Welcome to Weathered Questions, where we answer the questions on your radar.
Welcome, everyone, to another episode here of Weathered Questions, meteorologist Kai O'Mara, alongside meteorologist Jan Reichard.
We're getting the summer all wrapped up, Jan.
And, you know, typically in the Midwest, June is one of the rainiest times of year, but lately... Oh, my gosh.
It's just that the rain's been moving over the exact same areas and...
Just a quick highlight for folks that may not realize this.
Eastern Indiana, last week, picked up more than a foot of rain in a day.
They're not close to a beach out there, okay?
They are.
They
might be now.
They might be now, but oh my gosh, and it was just the rains were just training and training and training.
What is the deal with that?
Why do they do that, Jan?
I mean, people are asking all the time, like, why does it keep me under the same spot?
Yeah,
yeah.
Well, so you mentioned that word there training, right?
That's something that we use as meteorologists a lot.
Maybe you've heard that before.
Training storms are those that just like Kai just described, essentially they just keep going over the exact same area over and over and over.
And if you look at a radar image of these storms, it might look like
the storm is hardly even moving, and it's literally just sitting over top of a city or a certain area.
And in part, that's kind of true.
What's actually happening is that storm itself is moving, but then it's kind of regenerating on the back end.
So it's kind of dying out on the front, regenerating on the back.
And so while the true storm itself is moving with the steering winds and stuff,
the precipitation does not actually move and continues to occur over the same area.
And so there's a couple of different reasons that can happen.
And there's also a couple of different kind of flavors, I guess, of those training storms as well.
The simplest version is probably just a stationary front where you have something that
usually like a warm front and a cold front maybe that are kind of competing against each other, not allowing those boundaries to move on as they normally would.
And so you get that stalled boundary that basically just doesn't let the weather keep moving forward.
And so then that's when you get these areas that just constantly get precipitation over and over and over.
Yeah, that's where you can get, especially, you know, in the summer months and in humid Midwest, if you have enough moisture available, it's where you can get some pretty tricky situations with maybe some flash flooding or things like that.
But that's probably the simplest explanation.
There's also some opportunities for, you know, upper level winds and other things to get involved, as well as we talked a little bit
in the last couple of episodes here, or really a couple of episodes this season, I think, about the low-level jet.
That can also have an influence in it, too.
But that's probably the simplest explanation.
And we do try to keep things at least a little bit on the simple side here.
Yeah, probably has to do with the wind, too, a little bit.
Either the winds are really slow, so it's not really moving the storm very much, or they just keep moving in the exact same spot over and over and over again.
Now it's like focusing a hairdryer in one spot and it just doesn't want to move You know and so that that might be part of it But uh, yeah to your point like people would look at radar and then four hours later Because it's the same radar did it update?
Yeah, it updated.
It just everything just regenerated again.
So you can get a ton just a ton of rain With storms like that and you know people's backyards up my neighborhood right now are intensely green
like intensely green and we're getting mushrooms all over the place.
Yes.
And I'm having to watch that with the dog big time because I don't know what those are, but we have to get those pulled right away.
I don't know what they are, but they pop up overnight.
Yeah.
And they're huge.
I mean, they're some of them are, you know, by the size of a measuring tape, maybe.
the heads on them.
They're pretty big, like two inches across, two and a half inches across.
I
love that measuring tape was the first thought in your mind.
Not like our classic hail measurements, like
softball
size, baseball size, measuring tape size.
No, it's just I was looking around the office.
This is the first thing I saw when we were doing this.
The other part is the CO2 card.
We don't want to mushroom the size of a CO2 car.
No.
Well, on that same kind of similar note, Kai, you know, we have dove into a few topics similar to this, but because it's so relevant and prevalent in our lives right now, we've had a couple questions come again of what is up with all of these early morning storms?
Like, this is not common.
This is not normal.
What's going on here?
Can you give the listeners some answers?
Sure.
Well, and you know, hopefully we've established enough and I'd have to go back and we'd have to figure out which which episodes we've talked about this type of thing.
But the time of day for storms has definitely been one that I think both to you and me, Jan, at least in our very early days until we got to college were kind of mistaut.
