Welcome to Weathered Questions where we answer the questions on your radar.
Welcome into Weathered Questions, the podcast where we answer the meteorology questions on your radar.
My name is meteorologist, Jan Reinhardt, joined by meteorologist, Kai O'Mara.
We are here to chat all things weather with you, answer your questions, and weather wonderings.
If you have something you would like to send in for us to answer or talk about, feel free to do so, weatheredquestionsatgmail.com to join in on the conversation.
Or you can always follow, head over to Kai's new website that we talked about last week and submit a question.
through that as well.
A couple little follow-up things that we had come in over the last short while.
So some good episodes, I think, to catch up on recently.
Kai, was that just 6.1 that we talked about your new website?
It was.
Yeah, it was right before Labor Day, because we took Labor Day a week off.
But yes, it was our last episode.
We talked about it.
You know, thanks to everybody who's downloaded the podcast.
We saw some of those, some of those numbers go up.
So that means we're spreading the knowledge.
That's what we want to do here.
So thanks everybody for visiting the site and it provides a nice little interactive environment for learning as the kids are now deep into school several weeks in.
So that's awesome stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
Another fun little tidbit.
I had a conversation with somebody recently.
They had listened to episode 510.
So if you want to go back and listen to the trivia there, I'm not going to give away the correct answer for trivia.
The trivia question was basically which side of a mountain tends to get more rain.
And I was having a conversation with someone and they were like, well, obviously it's the outside of the mountain.
not the inside, not the,
you
know, not under the earth side, which I chuckled and it was a good laugh.
So thank you very much for that and for listening and for talking with us about the episode.
We love to do that.
So.
Well, all right.
I mean, in or out, that's the thing.
And, you know, when I think about that question, I go, is it the east side or the west side or the north side or the south side?
I mean, technically, we weren't specific, but that is true.
That is pretty funny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It made me laugh because I definitely did like a double-take of what?
Oh,
right.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, should we get into it, Kai?
I think we should.
I think we should.
And we're at the time of year where this is kind of a transition month in weather.
There's lots of things that shift back and forth.
We start getting ups and downs in temperature and not just here at the ground, but also in the upper levels of the atmosphere.
And today, Jan, we're going to dive in and talk about all things weather balloons, what they are, how they work, what is inside them.
I've actually helped personally launch one.
I can tell that story, too.
But why don't you get started here about all things weather balloons, including the weather instruments that are on them and maybe how they get tracked around?
Yeah.
So, yeah, what is a weather balloon, right?
And it's core giant, well.
Yeah, giant.
They are.
Until you fill it up like any balloon, it's pretty small.
But once you start adding the air, they expand and get very, very large.
And essentially, you're filling it with helium, right?
So it's going to be able to float and go up through the atmosphere and gather data as it's going.
I guess I'm not 100% sure.
Do you know what they're made out of, what that balloon is, the material of the balloon?
Do you know?
Leave it some kind of latex material.
or close to it.
That was what I wanted to say.
Yeah, I believe it is.
It's almost like a huge rubber glove in a way.
Yeah, or like a punching.
Yeah.
If you ever play with a punching ball before the rubber band on it, it's very similar to that.
That's a good
comparison.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they're very, very delicate as well.
You know, when you're when you're handling them, you have gloves and stuff that that you wear.
You don't want to get, you know, your your oil from your skin onto them.
I think part of that goes into, as it's going up through the atmosphere, you're trying to do as little as possible to compromise the balloon and you don't want it to pop prematurely.
So yeah, you do have to have some special protocols and stuff.
Kai, you mentioned you've been able to launch one.
When the National Weather Service offices do these launches, there's a little
Shed basically out behind the office is that has all the helium tanks has all the supplies and everything and is far enough away as well that that you're able to You know not have any not have the balloon hit anything as it's going up because as soon as you release it You know you fill this balloon with air you have all the instruments attached to it that that radius on attached to it And we'll dive into what what all is in that But as soon as you release it it
flies pretty quickly and depending on the winds, it very easily can, you know, go sideways, literally go to the side and you don't want to be hitting trees or buildings or stuff like that.
