Welcome to Weathered Questions, where we answer the questions on your radar.
Well, welcome into Weathered Questions, the podcast where we answer the meteorology questions on your radar.
My name is Dan Reinhardt, joined by Kai O'Mara, and we are here to answer all of your weather wonderings and help.
kind of dive into what's been on your radar.
You are always welcome to join in on the conversation.
Just send us an email at weatheredquestions at gmail.com.
Ask us your questions and we will get those answered.
We'll start off today with a topic that has been very top of mind for many Iowans.
That's where Kai and I reside from.
And so obviously a lot of our stuff ends up focusing there.
But
we do dive into and will dive into a lot across the country here as well, even just in this episode.
So, Kai, the question today, why wouldn't it stop raining in September?
Oh, great question, actually.
So there's probably a wide variety of factors behind that.
But there are different parts of the country that also had extreme weather.
And it wasn't just us in Iowa that had the extreme weather.
If you look at the Midwest and the way it all breaks down, so Iowa was wet everywhere.
Even the southeast corner of the state, which has been notoriously dry
this
year, also was very wet.
And if we just look at the percentiles, what we call them, which is essentially just like when you go, if you're a parent, if you visit the doctor and your child gets their height and weight, a lot of times the doctor will put you on a percentile graph.
So if you're in the 50th percentile, that's exactly in the middle, 75th percentile.
OK, a little bit on the high side.
I was always 99th for height, spoiler alert always.
I was like the tallest guy.
But what this does is it.
it puts it in a ranking system, which is kind of like how you'd expect in a NASCAR race.
Number one is the biggest and the strongest, and then number 43 is the last place finisher.
Well, in this case, it was ranked from number one to 134.
So one is the wettest, 134 is the driest.
In East Central Iowa, we were ranked number one for the wettest September on record.
Western Iowa ranked number two
Omaha area close to three.
Now some of that rain fell in early October in Omaha.
But then if you get into northern Michigan, 134.
So driest on record,
just
eight and eight hour drive away, you know, up towards the Green Bay area, just north of Green Bay.
It got really dry really quick.
And then in southeast Missouri ranked number 124.
So just south of St.
Louis.
So if you drive seven hours northeast,
from Iowa and seven hours southeast.
Now you've got two areas that are extremely dry.
And Columbus, Ohio area, rank number two out of 134.
And so there was almost this continuous belt of moisture coming across the area.
I think the main driver of this was a huge high pressure system in the Southeast US.
It essentially gave us a very July-esque type of pattern here.
And we just had wave after wave going around the high.
There was the Southwest US monsoon still ongoing.
We also had a remnants of a hurricane in the Pacific get caught up in that pattern.
And as a result, nothing really changed.
Recall in our last podcast, we had to take a week off.
There's a separate story behind that.
In our last podcast, we talked about
internet hype about frost in mid-September.
Obviously, that didn't happen.
It turned into a swampy nightmare around the area.
And that continued into the first day of October, but now it's really nice this week to finally have been dried out, for sure.
Yeah.
It is human nature.
We talked about that with Dr. Tim.
What was that back in season five, I think?
Oh, yeah.
Drs.
Tim Segers.
Yeah.
But how just human nature makes you happier with sunshine around and how clouds can make you dreary.
And I have noticed just here in the last couple of days, everyone much happier to be around because we have the sunshine back.
It was very cloudy, very dreary for quite a while for us here.
So yeah.
Yeah, well, I mean this would have been so September 20th for us You know we had already and I don't think it's any secret with this audience This is not live because you might be listening to it on an airplane right now You might be listening to it on your drive to school and you know darn well that you know if it's two in the morning We're not up doing this with you live at two in the morning.
I'm sorry.
You can't sleep.
That's why it's why we left TV did not wake up at 2 a.m
Exactly.
So we get down to the basement first off we wake up the morning of the 20th and Indian Creek
which is a creek that runs through Marion as the highest I've ever seen it since I lived here.
