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Jordan Powers: 0:15

Welcome to Cultivating Curiosity where we get down and dirty with the experts on all the ways science and agriculture touch our lives, from what we eat to how we live. I'm Jordan Powers.

Emily Cabrera: 0:27

And I'm Emily Cabrera. We're from the University of Georgia's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

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Jordan Powers: 0:35

June marks the beginning of the six month hurricane season in Georgia. To help us get a baseline understanding of what hurricane season truly means and how to prepare, we invited Pam Knox, agricultural climatologist and director of the UGA Weather Network, to join us on the show. Pam, thank you so much for coming in this morning.

Pam Knox: 0:52

Oh, it's great to be here.

Jordan Powers: 0:52

Before we dive into this very timely topic. I think some of our listeners might be hearing the term agricultural climatologist for the first time. Can you walk us through what that role involves and why it is so important, especially at this time of the year?

Pam Knox: 1:05

First of all, you have to understand that my degree is actually in meteorology, so weather forecasting and so on, but I've spent almost my entire career looking at climate, and if you're interested in what the difference between weather and climate is, there's really a simple explanation that I heard from a third grader once, and that is, climate is the clothes in your closet, and weather is what you wear today.

Jordan Powers: 1:27

That is brilliant!

Pam Knox: 1:28

Which is an amazing statement, and you can all relate to that, because when I look in my closet, you know, I've got winter coats, I've got boots, sweaters and so on. And then we've got all the shorts and the T shirts and everything for summer. And so climate has to really cover the whole gamut from, you know, the coldest colds to the hottest hots and the daily average weather and so on. So what I spend most of my time doing as a climatologist is to look at the large scale weather patterns that are happening, how it's affecting the weather that we see today. Of course, you know, a lot of the farmers are more interested in weather than they are climate. So as a climatologist, I work with looking at what has happened already, because that's part of the growing season, and then look towards what we're going to expect for the next few weeks and even the next few months. And I have to keep all of that in mind when I'm looking at particular weather stations, or if I'm looking at the state as a whole, or sometimes looking at it in terms of global weather patterns, because, of course, the wind comes to us from other parts of the world. It's not all just local to Georgia. The agricultural part of it is because my primary audience is the agricultural community, so that's Extension agents and farmers and people who work with them.

Jordan Powers: 2:36

And you mentioned the weather stations just now in that response, tell us a little bit, that ties into your work with UGA Weather Network. Can you give us, like the 30-second snippet on what that is, and we will be sure to link to more in the show notes as well.

Pam Knox: 2:46

Okay, well, the University of Georgia has a weather network that's different than the National Weather Service Network, but it measures the same kind of information. It measures temperature and rainfall and humidity and wind and so on. It also measures soil temperature and soil moisture, which is important for growing crops, but is not taken by other groups. We have 90 stations across the state. The weather stations record all this information. It's used by farmers to do things like schedule irrigation. If it's been dry, they need to know how dry, and so they will look to see how much moisture there is in the soil, and use that. They also use the information of soil temperatures for figuring out when to plant. You can plant corn when it's about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, but you really don't want to plant peanuts or cotton until it's closer to 65 degrees, and that's the soil temperature, that's not the air temperature. So you have to have that kind of information. Wind will tell you things like insects, especially pests, that are affecting the plants. Where are those pests coming from, and when are they likely to get here? That's also useful for diseases like Southern rust on corn. And so all of that is just collected so that people can compare what they actually saw growing this year to the weather. Because the weather, obviously is one of the biggest influencers of how the crop is growing.

Jordan Powers: 4:00

Absolutely, so a huge amount of data that's being collected and processed and a huge resource for especially that agricultural community here in the state. Even as a lay person, it's fun to kind of poke around on there and see that amount of data and how much of a resource it really is.

Emily Cabrera: 4:15

You mentioned the difference between weather and climate. I think sometimes these terms can get used interchangeably, but they are different. Can you kind of quickly touch on what makes weather, weather and climate, climate?

