Solar Storms & Super Hurricanes with Richard Spinrad

0:00Chuck, we don't always get access to the operations of the US government. and occasionally we'll bring in the head of an agency. And I loved it, bringing in the head of Noah. Yeah, and I loved it because now we have the inside betting track on the next hurricane. Is that right? The sporting events in Vegas, there's like the hurricane track. We got the line, baby. Okay, if you want to bet on the next hurricane, tune in to this coming episode of StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

0:46This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Got with me, Chuck Knight. Chuckie, baby, how you doing? Hey, Neil. So Chuck, today's topic is the weather. Ah, excellent. Yes. That's supposed to be the safest thing to talk about with anyone, right? No longer. Oh, no. I guess not. Very good point. No longer. Very good point. But we know that it's extreme. Yes. And if we comb the earth to find who's the top weather person, that's going to be. Sam Champion, WABC News. He's amazing. It's going to be, every local news has their person who they are certain is like the best weather forecaster there is.

1:31But we can go above them all because we're StarTalk and we have access. And we brought in the chief head honcho of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dr. Richard Spinrad. Oh, my gosh. Wow. How are you doing, man? Hey, I'm doing great, Neil. Chuck, delighted to be here. Thanks. Let me get your full title straight here. The Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. And that's a different title from being NOAA Administrator. Is that right? Yeah, actually, my full title will probably take the full duration of this show. But it is the Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and the Administrator of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

2:17So it's really two hats in this job. And we're reminded that commerce, which is a huge branch of the U.S. government, cares about climate and weather and because goods and services are delivered through the air, on the waters, over the land. And our relationship with climate is deeply impacted. Yeah, like commerce and the melting ice that is causing passage through near Alaska. And it's a contested waters now because you have Russia who wants that water. And we, of course, and China. And it's all because it was ice. And nobody's looking at the point that it was ice. what was one place is now open water.

3:10It's now open water, right? Yeah, yeah. So tell me a couple of things here. What is your relationship with the Navy? Because obviously they care about oceans as well. Yeah, so that's a great question because I actually worked for the Navy for the first part of my professional career. Is there any part of the government you don't work for? Yeah, Congress. I have not worked for Congress yet. That probably won't happen either. But Navy, I mean, obviously Navy cares about oceans and climate and atmosphere. And it's not just how they operate their ships. They're going to be concerned about what the impacts of climate are going to be for their bases.

3:48You know, think about Norfolk, where we've got the Atlantic fleet and sea level rise impacting the operations at the base there. It's an important element of naval operations. This is Norfolk, Virginia, yeah. Norfolk, Virginia, yeah. But I could say the same thing about just about anywhere the Navy operates. They do care about the shoreside facilities, but they also care about the ability to fly and carry out their missions. And obviously, I mean, one of the strongest components for Navy is understanding how the ocean changes. What are the dynamics of the ocean? How does that affect ships and submarines?

4:20Right. And also, last I checked, there's several whole countries in the South Pacific where the average sea level is just only a few feet. The lavish elevation of the land is only a few feet above sea level. So if we start melting out glaciers, we'll lose entire countries creating, what do they call it, climate refugees. Exactly, exactly. And this is not some sort of theoretical thing that will happen a thousand years from now. The sea level rise rate that you're alluding to has increased dramatically. When I was a grad student, you know, a few decades back, we would talk about sea level rise as being, say, one to three millimeters per year.

5:02In some places, it's doubled or tripled. And so consequently, some of these nations are actually going to be eliminated before the end of this century. They'll actually be underwater. Right. Yeah. Whole island nations that will disappear. Whole island nations. And tell me, of course, everyone cares about the weather, although climate change has been politicized, as we all know, recently. I'd like to remind people that NOAA was founded in the year 1970, and it was signed into law by a Republican president. So the politicization of climate to me feels like a very recent phenomenon because clearly we all care about the weather and nobody wants to have the weather get the best of them in any part of their life or job.