And I'm going, oh, this is not good.
You know, we're talking about entire parks flooded, entire wetlands totally under, roads going under in some locations.
So it's like, all right, this is a big deal.
Get down to my own basement.
And there's that dreaded squish sound.
And we've never taken on water here.
since this house was built in the late 1990s.
That has not happened.
And so for us, I'm like, man, this is really extreme if this is the case.
Well, it's spread out all over the bottom.
And we had two finished rooms.
And the big thing was just we need to get dry really quickly.
And as soon as we can get dry, we can start worrying about other stuff.
And so we did that.
And within about 36 hours, we were down to concrete.
And the trim was off the drywall.
And we managed to save the walls and the trim that way.
Thankfully, the water was probably only three quarters of an inch to one inch deep that had come through the backup.
Nothing came in from outside.
It was all just backup from the drain.
Some pump failure, so on and so forth.
You couldn't find a pump in town that day after.
We were driving all over and it was a huge event.
A lot of people got impacted.
But now, as we go a little bit later,
We've just turned this into our own HGTV episode.
My sort of rebuild down here,
flooring is in.
Good excuse to freshen things up.
Good excuse to get a dumpster out at the house.
And we filled that thing up.
Insurance took care of us, which was great.
Huge reminder to everyone to just check your policy, because I think Jan and I would be the first ones in line to tell you that weather extremes aren't lessening.
There's more coming.
And if the Super Nino, whatever we want to call it, brings us a four inch rain in December, who knows?
Your house could be next.
And
so
it might be worth checking your sump system.
It's worth checking your insurance policy.
And so now the next thing I've got to do, and maybe in a couple of weeks when we talk, we'll be looking at how to get some alarms in here for moisture intrusion.
I'm going to try and figure out like a smoke alarm system.
for
the
sump area, if the water ever goes over where it's supposed to, like, you know, have like strobe lights everywhere or something that wakes everybody up, so I at least have a fighting chance to stop it from happening.
But again, until it happens to you, there's no real reason to think about it.
For sure.
It's just like health scares.
That's how much it is.
Yeah, you know, you don't think about a cholesterol issue or blood pressure issue until you actually have a problem.
I mean,
it's the same with most weather where like people
Don't heed tornado warnings until they have a personal attachment to it right until right they personally have been impacted or you know a family member is personally impacted and it sucks that somebody you know has to Suffer in order for us to react, but it is it's human nature.
That's just how we are That's
absolutely the way it goes, but I think that was the biggest problem now as to go into October we have to kind of
Think about agriculture a bit here.
I don't
know if you saw the pictures this past week, Kai.
Being that we're in Iowa, obviously we are very heavily egg focused.
But have you seen the corn sprouting on the stalks, those pictures?
I have not seen that.
Oh, yeah, it's pretty wild.
There's been so much rain that the corn is literally sprouting just in the fields, right on the stalk.
That's not good.
No, it's not good.
And, you know, that's going to be something that farmers have to adjust for in terms of, you know, are they, instead of harvesting that for seed or is it now going to be animal feed or, you know, what, what they have to do that way.
So it's going to be an interesting process ahead.
Well, and getting the equipment out there
because
it's been so wet.
That's, that's
another big
battle that we've seen every year.
We usually run into that somewhere in the state where it's just a little too wet for a while and they need some time to get it dried out.
But then.
Let's just say we do go dry for a week and the ground actually stiffens a little bit.
That crop still might not be dry and they may have to spend some money drying and a lot of those big dryers that run a lot of fuel.
So that's an expensive process.
And so there's all sorts of things that for some folks that are just going to their job and driving home, yeah, it was a really wet month.
But economically, it can be a huge impact in the next
30 to
60 days of what this all turns out to be because the entire corn belt got it.
It wasn't
just
one town.
It wasn't like a tornado hit one town.
This was just a really ridiculous rain event that had come through and really never quit.
Just kept coming, you know?
