22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY february 16-22, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com out into the future. We don’t know what each molecule is doing and is going to do. Isn’t there a longer-term understanding though, seasonally, of what the weather is going to do? Blier: In September or October, people say, “What’s the winter going to be like?” We look at things like El Niño, cycles in the atmosphere. But there’s no real way to tell. When you consider the complexity and all that’s going on with it, I would think people would be impressed that we can predict the weather two or three days from now. Garcia: If we were doing what we’re doing back in the days of the Salem witch trials, we would all be burned at the stake. It seems there might still be difficulty in maintaining public trust. If you forecast conditions that are different than what actually happens, does it make people skeptical? Is there too much caution? Garcia: Going into Jan. 4, the media really picked up on the term bomb cyclone. It’s a rapidly deepening storm that has potentially large impacts. We highlighted that storm pretty hard with wind and rain. We give ideas, like: If you don’t have to travel on that day, don’t travel; if you have the ability to work from home, work from home. We had trees down, and power outages. We started getting messages on Twitter and Facebook saying, “This was a dud, this didn’t pan out the way you guys said it would.” But when I was driving home to Santa Cruz that night and there was nobody on the road, I was like, “Yes, people heeded the warning.” We had one death that night in our service area, in Sonoma County where a tree fell on a house and killed a 2-year-old. That’s because people did stay home and heed our warnings. It’s hard to quantify lives saved. I am not going to worry about crying wolf when the potential impacts are huge. We are not talking every year, every other year—it’s for extreme events. It’s not crying wolf at that point, it’s giving a plausible worst-case scenario. Do you think people are more or less skeptical of weather forecasts today than through history? Blier: In the 1860s, Admiral Robert FitzRoy [of the British Navy] became the first to issue daily weather. Prior, it was “foretelling the weather.” He transitioned to “forecast.” London, interestingly, is a tough place to forecast the weather. How has weather forecasting developed and changed? Blier: It’s cool how far this field has come in such a short period of time. You need to have standardized weather instruments at various places, all sending information to a place to be measured. Prior to the invention of the telegraph, there was no way to do that—the Pony Express was just not fast enough. You needed some way to communicate across vast distances. We think now that the idea of standardized time across the planet has been the way it’s been forever, but it hasn’t. In the 1800s, every town had its own definition of what time was. FitzRoy really pioneered that. Your focus is in Central and Northern California, but to forecast what is happening here, are you looking at the entire planet? Where does our weather come from? Blier: The basic flow is west to east. Generally, it is more significant what’s going on to the west of us than what’s going on to the east of us. If you were to go back in time before weather satellites, the Pacific Ocean was a big black hole. It was an extraordinary moment when the first weather satellites were launched. Before that, it was as if everyone was blind. Garcia: I get jealous of the East Coast sometimes. They get a couple of days. We’re looking through foggy goggles and they’re looking through sunglasses. Blier: With satellites, suddenly you could see what everyone looked like. We could see the face of the weather— it was stunning. How much does climate change impact your modeling? Blier: It is important to understand the distinction between weather and climate. Climate is the statistics of weather over time. There is some evidence that as a result of climate change in general, somewhat more extreme weather is occurring. I’ll leave it at that. Let’s say, for example, that kind of event that we just had, three weeks of heavy rain, may be a once-in-50-year event—maybe with climate change it becomes a once-in-25-year event. Really what we are doing, day in and day out, is forecasting the weather out the next seven days. That’s not to say climate change isn’t significant, but the role we are doing here is relatively limited. Climate change is obviously a politically charged issue, but what about weather—is there a political tenor to it? Garcia: There is actually a very bipartisan feel to weather, which is nice. Weather is a shared experience among everyone on this planet. Is there “good” weather or “bad” weather? Garcia: We have to be careful about what we call good or bad. We get really excited when we see severe weather, because intellectually it’s stimulating to us. Whereas, in the general population, severe weather can have dramatic “It is important to understand the distinction between weather and climate.” A satellite image in early February shows clouds off the coast and snow blanketing the interior mountains. NWS meteorologist Dial Hoang analyzes a quantitative precipitation forecast. Courtesy NOAA daniel dreifuss
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