You want it to be able to quickly get up into the air.
So that's the basic premise of launching a weather balloon and at its core what it is, how it works.
Basically, again, you have this radio sound, this grouping of instruments attached to it.
And it is tracking all of that information as it's going up to the atmosphere.
So whether or not you're familiar with a personal weather station or not, a lot of us understand that weather data is gathered on the ground all around the world all the time.
And that's how we get
different data measurements that we're able to use in our forecast and our current now casting as well, these weather balloons have all of those instruments and they're gathering that data through the atmosphere.
So through a general column of the atmosphere in one spot overhead, getting that data at the ground as it's launched, getting it 100 meters up, 200 meters, and up to however far it can get before it pops.
as it's going up.
So one of the things that I don't think people maybe realize, this happens with your party balloons too, what actually happens because of the temperatures and the pressure, your balloon actually expands as it goes up higher and higher into the atmosphere.
And so that is the limiting factor.
And that's why that material, that very stretchy kind of latexy material is very important is to allow it to be able to
expand as much as possible before it ends up popping so that we can get data as far up as possible in the
atmosphere.
Yeah.
Well, some of these flights will go to 80,000 feet, 100,000 feet.
I mean, you're talking about 20 miles high in the atmosphere, and it's exactly what you mentioned is whenever you have less air surrounding you, your inflated object is going to take up more space.
You can think about this.
I learned this several years ago, going out to the Rocky Mountains, went out there to visit a friend of mine and it was actually a couple of guys and I went out there.
We brought some chips like any good guys would do, right?
We get up to Denver and the chip bag is almost blowing up in the backseat.
It's like really, really tight and it is inflated and I'm going, okay, this was good science.
I did not think about.
And then we had the reverse coming home.
You'd buy something there.
I bought a bag of Rocky Mountain Thunder whole bean coffee.
Fantastic.
Okay, but it had space, you know, like when you go when you buy them in the store right now, you know, the beans kind of move around inside the bag.
There's some air in there.
By the time it got back down to the house, it had vacuum sealed itself.
because there was so little air to begin with.
And then the surrounding atmosphere kind of crunched it in there.
So these weather balloons actually.
Freshest
coffee ever had,
right?
It was awesome.
It was great.
But these weather balloons will get to the size of an SUV easily.
When they are launched, they're about six feet in diameter.
And then they'll grow to the size of a car easily before they explode.
If you've ever seen a weather balloon launch, if you're looking at weather data and it only made it about halfway up, a couple of things could have happened there.
Maybe we had something go on with the transmitter.
Maybe we had a premature kind of blow up where the balloon just exploded, unfortunately, as it was inflating.
You can liken it to blowing up balloons at a birthday party and one out of 20 just blows up in your hand.
You're trying to get it to size and it blows up.
And so that may have been an issue on one of them.
We've been asked though, Jan, about recovery.
How are these recovered?
Well,
Not many of Mar, but when you do see one, they've actually got prepackaged postage.
You can drop them in a mailbox.
They'll go back to Silver Springs, Maryland, and they'll go and get refurbished and launched again.
So they'll come down, they got a little parachute with them.
So when the balloon blows up, there's a little parachute and it parachutes down.
These places, you know, people have found these things a hundred miles from their launch site.
I mean, depending on how long they drift and how fast the jet stream is.
If you think about it, if that balloon goes up into a 200 mile an hour jet stream in the winter, it's not coming straight down.
It's going to get carried.
So a balloon launch in Davenport might wind up in southern Michigan by the time its journey is done.
So it's very cool.
It's a very neat thing.
And when I helped launch one,
it was during a severe weather special back at the TV station.
We wanted to get a behind-the-scenes look at how severe weather forecasting is done and went to the Quad Cities Weather Service and we were there in the early morning for the early morning news and everything and it was easy, it was fun, it was neat.
