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- [00:01]
Emily Gracie
The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season was forecasted to be active. NOAA predicts 17 to 25 named storms this year. It is the most storms NOAA has ever predicted. But active doesn't begin to capture what.
- [00:15]
Jamie Rome
Unfolded the potential for catastrophic flooding from heavy rainfall all the way from western North Carolina just to the west of Charlotte Hickory, Asheville.
- [00:24]
Emily Gracie
This was a season that redefined our expectations. From early season record breakers that put forecasters it is now a Category 5.
- [00:35]
Jamie Rome
Hurricane, earliest we have ever had that.
- [00:38]
Emily Gracie
To long lasting inland devastation that reshaped communities. The water was up almost to the first level of our place.
- [00:46]
Jamie Rome
When I saw this, I broke out in tears.
- [00:49]
Emily Gracie
Man, it just takes my breath away. No one can argue that it wasn't an impactful season. New tools emerged, Messaging shifted.
- [01:00]
Jamie Rome
Very concerned about multiple life threatening hazards that are going to start playing out here in just a next couple of hours. This is going to create unsurvivable conditions in these areas.
- [01:09]
Emily Gracie
But one thing is certain. Forecasting these tropical systems has never been more precise.
- [01:16]
Jamie Rome
I mean, we're making predictions now. I would have never thought possible when I started and they still to this day stun me.
- [01:23]
Emily Gracie
Today I'm going off the radar to take a look back at the 2024 hurricane season. With the Deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, Jamie Rome, we'll discuss the successes of the year.
- [01:36]
Jamie Rome
This is fascinating because people are naturally evolving away from the cone and focusing on the hazards, which was the whole point all along.
- [01:46]
Emily Gracie
The lessons learned.
- [01:47]
Jamie Rome
You know, you're thinking to yourself, but when you see the collective whole, the agency take that step, it's sort of like, oh, oh, you know, this is going to be bad.
- [01:55]
Emily Gracie
And he'll share what he says is the most important change the weather community needs to make when it comes to hurricane messaging.
- [02:04]
Jamie Rome
Telling people why they've been ordered to evacuate. Telling people why they're under a hurricane warning. Telling people why they got smoked with winds even though they were outside of the cone. That's why we have trust.
- [02:19]
Emily Gracie
I'm meteorologist Emily Gracey and you're listening to off the Radar, a production of the National Weather Desk. On the show, we dig deep into topics about weather, climate, the ocean, space, and much more. Our goal is to help you better understand the weather and to love it as much as we do.
- [02:38]
Audible
Audible's best of 2024 picks are here. Discover the year's top audiobooks, podcasts and originals in all your favorite genres, from memoirs and sci fi to mysteries and thrillers. Audible's curated list in every category is the best way to hear 2024's best in audio entertainment like a stunning new full cast production of George Orwell's 1984 heartfelt memoirs like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown, Jackson's Lovely One. The year's best fiction like the Women by Kristin Hannah and Percival Everett's brilliantly subversive James Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com imagine and discover all the years best waiting for you.
- [03:27]
Emily Gracie
It's December, and as we look back at the 2024 hurricane season, it's safe to say it was a season of record breaking storm activity. My guest this week is Jamie Rome, the deputy director of the National Hurricane Center. And if you don't recognize his name, you may recognize his face and his voice from the forecast updates that the National Hurricane center puts out when a storm could impact the U.S. they put them on Facebook, they put them on YouTube, and it's just a small part of the important work the agency does to keep communities across the country safe. I went into this interview with Jamie with a list of questions that are pretty typical. But pretty quickly, in true off the radar fashion, we took a total pivot and actually started talking about things that were much more important. We started talking about people, about communities, about you and how hurricanes impact you and real changes that can be made in communication when it comes to hurricane season. So get into those changes, the evolving needs of society and how to improve trust between meteorologists and the people living in the potential path of destruction when a hurricane actually moves on shore. I hope you get as much out of this discussion as I did. Please enjoy my talk with Jamie Rome. Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about the 2024 hurricane season. It was an interesting one, but I want to go back to May and the outlook that came out and talk about how things kind of stacked up as far the season this year. Verifying that forecast.
- [04:59]
Jamie Rome
Yeah, the seasonal forecast is actually, you know, led by a sister office within ncep, National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Climate Prediction center, and you know, climate signals that time were, you know, indicative of a busy season. And that certainly played out, but I think not in the way that maybe everybody anticipated. You didn't have the classic, you know, start and evolution, you know, the very dramatic pause in, in the middle of the season that led people to speculate about, you know, the season as a, as a whole. And I think this is just a great reminder for us all that, you know, weather is, is fluid. I mean, it's, it's it's not going to always evolve the way one thinks. I think we need to all stop jumping to conclusions about what that may or may not mean and let the science and the data, you know, take us on that journey and just be patient. That, that, that's sort of the takeaway I had from how the le. The season evolved a little bit. Non traditionally.
- [06:06]
Emily Gracie
All right, let's talk about some of the new tools that were tried out this year. Some changes. One of them, a lot of buzz last spring when it was released. But the all important forecast cone, which everybody recognizes this on a map, there were some changes to it this year. You guys decided to start including those inland hazards, the inland watches and warnings for hurricanes and tropical storms. So did those changes make a difference in the 2024 season?