A lot of us kind of thought heating of the day and then after that, they just don't happen.
Well, that's just simply not true.
And as we've seen across the country, you know, we see it every year, but particularly so in the last 10 days, that these storms have really gotten their act together in the late night and early morning hours when there isn't an ounce of sunshine anywhere in the United States.
And you sit there and you go, well, what's driving this?
How can this possibly happen?
You know, we talked a little about the low level jet last time, but there's probably two processes at play here.
The first one has been blamed a lot.
for the summertime storms.
And that's that whole ring of fire pattern where you've got the heat wave and then the storms move around the outside of the heat wave.
This one may have a little different mechanism to it.
And it's a surprise for most people, especially those that live in the Midwest, to know that the United States actually has a monsoon season.
And a lot of times you think about that over in India or Asian places.
You don't think about that in North America.
But the bottom line is
down in the southwest united states there is something called the southwest u.s monsoon and a lot of folks take monsoon as the word for a huge heavy downpour you know it's a monsoon out there but in reality it's it's it's a whole lot less exciting monsoon is just a seasonal wind shift that's all it is and that's why it's so predictable to go out to los vegas in october november and have really beautiful weather but go to los vegas in july and august and you're bound to get wet out there
And I'll tell you that the southwest monsoon, for over 50% of their precipitation, you can account for that in July and August.
And that's in Arizona, New Mexico, states, Southern Nevada.
And then meanwhile, off to the east.
So what happens is there is an area of intense heat.
Usually, and this is a fun fact, in the Midwest, we tend to get the warmest temperatures of the year in July.
In eastern Texas and Louisiana, it's more like August, even early September.
And if you haven't looked lately, Dallas, Texas has been cooking like 104, 105 every day, not a cloud in the sky.
And the monsoon is going around that and moving up and through Mexico and then into the Southwest US.
And then what happens is those waves go up in Nebraska and then they move east into Iowa and then they go around through Illinois and Indiana.
And then they actually make it all the way around and they go all the way down to the Carolinas and then back out to the Atlantic.
And they just do a full circle.
So I think that's probably a play, Jan, mostly for the timing of the storms, because once they're established and it's already warm and humid, we've probably already noticed this for those of us in the state.
I mean, we had our sliding glass door fogged over entirely.
Aris has been regularly like that.
Yeah.
And we are AC snubs.
Like
it was just that humid out.
And then I went to start the dryer and it starts screaming at me.
And I'm going, all right, this has been a horrible month for expenses.
I'm going to spare all the listeners that I'll tell you that off camera.
But the dryer starts screaming and I'm going, what in the world is going on?
The outside of the drum had condensed and the rubber belt driving the drum was actually slipping on it.
Wow.
In the morning.
This is before the corn has even done anything the corn's not even awake yet So I mean it was just a remarkable amount of humidity and I you know long story short I think that's the reason for the morning timing It was a very regular timing you could you could just time it out like a clock and that's how the monsoon season works down in the southwest US So if you didn't know they had a monsoon season now, you know,
and if you take anything away from this episode I think that is one of the biggest maybe weather myths is
monsoon does not mean rain.
It means wind that happens to often drive rain patterns in the southwestern U.S.
or, you know, you hear about the monsoon season in Asia and stuff like that too, right?
Not rain.
Wet seasons are critical.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, the southwest U.S.
could use all the water right now they could get.
based on some of the lake levels out there.
So hopefully this is one of those cases that can actually help them at the end of the day versus hurt them.
Even though it has been a ton of rain for everybody else, hopefully they're getting some of this rain too that they desperately need down there.
Absolutely, yes.
Well, talking about rain and other parts of the world and the country, we're going to move on a little bit from good old Midwest weather for our tribute question today.
gonna ask you a little bit about mountains.
So today's trivia question, true or false?
So 50-50 shot here.
One side of a mountain is more likely to receive rain than the other.
True or false?
One side of a mountain is more likely to receive rain than the other.
I'll give you a few seconds to think about that and we'll back with the answer in just a few.
All right, so that should be a question today.