5:54Yeah, I think a lot of the making it a political issue comes from trying to figure out whose fault this is. Who do we get to blame for this? The thing about NOAA is that our mission is very much looking to the future. We're about predictions and projections. And so for us, it's less about, hey, who caused this problem and more about how well can we predict what the change is going to be in the future? We talk about sea level rise. That's what people hold you to because they try to make decisions based on your predictions. However, you have a moving goalpost at all times, Rick, because quite frankly, what happens is these projections are modeled on what we have now.

6:36OK, but the variable is, do we increase the amount of fossil fuel that we're burning? Because, I mean, that's really the issue. So as you have fossil fuel burning coming online, that changes everything that you guys said was going to happen. For instance, the predictions that were made previous to now, basically everybody's like, oh, yeah, well, they're all wrong. But first they were saying they're going to be wrong because it's not going to happen. Now they're saying wrong because it's happening much quicker. yeah models would normally have a future expectation for a rate of co2 increase or rate of anything isn't that right uh rick yeah that's right and and this is what uh climate scientists would call the assumption of stationarity that is to say that things now are what they're going to be in the future and it's not and that's the whole point is so how do you take the models that you were talking about, Neil, and initialize them.

7:42Put the data in up front to start the model. What assumptions do you make about how those conditions are going to change in a year, in 10 years, in 20 years? That's the challenge we have in front of us. But we're getting really good at improving the skill on those models. Has your scope been... I'm wondering... I think when NOAA was founded... By the way, I did a deep dive into this. Hardly anyone, certainly not even geologists or biologists, had ever combined ocean and air in the same sort of conversation. There were atmospheric scientists, there were oceanic scientists, and the full system, the full organic system of all these interplaying parts, it seemed to me only came of age a little later when computer models started having something to say about it.

8:41And so now what I pose to you is now what's under NOAA purview is also space weather, like what the sun is doing. So these look like land grabs to me. We're space grabs. You started out with just the ocean. Now you want like the solar system. The universe. We're going for the universe. We're going for it. Yeah, Neil, you're exactly right. And it is an Earth system. And the best place to see that is in how hurricanes form and grow and move. You can't predict that without a good understanding of the ocean and the atmosphere. And, you know, the best example on that one was Hurricane Katrina, which, as you may remember, intensified really quickly before it made landfall around New Orleans.

9:31And we now looking back know we could have predicted that better if we'd had better data from the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, if it shouldn't happen today, you would have predicted it better than we were able to do back in 2005. Yeah, certainly what we call the rapid intensification of the hurricane as it made landfall. And that's because we would look at the whole ocean, not just the surface of the ocean, to put the data into the world. Yeah, but you guys, I mean, you're being humble because you're not tooting your own horn about this last huge storm that we just experienced where the rapid intensification was predicted and did happen indeed due primarily to the amount of moisture that was being held in the landmass where the storm was going to traverse.

10:24So, you know, you should say, yeah, we didn't do it back in 2005, but take this, bitches. We did it now. I'm sorry. I don't think he speaks that way, Chuck. I love the way you said that, though, So, Rick, catch us up on this thing with land water and how that is not neutral as a forcing factor on a hurricane that makes landfall. What I understood, there was a recent hurricane that saturated the landscape, the land. And so now when a hurricane makes landfall, there is sort of latent heat available to it from the water that is in the saturated ground. Because normally a hurricane would weaken as it goes over the land, right?

11:13Yeah, it's all about temperatures, right? And so we know the temperatures of the ocean, in this case the Gulf of Mexico, are going up. We know the temperatures in the atmosphere are going up, which means that those storms can hold more water. And so think about it. We had Hurricane Harvey that hit Houston, and it dropped five feet, five feet of rain. When I was a kid, we didn't talk about feet of rain. And so now you look at what Hurricane Helene just a few weeks ago did, especially in western North Carolina, and the damage was water. You're absolutely right. Most people think hurricanes, so it's about winds.

11:48In that case, it was water. But in terms of the forcing function on the hurricane itself, that water that's sort of still had rendered land masses soaked. Are you saying that that does not continue to play into the other than the water's got nowhere else to go, I guess? Yeah. Well, that's basically it. I think it's a combination. If you've got soaked terrain from previous precipitation prior to the hurricane coming in, and that hurricane's got more moisture than it would have before. Helene was also huge. It was a massive hurricane. It was 500 miles across. And that's significantly larger than most hurricanes.