- [06:36]
Jamie Rome
Oh, I think it made a big difference. I mean, and we can't prove that yet because we're still going through the evaluation process, which is your one part is opening up comments so people can send us comments. And they do a lot of them. So we're still going through it. But I mean, can you imagine trying to communicate the inland extent of damage and the impact of damage from a Helene type storm without that, that cone? And while we can't quantify, oh, you know, 10% more people took an action because we can't make those that sort of leap yet the circumstantial evidence that we've heard in the form of people commenting would lead you to think that it had a fairly large impact on the communities that were in the path. And so, I mean, it felt like we were barely through the first storm before people started saying, well, the storm surge is not on the cone and the rain is not on the cone and the tornadoes are not on the cone. And I was like, this is, this is fascinating because people are naturally evolving away from the cone and focusing on the hazards, which was the whole point all along is that, you know, we kept saying for 10 years, don't focus on the cone, don't focus on the skinny black line. The cone is only one. And nobody listened. You know, everybody just kept doing the same things over and over again. But then we put the inland watches and warnings, which are a better representation of the wind risk. And everybody started saying, where are the other hazards? And I was like, that is the metric of success. Before the ink is even dry, people want the next version, the next step. So obviously it's a two year experimental period or two year trial period. We're going to gather feedback and do due diligence for that entire period of time. But year one so far looks, you know, really, really promising.
- [08:38]
Emily Gracie
Yeah, good timing. I mean, so relevant with what happened with Helene this year and the inland impacts that extended so far inland. We'll get into specific storms in a second, but I want to talk about some of the other new tools that were used this year, one of those being the use of artificial intelligence to translate this important forecast information into other languages, specifically Spanish. So how did that go and was it accurate?
- [09:05]
Jamie Rome
Yeah, I think the accuracy part was really good. Whenever you deploy, like a new technology, you kind of have like this, a period where you sort of think, you know, you got to work through the kinks and that sort of stuff. But, you know, a lot of the kinks at all had been worked out before the translation went live. So, you know, I felt like it was. It was really you accurate in most cases. I mean, there were some examples of a few little quirks here and there, and it was largely reliable. It wasn't just that we've started to incorporate the alternative language or the different languages in our video streams as well.
- [09:45]
Emily Gracie
Yeah. When you started working at the hurricane center way back when, did you have any idea the amount of time you would be spending on TV and on YouTube during these forecasts?
- [09:54]
Jamie Rome
No. And it's funny, you know, I was. I was just talking to someone a couple weeks ago, and, you know, they're asking about the evolution of my career, and I actually started off when I was in college wanting to go into TV broadcast. You know, I thought I wasn't good at it. So, you know, I went a different.
- [10:09]
Emily Gracie
Nobody does.
- [10:11]
Jamie Rome
I went a different path, you know, and then here I am, full circle, you know, right back in it. So I guess it's funny, life. Life's interesting sometimes, but no, I didn't think coming into this line of work that it would be that much tv. But the TV part is rewarding because there's almost like an instant feedback mechanism that gives you the opportunity to feel like you're making a big impact, a big, big change.
- [10:39]
Emily Gracie
Okay, so let's talk about some more new tools that have been used, not just this year, but in recent years. And one of those being there's a lot of stuff going into hurricanes that didn't used to. We've got drones being dropped out of the hurric hurricane hunters in addition to the instruments that already were being dropped out of them. There's sail drones, there's all sorts of stuff. So has any of this made a difference in forecast precision? Over the years.
- [11:06]
Jamie Rome
So it's a very exciting time. These new technologies are allowing us to start to poke and probe at different aspects of the storm. And it's very exciting because, you know, some of the evolving science and research indicates that, you know, collecting this non traditional data, if you will, really could have a big impact on numerical weather prediction. So it's really exciting, but too soon to know precisely, you know, what impact it's going to have.
- [11:35]
Emily Gracie
So do you think in the coming years forecasts are going to get even more accurate?
- [11:40]
Jamie Rome
Yeah, especially so we have to stop thinking about the forecast as just the track. Right. The track, because it's undergone 10 to 15 years of really impressive gains, may start to reach the limits of predictability, which is a fancy way of saying, you know, plateauing. Right. The accuracy is going to start to plateau. But the other components of a storm which people often overlook, like the storm size. The storm size is a really important aspect of the storm because it determines who gets what on the ground. Right. You know, who gets wind and how much wind and is your roof blown off, you know, you lose power, you know, that sort of stuff. So the structure and size, I think we're going to get, you know, see, you know, huge improvements in the next several years. We're already on the front edge of the rapid intensification you've seen like over the last five years. I mean, we're making predictions now I would have never thought possible when I started and they still to this day stun me. Like I'm still sort of stunned by them. So we're, we're still in that upswing of rapid intensification and then predicting intensity in general is going to improve and what. All that will then manifest itself is improvements in the hazards, like a Helene. I mean, if you looked at the incredibly aggressive and early messaging about the inland rain, that would have never been possible, you know, five, six, seven years ago. So I, I think where you're going to see the improvements in hurricane forecasting is not these traditional metrics, but rather whether rubber meets the road. Meaning like the localization of the hazard, the localization of how much storm surge you're going to get, you know, who's going to get tornadoes, you know, who's going to get winds. That, that sort of stuff is really, over the next five to 10 years is going be a fast evolution.
