter, we're going into an El Nino period it looks like. So winter doesn't look that really, it's looking to be very depressing for Jon. >> Right. It is, it is. And I'm sabbatical so that will make up for it.

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>> We now have a caller from Rye, New York, which is great because it's both the capital of humor and name for a liquor.

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>> All kinds of serviceable. Thinking about communicating science to the public, how do you handle conspiracy theory callers, and is chemtrails your least favorite topic?

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>> You want to go with that first? >> Yeah, I'll go with that. >> We're both going to have to. >> Yeah. So, the key is to be respectful. So, when people call in and ask things like conspiracy, chemtrails, chemtrails, if our don't know this, they're contrails that come out of the back of jets, and that's just the warm moist air coming out with the engine mixing with the environment. If the environment's right, you'll get these long condensation trails they're called. But there's groups out there that call this a conspiracy of the government. They're chemical trails and the government is poisoning us. So the thing is when somebody's calling in you don't really know if this is something that they really believe, in which case you won't be able to change their mind anyway, or it's something that they've heard and they're open to having their mind changed. And so you've got to listen to what they're saying and then try and present the actual factual information. And then I'm going to let Jon talk, and then I'll tell you another story that I think is true that maybe Jon doesn't.

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>> I think those are all excellent points and a very good question. Respect is the key thing. And I think part of respect when you're adults, we deal with this with our own kids of course, anybody who has kids who get into the adult stage, part of the way you respect an adult is you tell them the truth. And so the truth doesn't necessarily mean factual truth. As you said, Steve, there's no point, there's not going to be any resolution if you're trying to beat them up with the facts However, sometimes I find myself in a situation like that after being respectful and saying, you know, actually, there's a physical reason why there's a condensation trail left. You're not thinking about the five million billion ton atmosphere we have on this planet. There's no way that can actually be screwed around with on that kind of a scale by some sort of clandestine operation. It's impossible. The numbers will not add up. But then you have the opportunity to remind people that if you've got an idea and it's a defensible scientific idea or defensible policy idea, then you have a responsibility to put it out for criticism. And if you're afraid to put your ideas out for criticism, then you're not playing the game. And so I think very often have had some flavor of that and said if you really believe the moon is what's controlling the weather, write a research paper, submit it to the journals. The people who will review it have no agenda against your idea. They do have an allegiance to the laws of physics and the accepted theories of our science. And if your ideas conform to that in a systematic way, you will succeed in getting them out there. If they don't, you will not. And that's the way the game is played. And so we have an opportunity to make that point alerting people to just the nature of active scientific research. We're not custodians of facts. We're creative thinkers confined more than honest in a substantial way. Confined to make creative statements about our reality with a limited set of rules that we can't violate. It's a fun job, but it's creative. >> And that's so good, I'm not going to follow up with it.

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>> Yes, the question about this one mile temperature layer, is that just kind of a favorite area of climatologists? Is that like weather balloons going up every day that level? Why is that such an important level to climatologists? >> Good question. The reason why we have the data is a function of the balloons that go up every day. About 80 of them across the continental United States, some 400 or so over the northern hemisphere, twice a day. And then we ingest that data into numerical forecast models, and we can pretend we have data twice as frequently, actually, is what we do. That level is interesting to me actually because it's been neglected by people thinking about the climate problem for a very long time. Much of the focus has been on the surface temperature, and there's all kinds of caveats people have to use in order to make statements about surface temperature trends, and those caveats allow skeptics to have fuel to say, well, you don't really know what you're talking about. And if you go to a level that's a little bit above the ground free from some of that problem, you can say some new things that actually happen to corroborate what's being said everywhere else. In addition, that level is one that day to day weather forecasters, in the wintertime particularly, pay attention to it. The minus five line is a pretty good indicator of the boundary between rain and snow. So by choosing that line, I think I'm hoping to invite a community of people to look at this problem who might not otherwise care about it, but they say, oh, yeah, minus five, I think about that a lot because it has to do with rain or snow. Something like that. >> Hi, guys. >> Hi. >> There, we're on. Hi, guys. Long time listener, first time caller.

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I'm interested in knowing, and I'll cop to being a meteorologist as well, what sort of impact do you think social media and the proliferation of phones where people can get weather data is having on the types of questions that you're getting or the conversations that people are having about weather? >> That's a really good question, so I'll let Jon take it.