It was actually not a very long process at all and at that time they were doing them twice a day so very cool, very
neat.
I think that important thing to mention there that you just noted.
You were there in the early morning hours for that launch that you did.
Balloons, they're on a very specific schedule.
They are launched at the same time, everywhere, twice a day, generally.
There are some special launches.
that happen if there's a big outbreak expected or a big event in weather that is expected.
They may do some special launches, but these are expensive to launch.
And so that's also why I said everywhere, everywhere with a caveat.
Everywhere that does weather balloon launches.
For example, you did your launch in the Quad Cities.
If we're talking about Iowa, which is what we are experts in, you did your launch in the Quad Cities.
They launched balloons in Omaha.
They launched them in Minneapolis and down in Kansas City.
But where they don't launch is the Des Moines office, right?
Yeah, right.
Right?
Yeah.
And the whole purpose of their launch sites is to get it very spatially evened out.
And in addition to Des Moines not having a balloon, St.
Louis doesn't have one either and neither does Chicago.
And you'd think to yourself, how in the world in a city like Chicago not launch a balloon?
Well, I don't really need to because
The way that the balloon network is is spatially organized is they try and make it as even as possible So there could be some very small Weather Service offices launching balloons very small towns that might launch a balloon and then you get these larger cities in America that don't have one now in an ideal world every NWS office would launch a balloon and it'd be a no-brain absolutely and we'd have a better model grid and everything else but right now that's what the budget calls for and that's what we've got and In fact, I don't believe anybody
Don't think Indianapolis launches one either because Detroit launches one.
I do know that Mm-hmm, and that
sounds right.
Yeah Detroit launches one It gets kind of weird down in Kentucky and Tennessee also for balloons So they've got it all spatially figured out but yeah, just cuz you live in the capital city doesn't mean you get a balloon
Yeah, sorry.
They haven't they haven't they haven't kind of gritted out.
So
that, like you said, like it's evenly distributed across the country and we're getting a fairly even distribution.
But that said, when you're going from the Quad Cities, one side of Iowa, all the way to Omaha before you get the other one, like it gives us a good idea of the profile of the atmosphere, but we don't have.
all of the data and that's that can be a reason that we have varied forecasts or that things change maybe more frequently than as meteorologists we would like them to because we're not getting in every little piece of data that we possibly could.
Right.
I
think that's another thing, another thing to remember.
We'll move on here fairly quick but I do also want to mention the the weather instruments so there are the basic you know
temperature sensors, humidity sensors, pressure sensors that are included in that little radio sound package.
But they aren't, you know, you'd think of a thermometer and a hygrometer, which is the humidity sensor, as the classic thing that you picture as a kid.
But the
things that are included in that radio sound because it's going through the atmosphere in different changing through pressure, changing through temperature, all of that.
The sensors are a little different maybe than you might picture traditionally.
That thermometer one, for instance, a thermistor, it's basically a special piece of metal that will fluctuate depending on the temperature and be able to be read accordingly by the little computer that's included in there.
There are things that measure temperature, but it's not your traditional thermometer.
There are things that measure humidity, but not your traditional, you know, sensors that you would normally expect on a ground weather station.
They are specific to that radio sound so that they can go under the pressure changes and the, you know, extreme low temperatures and stuff that they're going through in the upper atmosphere.
Yeah, it is pretty harsh environment up there.
I mean, they've got to get through a lot for sure.
So to your point it's a basic package, but it's harsh up there man and think minus 50 minus 60 Even colder.
I mean, yeah, that's tough.
That's a tough environment to go through Absolutely electronic, you know, so it's it's one and that's
why That's why when you do find one if you do find one of these things do send it back Do drop it in the mail because again, it's it's prepaid and it's something that
If we don't have to remake them all the time, that would be great.
It would be great if we could just refurbish
them
and
get them back.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, well, let's move into today's trivia question.
