48: Lake Effect Snow is Magical (re-air)

Happy new year! While we recover from the Lakies and the holidays, we're re-airing our 2020 conversation with Tom Coomes of ABC 57 in South Bend.

This is an automated transcript; we apologize for any errors. If you notice any problems, please email the show at teachmeaboutthegreatlakes@gmail.com. Thank you.

Stuart Carlton 0:00
Hey everybody, this is Stuart the titular me from teach me about the Great Lakes. Thanks so much for listening, since everybody was on holiday break for the second part of December, and we're all kind of taking a minute if you will, to recover from a pretty busy fall in which we did a lot of cool stuff. We don't have a brand new episode for you this week, but we're gonna bring you a we're gonna do a greatest hit, we're gonna call it and this is from way back, if you could think all the way back to March of 2020, early March before all of this started. We interviewed Tom Coombs, who's a weather forecaster with ABC, I think 57 in South Bend, Indiana. And we talked a lot about lake effect snow and winter weather and things like that. And since the winter weather is finally starting to creep its way down here to West Lafayette. We thought that'd be a really good episode to re air. I'll give you one little bit of background on this. So this was our fourth episode. Originally, we had just started recording them. And Tom was our first person we interviewed who had kind of a following online. I mean, he's a TV dude and had a following online. And so we were pretty nervous about the recording, because you know, everything was brand new. And, and so anyway, so we went and did the recording, and got everything lined up. We started our recording software and everything. And we, you know, we were asking questions is that the other having a great little conversation. But about every five minutes, my microphone would totally crap out. And so Tom who was promoted? No, he wasn't remote. This was before, you know, he was in like the TV studio. That's right, in some sort of secret recording room. They have, like, really professional stuff. I'm like in my office anyway, and he kept doing like, Hey, man, like your microphone isn't working, something's going on. And so we kept trying, and my audio kept fading or like making this really annoying sort of noise. And, and, you know, but he powered through it. So what I have to do is I had a USB mic at the time, and I would have to unplug my mic and plug it back in. But the thing is, is that we wouldn't know if we wouldn't know if it was happening until it it kind of already happened. And some of my audio had been completely trashed. And so what I ended up having to do, but again, this was a big interview and a busy guy. And so we didn't have a lot of time. You know, we don't want to ask him to rerecord everything, because that would just be horrible embarrassing. So what I ended up having to do was like go back into the, into my office after we recorded this, and basically redubbed my dialogue in or my questions and things like that. Not everyone, but some of them. I had to do like I think they call it ADR in the movies, which is like, you go in and rerecord your dialogue and stuff like that. And so I had to do that, including like some of my stupid jokes and absurd comments and what have you. And so it was really the first maybe not the first but an early key. We're all professionals here kind of moment. So anyway, listen in and see if you can find the dialogue that I re recorded. I edited over it as best as I can, but not that good. Because you know what, I am not an audio editing professional, which is why a little bit after this one, we hired an audio editing professional. Thank you, Quinn. Anyway, so enjoy this interview with Tom Coombs. It was a good one. And I learned a lot about weather, which I don't know a lot about. Thank you so much for listening. And we're gonna be back with a fresh episode on the 17th. And then we should go the first and third Monday of every month pretty much. We have a really exciting year planned. We've had our editorial meeting and it's going to be you know, really educational and a whole lot of fun. So we can't wait to get started. And in between now and then this is it's a nice interview. We hope you enjoy it. Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns. You can find us on Twitter at Teach Great Lakes. The website teach me about the Great lakes.com. And I think that's pretty much it. Thank you so much for listening. This has been a really rewarding thing to do. Super happy to do it. super glad to do it. And I can't wait to keep doing it going forward. I think that's it. So rather than an awkwardly, I'll just say thanks for listening and keep great nose lakes.

Carolyn Foley 3:54
Doo doo doo doo

Stuart Carlton 3:57
teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes a podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice get people who are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton and I work with Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant. And I know a lot about precisely how much it's going to cost to repair the leaking roof on our house. But I do not know a lot about the Great Lakes. And that's the point of this here show. I'm joined as always by Illinois-Indiana secrets Research Coordinator, Carolyn Foley Carolyn, what's up?

Carolyn Foley 4:30
Not much Stuart, how are you doing today?

Stuart Carlton 4:32
I'm doing well. Thanks. I'm actually really excited about today's episode, for a few reasons. First of all, because I do have a leaky roof. And I think that it's always good to talk to a weather forecaster when you have a leaky roof.