12:34So large hurricane, warm waters, so more moisture available. The ground was already pretty wet, and now you're just dumping buckets onto a wet sponge. So it's going to cause a lot of flooding. Why do I have in my notes that you also care about the bottom of the ocean? Like, what does that do for you? Well, there's a hole in the bottom of the ocean. No, there's a flood. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. The bottom of the ocean is important because without a bottom of the ocean, we wouldn't have an ocean. Oh, okay. I mean, so the topography of the ocean is going to drive, help drive how the currents, especially in coastal environments, where the water goes, how it flows.

13:14It's going to impact things like accentuated tides in areas where you've got extreme changes in topography. So why is this important, especially in the context of a hurricane? Probably one of the biggest problems, one of the most devastating aspects of hurricanes is storm surge. what happens to the water, the ocean water, when it gets close to the shore. If the topography is just right, you can actually funnel that storm surge and you can end up with 12 to 15 feet. That's what they got in Tampa Bay when Hurricane Milton hit. Yeah, and Hurricane Sandy hit New York. I mean, I think it was Tropical Storm Sandy at the point it hit New York, but that storm surge is what took us out.

13:55We actually call it Superstorm Sandy because it was both a tropical cyclone And then there was a nor 'easter component to it as well. So it was kind of like the worst of all factors combined. And yeah, you're right. Storm surge. Yeah, I grew up in New York and my mom was living in an apartment that got flooded as a result of super storms, Sandy. And we did not. That's interesting. That was, what, 12 years ago? We didn't have the forecast down pat yet.

14:32Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

14:57so when did you start reaching out and caring about what the sun does um well we've always had that as part of our mission i think it's fair to say that i mean obviously the sun has a luminosity and an energy but but but it at the next level the sun cycles and their solar storms. And so it's not just that there's a star there delivering energy to your model. There are these fluctuations in the energy to the model that now you guys seem to care about. Yeah. So the sun is a pretty dynamic object and it goes through these cycles, right? And we're actually in the middle of one of these 11 year cycles.

15:37It started last year. And one of the really interesting aspects of that is that the sun can occasionally actually send out these huge, huge coronal mass ejections, which are these charged gases, the plasmas that get ejected from the surface of the sun at a speed of about one to two million miles per hour. they are on the sort of positive side the factors that create the beautiful northern lights the aurora borealis but a little bit more insidiously they also interact with navigation systems they interact with electrical grids they can affect power grids they can affect communication systems and so in fact the storm that erupted in last may may of 2024 solar storm solar storm the solar solar storm was a category of what we call G5, Geomagnetic Storm 5, highest-ranked storm, one of the most severe that we've seen in decades.

16:36But you didn't hear about it much. Well, I know you did, Neil, but a lot of you didn't hear about it. And that's because we knew it was coming. And in years past, we might not have known it was coming. And so we could make changes. What kind of changes? Airplanes could change their routes in order to avoid the impact of the solar storm on their GPS systems. Can you see the actual discharge as it makes its way here? That is so cool. Yes, you can. And in fact, we have just launched, in June of 2024, we launched a new satellite. It's a weather satellite. It's the one that you would use when you turn on TV and they show you the full disk of what the weather patterns are on the East Coast or West Coast.

17:20But this one has a compact coronagraph. Oh, nice. That is the tool. I'm sorry. You guys lost me. Neil said, oh, nice. You said compact coronagraph like, you know, like I say, my glasses case. It's just like my glasses case. And I'm like, okay, what is a compact coronagraph? I got this. So one of the great inventions of the recent century has been the ability to create an image of the sun in a telescope as though with a set of optics. as though the sun had just been eclipsed by the moon. Oh. And when the sun gets eclipsed by the moon, all the bright stuff is blotted out, and you see the edge, and you see explosions on the edge.

18:06Right. You remember when we saw the eclipse, this recent eclipse, when we were stationed up in Vermont, you saw these, along the edge, there were these little sort of prominences sticking out. So imagine being able to do that at will, right, rather than waiting around for an eclipse. Interesting. And so now, Rick, you say you put one of these in orbit. That's cool. Yeah, we actually have that one in orbit. There is another sensor on the Discover satellite, which is at the L1, the Lagrange one point. The Earth on Lagrange? Yes, exactly. Now, Chuck, don't we have a Lagrange explainer? We do. For those of you who want to really go a deep dive on Lagrange points, we go all through all L1, 2, 3, 4.