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I'm not sure how it's impacting the questions that we're getting other than the Facebook. So, Larry has a Facebook show, and he does it. I've tried doing some Twittering, some tweeting actually was occurring about us coming here tonight. I find that I just don't do it as much as I want to in order to try and figure out how the social media works. I think in general, our show aside, it's playing a really important role. And the example I like to think of are actually two. One is the movement of this Sandy storm up the east coast. So people were Twittering about what was going on in their location, and other people were following it. And so the people further north were following what the heck is going on to the south of us. They're getting flooded. The weather is really bad. And so because of that, they could do more quicker reaction and believe that, yeah, this is a nasty story because the person in southern New Jersey is getting flooded, and I live up in Long Island so I better do something. That's one. The other one that I like to point to where it's obvious social media played a role is a study that a colleague and former student ours did, John Knox, who's now in Georgia. In 2012, there was a whole bunch of tornadoes. It was a big tornado year, and they all went through the southeast and they went through Georgia. And then there was a person who on Facebook who found, I think she lived in Tennessee or someplace north of Georgia, and she found a bunch of debris in her yard. And so she took pictures of the debris and posted it on Facebook and said if this belongs to you, let me know. Because you know homes get destroyed, people want those personal belongings. And so people started saying yes, that's the photo of my grandmother, and then she would send it to them. And then other people found out that she was doing this, and they started sending her photos from the homes that they lived in. And then people started to claim those as well. And then what John did with his students was to find out, okay, this is where it landed, this is where it was picked up from, and so they could actually look at the debris paths, not just the tornado paths but how far debris went. >> Awesome. Yeah. >> So I think we're going to see much more. We see validation now. There's rain apps. So when it's raining out, you can go outside and say, it's raining or it's hailing or it's snowing and researchers are correlating that with radar signals. And so we're seeing, I think, more and more of this social media are going to play a role in weather forecasting and in doing studies. >> Yeah, and if I could follow up. These are excellent points. Really great points and they allow me to make the statement I was going to make anyway, which is I think the answer might be, my guess would be that it doesn't directly affect the questions we get but it provides a background that's different than it was in 1998. People have a greater awareness not only of their own local weather but also connections between their locality somewhere else for reasons that you talked about, and also the spread of the availability of looking at radar data and all this other stuff. Every Little League field I've ever coached on has a radar screen at the concession stand. Everybody knows how to use that. And when I was playing as a kid, nobody knew about that, and there was no availability. So it sets a whole different bottom level for conversations, which, of course, is what we're about on the show. It's all conversation. >> And if you're a biker and you're going to leave for home and you know rain's in the area, what do you do? Get your smartphone and call up the radar. >> Everybody does it. >> So, a little bit different from the social media, but 10

days ago on Monday at 11

45 I was here preparing for a group on Tuesday. The alarm goes off in this building and it's not an alarm I'm used to hearing. What is it? That's probably the tornado alarm. >> Yeah. >> About five seconds later, my phone goes off. >> Yeah. >> It's like, I didn't even know I had that app.

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>> And I bet you know how to turn it off.

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>> But once it works once, you don't want to. >> Well, it was amazing because about 10 seconds later my wife calls.

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And she says, my phone went off.

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And we're down in the basement. So I drove home. I only live about six or seven blocks away. It was like, wow, here it is. That's pretty impressive. And you're sitting down there and the rain isn't falling very hard and I don't know if this is a waste of time or not.

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15, boom, it expires. We can take the kids back upstairs. They're asleep. 18 it goes off again. We go down in the basement. Tuesday morning we wake up to find out there was a tornado five miles from where we live. So I think that's really remarkable. It's technology not exactly the social media, but the speed with which those alarms and the accuracy is really remarkable. If you guys could talk about that, I'm going to go over and give a microphone. >> Yeah, it is amazing. Tom, I have exactly the same story in my house, not with my phone. I've gotten calls from the Smithsonian about this thing. I'm probably going to end up there.

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But I get a lot of private time. >> That's amazing what Alexander Bell could do. >> But my wife's phone went off, and where were we? For the first time in 20 years living here, I'll tell you the truth, 20 years living here, first time we ever were in the stairwell. And I'm thinking to myself, this is why I made the joke, when you said you don't know how to turn it off, who would after they see how it works? Who would? I don't want to know. I want it to always be available. That's remarkable. I couldn't agree more. >> So the nights when the thunderstorms went through we were in bed and then all the sudden heard this thing go off. And I woke up and I said, what was that? And Ann says, well, that's probably your phone. And I was like, yeah, yeah, and I went back to sleep.