Carolyn Foley 4:44
That's a very great use of their time. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 4:46
I think it's a real solid use of their time. But second of all, you know, as the whole point of the show is that I grew up in the Gulf South and just moved here. And so the weather here, in addition to being just terrible, it's also something really bad asked me to be incorrect.

Carolyn Foley 5:02
It is not terrible. There are some wonderful, wonderful things about the weather in the Great Lakes region, however, continue.

Stuart Carlton 5:07
No, no, that's true since I moved here if I experienced multiple days of totally decent weather, so I actually agree with you, the summers here are just fantastic. And the winters here are also days of the year. But anyway, so it's today we're gonna interview Tom Coombs, who's the chief meteorologist at ABC 57 News in South Bend, Indiana. And my gut feeling is is that this is the first of several interviews we're gonna do with meteorologists. Because what I've learned is once you start talking about the weather, it's hard to get people to stop.

Carolyn Foley 5:34
That's because the weather is just extraordinarily interesting. And all of us experience it every single

Stuart Carlton 5:38
I think you're right when I grew up, my dad, actually, we would watch three different weather forecasts in New Orleans, he knew where they were timed, you know, so the first one would come on at, you know, six after the hour, the second one would come on in, you know, 11, after the hour, and third at 17, after the hour, on three different channels. And if we didn't get those, you know, he would be out cooking or whatever. And if we didn't call him when the weather came on, he would be extraordinarily irate. So

Carolyn Foley 6:01
it just makes so much sense.

Stuart Carlton 6:04
But also explain why I just sort of glanced at the weather when I get up and make sure that it's not actively raining or snowing and get on with my day. Before we get to today's interview, we have a little bit of housekeeping to take care of. So let's just bang that out right now. First of all, don't forget to Like, Subscribe, review all of those things as podcasts, it helps other people find us which we think is important, because I think there are a lot of people that need to learn about the Great Lakes. So if you have a second, please take a second to go to your podcast, app or directory or whatever. And take a minute to give us a review. If you're listening to this in your browser, why not subscribe. It's a great subscription, free and informative, like all the best subscriptions are. And if you have a friend, please pass this show on to a friend. And then second bit of housekeeping. Number two is we have a website, brand new website, actually it is WWW dot teach me about the great lakes.com And that should be active by the time you hear this. So go to www dot teach me about the great lakes.com to check us out. If you want to see the show notes for today's show, which will have all sorts of interesting links. And what have you just go to www dot teach me about the great lakes.com/four Because this is episode number four. And with that, Carolyn, let's go ahead and bring on Tom Bucha.

Tom, how are you today?

Tom Coomes 7:39
I'm doing very well. The sun is shining, which if you're in Lake and Piguet country, you know how rare that actually is?

Stuart Carlton 7:47
Yes, it is beautiful out actually I rode my bike in this morning. And it was cool. But but it was nice. I'll take it. Your chief meteorologist with ABC 57 News in South Bend. Right? I am. So what is the chief meteorologist do exactly. I'm trying to figure out what it is you do day to day. And I think that's probably interesting. In and of itself.

Tom Coomes 8:07
It's a lot more than you think most people think that we just show up, you know for about 15 minutes, and then we go home. But my day actually started just today we had some toll road safety training saw me here already at noon, then I've got of course this podcast and I've got to go over some interoffice graphical stuff, some scheduling, planning out our whole newscast for a full day. So on average, usually my days are usually nine to 10 hours anyway. And that's because we actually forecast or at least I do, I actually forecast the weather, to do my analysis, come up with a forecast. And then I have to present it multiple multiple times in multiple different ways from radio to newspaper web. And then just doing the old fashioned TV newscast which some people still watch and some people don't. So we have to figure out ways to reach them in any medium possible via social media. You know, even doing podcasts like this is a way to help inform and educate people about the weather and being better weather prepared.

Carolyn Foley 9:08
So I've been incredibly impressed by how many neurologists are on Twitter. And when something's happening, they're all tweeting it. And I think oh my gosh, these people never sleeps. So thank you very much.

Tom Coomes 9:18
It's a small world. You know, I think we kind of feed into ourselves, because we might be the only other people actually reading our tweets. But But yeah, when things are exciting, you know, we love to share the science. And, you know, I think we get to express ourselves more than on television, which sometimes is just, is it going to rain today? Yes or no? What's the high? What's the low? You know, we can really start getting wonky. I think on Twitter.