We're going to talk lightning right now.
And the question today, multiple choice, lightning can hurt you by transferring through A, Windows, B.
plumbing, C metal or D all of the above.
How can lightning hurt you?
Can lightning hurt you through windows, plumbing, metal or all of the above?
Give you a little bit to think about that and we'll be back with the answer in just a few.
Alrighty, hopefully you've had a chance to think about this one.
Lightning can hurt you transferring through what?
Windows, plumbing, metal, or all of the above?
And we could even add some more to it, Jan, but it is D. All of the above.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And the thing about lightning that I think gets a lot of people is there is no lightning warning product.
There's no lightning watch product.
It's a fatal situation if you get struck, not always, but sometimes as we know.
And it happens so quickly you can't react.
So it's a real big hazard.
It's not like rain where the sky gets dark first or it's not like snow where it just begins to start snowing and you know something's out there.
This is one of those deals where it happens so fast and it is so lethal and it can travel through a bunch of different things.
This is also why we don't advise taking shelter under a tree because it can go through a tree also as you've seen.
It's dangerous stuff and especially in the athletic realm people are usually very respectful about watching for that kind of stuff and sometimes people have lightning detectors to figure out how far away a strike was.
That's great for the strike that just occurred but it doesn't tell you a darn thing about the next strike.
It doesn't give you
a forecast.
No,
no, it really doesn't.
And if there's a thunderstorm coming towards you, you can assume that lightning's in it as well.
And I think that's about as much as you can leave it.
You know, trying to get into a shelter as best you can, but it can absolutely travel through a lot of different things.
And of course, electricity, metal is one of the big ones.
So definitely watch for that.
Yeah, I think in general, obviously, you know,
do get into a sturdy building, do get inside, don't stay outside in the wide open, right?
But I think that there is somewhat of a misconception with lightning of, all right, I'm inside, I'm safe.
Like I can stand, you know, right next to my patio door and watch everything or, you know, like in on my covered porch or something like that.
Like, no, you still want to.
um be securely inside and there is actually truth to not use it you know don't use your hair dryer or or not that I we used to say corded phones I think that one is out of date
yeah I think so I think that one's that one's about done landline phones
and and those are very small minute uh possibilities but the possibility is there and and the best bit of safety is to
not be using anything that is connected to something that lightning could get through, basically.
There you go.
Exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Next up, this one I feel like is a little bit more of a opinion question.
What is the hardest type of weather to predict?
So I know I have my opinion, but I'm curious what yours is,
Kai.
when it comes to trying to figure out whether the temperature of the day, the precipitation of the day, the winds of the day, and how it might affect where people live, work, and play.
I didn't mean for that to rhyme.
It just happened to come out that way.
Well, it sounded very poetic.
I'm going to say, I mean, there's two things for me.
Number one, huge transition times where we go from a very stable pattern.
To one where there's a massive front either one way or another Or the second one is trying to figure out a pop-up thunderstorm You know those are those are the two for me that I think are very difficult not not the science behind the pop-up but where it might happen because
The the concrete crew that's out there trying to get their job done at 3 30 in the afternoon If there's a organized cold front you can give them high confidence as to when it might rain if it's a pop-up situation You can pretty much say hey sometime between 2 and 6 p.m.
You could get something or you might not and That's really that's a challenge for me.
I don't like those patterns because I like to be able to give somebody some kind of confidence But those are my two big changes
big fronts, and then the pop-up storms.
I would echo those.
The thing that I will add is snowfall in terms of specificity.
So to your point about a pop-up thunderstorm of, okay, I know there's going to be a thunderstorm.
I know that somebody in this area is going to get one.
The chances are very high that a thunderstorm will happen, but being able to pinpoint where,
For me, for snowfall totals, it's the same way of like, I know it's going to snow.
But, you know, the thing that I hate is those similar to you transition times, right?
Where you have the temperature right around that 32 degree mark.
And when is it going to cool down enough and how high up is that snow going to pile up?