You okay?
Sorry, I'm fine.
I bumped my hand on the counter.
I'm fine.
All right, so today's trivia question.
One side of a mountain is more likely to receive rain than the other.
And that's a true or false question.
Let me think it is.
I do the shot.
It's true.
I'd be surprised how many people
Maybe you're like, well, they're probably asking this for a reason.
And so you guess true.
But maybe you don't really have a good understanding as to why that might be.
Essentially, in mountains, there is what we call in meteorology, a windward side and a leeward side.
And that windward side is going to get more surprise wind.
Yep.
And essentially what happens, we all know, we're gonna take a step back to the mountains for a second.
We all know that clouds happen when air is moving upward.
You have rising air and you get clouds to form.
Essentially, the mountains are something that forces all of that air to move upward.
So on that windward side, you have your air being pushed upward, you get your clouds to form, you get stronger winds, you get...
your precipitation.
And then on the other side, something that we call a rain shadow, where basically all the precipitation has been used up and kind of get a drier patch or a mountain desert that will occur.
So yeah, that one's true.
But just not something we have to deal with very much here in the Midwest, but definitely an interesting phenomenon and something that
Very prevalent in the Western US for us.
Yeah, all sorts of all sorts of havoc out there in the in the mountain range.
That's why it's so hard to predict snow out there.
You know, down to the inch.
I mean, that's it's really difficult to do.
I mean, you can tell there's parts that are more favored than others to get snow events when the winds are what they are.
But yeah, I mean, to your point that the mountains are a big hill.
There's a big rocky hill that's in the way of the wind and so the wind can't go underground.
It's going to have to be forced up.
So there's a big word for that.
It's called orographic is what it's called and it's called orographic lift and it lifts up in there and it condenses it out.
Back when I was in college there was actually an old little module that we played with and I have yet to be able to find it on the internet anywhere.
We used to call it mountain sim.
is what it was and you'd set the temperature and the dew point of the air and you'd blow it against the mountain and you'd see how much rain fell out of it and then you'd see how warm it was when it ruled down the other side of the mountain and it taught us all about temperature changes and how much um how much moisture is really important to that whole process and once you get to the top that's why it can get so darn warm in the Dakotas and Nebraska in February when that dry air races down the mountain and it
you know, warms up and compresses.
You can have 70 degree afternoons there that are really pretty.
So mountains definitely make the world go round out there for sure.
No question about that.
Moving on here today, you can get severe weather in the mountains, by the way.
It's not common.
You get some gnarly hail.
But you can get some pretty good stuff, especially just to the east of the Rockies out by Denver, eastern Colorado area.
Let's talk SPC outlooks, Jan.
The Storm Prediction Center issues these outlooks.
What are they and what do they mean?
Yeah.
So for those who maybe aren't familiar with that term, I'm sure you've seen them.
Severe weather outlooks, weather apps have them.
You see them on air forecasts all the time.
You see them on social media all the time.
They are traditionally colored in that kind of
green, yellow, orange, red, pink scale of colors.
And essentially, it's a scale of one to five, how bad is this round of severe weather going to be?
And I think we show these a lot as meteorologists, and we briefly describe them.
But with this platform, this gives us an opportunity to really get into it and really help people understand, what is it that you're actually looking at?
When you see those greens, there's a really light color of green that some stations just don't even show, and then there is a kind of darker green.
And those basically mean there could be some general storms.
Either the lighter green, which is just basic garden variety thunderstorms, or the darker green that is... Yeah, you might have some severe weather, but not really that bad.
So again, those are going to be on the lower end, especially for us here in the Midwest, we're getting a lot of storms.
Other parts, again, of the country, maybe we'll do those a little bit differently just because we're not as used to get the big wild swarms.
But here in the Midwest, we tend to pay a lot more attention once you start to get into the next level two, level three category, those slight early hands.
And those are going to mean scattered or numerous storms.
And that's where we're starting to look at either more long-lived storms or storms that are capable of producing a little bit more intensity.
The higher end of that, the moderate, the high, that red, or pink, those are going to be much more widespread, much more long-lived, and much more intense.