Stuart Carlton 9:47
Well, let's go ahead and get wonky then. So this has been a pretty warm winter so far is that what causes that is that predictable? Or are you planning for that to happen or is it hard to predict what's what's the deal with that?

Tom Coomes 9:58
The long answer is, you know Have those seasonal outlooks, you often will see even here on TV, we give a forecast in November, which I will say as pretty good for myself, I said that there was no sign of a significantly cold or harsh winter compared to last year I'm gonna reach negative 20 Compared to earlier years of the past decade where we've seen more than 100 inches of snow here in south bend. This is one of the least snowy and warmest winters on record. There's a couple of things that we look at what drives winter weather. You've probably heard of the Nino, El Nino, right, or linea. Those are two big things because people think, you know for hear El Nino usually means milder winters, drier winters, and La Nina usually means wetter, which often means snow year and colder winters. But that's not the only thing we focus on that so much. Because these climate drivers when they are very strong, we have a very strong El Nino or La Nina, it takes over the weather pattern. And it pretty much influences the entire season. But often it's not very strong. And so then you have these smaller influences, like the Arctic Oscillation, which then influences the polar vortex which got going around very popular in TV, even though it is a real thing that happens every year. But how that interacts. And this season has been very, very mild. And one of the biggest things that we've talked about is the lack of the polar vortex being weak, it's actually stayed very strong. So when the polar vortex is strong, it's a strong circulation across the top of the world, that cold air is locked over the Arctic Circle. So the cold air doesn't fall southward. Now if it gets weak and wobbly, kinda like a tarp, when it starts to lose its momentum. So polar vortex it's weak that tarp starts to wobble. That wobble is when you start to get those big Arctic intrusions that spill into some places. And we just have not had that this season. So we have not had big spills of cold air, we've not had a lot of snowfall because of it. And it's been a mild winter. And then finally, the thing that some people don't think about that I kind of take into my forecast is climate change, the climate is just getting warmer. So if you're spending more days above 32, guess what, you're going to have less snowfall.

Stuart Carlton 12:24
So there's a lot to unpack there. Tom, that's pretty interesting. Let's start with the polar vortex. I hear a lot about that. But usually in the context of like when it's gonna be a frigid winter, right, a really cold winter, right, everybody starts saying polar vortex polar vortex. But so what I'm hearing from you is what that actually means is there's a weak polar vortex at air and it causes cold air to be sort of spit into our area by it is that fair to say?

Tom Coomes 12:46
That is correct. You know, it's and it can be the both in a given year, the polar vortex can be strong, or it can be weak, it can also be off center. So think about this, if it is right over the top of the Earth, which it is actually right now fairly well centered over the geographic North Pole. The cold air is evenly distributed in a nice circle across the top of the world, right. But when it gets lopsided, or when it weakens, that's when it can spill into the lower latitudes. And that's when we get those really cold arctic outbreaks. Got it?

Carolyn Foley 13:19
So what happened in 2019? Was it lopsided? Or was it wobbly or

Tom Coomes 13:27
from what I can remember is, it was definitely very wobbly. Sometimes, instead of just having a nice conformed dice circle, instead of just being lopsided, it had multiple lobes that would spill in different directions. And one of those I mean, big time dropped into our part of the country into the eastern United States. And then there are some times where it can be lopsided where I believe that was back to 2014 2015 was a very big snow year where we almost had snow every day in February. And the temperature never broke freezing. It was lopsided and tilted towards our side of the Earth. So eastern North America, incredibly cold Eurasia incredibly warm because the other side was mild, think of that top leaning towards one side of the Earth.

Stuart Carlton 14:14
It's almost like the same amount of air just distributed differently across the globe. I'm pretty sure that was 2014 the left Indiana for Texas, coincident led

Carolyn Foley 14:26
in my head I'm imagining like a hot fudge sundae kind of like all over so yeah,

Stuart Carlton 14:32
yeah, but it's a cold focus.

Tom Coomes 14:34
And that's why I go with the top connotation because it is spinning in think about when the top starts to finish up towards its last momentum. It really gets wobbly and then it just flops in one direction.