Pam Knox: 4:26

The first thing I usually use as a difference is that I think of weather as being more forward looking in time. You're starting with what the current conditions are, you're looking towards forecasts. Are we going to get rain this afternoon, you know, are we going to get a frost in a week? So I think of weather as short term events and things that are looking forward in time or forecast. For climate, I think of things that tend to be longer, that averages over three months or a year, or something like that, looking at past events, so past hurricanes or past wind storms, or, you know, just past droughts, because droughts, of course, are very important for agriculture, so it's a difference of time scale, and it's a difference of which direction you're looking.

Jordan Powers: 5:05

During hurricane season. Residents will likely hear terms like La Niña, El Niño and ENSO referenced often. Can you break down what each of these terms actually mean?

Pam Knox: 5:14

The atmosphere of the globe as a whole can be thought of as a giant jiggling bowl of jelly. So there's lots of little waves and ripples that are going through the atmosphere at any one time. Some of them are small, some of them are large. And one of the largest is what we call El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or we call it ENSO for short. And that comprises both El Niño and La Niña, they're two opposite phases of the same oscillation. And so when we're in an El Niño, usually the water in the eastern Pacific Ocean is warmer than usual. When the El Niño is the strongest, which is usually in the winter, that will have really unusually warm water, it affects people locally there, because that warm water cuts off upwelling of nutrients for fish. So a lot of the fish harvest is really poor during that time. Also affects people that are growing potatoes in the uplands of Peru. It was named El Niño because it came around Christmas time. Usually it was the strongest around Christmas time associated with the coming of the Christ child. Of course, there they speak Spanish, and so it was named that way. And then the opposite of that is when the ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean are colder than usual. And that's the opposite La Niña, the little girl in Spanish, that also usually is the strongest in the winter. And so it oscillates back and forth, just like a seesaw. So you get this oscillation back and forth. It's not as regular as a heartbeat. It does oscillate on, you know, a quasi regular pattern. So we switch back and forth. Usually, an El Niño will last for no more than a year. Sometimes a La Niña will last for several years. And if you're in between, we call that neutral. So the ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean are close to normal. You might not think it would affect things here in the Southeast, but actually the climate signal of ENSO in the southeast is very strong compared to most parts of the country, and so we can use it as a tool to predict what the weather is likely to be, especially in the winter, but it does have some impacts in the summer as well. There's all these other things that are going on at the same time. Like I said, it's the bowl of Jell-O so you're having lots of different kinds of interactions, all happening from just a few hours in scale, from some of the really short term waves to things that can be multi-decadal, some of the ocean oscillations, if you bring the ocean and ocean works on a slower timescale. So that makes it a very interesting thing, because you got to really consider all these different things when you're looking at changes in the short term, weather patterns. The impact of having either neutral conditions or La Niña conditions is that the jet stream that's high up in the atmosphere, so it's about the level that jets fly at, is weaker than usual, and that's because of temperature patterns. And so when it's weaker, we have these storms that come off of Africa. They develop as tropical waves, they get stronger and stronger as they go over the warm ocean, and they develop a vertical circulation. If you don't have a jet stream on top that, that development goes really well. So a lot of the waves develop into named storms. When we're in the opposite phase, when we're in El Niño, that jet stream is stronger than usual. So if you get these waves that try to develop, the jet stream would just come and blow the top off of these developing systems, and they just don't develop as much. And so really, I mean, the reason that El Niño and La Niña can affect the hurricane season is because of the way it's affecting the vertical development of those storms.

Emily Cabrera: 8:31

Wow, that is so cool. And according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, for short, they're predicting that this year, this season, will be an above average Atlantic hurricane season. What does that actually mean? And how should we be prepared when there's higher than normal hurricane activity?