So that's the basics of it.
there is not any one of these that is, oh, if you have a moderate risk, which we can talk about that too, moderate is level four or five, even though it's called moderate, right?
And so there is a little bit of confusion, I think, with the names as well.
And that's why so many entities will end up just using the colors or just using the
Zero to five scale or something like that versus the actual names because I think that our human nature kind of gets in the way of Interpreting what those terms actually mean, but if you have that read that level four out of five Or or moderate that Doesn't necessarily mean oh, we're definitely getting tornadoes.
We're definitely getting a long track It can mean that you just have a really good setup for very large hail or or very damaging winds that
are straight line and not necessarily tornadic.
There is no single category that guarantees you any one type of weather.
And I think that that is something that also is a very common misnomer with these that, you know, it's, yeah, tornadoes are the big bad beast, right?
But hail and wind can do just as much damage.
And the science is there for us to be able to understand and predict those larger events ahead of time as well with those.
So,
yep.
Yeah.
Well, and the reality too is it depends on how you want to really look at this, just from a language standpoint, severe weather outlook in your mind, you can replace it with severe weather risk.
And if it's a low risk or a high risk, and then you can just kind of compare that to a doctor's visit you've had.
Let's say you come back and you've got a variable that's a little bit higher risk and the doctor says, Hey,
You know, there's a couple things in here that's elevating your risk for a heart issue.
Doesn't mean they're going to have it.
Just means your risk is elevated until you mitigate that somehow.
Now, in weather, you don't really do that.
You just have to be aware on that day that your risk for the next six hours is unusually high compared to a normal day.
And actually to a normal day that, you know, there's a high pressure system around, you know, your chances for severe weather are.
a hundredth of 1%.
And then once you actually think about those probabilities that you see come out of 30%, 45% within 25 miles of you, it's actually a pretty healthy risk when that happens.
And so that's another way to think about it.
If it helps playing your days, if you replace the word outlook with risk, it might change your mindset on that a little bit.
So I think that doctor
analogy is is pretty helpful too because I think that's something that people very commonly understand whereas if you get a severe weather risk Issued that that it's like well, it didn't happen.
Why didn't it happen?
Well, you don't always get the heart attack
good
You don't you don't want a tornado to be going through but it is our job to tell you that the Parameters are there that it could happen and that's exactly what we're
doing.
I would love actually
somehow some way to get somebody with his background on here to just discuss the mentality of When a person's home is hit by a storm and that person goes online to rant at the meteorologist that says That storm wasn't good enough
Yeah,
so I just I think to myself like how mentally disconnected can you be to all of a sudden say no?
No, sign me up.
I would like to fight insurance.
I would like to repair my home.
Do you really want to do that?
Like, seriously, what is wrong with you?
No, you don't want to do any of that.
That stuff is not fun.
I've been through all that.
Correct.
You've been through that.
It ain't fun.
Yeah.
No.
So I've never understood that mentality.
Now, I think there is a mentality that is very valid.
It was sunny all day.
There was a moderate risk what happened I changed my plans because it valid conversation Very well, and that happens happens every year does you know
absolutely does
so It's just it's one of those deals.
It's something the risk is there and and whenever that risk is present Be glad if you don't get hit direct because it's just not something you want to have happen to you your house your family nothing like that
Absolutely Well, we're gonna wrap up the show today
less stormy, more talking about that sunshine or lack thereof.
We're going to talk about daylight saving.
And the pros and cons, this has been in the news a lot lately.
This has been something that has been talked about in DC, the House passed a bill.
It's still with the Senate, I think, to discuss.
Just let's unpack a little bit of, okay, school's starting up here.
What does permanent daylight saving time mean for sunrise, sunsets?
How that changes our lives is something we've had for quite some time.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, first off, we'd notice more of a difference the farther north you go, number one in the country.
You'd also notice more of a difference if you're on the western edge of a time zone.
So that's two big things right there.
But the biggest thing that I saw floating around was, yeah, you know, the sunrise is going to be really late in the wintertime, like 9am late for some areas of the Midwest.
And I would be like 840, 845.