It was really something to see
it happen.
It really was.
So I think naturally there are some questions also about what does this mean moving forward in terms of flipping the script?
Is it going to dry out?
Are we going to have that insanely dry weather as the opposite and we're just going to be hurting for rain again?
Depending on where you are in the country.
As far as the October outlooks go, if you split the country diagonally from northeast to southwest above that line, can expect some below average conditions for precipitation.
Below that line could expect some above average conditions for precipitation.
We're kind of right in the middle, as we so often are here in the Midwest.
Yeah.
Well, it looks at the very least like the first half of the month should be what we kind of call a drier Northwest pattern.
Fairly dry.
Yeah.
So that should mean a lot of nights in the 40s and a lot of days in the 60s and potentially some 70s.
But at the very least some 60s coming, which would be nice.
This is
We've had kind of some really slow starts as of late to getting some freeze events to happen The average first frost and freeze is technically in October.
It just depends on what part of the state you're in
But
I would say that the back half of October is probably going to have some more cold intrusions to it That's not a very bold forecast by the way because that's usually what happens.
Yeah, but it seems like right now
A lot of the cold air is going to stay bottled to the north and then there might be some some better fronts that come south.
But even then it doesn't appear like any sustained cold is in the offing.
So this could be another, you know, fairly mild fall for us coming up.
But let's just hope that October is a bit drier.
And here's what's going to be interesting.
When you look at the October climate report, for a lot of people, we're already at the normal amount of rain, just because October 1st happened.
We
had
rain on October 1st.
And so like the Waterloo Cedar Falls area, I believe is already above normal for October from all the rain they had that morning on the 1st.
There's normally so little rain in October.
So that's why when you look, if you're ever doing historical weather research and you just look at the total for the months, you really have to drill in a little bit deeper than that because the wild part is you could have, and this just goes to say, you could have
a normal amount of precipitation.
If it all fell in three hours and then it never rained again the rest of the month, you could actually be in drought by the end of it.
It's possible.
But yet you had normal precip for the month.
So there's always a story behind the big number, as we've always seen in the past.
So that's just a prime example right there.
The month is a spectrum.
You have to think about the entire thing and how it shapes up as a whole.
All right.
Now we've talked about kind of some local phenomenon here Around the tropical climates Jan There has been a fair amount of Pacific hurricanes
Yeah, we
have had zero Atlantic hurricanes first time on record that we've gone this late without an Atlantic hurricane What is the latest where we're at right now on the hurricane season update?
Yeah, and we put this this question in right after our
discussion that we just had because those things are actually somewhat related in terms of why we kept getting the same weather, why the Atlantic is getting the same non-existent hurricane weather.
It all kind of wraps up into the same thing in terms of how those weather patterns interact with each other.
So now that we have gotten rid of our rain, we'll probably see a little bit more happening.
down there.
But Atlantic Hurricane, as of recording for us here, Atlantic Outlook is still somewhat quiet, but there is a little bit of some action that we're watching down in the Gulf.
So we'll keep our eyes on that.
And obviously, again, hurricane season in the Atlantic goes until November 30th.
The midpoint is mid-September, about September 10th.
So
We are still, we still have a lot of hurricane season left just because it's been quiet.
Just because, you know, the summer is quiet in September where it normally really ramps up was quiet.
We are absolutely not done.
There is still certainly potential for things to happen down there.
You mentioned the Pacific, though, and it has been quite active.
We have a Rachel out there right now, which letter are already recording.
It's deep in the
alphabet.
And I'm trying to think what, do you know off the top of your head what the most recent named one in the Atlantic basin has been?
I do not.
I have to pull it up.
Because we are definitely not there.
No,
no, no way.
I
want to say
F, F for
G.
That's kind of where my head was at, too.
And it's not pulling up right now, of course, for me.
But yeah, we've got to, Nolo will be kind of moving off here fairly quickly, but Rachel's still out there and there's still probably some more ones that could get developed here before too long as well.