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>> Meteorologist found dead in bed. >> Not the desired result.

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>> You just can't get the information, you actually have to act on the information. >> Hi. This is kind of a nice segue to the question I was going to talk about since we're talking tornadoes. Have you noticed any difference in the number of tornadoes, either nationally or by the Wisconsin average, in the average strength in Fujita scale? Has there been any average change in that department as related to this global warming? As we're seeing it definitely getting warmer, has that affected that at all? >> So I normally say, when we're looking at the number of tornadoes that Wisconsin gets a year, the average number I use is... >> 75 or something. >> 75? >> I don't know. >> 21. >> 21. >> It's what I typically use.

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>>

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>> Like, wow, that's a lot of tornadoes.

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But we were doing a column for the newspaper about tornadoes because we just had those. So I looked up and I wanted to confirm that it was 21, and actually a NOAA web page that I had gone to, I remember what the address is, but it was an official page so it was one I could believe, they said that the average number of tornadoes in Wisconsin was like 24 or 25. I was like that's higher than I expected. But the time period was from 1990 to 2009. And so the time period that I typically use goes back even further so whether or not, however, so it's gone up, whether or not that's statistically significant is a totally different question, which I never looked into. I just went back to my long-term average. >> And some of the stuff that's baked into that cake that leads to those questions is populations have expanded in various parts of the state where they weren't there in the 1940s for instance, and there's more people available to report and see these things. There's technological ways to see them now that didn't exist even in 1975. That's why I was thinking of 75.

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So it's a complicated issue. And in addition, the physical factors that conspire to produce a tornado is quite a number of dimensions you've got to worry about. Some of them will be directly affected by a warming planet. Others are much more circumstantial to the region. So it's difficult. >> So there's no way of actually telling, then, of the average strength, Fujita strength on these, if there's been any change in that department either? >> Yeah. I just had a student who left. Now he's working at weather service in La Crosse. He's been looking at exactly this issue. Trying to rank tornado outbreaks. He's got a giant data set that he could use to address that very question. It didn't tickle his fancy, which makes me think there's probably nothing to it, but I don't know if that's right because he's a curious person. >> The other thing I'll add to that is as time goes on, not just with tornadoes but with other severe weather events, we learn things from them, and so we build our buildings better. And so the way we determine the strength of a tornado is the destruction that it does. And you can't classify a tornado until you actually look and go out after it has occurred and find what the destruction is. And so we used to classify that destruction by what we called the Fujita scale, the F scale. And if you know, if you're a weather geek, you know that that has now changed to the EF scale, the enhanced, and part of that was that our buildings have gotten better and so the destruction isn't as much. And so we had to adjust the scale to meet with the improved buildings. >> So this is Isaac with the CIMSS workshop. He's from Middleton. >> Middleton. >> All right, do you know if there were any special circumstances that led to the double tornado in Nebraska earlier? >> A couple of weeks ago? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I'll give my answer which is I don't know if there were any particularly unusual circumstances that led to that. I think to capture these double funnels at the same time on the ground is a relatively new thing, but I know I've heard reports of similar storms. They're rare. They're not commonly, or not commonly reported I should say. I don't know if they're not common. But I don't know of anything that was particularly unusual about that environment. >> I think one was dying while one was developing. It's a nice picture. >> Yeah, it is. It's quite dramatic. >> And if we had a Facebook page, we would put it on that.