So, snowfall for me in terms of totals versus...
Is the snow actually going like, are we going to get snow?
Are we not?
But the thing I hate is the, is it going to be one inch or is it going to be four inches thing?
Because everybody puts so much stock in snowfall totals and I just, they are the bane of my existence.
Well, they're difficult.
They're difficult.
And I've always likened it to, now, I think I've just gotten to the point where I just don't care as much.
And I don't say that in a nonchalant way.
I just say that as, no matter what we say, somebody's going to measure something different.
But I think what is difficult to dispute is the timing.
And if we can get the timing right, I think that helps a lot of people.
So I remember that there was
Some type of discussion years ago about the top two things that people are looking at when it comes to winter weather is the timing of the threat, and then how much will we get.
And in reality, a lot of our accidents happen below two inches of snow.
So it's that initial coating that causes the problems.
if we can figure out when it happens.
So if we're able to tell an audience that, you know, after three PM is when the snow is going to come, whether it's one inch or two and a half inches, I think if we get the timing right, the overall amounts are more forgivable at that point.
Yeah.
And in reality for me as a homeowner, I sit there and I go, it doesn't really take me that much longer to clear another inch.
Where it could be a problem is if we went one to two and got, you know, nine and a half.
All right, that's a problem.
That's a problem.
Let's try not to do that.
And quite honestly, that really doesn't happen much anymore in 2026.
It happened a lot 10 to 15 years ago, 20 years ago, but things have gotten better.
And part of that is also looking at what we call the climatology of the storms.
The more you research these winter storms, the more you realize that, all right, storms that look like this, even though the model is spinning out a foot of snow, storms that look like this rarely drop more than six.
So why don't we cap our forecast at six, and let's hope it doesn't exceed that.
And nine times out of 10, that technique worked.
And I think people kind of respected that.
And
that is something you are so good at, Kai.
I think that we are all very lucky to have been able to benefit from that.
Well,
thank you.
I quit.
I'm walking away.
No, don't leave me.
All right.
Well, we are almost out of time.
Do you want to tackle one more short topic?
Sure.
It won't take me more than 30 seconds.
All right.
Fire away.
There was some internet hype about a widespread frost in Iowa in mid-September.
That's garbage.
Moving on.
Done.
End of show.
What it was was a model run that dropped down a huge Arctic front that made no conceptual sense.
And if anything, this week is actually going to be a fairly rainy week for the state.
So exactly the opposite of what you saw online.
Surprise, surprise.
And rant.
There you go.
Average first frost or first freeze is going to be like early to mid-October.
Like, that's
just consistent.
Yeah.
Especially, and I look this up too, just for the fun of it.
That's part about meteorology is you just, you got to go back and you got to realize, does this make sense?
Like, does the data I'm seeing make sense?
The four inch soil temperature in my area is 76 degrees.
Okay.
We kind of need to cool that a little bit and we'll get there.
We'll get there, but not this week.
Not this week.
I think this is going to be more of a humid week again, occasional rain.
So just keep that in mind.
as we go forward.
Don't believe everything you read online as we've tried to teach, but just another great example this week of it coming around again.
So our next episode, we're going to dive in a lot to the Climate Prediction Center, Jan.
And we are also going to dive in a lot to this whole El Niño concept, speaking of online hype.
We're going to talk about that here in our next episode.
But in the meantime, you've spent 25 minutes with us here on Weathered Questions.
It brings us to the end of another great one.
I hope you've learned something today.
And at the very least enjoyed the conversation.
You can help leave us a review, spread the word that we are out there talking about weather.
And we're going to get back, I think, pretty much on a regular schedule here, Jan, all the way through the fall season, maybe minus Thanksgiving or so.
So hopefully a new episode per week for everybody.
So if today's conversation sparked questions of your own, be sure and let us know.
You can email your questions to weatheredquestions at gmail.com.
We want to know what's on your
radar.
Until next week, stay safe.