Stuart Carlton 14:49
Sure. Let's talk about this idea of snow Have you hear a lot about lake effect snow, and I don't know exactly what it is. I mean, it's something to do with Lake having an effect creating snow So that's kind of what I got. What exactly is lake effect snow and why does it

Tom Coomes 15:06
is magical. are so I say it because it makes my job but important, especially living here, I grew up here in south bend. So I've only known like effects now it kind of feels sad without winter without like effects. Now, lake effect snow is really convection. So it's a almost like thunderstorm phenomena. In winter, you have cold air, usually very cold arctic air moving over a relatively warmer body of water. What we're looking for is we'll call it a delta t, the difference in temperature. Sure, we really want to see that difference in temperature between the air and the lake greater than 10 to 15 degrees. So if the water temperature is around 35, you get air That's 25 2015 degrees moving over Lake Michigan, you're getting ready for a good dose of lake effect snow, what happens is just like in a summer day with a thunderstorm, but we're just in a different relative temperature range, is you have the evaporation off the lake. That's the fuel and the heat going right up into the atmosphere. And usually we see snow from system snow and some sort of stratiform you know, big blankety great cloud. Lake effect. snow clouds are more like thunderstorms. In some ways. It's low level convection, they're going to be puffier that are cumulus based clouds. And they can really bring some heavy snowfall because you're just loading almost a thunderstorm. But in this case, it's heavy snow.

Stuart Carlton 16:42
Essentially what you're talking about then is the temperature gradient kind of pulls a bunch of moisture up into the air where it then is so cold in the air, the atmosphere that it turns into snow is that close understanding. Yeah,

Tom Coomes 16:54
pretty much your you know, you have that evaporation, so we are fueling with the heat. Think of it just like you'll, you'll sometimes seen this on open water on a very cold day, right? That evaporated fog that's going up there. So think about that moisture loading up into the cloud, we also have the heat there. So we're building a good cloud base. So we have good dynamics, we're loading a cloud, and then it pretty much takes all that moisture that has been loaded up over the lake, and almost immediately dumps it back down over the land in the shadow of the lake. So the areas that are most susceptible to that are on the leeward side of the lake. The prevailing wind direction in most cases is west to east, or northwest to southeast. So the western shores, or the western part of Michigan, the western part of New York State, or the western part of Pennsylvania, even into northeastern Ohio, big big lake effect countries. But you know, lake effect can be any shore of the lake, it just depends on the wind direction. And that's what you're really forecasting here with Lake Effect is the wind, you know, we can look at computer models, but we're really looking at the wind forecast. And we're looking for something called the fetch. Okay, a long fetch is the real wonky weather term. And it's the length of the wind over that open water. Gotcha. So when we look for that long fetch setup, we're looking for a very consistent wind direction likely out of the Northwest or north for the longest period of time. And so if you have 24 hours of just a very consistent wind flow, which is kind of rare to have, you're probably going to have a very big lake effect event in one area because that band will set up and it will just dump snow until the wind changes

Stuart Carlton 18:45
make sense. Okay, I know you're busy man. We have one question from Hope charters or communication coordinator that I have to ask because she made me have you ever had any good green screen mess up stories that maybe you can share with us?

Tom Coomes 18:59
I wish I did. I really dug in maybe a maybe I'm just somebody who just lets that stuff go, right. I don't have maybe the biggest is you know, when you move to a different area or different part of the country, as meteorologists, you need to know how people pronounce things. Oh, yeah. So when I my first job, I moved to western Colorado, so I learned mountain snowfall as well. We can do a whole different thing on that. But that's nothing to do with the Great Lakes. But there was a town. Let's see how it was spelled. o l a t h e How would you pronounce that? Oh, lave. I thought it was Oh Lof. Oh, laugh

Stuart Carlton 19:39
but it was a lathe. A lathe? That was my eighth

Tom Coomes 19:42
guess. And I got a lot of calls. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 19:46
I don't know. Oh, my dad.

Tom Coomes 19:47
I'll leave the sweet corn apparently is big time famous in the West. It's really tasty. It's good. But it's it's only fun.

Stuart Carlton 19:54
Yeah. My dad lives in New Orleans and he watches three or four weather forecasts at night and While the younger generation are still learning the names and he complains to me about that a lot, because there's a lot of screw names in Louisiana,

Tom Coomes 20:05
I would not want to work there because I do not know French very well. And so even looking at French terms, it's kind of like, I mean, that whole Lafayette, you look at that. I mean, is that how you think that would be pronounced when looking at them?

Stuart Carlton 20:20
Yeah. Or if he spoke French, that's actually not how you pronounce it. All right. Well, we'd like to wrap up with two questions for each of our interviewers interviewees. The first one is this. If you could have a really great doughnut for breakfast, or a great sandwich for lunch, which would it be?