Pam Knox: 8:52

Yeah, hurricane forecasting for the season is strictly forecasting the likely number of named storms. It does not say anything about where they're going to go, how strong they're going to be, or if they're going to make landfall. Obviously, all critical things if you're worried about impacts from the hurricanes. This year, because we're in neutral conditions, we don't have that jet stream aloft, which means more of the waves that develop are going to be able to grow to name status. And we know that it's likely to be a little bit more than the average. Now, last year was definitely above normal. It was La Nina and then neutral conditions for a lot of last summer. And we had more than usual named storms. I think we had 18 last year. The average is around 12. We're going to probably see more named storms than usual, but we don't know where they're going to go. It's very unlikely that we would have another season that looked exactly the same as last year. We could have most of them stay out to sea. We call those fish storms, because all they really affect are fish hurricanes are steered by the position of what we call the Bermuda high, or the Atlantic high, which is located over the ocean and has a clockwise circulation around it. That wind pattern around the high pressure really pushes the storms around. The storms don't just move themselves. They're blown around by the large scale weather patterns, and that's why it's really important when we get into tropical season, that you keep an eye on how those are changing over time, because when a hurricane does develop, we really are going to be dependent on the forecast from the National Weather Service, or other aspects of NOAA, or the Europeans have models that they use, and all of those come in together to try to figure out where that storm is going to go and how fast it's going to go. The fastness will affect how strong it gets, because if it's going really slow and it's going over really warm water, usually it has to be at least 30 degrees centigrade or higher to really be good fuel for the hurricanes. And so if that happens, and it stays over that warm water for a long time period, the storm could get bigger. One of the things we've noticed in the last few years is that the Gulf of Mexico has been really unusually warm, and it is now. So we have these storms that come over this really warm water, and they just suck up that energy from the water and develop into really strong storms. And we've had some storms that have intensified very fast. Michael did that in 2018 some of the other storms that have hit Florida, and even Helene really got intense quickly because of that warm water serving as fuel. And so that is something that we really watch for but you can't really predict that very far ahead. That's why, if you're if you know there's a hurricane out there, you got to keep up with your forecast. And I don't even encourage people to really use their regular weather apps, because just a small difference in the path of that storm can have a huge difference on what the impacts are. You know, if it's 100 miles farther east, then you're probably going to see sunshine and maybe some winds, but probably not much rain. If it's 100 miles to the west, and you're going to be right in the thick of the heaviest rain and the winds that are the strongest, and so that is something that people need to be aware of. The apps only, a lot of the apps only update once or twice a day, and that's not fast enough if you've got a hurricane, because things can change so fast.

Jordan Powers: 11:55

With the unpredictability of these storms and how quickly they can develop and how the paths change, we have a wealth of resources on hurricane preparedness and tropical storm preparedness through UGA Extension, because that preparedness is key when there's something that you can't predict, right? You just need to be prepared in the season. And we will be sure to link to all of those resources in the show notes. But as someone who deals with this day in and day out, 365 days a year, can you share your top three tasks that Georgia residents should have on their to do lists as we enter hurricane season?