- [13:36]
Emily Gracie
Yeah. How much does the hurricane center have to have knowledge of like communities and infrastructure when making these forecasts in places like Asheville, you know, just knowing like city infrastructure or terrain or, you know, the fact that they had rain days leading up to it. Did you foresee those kind of impacts and impacts to like their water system for weeks to come? How do you like, mitigate that? And then thinking about like, oh, the Big Bend of Florida, this is going to make landfall here, but there's not many people there. What's the knowledge like of communities, I guess is what I'm curious about.
- [14:13]
Jamie Rome
It's a really good question because it speaks to not only where we're going as a community, but some of the projects that I'm like personally leading. So we call this internally a consequence modeling. You know, okay, fair enough. You got a hurricane of X strength that's moving in in this community. What are the consequences? Right? It depends on infrastructure. It depends on the socioeconomic aspects of the community. It depends on the breakdown of the community. Is it, is it more elderly? Is there a higher percentage of people with disabilities? I mean, there's like all these new variables that meteorologists have not been used to thinking about. I mean, and you can look at barrel, for example, rather large power impact or impact to the power grid relative to the total wind strength. I mean, you could, you could probably send a similar strength storm into other parts and get a different outcome, other parts of the country and get a different outcome. But that is, at the end of the day, what people are really looking for, not only in terms of protecting themselves and their property, but emergency managers are looking at that in terms of making decisions about evacuations and how to evacuate, who to evacuate, how many shelters to open. And I think that's the next frontier, not just saying, oh, a category two is going to move into the Big Bend tomorrow night. But look at what does that mean in terms of a societal impact. And the reason that's so important is you're not only trying to eliminate loss of life and reduce impact to society, but it has a rather large, you know, evacuations have a rather large impact economically. Right. So you're trying to mitigate the economic fallout to these communities. Just a myriad of decisions that have to be made above and beyond its category two. Right. There's so many decisions that have to be made in the run up to these storms. We're trying it at the hurricane center. We're trying to factor in these different elements. Not so much in the forecast. They don't change the forecast, but they change the messaging, the words that you use, how you use them, who you're reaching out to in a storm. They sort of change your strategy, but they don't change the forecast. So it's a really, you know, it's a new frontier for the meteorological community and it's, it's an exciting one. But I think we got a lot to learn in this journey.
- [16:53]
Emily Gracie
I think I spoke to you a few years ago at the AMS meeting in Milwaukee, and you were talking about mortality rates not just in that an initial period of a landfilling hurricane, but in the days to come, days to follow after landfall. And you were talking about what people were dying from and how alarming that was. And I'm curious, that was maybe two or three years ago at this point, with that research, have you been able to make any changes to messaging when it comes to that period of time after landfall? And simple things like being prepared for power outages for long periods of time.
- [17:30]
Jamie Rome
You can't improve that which you can't track. So we had to come up with this better way of tracking mortality if we, if we had hopes of bringing it down, you know, that tracking immortality over the last 10 years or so, it was basically what informed and empowered the standing up of the nation storm surge program and the new storm surge warning, the new products that went with storm surge. And what we're seeing now is a rather dramatic drop in mortality from storm surge. I mean, it's really dropping quite remarkably, at least over the last 10 years. But we're seeing other trends in mortality that are not as positive. Like, for example, you were seeing an uptick in mortality from inland freshwater flooding. It's going up rather abruptly. And you're starting to see we thought we had largely beaten wind mortality, and I think we have at the coast, but these storms are taking the wind farther inland, like, like Helene. And you're starting to see a resurgence of wind mortality, but inland. Right. And so that's why tracking and studying these trends is so important, because as we look towards the next generation of policies and procedures to hopefully mitigate that continued upward trend, you got to know what is the cause of death. And the other one that's happening too, we're seeing a lot of indirect mortality. So indirect is what happens after the storm. So the, you know, the winds and the surge and the water are all gone. People are out cleaning up or, you know, suffering without air conditioning, and they succumb to those conditions. Right. So that's indirect. So we're seeing an uptick in that. And I think that speaks to how we have to educate people how to survive a hurricane. We've taught them how to survive, like the first wave, like the first you know, 24 hour. When the hazards come through, now we got to teach them how to survive the two weeks after with oppressive heat, no power. So it's a different communication effort. And then there's even a third form of mortality that we're just starting to learn about called excess mortality. And this is like the death that might occur five years from now from the stress, the emotional strain that it places on a person to go through a major event like this or the lack of access to healthcare, these aspects that happen in a hurricane. So we've historically only really tracked direct mortality. Increasingly, we're having to learn more about this indirect mortality and then this excess mortality, because those numbers are larger in magnitude than the direct mortality, which is sort of surprising to us all.
- [20:24]
Emily Gracie
Interesting. I've never heard of that, the excess mortality. So did it come up because, like, five years after major events like Katrina, there was like a. An alarming rate of death is like, where did this come from? How did this get discovered?