So again, all of that as of recording time for us here, things absolutely change very quickly in the hurricane world, but just wanted to throw in a little update with that just because of, again,
it's been fairly quiet in other parts of the country while those extremes are happening both on the dry side and wet side over land as Kai noted.
We've been seeing a very quiet Atlantic hurricane season but a very active Pacific hurricane season with all of those pressure systems interacting with each other and blocking each other out.
Again, they kind of interact.
We also did have though
you know, talking about other parts of the country and active weather, a fairly robust nor'easter storm here, just what was that last week?
Yeah,
I
totally missed that.
We were in the midst of flood cleanup and I just, I heard that they were going to get some rain and wind and then I finally looked it up and I thought, oh, that might have been actually fairly substantial, but I never
saw
the end result of it.
Yeah, well, there was a lot of flooding, a lot of, you know,
what you would normally get, but it's been making some headlines recently just because there was, because of all of the combination of storm surge and wind and everything, there's a shipwreck that got uncovered.
in one of the beaches in the Northeast, which is kind of cool, like a century old shipwreck that came uncovered.
Yeah.
But I did some digging into it too, because, again, as we just noted, hurricane season, it's been pretty quiet.
So I was like, what's going on here?
You would think this was like Superstorm Sandy or something, but it wasn't.
It was...
quote unquote, just a nor'easter.
But it was just kind of the combination of of everything happening all at once in terms of we had a slow moving storm.
We had the the tides were high with with the lunar phases.
So all of that kind of combined together in order to give us that very
big event that, you know, some of the outer lying islands, I know on, I think North Carolina, those, those, the boundary islands, they kind of got cut off for a while.
There's, there's a lot of impact from that one, which is not expected.
If they got cut off, that's almost hurricane style of impacts then.
Because I've seen that happen with coastal storms before, mainly tropical ones where there's an interstate or a highway that runs over there and that water washes over the road.
And
that's
probably what you're talking about.
That's a significant event then.
Oh, absolutely.
I kind of
wish I would have been able to invest, but I'm kind of like, eh, I'm bailing water out of the house.
So
sorry.
You had your own flooding to deal with.
But yeah, I did want to throw that one in there because there were some substantial impacts from that storm as
well.
Yeah, I've got one quick stat, Jan, before we go into trivia today.
Yeah, what's
up?
I forgot about this.
I was part of an Iowa Ideas panel last week.
And there was a
guest, Madeline Westberg from Iowa State.
I know her well.
Oh, good.
She gave me a stat that gave me an audible reaction.
And I think I want to share it with all of you.
She mentioned that 40% of our yearly precipitation falls on the 10 wettest days of the year.
We were talking
about we were talking about how wet September was.
Okay.
And so if you take the 10 wettest days of the year, that's 40% of your yearly total.
That's wild.
It does make sense.
Plus or minus,
right?
But
that
just goes to show that those those 10 wettest days contributed ton to the overall pool of data.
So I just
want to share that.
That was a great
stat.
And all the years that I worked in TV and, you know, airing climate stats, I never came across that one.
And that was
awesome.
That's a very interesting thing to think about.
But it does make sense, right?
Like when you get those big downpours, those big rains, like they will add up, they will pile up.
Yeah.
Well, kind of like October 1st up in Northern Iowa.
Exactly.
That wettest day up there is going to account for the whole month, probably.
Yeah.
Or maybe 90% of the month's rain will is going to be on that one day.
Pretty neat.
It's good stuff.
Cool.
Here
you go.
Yeah.
Thanks for sharing.
I appreciate
that.
Well, thanks, Matt.
Thanks to Madeline for that.
I got to give her
credit where it's
due.
So there we go.
Absolutely.
All right.
For today's trivia question, we'll keep it in the hurricane realm.
We've probably mentioned this before on the show.
But in case we haven't, we'll mention it here.
This is a fill-in-the-blank style one.
When ocean temperatures dip below blank, it is nearly impossible for hurricanes to form.