18:52and it's really incredible. And five. Can't leave out. And five.

19:00Clearly, I was only a pay attention for four. Five's important because we're going to have a really good one. Five's a good one. Five here in a few years. All Lagrange points are not made equal. But if you want to see how you can find perfect equilibrium in the solar system, to me, that's what Lagrange point represents. Exactly. Exactly. So it depends on which two bodies around which you're describing the Lagrange points. So, Rick, this is the Earth-Sun Lagrange points. Is that correct? Yeah. And as you can well describe by having multiple views of the sun from different angles, that is to say, in Earth orbit and then at L1 and at L5, we can look at basically the whole three-dimensional character of the sun because not all of these coronal mass ejections are necessarily aimed at us.

19:50So we care about them all. But at NOAA, we care mostly about the ones that are going to be aimed at us. And again, to do the math, these things travel in about one to two million miles per hour. Sun's 93 million miles away. So it's a three to four day transit that we can give people enough lead time to make preparations for a major geomagnetic storm. So we can imagine a future where we have a colony on the moon or Mars where neither of those objects have shielding from this kind of radiation in the way we pretty much do here on Earth with our atmosphere and our ozone layer. But they don't. So presumably they would be deeply connected into your capacity to predict.

20:34And so on. Because then everyone would know to run underground or run behind shelters, this sort of thing. so so can i ask okay this might be a silly question but i'm just asking um so with all your equipment because noah is really a space organization i mean you're looking back at earth but all your stuff's up in the space no no they got buoys and stuff that's true that's true i take it back okay you're absolutely right um but when you when you talk about these ejections, do you move that stuff or is that stuff just hardened? Or what do you, because I mean, radiations has got to be like the most damaging thing for equipment, right?

21:16Yeah, you're not going to be able to move this. I mean, this is immense amounts of energy, but what you can do is it actually, it's really similar to our discussion on hurricanes. We're not going to be able to move hurricanes in spite of what some people may think, but we can make the predictions work and we can tell people this one's bearing down. here on Tampa, plus or minus 20 miles, and you got two days to evacuate. Same thing with space weather. If we get the picture, especially if you've got multiple views, we can say this is going to hit pretty hard in the northern part of Quebec or in Asia, and therefore folks can make adjustments.

21:54They have three days. They can power down their grids, their electrical grids. They can re-vector aircraft, so they're not going to be affected for navigation purposes. Chuck asked about the satellites that are already in orbit. They certainly have a susceptibility to this. You can't just say, hey, bank a left or hover over Africa until it's clear over Asia, right? You can't do that. You can't. We can shield some of these to a certain extent, but what we can do is, again, if we know it's coming, we can make accommodations with regard to power or use another satellite to cover for the one that might be most vulnerable.

22:30The sacrifice satellite. Yeah, no, we don't do that. We don't put them up for sacrifice. So there's something called unexpected events. Now, I foresee the day where no event is unexpected. And so no one is taken by surprise. Where are we now with regard to NOAA's modeling and other agencies modeling? and things just happening, taking everyone by surprise. There's a really interesting aspect to your question, Neil, because there's a famous story in meteorology. It's called Isaac Storm. In fact, Eric Larson wrote a great book on Isaac Storm, and it was a hurricane that hit Galveston in the year 1900.

23:10For the folks in Galveston in 1900, that storm was an unexpected storm. They didn't expect it to hit. Now, obviously, there's never going to be another Isaac storm. We've improved that. There are things though, that happen, uh, on much shorter time scales. And so I would say they may not be unexpected like tornadoes. Um, but the time that we're able to give people to react to them and is shorter. So right now for tornadoes, we're looking at an average lead time on most tornadoes of about 12 minutes. About 50 years ago, the lead time on tornadoes was minus five minutes. Okay, that doesn't even make any sense.