Tom Coomes 20:36
I would definitely have a sandwich.

Stuart Carlton 20:38
And then the follow up question is when I'm in South Bend, where do I go for a really great sandwich? This is actually really why I'm asking.

Tom Coomes 20:45
Usually my house I make pretty good sandwich. I made a really good BLT. I grow my own tomatoes. I mean, I'll lay this all out. Actually, I know a good place. It's a all mama's on the avenue, it's near the south and farmers market, they will do their own like Italian meats, their cheeses a topping out, it's, it's a very good sandwich.

Stuart Carlton 21:07
Great. That's definitely what we'll do. And then we'll go to your house for dinner for BLTs. And great, just have a great time. We like to ask our guests for one little bit of life advice for the listeners out there can be serious or silly, you know, related to the Great Lakes and whether or not you know, anything along there. What's one piece of life advice that you have isn't like the toughest questions? Yeah, whether it's easy compared to the sandwiches, right?

Tom Coomes 21:29
I'm always prepared for the weather. I think this is what I even tell kids when I get when I do my school visits. And it seems kind of silly. But I really do think that and I think it's best coming from forecaster especially is learn from your mistakes. And I'm not talking about big mistakes. As a forecaster every day, I learned from what you might consider a mistake. I forecast 35. And it was 36. Why did that happen? I look at that every single day. Now I think me getting within one degree is pretty good. But even when it comes to the lake effect snow forecasting, which is tough, why did it snow, six more inches just west to here instead of over this location? I look at that every time because that next circumstance is going to happen again. So whatever you do, whatever trade you do, you're never going to do anything. I think perfectly. There may be a suffered a couple times where you just get it absolutely right. But you probably get it good enough. So knowing you know the amount of precision and accuracy that you need to do to perform a job. How can you do that consistently? And can you learn from those times that maybe you didn't quite get it exactly right. But the next time you do it, you're like, Oh, I remember that. I remember what happened. And I'm not going to do that, because I'm going to rely on my experience to have a better outcome next time.

Stuart Carlton 23:00
Yeah, that's something that's interesting that it's something that I talk to my kids about now that you mentioned, it is like it's good to make mistakes, you learn

Tom Coomes 23:06
so much more from your mistakes. And maybe the bad part is that we call them mistakes, because it has a bad connotation, but it's just not the outcome. Sometimes you didn't want to happen. So how do you put this into your favorite? You know, you get this from playing board games or playing card games? Why did I lose? Well, if you think back to three plays earlier, I would have done this, this and this. I probably could have won. It's you know, is that a mistake? Maybe but you learn?

Stuart Carlton 23:37
Well, fortunately for me, I'm very good at making mistakes. That's good luck. You'll learn a lot. Yep. Tom, where can people find you if they want to connect with you on Twitter or Facebook? What's Twitter is

Tom Coomes 23:47
the best way in the weather world to really get probably a good response for me at Tom combs, T om C O mes, I'm on Twitter, find me there. It's probably the best resource to go back and forth. And if we really want to get talking, we can find a way to talk even more from there.

Stuart Carlton 24:04
Well, Tom Kuhns, Chief Meteorologist for ABC 57 News in South Bend. Thank you so much for teaching us about the Great Lakes.

Tom Coomes 24:11
It was a pleasure.

Stuart Carlton 24:27
You know, Carolyn, the weather really is. I'll admit a little bit mildly interesting.

Carolyn Foley 24:33
It's super interesting. What are you talking about? And yeah, I mean, learned all sorts of cool stuff today.

Stuart Carlton 24:39
Yeah, I have a feeling that you and he could have sat there and just nerd it out on weather for a bit longer than then maybe I could have potentially. Yes. Yeah. I think it's part of Canada because So you're from Canada. Right.

Carolyn Foley 24:50
I was waiting for the token Canada moment

Stuart Carlton 24:53
of its token I think. I think it deeply describes what's happening because at any minute in Canada, no matter I mean, tell me if this is Right, no matter the time of year, you could get covered in feet of snow, like walking home from the grocery store if you're not careful, boom,

Carolyn Foley 25:07
buried. I don't know if that's accurate, but you know, sure.

Stuart Carlton 25:11
No, I I'm yeah, that's just how it works in Canada. I happen to know because I've looked it up on the internet. So Carolyn, what is something that you learned today about the Great Lakes.