So what is the minimum temperature basically is what we're getting at here that hurricanes need in order to be able to form?
We'll let you think about that one and be back in just a second.
All right.
Today's trivia question fill in the blank when a hurricane or sorry when ocean temperatures dip below blank It is nearly impossible for hurricanes to form that minimum temperature 80 degrees Generally the the Atlantic basin when you're getting hurricanes is gonna be a little bit higher Maybe closer to that to 85 ish degree mark, but yeah, you can't get hurricanes Basically when you're in the 70s is just too cold
Yeah, at least you
can't get them started.
You can't get
them
started that way.
I believe 30 Celsius is the magic number that the systems really want, which is 86 Fahrenheit.
I think for the Celsius conversion, about 80 is 26.5 to 27 degrees Celsius.
You really need to be in that mid...
mid-upper 20s range to kick anything off.
And so that, you know, we're almost out of time.
But that gives us one little thing here to talk about with hurricanes is, you know, back in the mid 2000s, there was a huge push about warmer water is going to cause more hurricanes.
And that's just not true.
And this year shows that the ocean water is cooking right now.
But the way the wind patterns are, the way the wind shear is,
There are so many other ingredients aside from just having warm water.
That's like saying just because you got an oven means we're gonna be eating more cookies.
Not necessarily.
You gotta
bake
them.
Just because you put more sugar in the cookies means they're gonna be tastier.
No, that's not necessarily how it works, right?
More of one thing doesn't equal intensity or
strength.
This has been, to your point, a textbook El Nino year.
really has right down
to the
tropics and even right down to some of the parts of the Midwest being wetter.
Well, we had that in 1998 also in the last real big El Nino like this.
So it all kind of plays out.
All right, real quick here as we wrap up.
Quick question that came in.
You've mentioned that evaporation is a cooling process before.
Why is that?
Why is why is evaporation a cooling process?
Well, basically It comes down to a fancy word called latent heat and and essentially the as as something is evaporating the the latent heat that is is going into it the energy absorbed or released during that that physical change that
changes the temperature.
So that's really what it comes down to is it's a physical change.
It's a change in that state of matter and that's why it cools down is because the heat that is going into the process of making that change of state actually cools it down the air around it.
I think that's the easiest.
explanation I can give.
Yeah, it's basically the opposite of a condensation process is what it is.
And the condensation process is why the koozie was invented.
Because if you go grab a can of soda, it's harder to do now because we're getting into the fall.
But it's not like the koozie keeps the cold air in the can.
What it does is prevents
beads of water from forming on the outside because condensation is a heating process.
And you
don't want that heat to be transferred to your beer can on a Sunday afternoon watching football.
That's what you don't want.
There's actually a research paper about it.
It's four pages long.
I'll probably put it in my LinkedIn again because it's just something really cool.
There's actually researchers that spent time coosy versus no coosy as to how much the inside went up.
I personally think that's an
Iowa state senior research project.
I think we should do
that.
Honestly.
I mean, it talks about meteorological variables and talks about everyday use.
I mean, how much more practical can a research project
be?
Right?
Sounds great.
It's fun.
I'm going to a tailgate this weekend, but I'm also going to be doing my research project at the same time.
Take a thermometer in there, see what you get.
That's what we do.
Sometimes the best research results are off of the simplest ideas like this.
Exactly.
So there you go.
All right.
Well, you have now been with us 26 minutes of your day or your night or your evening or your morning.
Whatever it happens to be and we appreciate you being here.
It brings us to the end of another episode.
I hope you've learned something new today I will tell you that we are on a shortage of questions So if there's anything bouncing around in your head that you'd want us to answer Please let us know and it can be anything any topic regarding weather and even if we don't know about it offhand Look it up for you for our next episode.
So
If it sparked that conversation in your mind, or maybe a conversation between your family and friends, let us know.
Weathered questions at gmail.com.
Until next week, stay safe.