- [20:39]
Jamie Rome
Well, you know, certainly it's. It's research done, not necessarily about hurricane center. A lot of this research is done, you know, outside of the hurricane center. But a lot of us internally were sort of, you know, wondering, you know, what. What happens. Because if you. If you look at mortality over time, you see when a hurricane comes through, you see sort of a rise and a dip and then a tail. Right. And, you know, what was caused by the hurricane? Did the hurricane just shift mortality forward in time? Right. You. We started to sort of ask ourselves these questions, but we couldn't answer them. You know, there was no data out there of it. And then some of us started to reach out the sort of public health side of things and talk to them about that. Unfortunately, Covid came along and basically, I mean, sucked the oxygen out of the room with respect to engaging, you know, anybody in public on the public health side of the House about this. And now we're restarting those discussions with public health about what of this tail and mortality that we see for years after a storm. You know, how much of that, you know, is due to the storm? How much of that can we mitigate with policy changes? And it might not be policy changes, you know, on the forecasting side, it might be public health policy changes. And I think the storm that really brought it home for everybody was Maria in Puerto Rico. And you. You saw not just the traditional, you know, sort of direct mortality with the initial few days, but this long tail of excess mortality in the thousands, which you wouldn't expect. You in a developed Nation like this. And, and I will say that mortality is probably one of the hardest things to track. And it's very hard for people to talk about it because it's very heavy. Right. It's a very heavy subject. And I think, you know, physical scientists are fearful that they're gonna say the wrong thing or, you know, maybe be insensitive to the topic. Right. And the more we can sort of break down that stigma and sort of say, well, we can't bring down mortality. Right. That's all of our stated goals. All of us gotten weather. Right. Including you with this goal of like saving lives. Right, right.
- [22:52]
Emily Gracie
It's the whole point.
- [22:53]
Jamie Rome
Right. So, but how, how are we going to do it unless we can track it and sort of talk about it as a community? Because it's, it's not just policy decisions. It's. It's changing the way we communicate. You know, for example. I'll give you an example. So it's not so abstract. All right? A lot of people lose power after a storm. They don't have air conditioning. If they're elderly or, you know, medically vulnerable, that might not be a good condition, you know, for them. Or maybe they have insulin and they can't keep it cool. If you try to tell people this after the storm has passed, they don't have power. They don't hear you. There's no Internet, there's no tv, there's no dissemination system. So trying to teach people to talk about power loss two days before a storm, that's not intuitive. That's not intuitive to a meteorologist because the meteorologist thinks I have to talk about hurricane warnings are in effect or I have to talk about the cone shifted or I have to talk about the spaghetti models. Right? So teaching meteorologists. Oh, no, no, no. You gotta talk about power loss before landfall because if you wait till landfall, nobody's gonna hear you.
- [23:57]
Emily Gracie
How do you get the TV meteorologist to do that? Is there training? Do you go to conferences? How do you get that message across to the people who are communicating to the people on the ground?
- [24:06]
Jamie Rome
Yeah, so we try. I mean, exactly. So, you know, we're partnering with conferences to try to offer workshops. You know, we're doing one this year at the National Tropical Weather Conference. We're trying to go to more conferences and we're trying to engage not just the weather professionals themselves or the weather communicators themselves, but the producers, like the people above the, you know, the on camera person. Because often they're making the decisions, right? They're like oh, you got 90 seconds to talk about this storm, you know, versus the five minutes that you need, right, to talk about the storm. So, you know, if you got 90 seconds to talk about the storm, people are not going to talk about power loss. They're going to talk about the cone, the new cone. Hopefully they're going to talk about the models, the change, you know, they're going to talk about all these things. And so teaching these producers that, hey, you know, we need you to expand out, you know, the time and coverage, we're at the front end of that evolution. It's something that's like, you know, the staff here are really passionate about engaging the broader communication. And I don't want to limit it to TV because, you know, some people, you know, get it through podcasts or get it through social media, whatever. So it's, it's a, it's a broader discussion. But again, back to the point is you got to justify it from the mortality standpoint and preventing mortality. And that means we got to teach people that it's okay, you know, we, we, we can talk about these things without disrespecting, you know, people or the subject.
- [25:40]
Emily Gracie
No, I, I like the producer part because it made me think about when I was on TV and I was doing, you know, a new hurricane update would come in, my producer would get in my ear and say, start with a cone.
- [25:50]
Jamie Rome
Start with the cone.
- [25:51]
Emily Gracie
Start with a cone.
- [25:52]
Jamie Rome
Let me guess, start with a cone, then go to satellite.
- [25:55]
Emily Gracie
Yeah, I mean, those are the two visuals. That's why, And TV is so visual, so it's hard to, you know, it's just not as sexy to talk about power outages or to have a visual that demonstrates, you know, power outages. That's hard too. So, you know, it's, I see both sides, but you're right, if you're going to go with impact, then power outages and how to survive that is so important. Okay, so I do want to talk about the cone, though, in the way that I think a lot of people don't know that the size of the cone every year changes depending on the previous year's forecast. So can you explain that and then what accuracy was like this year and how that's going to impact next year's cone.
- [26:36]
Jamie Rome
Yeah. So the size of the cone, it's based off the prior 5 year average of our track errors. Right. So we, we average the last five years and then you get an error at each time step. So day one, day two, day three, and, you know, it's intuitive the errors grow like as you go out in time. That's why the cone gets bigger as you go out in time. So what has happened is accuracy has improved over the last 10 or 15 years like we talked about. So it's top of the show is the cone has shrunk. And so there's this unintended problem that has occurred with that is people who interpreted the cone as an impact graphic 15 years ago, that wasn't the interpretation that we wanted, but they kind of accidentally made it right into decisions. But now the cone shrinks and more and more of the storm is falling out of the cone. So people who are looking at the cone as an impact graphic are making the wrong conclusions. Now to your point, it's done every year and I would say in the last couple of years people have gotten more sort of in tune to this and more interested in this. And is it going to shrink this year? We haven't run the numbers yet. You know, we go back at the end, at the conclusion of the hurricane sea and sort of reanalyze everything. You know, just go back and you know, fine tooth column, reanalyze everything. And sometimes storms go up and down and you know, intensity or left and right, you know, there's some small little changes that get made to each storm that then determine the annual accuracy which then feeds the five year accuracy. So it's, we don't know yet if the column is going to change. My guess is it would be relatively small like you numerically so small that you could probably barely discern it just because we're sort of reaching limits of predictability and track. So you don't anticipate these large changes in accuracy like you sort of saw several years ago.
- [28:43]
Emily Gracie
Okay, so let's talk about some individual storms, the ones that I remember, the one that stand out to me. So I assume that the general public kind of thinks of these, of these two, the first obviously being feral, which it seems like we were dealing with that for like weeks, you know, but noteworthy, right, because it was such an early season. Cat 5 Can you tell me what was the reaction of the hurricane center at that point where you're like, you know, oh crap, this is, we're getting started. Started like, you know, is this is going to be a long season or what was kind of the thought process going through barrel in those weeks that you guys were dealing with it?
- [29:19]
Jamie Rome
It, it's, it's not what you expect in that part of the basin and, and that early in, in the basin. So there's There's a, you know, the scientist in you is like, what's going on here? Why, what, what's, what's happening? Is something shifting, is something evolving? And you don't necessarily have time to answer those questions during hurricane season because you're onto the next forecast or onto the next storm. So there was, there was a little bit of that's not good. You know, the, the knee jerk reaction was a storm that strong this early in the season can't be good for the rest of the season. And while it was, it was busy, I don't know that it was busy as everybody thought at that moment when Beryl formed. Right. You know, at that point everybody sort of jumped to the hyper active insane activity and it still turned out to be quite active, but not nearly as bad as some people sort of mentally went and that, that sort of initial timeframe. But I think the lesson for that one is the traditional way people look at storms, especially those fixated on Stafford Simpson scale, we got to crack that nut somehow because I think people sort of on the front end of the storm like when it became a Cat 5, sort of didn't believe it. Like they were like it was so outside of the what was normal that it was hard to believe. And then people in Texas on the back end, you know, when it was weaker than it was at its, at its height, there was a little bit of complacency, you know, aspects going on and again predicated on the staffer Simpson scale thought process. So we, we got to get people to stop, you know, fixating on it, you know, and I don't have the answer today now. I just know it's something we're going to have to get after over the next several years.
- [31:12]
Emily Gracie
Last week on the show I interviewed Marty Ralph about atmospheric rivers and he was talking about how they created their scale for ranking atmospheric rivers. And it takes into account a lot of different factors. So I'm curious, does the hurricane center have any long term goals to adjust the scale for hurricanes or any interest in a whole new scale to rank hurricanes in another way other than just the wind speeds?
- [31:41]
Jamie Rome
You were working with social and behavioral scientists to sort of like we've done everything to, you know, make sure that we make decisions in a very disciplined way. But I think the general consensus thus far his scales have somewhat failed us at least on the hurricane communication side of things because the storm is just too complicated to conflate all that information in a singular number. So I don't know that right now we're looking at sort of altering the scale, but maybe sort of evolving beyond scales and communicating more directly. Meaning why conflate all this information into a number and leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what that means? Why not just tell people precisely what that means? That's, that's seven feet of storm surge. That's 40 inches of rain. That's 75 mile per hour wind gust. You know, why not just explicitly tell them? Now, there is an argument that not everybody's going to understand that right away, and that's sort of the argument against communicating that way. But we can teach them. Right. If we keep communicating with simple scales, people are never going to learn how to make decisions off this more rich data flow. But we can teach them. And you're already seeing that evolution like you're already seeing it. You know, we started off talking about the cone. Yeah. I got people beating on the door. Figurative speech. Well, why don't you put the other hazards on the column? And I'm like, yes, yeah, you're, you're starting to envision a hurricane as more than just wind and more than just a dot on the map. And I think we're starting to finally see this, this hunger from the public. Tell me how much wind I'm going to get. You know, tell me how much rain I'm going to get in. Scales will just naturally get pushed to the background, I think, without any sort of changes to them.
- [33:47]
Emily Gracie
One thing I saw more of this year that, you know, may or may not have been a good thing, but I feel like got the point across was video coming out of the NOAA hurricane hunter flights. They were terrifying. And, you know, a video of seeing the power of a storm offshore like that, a cat five. And then I think that helped people realize just how dangerous or scary or powerful these things were. So to say this is what they're flying through, this is what they experienced, and this is coming in your direction. Did you hear any feedback on that this year? Did you feel like that was more of a thing than it's been in past years?
- [34:23]
Jamie Rome
Yeah, and it's intentional, too. I mean, this is based off what social and behavioral scientists have. Have been telling us. You know, has several phrases that's used to describe this. Humanizing the forecast, localization, making people feel that the storm can impact them. Right. A lot of people view a hurricane, oh, it's coming to my state, but it's the next county or the next city or this is not my problem. You know, helping them to understand that the hurricane can Impact them in their yard, in their city and their neighborhood. That's called localization of risk. So, yeah, it's very intentional. And it's not just the aircraft. It's the. Have you noticed we're working with, you know, people to obtain video footage like we've never had before safely. Video footage like we've never had before, like storm surge. You've seen in the last five years these very. This very dramatic video of storm surge. And now we're turning storm surge from this abstract black box phenomenon that nobody understood to these very, very striking images. We're starting to use virtual reality and augmented reality to help people under. Like, to help people feel and experience the emotional. You know, we've got VR technology now where we have you in a house and the water comes up over your head. And it's fascinating to watch people, you know, you put the headset on, they try to stand up. The simulation is so real that they try to stand up. Some people hold their breath as the water. You see them. Physics. So all of this is part of helping people connect to the storm and understand it, because what happens, what has happened traditionally is people had these really simplistic rules. If it's above a Cat 3, I'll evacuate. If it's above a Cat 3, I'd board my house. You know, if it's above a cat 3, I'll do this. In. In helping people to understand that it's more than a number, it's more than wind, and it can absolutely impact you. Is. Is. I mean, it's a great question because it's. Specifically, what is the strategic vision of the National Hurricane center going forward? It's communicating the way you just sort of describe it.
- [36:43]
Emily Gracie
Yeah, that video always did really well on our social media. The other one that always got so much engagement was the Saildrone video, because you feel like you're in, like, a movie watching some of that video. Sometimes just the size of the waves is crazy. It's terrifying. Okay, so I want to talk briefly about Helene. I mean, this is one that's very heartbreaking. It's. It's difficult. I'm curious what the feeling was like at the hurricane center at the point you realize this is going to be a devastating hurricane, and not just for the coastline, but for folks hundreds of miles inland.
- [37:18]
Jamie Rome
You know, about two days before he started to get, you know, that really nagging feeling. And that was about the point. You saw the comm sort of jump, and you saw the agency took an action that I've never seen. Before, you know, issuing this press release about the inland flooding, basically urging and pleading with our media partners to, you know, cover the inland. I've never seen us do that before. You know, you're thinking to yourself, but when you see the collective whole, the agency take that step, it's sort of like, oh, oh, you know, this is going to be bad. And then we started to use words and language that you're not traditionally used to using. And then the pre event so that, you know, that's the rainfall that's occurring, the head of the actual storm, you know, sort of set in. You started to see these, you know, insane rainfall rates and flash flood emergencies and warnings and stuff happened before the storm even made landfall. And that point you were like, this is going to be, you know, really, really, really bad. So I would say to you probably about two days before, I mean all storms have a potential for that heavy rain event. And then you've got mountains. So you kind of knew maybe three or four days before you, you had a heavy rain event that you, it was really the sort of last couple days that you knew that it was going to be this catastrophic historic event that unfolded like it did.
- [38:45]
Emily Gracie
And then Milton, the one, the thing that kind of stood out to me about Milton was when it came on shore, I guess I always think of, you know, when hurricanes come on shore. Yeah, tornadoes spin up, but they're generally weak. But some of these Milton tornadoes were stronger, right? They were and there were a lot of them. So what made Milton spawn these tornadoes?
- [39:07]
Jamie Rome
Yeah, I mean obviously we have to look at it more closely in the off season, you know, so you can make some sort of, you know, quick judgment calls. It was, it was interacting with the mid latitudes and in such a way as tapping into upper level energy, pulling it down. But I think to your point, can we understand it enough to maybe bring that localization component that I was talking about earlier, the communication localization component, to bear in a forecast? And so instead of, you know, just a traditional, like moderate risk type communication, you know, can we go out and say over a hundred tornadoes, right? Can we go out and sort of say things in a way that people start to connect to the forecast and understand that it might be, hey, it might be me, that's me, right. I think that's where we got to sort of press forward and, and I'm speaking to myself too, you know, I, I'm one of the folks on camera for, for 10 hours talking to hundreds of thousands of people. So you know, what can I say? To make that tornado risk more human. More like, this is me instead of. I think most people just look at it as like, oh, it's Florida, right? No, your community, your neighborhood, your block.
- [40:29]
Emily Gracie
Yeah. I was alarmed by. So I live in Charleston, South Carolina. So we were dealing with overnight tornado warnings during Helene and I took a picture and posted on social media of, like, me and my kids in storm shelter and kind of hunkered down. And I had so many people the next morning, so many friends, smart, educated friends that said, oh, were we supposed to take cover when our alarms were going off in the middle of the night? Like, it was shocking to me then. Amount of people that did not take shelter during tornado warnings because it was in the middle of the night, it was inconvenient, and they just didn't think it was that big of a deal. So I guess there's just so much work still to be done. Like, if those are people who are friends with a meteorologist, who knew this was coming, who are tapped into social media, who still have power and they're not taking cover, like, that's alarming.
- [41:17]
Jamie Rome
Yeah. And it goes back to. We have to. I mean, the human brain is wired to, you know, if you believed every threat was going to happen to you, I mean, you couldn't get out of bed.
- [41:28]
Emily Gracie
Yeah.
- [41:29]
Jamie Rome
The human brain is designed to compartmentalize things like this. So when their actual threat is there, you know, how do we trigger the psychology to be like, okay, this is you. Like, this is not a drill. Right. This is the real thing. That's where we got to go from a communication standpoint. And you. I think we're really getting there. Like, you hear some of the comments from people that would hear a certain thing, you know, in and react to it, a certain word. A great example, again, not to make it so abstract, is when we use the word unsurvivable.
- [42:04]
Emily Gracie
That was impactful.
- [42:05]
Jamie Rome
Right. And you start, you know, you hear these. These. These stories of people who heard that and said, well, I've never heard that word before, so it must be serious. Right. And so, yeah, so I think we've got to continue to march down that road of finding words and ways and visualizations that connect to people and help push through that natural skepticism.
- [42:29]
Emily Gracie
Doesn't it make you think, like, looking back, that a meteorology degree should include so much more than science and that we should have been taking science, communications and psychology and all these other things?
- [42:40]
Jamie Rome
It makes me think I should have gone into broadcasting in the first place, because I might. Might actually be better at my job now. But no, it's that being, you know, funny. It really is as much communication as anything. And I would say the last 10 years of my career, I've had to sort of make that flip. Naturally, I was naturally curious about it. So, you know, it's been an enjoyable journey for me to work with communication specialists and experts and sort of retrain myself. But not every physical scientist is going to want to make that leap. Right? You know, a lot of people will tell you I signed up to forecast the weather. I want to forecast the weather. And I counter that with the needs of society have evolved, and this is what society needs from us as a community now, because the weather is not getting any easier to deal with. It's arguably getting tougher and tougher to deal with. And unfortunately, we live in a world of bad players and bad data and misinformation. So the good components have to rise up and somehow drown out all that bad information. Else our community, our weather community will lose what we enjoy now, which is a relatively high status in society. Weather is viewed very positively, whether professionals are viewed very positively. People seek out and trust the information we provide. I think to keep and grow that high trust, we've got to double down on the communication side.
- [44:19]
Emily Gracie
It's interesting what you just said resonates because I always laugh that meteorologists will introduce themselves like, hi, I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie. A biologist is not like, hello, I'm biologist so and so. But because of that high status, you want people to know your credibility. So it's. That's interesting until you send that.
- [44:39]
Jamie Rome
And these are not my studies. These are other studies. The. Generally speaking, whether it's private sector or a public sector, whether you're on camera or not, meteorologists employ or benefit from high degree of trust, high degree of interest, and don't believe me, wear a shirt that denotes your occupation on an aircraft. On an airplane, or go to the supermarket. You know, I think everyone in my neighborhood here, you know, knows what I do for living. I just put a new roof on and it was a spectacle in the neighborhood as everybody was like, what's going on? Why is something changing? Is the weather? You know, what's happening? And that speaks to just how much trust we enjoy in society.
- [45:23]
Emily Gracie
Okay, so looking back at the season, did anything really surprise you, catch you off guard, Anything really noteworthy about the 2024 season in your eyes?
- [45:32]
Jamie Rome
Just how much people want latch onto simple explanations, you know, so hurricanes are incredibly, incredibly nuanced. Very, very, very nuanced. And they're getting more nuanced as time goes on because society is more vulnerable, more, you know, more complicated. So people want a simple explanation. It's busy because of El Nino or not El Nino or it's busy because the ocean is warm. This model is always the right model. And they want these easy answers and explanation. And it's, it's nuanced and complicated. You know, we react to this temptation, right? And we react to the fact that people consume information and little snippets with this desire to conflate things. And, and we've got to resist that challenge and continue to communicate the entirety of the phenomenon because understanding why we make the decisions we make, whether you call that transparency or whatever you call that, telling people why they've been ordered to evacuate, telling people why they're under a hurricane warning, telling people why they got smoked with winds even though they were outside of the cone, that's why we have trust, right? That's why we have high standing in society. And if we start tempting ourselves to communicate with simple metrics and numbers and conflating things down, we will have eliminated the transparency and our trust will be eroded. So that, that was my lesson, is we can't stop communicating the why.
- [47:07]
Emily Gracie
Hmm, interesting. All right, so what's new for next season? There was the cone, there was the AI stuff this year. What, what's going on for 2025, what's in the works, anything you can share?
- [47:19]
Jamie Rome
You know, we want to make sure that we're looking at all of the data versus jumping to a conclusion. Soon there'll be year two of the cone. It's, you're more than likely going largely the same with maybe minor, you know, tiny little changes based off comments. So, like making the legend, you know, more easy to understand, something like that. And we're going to look at continuing to improve the hazard communication side. I mean, we lose so many people in rip currents and you never hear people talk about rip currents. So we're going to try to like, you know, push, push the rip current communication. I mean, more people die in rip currents than storm surge, which is shocking because, yeah, I talked about earlier this dramatic drop in storm surge mortality. We now lose more people in rip currents each year than storm surge. So, you know, we got to push rip currents up. People consume information differently. And if you look@hurches.gov and the preponderance of our products, they're very 20 years ago text forecast on websites that aren't mobile friendly. You know, we've got to modernize the content and meet people where they are and they're consuming information. Very, very different like this year. I mean, I know people are going to laugh because it's government, but like, we started doing short video clips, right? Very, very short video clips that were, you know, more punchy and eye catchy. You know, some of those video clips that we did this year were, were viral because that's how people want to consume information. So, you know, how do you take the same content, the same information and reformat it in those new methods? And doing that within government is obviously hard. I think that's where the next frontier is.
- [49:04]
Emily Gracie
I selfishly don't want you to change some of the old stuff about the website, though, because familiarity and ease of finding things is really nice. I can quickly go to where I need to go because it's been the same way for so long.
- [49:15]
Jamie Rome
It's going to be like. It's going to be like the Kong, right? The cone was institutionalized and people were so fearful that if you changed the cone, you know, you would cause this huge uproar and everybody would be confused and there would be this disastrous outcome. And I think we proved that you could smartly evolve the cone without this disastrous, you know, outcome. Okay, so now can we smartly evolve the tools that we use to disseminate graphics and information like hurricanes.gov that, you know, meet people where they are? Vast majority of people don't go to hurricanes.gov on their desktop or laptop. They do it on a phone. So, you know, getting it to where it formats and presents the information, you know, specific to that.
- [50:03]
Emily Gracie
Are you going to be presenting on any new research at AMS in New Orleans this year?
- [50:07]
Jamie Rome
Well, I'm not even sure going to ams. So we're still in, you know, we're still working on that. You know, my guess is you'll, you'll continue to hear more of the mortality. Like we'll be studying the mortality from this season and you're going to see us talk about the cone, you know, the successes of the cone, you know, what the feedback was and what does the next step look like. And I mean, I don't have any breaking news, but maybe this is good enough. You know, this is not it with the cone. This is the initial step of a journey, not the final destination. You know, I think we've got to evolve such that people view all of the hazards equally as important and not just see a hurricane as a wind event.
- [50:51]
Emily Gracie
There's a lot of broadcast meteorologists that listen to this. Is there anything that you would ask of them or other communicators or even, you know, people who are sharing information online about hurricanes.
- [51:01]
Jamie Rome
They're not going to like it, but it's the truth. The over emphasis on models showing spaghetti lines. So let's, let's think about this just for one moment. Let's just think about this critically. Even if the viewers could pick which one of those lines was going to occur, which they can't, and that's upsetting, but they can't. But even if they could, they would have to in their mind, build a two dimensional wind field. Right. And then evolve that two dimensional wind field over land, induce friction, superimpose a gust factor, add storm surge, and we know how complicated storm surge is. Add rain, add the tornadoes in the right flank and then infer all of that societal and infrastructure components that we talked about earlier into consequence mod. The human brain would have to somehow mysteriously do all of that to determine their risk, their vulnerability. It's physically impossible to ask a viewer to do all of that. So if they can't do all of that, why are we going to waste 50% of the broadcast on the lines? Why not use some portion of that time to communicate the risk, to talk about power loss, talk about vulnerability, and to talk about how to protect yourself and your family from those ultimate outcomes. And I know that's a tough one, ask. Because people want to see the models and TV professionals all the time. Tell me, well, if I don't show it to them, they'll just flip the channel and get it from somebody else. But just like we proved we could evolve the cone, I think we can evolve our communication.
- [52:46]
Emily Gracie
Yeah. And I think a good communicator will make it worthwhile to watch too.
- [52:52]
Jamie Rome
Right. And so one of, so people are like, oh, that's well and good. Tell me what that looks like. All right, so if you've got to show that, don't show them two lines and say, pick which one. Show them a bunch of lines and say, well, this shows you the range of possible out. This, this is a way of communicating the uncertainty, Right. This is how we communicate the uncertainty in the, in the forecast. So present it in such a way that helps people understand the trust part. Right. You're, you're telling them why the hurricane warning is this big. Right. Because of the uncertainty. It's use it to explain the why versus here's model A, here's model B. You pick which one that's leading to, unfortunately, a lot of bad decision making.
- [53:39]
Emily Gracie
Interesting. I mean we hear it over and over again. It's, it's an ongoing problem. But like you said, hopefully maybe 10 years down the road, that sort of practice will just kind of go away and we'll be in a better place. As far as communication, Jamie, is there anything else you want to share about this past season or hurricane forecasting in general?
- [53:58]
Jamie Rome
We've made great progress. We've made great progress and we live in an era now where trust is starting to wane. And I think it's imperative that we continue to communicate what we do know and more importantly, sometimes what we don't know. And that way, you know, after a storm, maybe somebody's under a hurricane warning and they don't get an impact, right. Or they don't get the impact that they anticipated. We need to explain to them why. Why that means not distrusting the forecast or not distrusting the warning. This is just a, you know, why did the storm, you know, it wobbled 10 miles to the, to the east and that took you out of the core of the, the eye wall, you know, or what have you. And again, back to this trust, you know, trust doesn't come easy and we've got to fight to keep it.
- [54:51]
Emily Gracie
Jamie Rome, thank you so much for your time today.
- [54:54]
Jamie Rome
No, thank you. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
- [54:58]
Emily Gracie
Off the Radar is a production of the National Weather Desk. Make sure you're following the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes publish every Tuesday morning. If you know someone that's interested in tropical weather and hurricanes, please share this episode with them. We'd also love you to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Let us know what you think of the show and give me ideas for future episodes. Special thanks to Jamie Rome, deputy director of the National Hurricane center, for joining me on the show today. Also thank you to Sinclair Broadcast Group and the National Weather Desk for their ongoing support. And thank you as always to my associate producer, Brian Petrus for his help on this episode. Our meteorologist, Emily Grazie, make it a great day.