Carolyn Foley 25:19
So something I thought was really cool was the idea that the years that people in the Midwest or the Great Lakes region experience a polar vortex it actually means that that's a week polar vortex year, and it's sort of slipping and sliding down around. I thought that was really neat.

Stuart Carlton 25:36
Yeah, I thought that was really interesting, too. I just always assumed when the polar vortex is bad or strong, then we're getting our butt kicked down here. But yeah, I thought that was good. And I appreciated your hot fudge analogy. I thought it was rock solid. Thank you. I try. And I learned well, I learned a couple of things. I learned one that it will although you cannot eat, you can drink the yellow snow, it turns out, and apparently it's tasty. And I also learned about like effect snow, which I didn't know I thought all the snow we got was like effect. But it turns out, it's just this phenomenon that happens when the warm air over the lake gets sucked up with the cold air in the atmosphere and produces snow. So I thought that was pretty cool.

Carolyn Foley 26:13
Incidentally, it's really, really cool to look at images. Like there was a loop the other day from Lake Superior, another great lake, where there's just streams all across the lake. I'll try to find the link so we can put it in the show notes.

Stuart Carlton 26:25
Oh, yeah, we'll do that. We'll put that in the show notes again, at www I teach me about the great lakes.com/four Because this is episode four. Well, thanks, everybody, for tuning in this month. Please like and subscribe, tell all your friends about us. And a couple of acknowledgments this month, I'd like to thank Melissa Windhelm for helping us hook up with Tom. And I'd also like Thanks, Steven Shaffer, he was the listener, and has presented us with a whole bunch of interesting ideas for things you might want to learn about. And this was one of them. So this was semi inspired by my Stephens email, we appreciate that. If you have email or questions, feel free to reach out. You can the best way to do it is probably go to Twitter, at h at twitter.com/what. The hell are we to reach out on Twitter via teach Great Lakes at Teach Great Lakes is the podcast. You can also look at the secret main Twitter feed, which is i Li N Sea Grant. And since we're talking about whether we have a really great feed for our buoys, actually, I don't know how the buoys tweet per se, but they find a way to do it while they're also out there monitoring data. So I encourage you to go look at that at what is it two yellow buoys on Twitter. And I think that'll do it for this month. Carolyn, thank you. And we'll talk to you as always next month.

Carolyn Foley 27:39
certainly talk to you later, Stewart.

Stuart Carlton 27:42
Didn't did.

Tom Coomes 27:49
I even looked up my untapped ratings

Stuart Carlton 27:52
as far as Whoa, you have untapped ratings.

Tom Coomes 27:55
I mean, I was like, Well, what is my favorite weather? I don't know. I don't really know off the top of my head. I may have heard of something. But I was like I went into my data. I'm a data scientist. So I went right into my data.

Stuart Carlton 28:04
All right, well, let's hear it then. What is your favorite wisdom related? My

Tom Coomes 28:08
top one was actually yellow snow IPA from Rogue.

Stuart Carlton 28:12
Oh, network admin and I was told not to drink that.

Tom Coomes 28:18
It wasn't bad.

Stuart Carlton 28:19
Oh, no, no, no, you shouldn't

Tom Coomes 28:20
do this. Nobody else no IPA was pretty good drinking it

Stuart Carlton 28:24
though. That's fine. Now I went to the rogue brew pub in Astoria, Oregon, and I don't think they had that there. So I'll have to check it out next time I see it.

Tom Coomes 28:35
I think it's a seasonal. If I love your buoys, trust me. We bring into our weather system. You can bring them in and because it's all part of the NOAA feed. So

Carolyn Foley 28:48
right you get it through like the mdbc website. Is that how you guys pull it or?

Tom Coomes 28:53
So our vendor pulls it? I believe that's where it comes in. I mean, it comes in one of those streams, but yes, I would. I would say it's probably through that because I'm looking mostly at just the temperature data wave height, wind and water temp. Is there.

Carolyn Foley 29:08
Okay, Stuart's gonna kill me but is there anything else?

Creators and Guests

Stuart Carlton
Host
Stuart Carlton
Stuart Carlton is the Assistant Director of the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program. He manages the day-to-day operation of IISG and works with the IISG Director and staff to coordinate all aspects of the program. He is also a Research Assistant Professor and head of the Coastal and Great Lakes Social Science Lab in the Department of Forestry & Natural Resources at Purdue, where he and his students research the relationship between knowledge, values, trust, and behavior in complex or controversial environmental systems.