Pam Knox: 12:27

Almost all the really strong hurricanes we've had, major hurricanes, categories three to five hurricanes, were a tropical storm three days ahead of time. That's why you have to be on top of things. That's why you have to be prepared ahead of time. And so you cannot wait until the storm is already named. You have to be prepared. I usually like to tell farmers that at the beginning of the tropical season, they need to make sure they have inventories of their equipment. They need to make sure that if they need power for water pumps, or if they're a dairy or something like that, or if they need cooling, they need to make sure they have a generator, they have access to fuel, and they need to have a plan for how they're going to take care of their animals. You know, how are they going to feed them if there's flooding, or if there's no power or something like that? Even for the average Georgian, you need to be prepared, just like you would for severe weather, right? You need to make sure you know how you're going to survive the storm. Now, with a hurricane, usually you have enough time in advance that you can drive out away from the storm, but people need to think about that. How are they going to contact their family? If they're all at work, where are they going to go? I mean, you can drive out and hope that you can find a hotel, but you need to have an idea of where you're going to go, and that might be dependent on where you think the hurricane is likely to go. So you need to have a plan ahead of time. If you're going to stay in your house, if it doesn't look like it's going to be a strong one, then you need to figure out how you're going to make yourself safe. So you got to find an area that's protected from winds, kind of away from windows, not too low in case of flooding. And so you need to think about all that ahead of time. But from an insurance standpoint, it's always a good idea to make sure you've got an inventory, even if you just take a video camera around, or your phone even, and just take pictures of what's in your house. You know, there's just no way you're going to remember all that. So you really need to document way ahead of time. For farmers, I usually like to tell them, you know when a hurricane is expected to come go out and take pictures of your fields, because you're going to have to document the before and after of that particular crop, because that's going to tell you how much money you're likely to get in payment. But to do that, you have to have pictures. It really helps to be able to document that. Some people use drones. Some people just go out with their tractor and they take pictures. So you need to be able to do that. Always helps to have things written down, because otherwise you're going to forget. You need to make sure you practice it. If you've got kids talk to them ahead of time about this is what we're going to do. That's true for severe weather or for hurricanes, which are a little longer, ahead of time. You can't just tell them at the last minute, you know, we need to get in the basement now, they need to know why. Because you don't want the kids to be scared. You want them to understand why you're doing what you're doing. So I'd say number one is have a plan. Number two is make sure you have all your documents in order, and you probably need to put those in multiple places too. You don't want to have paper copies at home, but maybe put them online somewhere, or store them at a friend's house or something that's in a different place. And the third is keep watching for updates, because things are going to change, the path of the storm is going to change, the intensity is going to change, the amount of rain is going to change, and so you need to update at regular intervals to make sure you've got the most recent information.

Emily Cabrera: 15:30

Something I read recently from an academic peer at the University of Florida said that the best time to prepare for a storm is a sunny day. And I just really like that sentiment, because it's so much easier to think clearly through all of the things you just listed out now, instead of when a storm is imminent, or even three days out, we can kind of become scrambled and fearful.

Pam Knox: 15:51

When the storm is imminent, then you're starting to think about, how am I going to actually do this. And if you already have a list of this needs to be done, that stuff, if you can identify it ahead of time, it's going to save you a lot of panic thinking at the last minute, of trying to deal with it and then competing with everybody else that hasn't thought about it ahead of time. I think most people think better, at least I'm a list maker, and so I always want to have a list of what I need to do ahead of time so I don't have to worry about it when the time comes to actually use it.

Jordan Powers: 16:19

Preparedness, lists, have that plan set in place, and like we mentioned, we will include so many references in the show notes, both on the Weather Network and the Climate Blog. We have a whole residents handbook on how to prepare for those natural hazards in Georgia, as well as an entire UGA Cooperative Extension Weather Emergency Resources page, so all of that will be linked in the show notes for residents and farmers in the state to prepare and be on top of it as we enter this hurricane season in Georgia.

Pam Knox: 16:47

I think it's important to keep in mind too, the first people that are going to help you are your neighbors. It usually takes at least three days before you get any real government action. As soon as you make sure that your own family is safe and your own farm is safe, you need to think about helping your neighbors too, because that's going to be the first source of help that they are likely to get.

Jordan Powers: 17:07

Look out for ourselves, but also look out for our communities. And you know, you saw that a lot last season, with the tropical storms and with the hurricanes of communities coming together, and that's something really important. Well, on that note, Pam, we know you are busy this time of year, especially, so we don't want to keep you too long, but we just want to say thank you for coming in and taking the time to talk to us about this incredibly important topic. It's something that we hear a lot about each season, but I think few people have had a chance to really dive into what exactly it is we're talking about when we talk about tropical storm and hurricane season. So thank you for your time.

Pam Knox: 17:40

Oh, you're welcome. It's good to talk to you when we don't have a hurricane bearing down on us right now, we have time to think about it a little bit ahead of time.

Jordan Powers: 17:47

Exactly we can even plan this [laughter].

Pam Knox: 17:49

Sounds great.

Jordan Powers: 17:51

Thanks again.

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Jordan Powers: 17:52

Thanks for listening to Cultivating Curiosity, a podcast produced by the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. A special thanks to Mason McClintock for our music and sound effects. Find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts.