Tornadoes are always in season for Jana Houser 

Hi there. My name is Paul, Paul Yeager and this is the MTM Show Podcast, a production of Iowa PBS and the market to Market TV show. Small admission science wasn't my greatest subject in school, but I'm still fascinated by it and always curious about what is new and what's happening. To try to explain some things. Right now, we're trying to understand why all of these tornadoes have been happening. Iowa has had more tornadoes than Texas at one point this spring. The severity, the frequency, the, well, is that really the case? Is it we've just done a better job of counting and understanding what a tornado is and the classification of we're going to science. We're going to school. Dr. Jana Houser is at Ohio State University. She studies meteorology. She's from Allentown, Pennsylvania, went to Penn State, studied in Oklahoma, worked in Oklahoma, in Ohio, now works at the Ohio State University and studies tornadoes. We're going to ask her a lot of questions about storms. And we're going to also look at this El Nino, La Nina and a change over. And if any of that has anything to do with why we're seeing more tornadoes in 2024, it's fascinating what she has been studying and what things have changed. And our greatest understanding about tornadoes. That's this installment of the podcast, which comes out each and every Tuesday. If you have any feedback for me, hit me up at Paul Yeager at Iowa pbs.org. Now let's go to school. Doctor Howser, I'm very happy you paid attention to the backdrop here in the podcast room. And you noticed the pure lard. And I want to tell the story I just told you before we recorded. It's from Rath Packing Company. It was a meatpacker where I grew up. And it was just one of those souvenirs that I kind of wanted for the podcast room. But you have a large story that I think is funny.

[Houser] I do have a large story. So my I come from a long lineage of cooks and ladies in the kitchen with their sleeves rolled up, and my great grandmother always cooked with Florida. And I can remember, you know, I didn't know her, except I was kind of an older lady. But my mom used to always tell me stories about how she would help my great grandmother in the kitchen, and it would be, it's lard or nothing, kind of an attitude there.

[Yeager] My mother's the same way. Still with her pie crusts. It is lard or nothing for her. And, you grew up, you've been in several states. Pennsylvania, Oklahoma now. Ohio. Where is home for you?

[Houser] So home is eastern Pennsylvania. Allentown. So about an hour north of the Philadelphia area. And I have a long, long history of family roots that go back generations to, like, like pre-Revolutionary War days there actually.

[Yeager] Oh, we're all living in Allentown. And, you know, I suppose everybody says the Billy Joel thing to you. After a while you just learn to live with it, right?

[Houser] Yes. Although that song was more about Bethlehem, which is the next town over, which is where the steel mills were. And they're talking about, like, tearing all the factories down and doing that. But, you know, it's their neighbors.

[Yeager] Bethlehem doesn't sound as good in rock songs as it does in religious songs at Christmas. Maybe that's why he said Allentown. I have no idea. I'll have to, if I ever get a chance to interview Billy Joel, I'll ask, is it really about Allentown or is it about Bethlehem?

[Houser] I would love the follow up to that conversation.

[Yeager] You went to Penn State and that was the undergrad. Was meteorology kind of your first start, or how did you end up picking that  discipline?

[Houser] Yeah. So we kind of joke in this field of meteorology that we're like genetically modified or mutated in some way to love meteorology since we're little kids. so I have loved the weather since I was a child. I was six years old with my cousin, and we would stand out on my parent's back deck, and I would look at the thermometer and the rain gauge in the sky, and she would pretend that she had a video camera, and I would be recording me, and I'd be telling everybody in my imaginary world about what the weather was going to be like, and really, it didn't stop. So, you know, progressing through the years, I had more and more of an interest, particularly in the severe weather. I had this amazing fascination with tornadoes, particularly by the time I was in fourth grade. And the school project of. What do you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be a meteorologist. Then I wanted to chase tornadoes. So all through high school, there were a couple of times when I kind of dabbled in thoughts of like, oh, well, should I maybe go into this other direction or this other one? But it always came back to meteorology. So I started right off the bat. applying to Penn State, knowing I wanted to do a bachelors in meteorology. And so that's, that's what I did. And then from Penn State, I went on to the University of Oklahoma, where I spent eight years doing my master's degree and my PhD, under the fabulous mentorship of Doctor Howard Bluestein, who is, world renowned severe weather specialist. and then I got my first job at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and was there for a little under ten years and recently transitioned about two years ago to the Ohio State University.

[Yeager] Now, weather wise, I don't think of Pennsylvania as a hotbed for tornadoes. Was that something was meteorology is one thing, but to very much focus on tornadoes, where did that specific interest come from?

[Houser] Yeah. So, you know, back in the 1980s when the Weather Channel was kind of a little bit more of like, a science entity, I used to watch the Weather Channel, like, kids watch cartoons, you know, that would be my go to. I would turn the TV on and watch the Weather Channel and just be, like, encapsulated by what was going on in the weather. And in 1991, there was a big tornado outbreak in southern Kansas. And I was really particularly impacted by the story of the Andover, Kansas tornado. And that just really kind of sucked me in. And from there I started, made my dad order Weather Channel home videos and, kind of funny, you know, 15 years after the fact, I actually have these old, you know, early 90s, home videos. And then my current graduate advisor, Doctor Bluestein, was actually in some of those from 15 years prior. And fun to see, you know.

[Yeager] Did you make up a fake green screen from those early home videos that you were talking about, where you were pointing to things? Did you have one of those too?

[Houser] You know, I think we predated the green screen, actually, I don't know. I don't know when the green screen actually kind of came into being. but no, I did not.

[Yeager] Help me out with Oklahoma and understand, I mean, Oklahoma is considered the center of Tornado Alley. I mean, the Storm Prediction Center, you know, this is where tornadoes are studied closely. What, in those eight years that you were there, what was the biggest piece of information you gained about tornadoes there?

[Houser] Oh, man. I mean, that's a hard question. I can't pinpoint a singular piece of information. I think it's an experience. Right. And it's like learning the process. So, you know, I think one of the most impactful, I think, self-reflection moments, I guess you could say, would be going from an undergraduate, experience at Penn State where had fantastic mentors and fantastic professors and kind of and I did well in school and came out kind of like with a really good GPA and feeling pretty confident about myself and then starting graduate school and like, feeling like the iron bar just got like whacked over me and was like, oh, you actually really kind of don't know anything. So it was a very humbling experience, and it really kind of taught me to, consider problems, a lot more broadly and simultaneously in depth and realize that, you know, there's just so much, so much knowledge out there to be gained, across all disciplines that we can never truly, you know, even know. I don't feel like I'm truly a master of my field. There's just still so much to learn.

[Yeager] And it's an area, but it's a good place to learn, I would imagine, because you have people that are always looking to the University of Oklahoma and, and your mentors specifically for the latest data. So in the time when you were small, Jana to Ph.D.. Jana, what has changed in tornadoes?

[Houser] A lot. So, in terms of our scientific understanding, you know, it's like, as I alluded to, I was a kid kind of in the 1980s, early 90s, and we were just on the cusp of, numerical weather prediction at all and numerical modeling simulations. So just the very raw sort of fundamentals were just starting to be investigated. And so in, in the time between then and, and, you know, PhD, which was still, you know, 20 years ago, I'm dating myself now, I guess not 20 years I was undergrad, but PhD was, you know, 12 ish. So, you know, still, we've learned we've just made a just huge advances. And those advances have come from our capability to observe the storms that produce tornadoes, as well as the tornadoes themselves. Huge, vast, like, you know, light year increases and computational capabilities, which have really helped to isolate the processes and the atmospheric physics that go on in the storm. So we're really, very much fundamentally able to understand the environmental conditions that are required, for example, for the storms that produce tornadoes. we understand how the thunderstorms that generate the tornadoes in the first place, like how they get their physical structure. We understand, kind of some of the aspects of the nuts and bolts of the tornado formation process, some of those pieces are still sort of being, put together, but we have a much clearer understanding than we did back when I was a kid.

[Yeager] So maybe the tornado itself hasn't changed, but the absolute understanding of it has dramatically changed.

[Houser] Exactly. Yes. So we're…

[Yeager] Not saying that. We're not saying tornadoes are different today. We just know a heck of a lot more about them.

[Houser] Exactly 100%.

[Yeager] What's the biggest change? I mean, you mentioned about all the understanding and how they form, do you sense that all the academics have stayed up with this? I mean, is it academics that's leading the study of this, or is it the people at the Weather Channel or the people who are meteorologists at TV stations or the National Weather Service?

[Houser] So the individuals who have really contributed to the scientific advances are going to be the individuals who have a research agenda, and those are primarily individuals that institution of higher education, laboratory institutions, etc.. the role of the people at, for example, like the Weather Channel or your local news station, while they might not be kind of getting down and dirty in the data and actually kind of going through and doing the science advancement, their role is to communicate obviously to the public and clearly, you know, tornadoes being a natural hazard. They threaten life, they threaten property. And it's very important to have appropriate, timely, accurate information to be communicated to the general public so that they can heed warnings so that they can be informed and make the best decisions, for their own personal well-being.

[Yeager] Okay. I'm not trying to, not make friends, but keep friends here. Storm chasers. Were you ever one?

[Houser] Yes, I still am one.

[Yeager] From an academic standpoint? 

[Houser] Yeah, from an academic standpoint as well as from a personal standpoint. I've done a  variety of different storm chasing, you know, you have. I was just talking to somebody yesterday. I kind of group storm chasers into sort of three categories. You've got like the scientists, the academic category, which are when people go out with scientific instruments with a mission and motive to collect data. And, you know, those chasers don't necessarily need to or want to get up close and personal with a tornado. Sometimes some of that data are best collected at a little bit of a distance. but they have a specific scientific question that they're trying to ask, and answer. And then you have sort of like the sort of what I call kind of intermediary, chasers for enjoyment who are anybody who, you know, could be just a community member. It could be, you know, somebody who is in the weather world and goes out and kind of, you know, takes a personal vehicle and is going out to observe nature and to observe this amazing phenomena that's, you know, simultaneously violent and disgraceful and beautiful at the same time. This is really crazy kind of dichotomy of violence and, and destruction coupled with this amazing beauty. and so I sort of feel like I'm mostly one or the other. I'm either going out with a scientific purpose, my history and my expertise is using mobile radar data to look at and investigate the tornadoes and the storms that produce them. So I have years worth of tornado chasing experience when I, have gone out with mobile radars and collected data that way and then I, you know, at times when a radar is not available or, you know, for whatever reason, field operations are going on, I've gone out with personal vehicle with friends or whatever who really just kind of appreciate and enjoy the beauty. And it's a challenge, too. It's a mental challenge. It's a game because you have to figure out where these storms are going to be, you know, at the beginning of the day, you have no idea how the day is going to unfold, and you have to make decisions that, to your best ability, are going to lead you to a place where the likelihood of seeing a tornado is going to be maximized. but there's, you know, the skills piece, which is where you use your knowledge and understanding of environments and understanding of storm structure and dynamics to get you somewhere. But then there's this logistics piece that's oftentimes partially in your control, where you're navigating a road system and you're choosing between road A and road B going north, going east. and then there's this component that's just completely out of your control, like construction zones, traffic jams, road closures, flooding, things like that, where like, nothing that you can do could really, you know, allow you to improve your decision making in that situation. So putting all of these pieces together, it's it's exciting. It's a mental challenge. It's an incredibly rewarding experience when you go out and actually see one of these tornadoes. And then the third category is kind of what I term professional chasers, just in the sense of like, they're doing this for an income. And so these are the people that are going out with their video cameras that are streaming to YouTube, they're streaming to the news networks, etc., and they're getting paid for their work. And oftentimes these are the individuals that are a little bit riskier in terms of their behavior. They want to get as close as they can. They want to get good ratings. They want to get sponsorships, they want to get money. So their motivation is to feed the public's frenzy for craziness.

[Yeager] You really, I'm not going to make you, answer this question. I'm just going to make a statement. Reed TImmer had some video from Greenfield, Iowa, a couple of weeks ago that we used on Market to Market. Read has more than a million followers on many of his socials. He had what looked like a drone following in behind a tornado as it went through Greenfield. He also has an armored vehicle and any but. But I have never seen a tornado like that. And maybe it's just because it was in Iowa and it was closer to where I live. But to see that thing go through a farmstead and the wind shear that goes through the buildings and and across the plains and knocks over wind turbines was fascinating to me to understand and reinforce the awesome power that a tornado has not read specifically, but those types of people like him, are they helpful to the science community and the general public?

[Houser] I struggle with this question, to be quite honest, and I've got to give Reed props. He has done amazing work for himself. He's really, you know, he's he's done wonderful things, for the storm chasing community as a whole. He's, you know, really done well for himself. in terms of science. I will say that the actual formal science that comes out in terms of publications, in journals, for example, that are peer reviewed or conference presentations where this work is being highlighted and featured and, kind of under the scientific microscope generally, that does not come from contributions like those types of storm chasers. I can think of like one paper off hand that I know, a tracer actually kind of contributed to where his vehicle had a pressure sensor and got kind of close to tornadoes and was recording pressure traces near tornadoes. so, generally, they don't contribute to large scale science. In that context, I will say what they do in which is, in my opinion, still a very, you know, beneficial service is they provide ground EIS for a verification standpoint. So, what has to happen is, you know, if a warning is issued like a tornado warning, the National Weather Service is typically going to issue that warning based on radar data. And they see the storm and they say that storm is rotating. I'm going to issue a warning, but they don't necessarily know 100% for sure that a tornado is ongoing or what is going to happen in the next five minutes or so. So where these chasers that, you know, kind of kind of both in the, in the sort of intense, extreme category as well as kind of these in between going out and looking for fun, category, where they can really benefit the general public is being those eyes on the ground and saying, yes, I'm seeing ground based rotation. I'm seeing a funnel cloud. This tornado is headed right towards this town. whatever. And so they can inform that warning decision making process that's very crucial to the piece of the communication and the dissemination of information.

[Yeager] And for me, at home, knowing where I'm supposed to go because they've sounded the sirens in my community and it's time for me to absolutely take cover because it has been spotted. So I asked, in our communication before we started, recording, I was just asking about the shifting of Tornado Alley. Oklahoma used to always be, I always think, kind of the belt of the alley. Texas would always get hit. But here in Iowa this year, as of a week ago, had the most tornadoes of any state in the country at this point. I know it's just an outlier. And again, we'll get into there's no two years alike, but is there any science telling you that things have shifted or maybe just a couple the last couple of years were just outliers?

[Houser] Yeah, this is a really interesting question. And I think, you know, we're still as a scientific community, trying to kind of come at who consensus about what's exactly happening in terms of large scale and statistically significant changes, particularly in geographic distribution. There is evidence to suggest that places like the Central Plains, the sort of traditional tornado alley, are experiencing a decrease in the frequency of tornadoes on an annual basis that doesn't mean that they're still not the Mecca. but that means that their numbers are kind of coming down a little bit. And on the flip side of that, we're seeing places like particularly the Southeastern United States. So Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, even into Georgia, those states are seeing a statistically significant increase in the number of tornadoes or and or the number of tornadic supporting environments and that is actually most noticeable in the early calendar year months. So the winter months. So we're looking at, you know, basically from January to March is when that uptick in the southeastern U.S tornadoes is being most noted. And then we also have a little bit of a signal for that when you get up into the Midwest area, Illinois, Indiana, a little bit into Iowa and that's a little less statistically robust. But there is still some signal that the number of tornadoes is increasing in terms of that geographic region. When you look across the board at the US as a whole, tornadoes are not becoming more common. And in time over the last 70 years, roughly, that we have data for, so they're pretty constant. What we're seeing is fluctuation and interannual variability. So one year you have kind of a dead year. The next year you have an extremely active year. So they still kind of you have these two extremes that still kind of balance out to be in the middle. but again they're extremes. So it tends to get a lot of extremes tend to get a lot more attention than average conditions do and then the other thing that we're seeing is an increase in the number of tornadoes produced on days where the environment is particularly favorable for tornado production. and then on the flip side of that, a decrease in the number of days where only a few tornadoes are produced. So if you looked at sort of a distribution of the number of tornadoes that are occurring per day across the calendar year, maybe, you know, historically you would have, I don't know, five events where you would have three tornadoes occurring on those five days. Now, those events are no longer happening, but instead were compensated by one day or 15 tornadoes form. So it's the same overall numbers. But things are getting kind of shifted around a little bit and distributed differently.

[Yeager] So when it happens, it happens.

[Houser] That's right. Yes, exactly. So we have these large, almost like supercharged events where they kind of compensate for the overall decrease and decline in some of those smaller events.

[Yeager] And you say, charged makes me think of intensity. Is the intensity different on, a day with 1 to 2 versus 10 to 15?

[Houser] Yeah, that's another really good question. And the answer is, you know, I don't know that I can support that on a sort of case by case basis, but in terms of the annual number of F4 and F5 tornadoes, over time, over the 50 or really, you know, 70 years worth of data that we have and we've got really, you know, really good data from early 1990s on through today. So we have, you know, 30 years worth of really good consistent reporting practices, good, consistent observations, etc.. So kind of honing in on that 30 year period, there's really been no change at all to the number of tornadoes that have been, overall intensities of Air Force F5. in fact, the numbers actually suggest a slight decline. Now, there's some question about whether or not that is truly nature or if that is slightly biased by the Fujita or Enhanced Fujita scale and the requirements for what is an F4 tornado or any of five tornadoes. So there's it's the tornado database is unfortunately kind of riddled with these non physical biases that are pretty much, you know, human driven, whether it be through population density changes or, reporting practice changes or like drones. Now we have drones. So we are seeing a larger number of weak tornadoes being reported in the database. F0 is particular and we're attributing this to things like drones to high quality radar observations that allow us to say, hey, we're actually seeing rotation here, not just straight wins. So ten years ago that wind report might have just been identified as a wind record. And then now, you know, today it's actually a tornado.

[Yeager] A couple of weeks ago, we had a system just right in our backyard. And it went for a good, you know, 5 to 10 miles, in here. And, and it was classified as an EF0. But I think 20 years ago we would have just thought of it as, you know, a good thunderstorm or a good gust of wind or a wind burst. And now we hear about derechos all the time and we hear about tornadoes. We're hearing all these crazy things. The reason for my question, though, is, is there any reason why you think that these systems have changed from those 1 to 2 to the ten to 20s happening on any given day? Is there any science yet that tells you why that's happening?

[Houser] It's a little preliminary, but I'll say what we do kind of know in terms of trying to put the pieces together, this kind of goes back to the environmental conditions required for tornadoes in the first place. So we need what we refer to as atmospheric instability, which is basically warm and moist conditions at the ground and cold air above that. So when you have that situation, you have air that's less dense underneath, air that's more dense. And if you kind of nudge that surface based air upwards, it will freely rise. And if you have moist air, it will produce clouds and convective storms. that by itself doesn't produce the types of thunderstorms that we need for tornadoes. The second component is wind shear, which is the change in wind speed and direction as you go up in height. So at the surface, winds ideally will be coming from the southeast. And then as you go up, you know, halfway through between the surface and where airplanes fly, might be out of the southwest and then up at the level where airplanes fly, it might be out of the west. So this kind of turning with height is really what, at a fundamental level, creates these rotating thunderstorms that we refer to as supercells, which produce the most damaging and catastrophic tornadoes. And so trying to put these pieces together, especially kind of in the climate change context, what we are seeing in terms of, you know, climate change and extrapolating, going into the future using complex climate models. we're seeing a, basically what kind of change in global warming are going to do is ultimately reduce the amount of temperature difference between, like the equator and the poles, especially during that hemisphere's summer. So we have not much, you know, not not nearly as much difference and exponential heating at the poles. So in terms of these components, that heat source is possibly good, but it actually reduces the strength of the winds high up in what we refer to as the jet stream. So if the winds in the jet stream high up are reduced, then we actually don't have one of those ingredients. So we might be getting thunderstorms and thunderstorms forming, perhaps even more frequently. But the tornado component of that is going to be reduced. However, we still have instances, especially during transitional seasons like spring and fall, where there's enough cold air in the higher latitudes. In polar latitudes. and actually, well, I'll get to winter in just a minute. But, you know, in the spring transitional months, there's still enough of this temperature contrast to create these necessary shear conditions. And in some instances, the, the additional input of higher heat, higher moisture content, particularly with the Gulf of Mexico being a moisture source for much of the southeastern portion of the United States, kind of supercharges, as I alluded to earlier, as a sort of supercharges, these large scale, what we call kind of synoptic driven events. This is where you have an organized surface, low pressure system, a cold front, a warm front, and then somewhere kind of in between. The cold front and warm front is typically where you get these, these, tornadic supercells that form in the wintertime. What we're seeing is, I mean, it still gets cold in the winter. So that temperature contrast piece is still kind of there. And it's actually exacerbating because the sea surface temperatures are warmer. So we're actually enhancing that temperature contrast in the winter months, perhaps in comparison to, you know, a cooler climate scenario where your ocean temperatures cool down. And this is, you know, especially kind of as we go into like the January, February, March time frame.

[Yeager] Also sounds like you're talking about ocean temperatures and currents, a little bit of that, El Nino / La Nina discussion that we're having. How does that fit into it?

[Houser] Another interesting question. And it's that's a really challenging piece to unravel because El Ninos and like the and so pattern the El Nino Southern Oscillation, no two events are exactly alike and there's not been good kind of convergence, I guess you could say a scientific evidence to suggest a definitive relationship there. There was one study that came out that suggested, particularly in reference to this, you're seeing more tornado events in the Iowa area, especially kind of like the March, April and early May time frame there was a study that came out in like the mid 20 tens that suggested in years where you're transitioning out of an El Nino positive. So this past winter, we were in an El Nino positive phase and transitioning more to a neutral or a La Nina phase that that particular geographic area. And like eastern Nebraska into western Iowa, might see an uptick in tornado activity the tricky part is that particular study was looking at kind of weaker El Ninos for that signal, and we had a pretty strong El Nino this past season. So it's a little bit questionable how directly representative that transition is. But I would, you know, wager some confidence in saying there's at least some connection there to what that description was compared to what we were seeing this past season. And, you know, there's also some evidence to suggest that there's an overall increase in tornado activity when you have La Nina years. and this would be a little bit more sort of in kind of the more like traditional tornado alley areas, as well as the southeastern United States. So in the winter and the winter months, the best correlation is actually between La Nina and the Southeastern United States. So, you know, we're grappling at little bits and pieces of information. Really, we just don't have long term enough data to feel strongly confident about this. But the evidence kind of hints at possibly some, some relationships there. It's also really tricky because as I mentioned, no two years are ever exactly the same. And so pieces might look similar, but other pieces don't.

[Yeager] Well, how long has the El Nino La Nina study? or at least talked about? How long have we even put this into the discussion and used this as a factor to help predict and report what.

[Houser] We have decent, and so, data that we can sort of extrapolate from various different sources, actually different to prior to what we have for the tornado record database. So the tornado record database, which starts in 1950, that's kind of the limiting factor. So again, like roughly 70 years worth of data or so. but again, you know, as I sort of mentioned, the early part of that tornado databases is fraught with inconsistencies. And, you know, to explain that a little bit, there were no tornado reports made from 1950 to 1971. They didn't exist initially. So what happened was Doctor Ted, Doctor Ted Fujita, who is, known by the Fujita scale. he hired a bunch of students to go back through and scour newspapers. from all across the United States and build a tornado database. And so all of the tornadoes that you see in that database from 1950 to 1970, those are all like acquired ad hoc and from a sort of looking backwards standpoint.

[Yeager] And given then so 50 to 70 is, is piecing together the puzzle, 70 to even 90 to 2000 technology is still advancing quickly. And then you could say we maybe have the newest round of data here in 2000 to, to our current day. I mean, is that a fair hugely generalization?

[Houser] The fact that you can almost break it down into those areas almost, almost perfectly. So from like the 19 to 1971 ish to roughly 1991, during that time frame, we had a centralized National Weather Service, that was capable of acquiring reports. but in order for those reports to show up in the database, somebody had to be there. Somebody had to witness the event. and so there's still a large number of events that were never reported because they were never, you know, either witnessed or somebody, you know, didn't know if it was a tornado or not. I just saw some trees knocked over and, you know, didn't impact them. So they didn't report it. Starting in the early 1990s, we had a transition with the modernization of the weather service, where we had radar data available. So the first national radar network came online in roughly 1991. And with that, we had information not just about precipitation, but also about winds in the storm. So we could actually detect areas of rotation. And starting with that, that has led to much greater improvements of not just the observations, but the warning procedures as well. So we can see those areas of rotation and know that that storm is capable of producing a tornado, potentially. And then once you get into like the 2010 era, we have cell phone internet that just exploded. And so anybody with a cell phone who's out chasing a storm or who lives nearby can take a picture or can send a report, and, you know, so if you if you looked at the raw numbers from 1950 to 2024, you would definitely see a linear increase in terms of the actual total number of tornadoes that is being reported but again, that's, that's really probably nonphysical. And that's much more, an effect of the reporting practices.

[Yeager] We're just better reporters. And that has maybe influenced the data, not necessarily to say that there are more. It's just we're better at counting and knowing what is exactly.

[Houser] And we're better at observing and communicating.

[Yeager] One thing I hear are commodity market analysts. They pay attention to the weather, trying to figure out, you know, for trends and crops. They talk about analog years. Just help me out. What is that? 

[Houser] An analog year or an analog event is basically using a past experience or a past season or a past year or a past storm to try to extrapolate what's going to happen today or tomorrow. So, for example, you see this a lot with tornado years. So you say, okay, well, given this phase of and so and coupled with the sort of overall jet stream pattern, will we think that 2024 is going to do something similar to, you know, 2004 where there was a similar setup? And by the way, I'm totally making those dates up. So I, you know, don't hold me accountable for that piece of information. so, we're basically using a comparison strategy. We're learning from past events and trying to apply what we know from past events and past configurations to current configurations and saying, all right, this event behave this way. We're seeing a scenario similar to that event, and we're going to anticipate an outcome from the current event or case that's based on the outcome of a prior case that we already know what happened.

[Yeager] I mean, let's face it, Doctor Houser, you are in the middle of history right now as it's being written about how we are understanding some of these things. given what you just said. I mean, that has to be kind of fun for you.

[Houser] Yeah, it's where, like, AI and machine learning play a really big part because it is way more than my brain can handle to go back through all of those possible cases. so it's really nice to have some computational algorithmic support to generate some of those analogs. And, you know, there are some events where you're very familiar with something like, oh, this looks very similar to what happened on this day. So, you know, I'm going to sort of make decisions thinking that we might have a similar outcome.

[Yeager] Well, we also discuss commodities. We look at not necessarily storm patterns, but rain patterns. We look at 1983, 2011 are the two biggest numbers getting thrown around for the 2024 growing season, where a wet May turns into a hot and dry June and an even hotter July. That's how they're trying to base it. Do you ever kind of waver back into just plain old storms? Not, not the tornadoes?

[Houser] Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I don't have my personal, like, research expertise there, and I'm not studying that. But in terms of just like, you know, daily weather prediction and, you know, thinking about, well, you know, I'm going on a trip in a week, you know, what can I possibly text for next week based on longer term trends and patterns, things like that? I definitely will we'll kind of go into the sort of larger scale, configurations of the environment and try to try to figure things out.

[Yeager] Last question. What's the biggest question we have yet to answer in turn?

[Houser] That's a good one. and I would say there's probably a couple bigger questions. one of them is, you know, we we don't understand the true nuts and bolts of the tornado formation process well enough to isolate storms that are basically next to each other and figure out which one is going to produce a tornado and which ones, not because they're in similar larger scale environments. Hypothetically speaking, they should both be capable of producing tornadoes. And yet, when it comes to what happens, you know, one of the storms makes a tornado and the other doesn't. So why that storm? Why that moment? You know, oftentimes these storms live for hours and only produce tornadoes for maybe 10 minutes or 20 minutes of their life. What's special about that time frame?

[Houser] So those are kind of the biggest, most important pieces of information that we're still not quite sure how to answer. and they're important to answer because if we can figure that out, then we have better ability to issue warnings and to predict and to, you know, have a better communication, strategy with the general public who ultimately, you know, we're trying to serve well.

[Yeager] And I can think of, just again, the storms from a couple of weeks ago where there's three tornado warnings all in the same bow of the radar, and only one of those produced the, the the actual tornado. The other two warnings went without any formation. And there is a fatigue that happens with the general public of, oh yeah, here we go again. Here's another, another tornado. But if you're very confident again, not all the time, but very confident, this is where it's going. That would be extremely helpful when your device goes off and says I'm in the path.

[Houser] Exactly. Yeah. and so I can appreciate that sentiment. And, you know, on days that are very active, sometimes there are multiple rounds of tornado producing or potentially tornado producing storms. And so you get something moving through it. You know, 4:00 in the afternoon and then again at, you know, 8:00 at night. And people, you know, get tired and get tired of it. And even from a forecaster's side of things, you know, if you have to be on for 12 hours and trying to be issuing all of these warnings, it's challenging to you as a human and your brain starts to get tired thinking about that. so, yeah, I mean, any, any additional information we can use to kind of put that piece together? The false alarm is a problem. So false alarms are basically when we were in for a storm and then nothing happens. And that's what the general public often remembers. It's like, oh, well, last time I was under a tornado warning and nothing happened. So why, you know, why should I act this time?

[Yeager] That's close to being right the most. Right, Jana, is when the forecaster predicts rain, they cut hay and it rains. That's the biggest frustration.

[Houser] Yeah, so imagine if you're an egg for sure. That is definitely a frustration. And then you know it gets down to like well what a 30% chance of showers really means. And you know all those things about future episode.

[Yeager] We'll discuss that at another time. Jan Hauser, thank you so very much for the time. I appreciate your insight.

[Houser] Thank you. I really appreciate it. It's been great.

[Yeager] Today's episode's executive producer is David Miller. I'm Paul Yeager, your host and producer and editor of this podcast. Audio assistance in the engineering form comes from Shawn Ingrassia, Kevin Rivers, and David Feingold. Chad Aubrey is our production supervisor here at Iowa PBS. Thank you for consuming this content. We'll see you next time here on the MtoM Show podcast.

Contact: Paul.Yeager@IowaPBS.org