And a lot of that was gone around to safety with kids walking to school, safety, you know, getting to and from work.
It's still quite dark.
I get that.
I tried to get a little bit of an angle on this one though of a weather angle to just share with everyone.
If we weren't in a situation where we fell back, first off, I don't think the summer is going to be that big of a deal one way or the other.
The sunrise would be pretty doggone early.
I can tell you that, but that's not always a bad thing.
But I mean, that's why we have shades.
That would be interesting to see.
That'd be an early sunrise.
I can tell you that.
But it's the exact opposite there in the in the winter if we don't fall back and that's one of the reasons why we fall back so the approach I took to this was our typical fog event and our typical road frost and refreeze events Typically relax around 9 30 or 10 a.m.
Under the current structure if we were not to have changed times anymore and kept it in daylight all the time
then you may have dense fog through 11 a.m.
Are we still starting school?
Are we still going eight to four on school here?
I mean, I know some middle schools that are going there, that classes are starting at 745.
What does that do?
Like a two hour delay is what we've always used.
Is it a three hour delay?
Do we feed the kids now?
Like does a two hour delay become a snow day in essence?
Same story with wind chills because...
If you want to change I mean I could fast forward my clock five hours right now Don't change the weather, but it'll it'll change the time that I hit my daytime high Yep, so the morning low now might be hit at almost 9 a.m And we've been in school for an hour and on a really cold morning.
What does that mean?
So I think those are the bigger things to look at is and I don't think those are even thought of That's just my thought.
I think a lot of yeah looking at sunrise and sunset
and thinking about how they're gonna plan their days.
One final thought on that.
The sun's in your face now.
If you are an eight to five worker, I mean, and you've ever gone home perfectly along that western highway or that eastern street and that sun is perfectly in your face, you're gonna increase your risk of accidents.
So in the wintertime, we would probably see more of that.
Currently, we see it in September a lot.
So another thing to think about when you're going back to school is the sun angle.
So just be ready for that.
If you take directly east and west routes, September is usually the worst for that for Iowa.
But those are just a couple of angles I took on it, Jan.
I don't think those were really well thought of, but it'd be something we'd have to deal with if it became permanent.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I think if it does become a permanent thing, I think they're
should be some studies and some very interesting data that comes out of those of the kind of fluctuation in numbers of accidents and things like that.
No matter what, like I said, we're not losing or gaining time ever with daylight saving.
All we're doing is shifting the clock.
So you have the same amount of daylight.
It's just when you get that daylight compared to when you're functioning in life.
Right.
And how that is going to change even if it is just by an hour, it's still pretty
substantial.
Well, and then the last part about this before we close is, you know, I get the whole fall back and spring forward.
And, you know, from a meteorological standpoint, a lifestyle standpoint, it works for us.
I mean, yeah, I'm screwed up for a day or two from the time change.
And if anybody listening is a parent,
So are your kids.
Is this not different than flying out of Cedar Rapids to Denver for a business trip and coming back a day later?
You're changing times in a course of a day.
Yeah, is it not different on your body?
That's my whole thing.
I never hear that brought up.
It's like, okay, so you're gonna tell me that changing an hour twice a year raises my risk of X, Y and Z. But if I'm an international traveler, my body's fine.
Like, how does that work?
That there has to be, yeah.
So I find that interesting that that's never brought up because I can fly out to Denver and back and I'm screwed up for a week.
You know, we keep talking about getting Dr. Tim back on this show
and asking him some
more motherful questions.
We'll put that
one
on the list, too, for Dr. Tim.
Dr. Tim, well, you know, it could be the altitude, too, Jay.
It's 5,000 feet higher than home.
That messes me up, too.
All right, before Kai starts bringing up other, who knows what actually is impacting us.
That, I think, takes us a little...
Yeah, you've spent a whole another half hour with us.
Thanks, guys.
Another episode in.
Be sure to send us your questions if you have them, if you had anything that we didn't get to today, that we didn't touch on enough, that sparked a new question for you.
Be sure to email those in to weatheredquestionsatgmail.com.
We want to know what's on your radar.
Until next week, stay safe.