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>> Yeah, right. >> Meg's from Madison. >> So I know we've been talking about tornadoes, and I remember taking a class a couple years ago that mentioned that hurricanes may possibly be affected by climate change and the warming of the Earth. Is there any credit to that? >> Yeah, there does seem to be. There's a brand new study that came out from one of our colleagues here in the department, actually in CIMSS. >> Right. >> Which decided to take an equally sort of blurry view of hurricanes that I'm taking to how cold it is over the hemisphere. Instead of worrying about individual temperature time series like in Moscow or in Leningrad or whatever it might be, Edinburgh, Scotland, I look at the whole hemisphere. Jim looked at the position of maximum intensity of hurricanes and didn't care what that actual maximum was but where was the position of the storm when it was at its maximum intensity Maximum intensity positions are moving pole-ward. >> Right. >> And that's interesting. And they tie that to a gradual warming of the ocean. And in addition, I think established even before this very interesting new study is the idea that if the Earth's atmosphere is retaining more infrared radiation, which is the kind that you and I emit and give temperature to all the things around us, it's bound to warm the tropical oceans more than they would otherwise warm in the absence of that retention. And the consequence of that is of course more fuel for hurricane development. So the more intense storms are hypothesized to become more intense in the future. The number of storms may actually go down. But the most intense ones will be more intense. That's the idea. And there's even some evidence that seems to suggest that. >> I wouldn't mind shifting from lots of rain to lots of drought. So, what can you tell us about what's going on in California and what the outlook is for that and what some of the triggers may have been for what I understand is a historic drought in a place that gets dry a lot. So can you tell us more about that and what it means for a wet place like Wisconsin with our unhappy cows that have all this rain and green alfalfa? >> Yeah, it's easy to forget too that our spring, our winter first of all, as we already said, was persistently cold. We didn't have a particularly snowy winter here, but every time it snowed, it never melted. So we ended up with a really good persistent snow pack as well. Then a remarkable thing happened in our spring, I think, was a gradual melt. Does anybody remember this spring as being muddy and sloppy? >> No. >> Isn't it unbelievable that we can all say that? Because we had a thick snow cover in mid-February and it gradually disappeared. So that's good for our agriculture and it's good for everything else around here. I think the same exact broad scale weather pattern in the northwestern part of the hemisphere, so northern hemisphere but western part of it, over the western US and Canada, that kept us cold, kept the west coast abnormally dry. So I think their drought really began when our cold snap began in mid-November. It might have already been going there, but it really was exacerbated from mid-November until now. And we've never really come out of that broad scale pattern. We haven't had a particularly hot summer, and we've been kind of stuck in a version of that very same pattern that we first got into in early November. So that's as much as I know because it's as much as I've thought about the drought in California, but I can see at least how it's related to some of the things we've experienced here. >> When I was a boy in Madison, I experienced what I thought was ball lightning. I also experienced a chain lightning. I haven't since, so I'm wondering if I was just imagining it. Can you comment on ball lightning and chain lightning? >> How would you describe ball lightning? >> It was like a ball of fire that I thought came through a window and landed near me. Now, I don't know if I was dreaming or not, but I was told it was ball lightning. And chain lightning is just like a chain in the sky that lasted, it wasn't instantaneous like normal lightning. >> So, if you had asked me this question in 1998, I would have been very polite, but in 1998 I did not believe that ball lightning was a real thing because theoretically they couldn't prove it. They couldn't develop it, and so I thought maybe it was like Saskatchewan. >> Sasquatch. >> Sasquatch, yeah.

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Saskatchewan actually exists.

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>> Yeah, it does. It's filled with Sasquatches

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>> Canadian ambassador is on the line, Steve.

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>> But we've had a number of callers over the years come in with that same experience. I observed this ball lightning, and their descriptions are pretty much the same. And so I went from not believing it to learning that, yeah, ball lightning probably does exist to the point where now in the lab they're actually able to reproduce things that look like ball lightning but on a very small scale. And those are exactly the descriptions that people generally give. It's just like a ball of light, kind of floats around. It will move through a wall or come in from a wall, and then just go away. And the fact that the callers are coming from all different parts of the Upper Midwest anyway, and the descriptions are all the same, it's just like, wow, I went from not believing to ready to go up to Saskatchewan to find one of those hairy guys that eats beef jerky.

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>> So, for the high school kids in the room, this is what happens in the '60s.

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>> No, no. This is what happens generally on Long Island.

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>> What about chain lightning? >> Chain lightning, so I haven't heard of chain lightning. My first thinking is that it has to do with the atmospheric structure. In the sense when you get a bolt of lightning, often it's not just one line. It's multiple bolts going back and forth. It's just our eyes can't see it go quickly. And so I'm familiar with this thing called ribbon lightning where the lightning bolt occurs and then the wind actually moves that channel. And so it actually looks like a ribbon of light, of a lightning bolt going through. So I imagine the chain lightning is something like that where the atmosphere is setting up so we're only really able to see the bright spots that are set up like a chain. I guess to me a chain is like you're getting a bright spot, dark spot, bright spot, dark spot like that. >> It looked like a chain. >> Hmm. So it was all linked together? >> Yes. >> Oh, okay. So I would even say even more it was probably the wind structure moving that around. That would keep that channel. Because what happens is a channel gets set up like a wire, an invisible wire. >> It was also lateral, not vertical. >> Oh. So most of the lightning that we have is not from cloud to ground, vertical. It's actually horizontal. >> Yeah, cloud to cloud. >> Yeah. And many observations, I just saw an observation from a colleague in Maryland, we're getting better and better observations of lightning. And the length of lightning strikes is shockingly long. There was this one that hit the ground, and so we had a photo of it from the ground and it looks like it comes out the cloud base and hits the ground. And then he has the detector where it came from, and that lightning bolt started 50 miles away from where it started. >> Wow. >> So that's why they say when you hear the roar go indoors. Or also lightning out of the blue. If you hear thunder, then there's lightning around, and you can be hit by it even though it's blue sky up above. >> So there are bolts from the blue. And I saw a show the other day, on NOVA I think it was, about these sprites that occur above thunderstorms, and I thought they were just a curiosity, but they have some really beautiful new data on these. So there's a lot we don't know about electrical storms in the atmosphere. But these sprites are apparently part of a global electrical current. >> It maintains the electrical field. >> Yeah. >> It maintains the field around the Earth, which keeps us safe from the solar wind. Unbelievable. >> So before we get to Dean Reed, along with this, could you talk about St. Elmo's fire? Like, Magellan's crew almost gave up like twice and then they had St. Elmo's fire and they were reinvigorated by this, and that's, what, 500 years ago. What is St. Elmo's fire? Do we get it in the Great Lakes? Can you get it around anywhere else? >> You can get it whenever. You can get it in your bathrooms. That's why a lot of times they tell you don't take a shower when there's a lightning storm around. Take a shower, but don't do it when there's lightning around. Because the atmosphere is getting all charged up, and Elmo's fire is like a static electricity that builds up around pipes and things like that and it gives you a blue color. And St. Elmo is actually the patron saint of sailors because they actually were thinking that that was protecting their boats. Where in reality, if you see that on your pipes, then... >> Get away from those pipes. >> It's like when your hair goes on edge. It's like, you're about to get hit. >> Yeah.

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>> So you should do something. >> You could mistake that as you're protected from the cold, but that's wrong. >> What do you do when your hair goes on edge?

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>> I get the buzzer out again.

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>> He relies on his phone now. >> Right, yeah. >> I'm one of those annoying callers who tries to get in two questions at once. >> Good luck. >>

Question one

you said that when the lakes freeze over, evaporation is done. >> Yeah. >> I believe you, but I thought there was such a thing as sublimation in which water could go from its solid phase to its gas phase without passing through its liquid phase, at least as far as we can see. >> So for that question is yes, evaporation is done. Sublimation occurs. >> Oh. >> But it's much slower. >> It's a lot slower. >> It's a lot slower. >> The water loss from sublimation is substantially smaller, but it does occur. >>

The second question is

those of us in the room here can see all these young people in the front rows who are here for a CIMSS workshop, can you tell us a little bit about what CIMSS is and what you do and what the CIMSS workshop involves. >> Sure. So CIMSS stands for the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. It's a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And we work closely with them in finding new ways to analyze current weather data from satellites as well as to help design the future weather satellites. In fact, I like to quote a colleague of mine from Europe who was in charge of the European Satellite Agency. Wisconsin is the mecca of satellite meteorology, and that's because it all began here. The father of satellite meteorology Vern Suomi. He actually started CIMSS along with Bill Smith. And the reason why he said it's the mecca of satellite meteorology is because if you're in the field of weather satellites, at some point in your career you have to come to Wisconsin to visit the work that we're doing here and where it all began. And so each summer we have a summer workshop for high school students as well as for teachers, a separate one for teachers, and they come and they learn about the field of geoscience in general with an emphasis on meteorology. >> And you're all interested young people. Interested in more than one thing. Some of you will not stay in the atmospheric sciences. But I can assure you that if you do, and this is part of the reason I'm always excited to be involved in some small way when I can as a member of our department, I can assure you we've got plenty of problems for you. We've got a lot of things we still got to figure out.

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The second question is

And many of those problems and the solutions that we'll come up with, hopefully in the next 25 years, have a direct impact on the sustainability of our society and our civilization. So there's not many other places you can go in science that have a more direct path to a high profile career than this one. So we want you to think about it, strongly. >>

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