23:54I'm just saying, when the tornado's over, I already know there was a tornado. That's right. That's right. Yeah, there is something wrong with that picture. Just to clarify, you're not talking about the prediction of the existence of a tornado. You know, you're talking about the path a tornado will take once it forms? Yeah, the path it's going to take and how intense it's going to be. Gotcha. Yeah, and because there are, like with hurricanes, tornadoes have classifications by intensity. We have the extended Fujita scale for tornadoes one through five, and it's the same kind of thing. So right now we can say we think this tornado or this aggregation of tornadoes is going to take this path, and it's probably going to be an EF2 and it's probably going to hit over here in 15 minutes.

24:43By the way, 12 minutes, 15 minutes is enough time to get out of the way of a tornado. Or to go... Or underground. Yeah, underground. So that's incredible. How do you feel? I mean, do we have deep resonant emotions when, for example, you go to see a movie that, you know, Storm Chasers movie? Yeah. Yeah. Twisters. Twisters, how do you – let's commiserate together here now. How do you feel when you see these films? How much effort – do they call you and say, help us get this right, or do they just make stuff up? And is it true that in a tornado I can actually call a cow as it comes by and it goes, and then disappears?

25:31Of course, Chuck. That's a stupid question. Everybody knows that. We are not using bovine sensors in tornadoes for our forecast systems yet. Because a cow could just totally hook you up on that. Right. What is your, if you mind if I ask, what is NOAA's annual budget? It's just under$7 billion. Would you say that NOAA's effort saves people and lives on a level far beyond the value of that budget? Well, I mean, we talk about lives. The answer is yes, Rick. You're the head of the organization. For Christ's sake, man. The answer is yes. Thank you, Rick. We talk about lives and livelihoods and lifestyle.

26:17So property and lives, but certainly lives. And the only reason why I hedge is because I can give you the best forecast in the world. I can give you plenty of lead time. But it's your decision to evacuate. it's your decision to take action. And we can't control that. So we like to think that two things, one, the quality of our forecast is getting better. And the second is the trust by the public in that forecast and the on-screen meteorologists and emergency managers is high enough so that when we say you better evacuate, the storm is coming your way, people actually take that action. But there's no question.

26:55I mean, I talked to you about the Isaac storm at Galveston in a year 1900 and i think the number was something like 10 000 lives were lost in that story wow that's not ever going to happen again in this country ever and that's because of the quality of the forecast and our ability to have the trust of people to make these decisions so yeah absolutely we're saving and you also affect uh forecast for fisheries right and other sort of coastal management of marine food is that yeah so we do marine forecasts as part of what the weather service does and we also have responsibility for managing marine fisheries uh which means we're the ones who do the stock assessments of how many fish are out there how healthy are the fish how healthy are the populations and establish regulations for how to sustainably fish for these fish and maintain a strong seafood economy.

27:54Again, we're part of the Department of Commerce, so it's an important economic consideration. So with respect to what you just said, what's your relationship with other countries? I know we're a national organization, but do you have international affiliations like for the typhoon that's raging in Taiwan right now, or when it comes to sustainability of food supply, like working with China, who just doesn't give a dam. So, but what's your role there? We care about our coastline and our oceanic property line, if you will. But if you're studying the entire earth with regard to climate, do you share your data with other countries and are they responsive?

28:36And what's your relationship? Yeah. Yeah, we absolutely can't do our job without strong international collaboration. And that takes a couple of different forms. There are worldwide organizations. It's a World Meteorological Organization of which we are a member. And in fact, the head of our National Weather Service is the U.S. representative to the WMO. And it's these organizations that establish policies with regard to data. And yet all of our NOAA data is publicly available. and we use that as if you will a lever to say to other nations hey we're giving you ours why don't you give us yours as well so there's a lot of collaboration for data and they recognize they need our data to improve their forecast we need their data to improve our forecast and when you start talking about fisheries yeah there's a lot of international agreements because a lot of the fish are in open ocean waters and there have to be agreements and and and the The agreements are not just about, hey, how much fish can we take sustainably, that is to say, to allow the population of the fish to stay healthy, but also to try to be the protectors of those fisheries by enforcing laws against illegal, unreported and unregulated fisheries, what we call IUU fishing.