Disclaimer: 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
doo, doo doo doo 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 0:36
Not much Stuart, how are you doing today?

Stuart Carlton 0:38
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 0:50
That's a very great use of their time. Yeah, I

Stuart Carlton 0:52
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 interesting to me incorrect.

Carolyn Foley 1:07
It is not terrible. There are some wonderful, wonderful things about the weather in the Great Lakes region, however, continue.

Stuart Carlton 1:12
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 are going to interview Tom Coons, who is 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 going to 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 1:39
That's because the weather is just extraordinarily interesting. And all of us experience it

Stuart Carlton 1:43
every single 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, you would be out cooking or whatever. And if we didn't call him when the weather came on, and he would be extraordinarily irate. So

Carolyn Foley 2:07
it just makes so much sense.

Stuart Carlton 2:10
I'd 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

Carolyn Foley 3:34
Duncan Duncan.

Stuart Carlton 3:41
Tom, how are you today?

Tom Coomes 3:45
I'm doing very well. The sun is shining, which if you're in like a pickup country, you know how rare that actually is?

Stuart Carlton 3:52
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. You're 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 4:12
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 has 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 newscasts 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 5:13
So I've been incredibly impressed by how many urologists 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 5:24
It's a small world. I, 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 5:52
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 what's what's the deal with

Tom Coomes 6:03
that? The long answer is, you know, we 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 and reach negative 20 Compared to earlier years over 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 for linea. Those are two big things because people think, you know for here, 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, kind of like a top when it starts to lose its momentum. So polar vortex it's weak, that top 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've 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 gonna have less snowfall.

Stuart Carlton 8:29
So there's lots 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 going to 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 that year and it causes cold air to be sort of spit into our area by it. Is that fair to say?

Tom Coomes 8:51
That is correct. You know, it's and it can be 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 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, all 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 9:24
So what happened in 2019? Was it lopsided or was it wobbly or

Tom Coomes 9:32
from what I can remember is, it was definitely very wobbly sometimes instead of just having a nice conformed nice 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 Oh, 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 10:19
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 lead.

Carolyn Foley 10:31
In my head, I'm imagining like a hot fudge sundae kind of like, all over so yeah,

Stuart Carlton 10:37
yeah, but it's a cold fog.

Tom Coomes 10:40
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 10:54
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. But that's kind of what I got. What exactly is lake effect snow and why does it.

Tom Coomes 11:12
is magical. Or so I say 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. They're 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 12:47
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 of the atmosphere that it turns into snow is that close understanding?

Tom Coomes 12:59
Yeah, 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 evaporative 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 are the western part of Michigan, the western part of New York State, sure, the western part of Pennsylvania, even into northeastern Ohio, big big lake effect countries. But, you know, like if it 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 14:51
make sense. Okay, I know you're busy man. We have one question from Hope charters, our 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 15:05
I wish I did. I really does. It maybe 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 parts of the country, as meteorologists, you need to know how people pronounce things. Oh, yeah. So when 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 new at 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 Olof.

Stuart Carlton 15:44
Oh laugh but it was a lathe. A lathe? That was my eighth guess.

Tom Coomes 15:48
And I got a lot of calls. Yeah.

Stuart Carlton 15:51
I don't know. Oh, my dad,

Tom Coomes 15:53
I'll leave the sweetcorn apparently is very big time famous in the West. It's really tasty. It's good. But it's it's only fair.

Stuart Carlton 15:59
Yeah. My dad lives in New Orleans. And he watches three or four weather forecasts at night. And all 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 16:11
I would not want to work there because I do not know French very well. And so even looking at French terms is 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 16:26
Yeah. Or if you 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 donut for breakfast, or a great sandwich for lunch, which would it be?

Tom Coomes 16:42
I would definitely have a sandwich.

Stuart Carlton 16:44
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 16:50
Usually my house I make pretty good sandwich. I made a really good BLT. I grow my own tomatoes. I mean, I've I've laid this all out. Actually, I know a good place to Oh, Mama's on the avenue, it's near the south and farmers market, they will do their own like Italian meats, their cheeses topping out, it's, it's a very good sandwich.

Stuart Carlton 17:12
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 17:35
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 sublet a couple of 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 19:06
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 19:11
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. Oh, 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 19:42
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

Tom Coomes 19:52
Twitter is the best way in the weather world to really get probably a good response for me at Tom combs T O M C O O NBS on Twitter find me there is 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 20:09
Well, Tom Coons, Chief Meteorologist for ABC 57 News in South Bend. Thank you so much for teaching us about the Great Lakes.

Tom Coomes 20:16
It was a pleasure.

Stuart Carlton 20:33
You don't Carolyn, the weather really is. I'll admit a little bit mildly interesting.

Carolyn Foley 20:38
It's super interesting. What are you talking about? And yeah, I mean, learned all sorts of cool stuff today.

Stuart Carlton 20:44
Yeah, I have a feeling that you and he could have sat there and just nerding out on weather for a bit longer than then maybe I could have.

Carolyn Foley 20:51
Potentially. Yes.

Stuart Carlton 20:52
Yeah. I think it's part of Canada, because so you're from Canada. Right.

Carolyn Foley 20:56
I was waiting for the token Canada moment of its token, I

Stuart Carlton 20:59
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, buried.

Carolyn Foley 21:13
I don't know if that's accurate. But you know, sure.

Stuart Carlton 21:16
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 21:25
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 weak Polar Vortex here. And it's sort of slipping and sliding down around. I thought that was really neat.

Stuart Carlton 21:42
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 effects No, 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 22:19
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 streams all across the lake, I'll try to find the links that we can put in the show notes.

Stuart Carlton 22:30
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 as 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 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 Sea Grant 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 to 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 23:44
Certainly calculators do it.

Stuart Carlton 23:47
Did it did

Tom Coomes 23:54
I even looked up my untapped ratings

Stuart Carlton 23:58
as far as Whoa, you have untapped ratings.

Tom Coomes 24:00
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 24:09
All right, well, let's hear it then. What is your favorite related

Tom Coomes 24:13
my top one was actually yellow snow IPA from Rogue.

Stuart Carlton 24:17
Oh, network admin and I was told not to drink that. It was a bad or No, no, no, you shouldn't you should

Tom Coomes 24:26
hit the LS nobody else no IPA was pretty good

Stuart Carlton 24:29
drinking it 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 24:40
I think it's a seasonal. I love your buoys. Trust me. We bring into our weather system. You can bring them in because it's all part of the no fee. So

Carolyn Foley 24:53
right you get it through like the mdbc website. Is that how you guys pull it or

Tom Coomes 24:59
so our vendor Are polls 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.

Carolyn Foley 25:13
Is there. Okay, Stuart's gonna kill me. But is there anything else that you really want on it? Or do you have pretty much all the sensors that you need?

Tom Coomes 25:22
I mean, for me, that's good. I mean, I'd love to have them in the water a little bit later. But I know that's not always possible. Because it's, you know, really interesting getting delayed vaccines. I know, they start getting pulled November 1, because you never know. But you know, things are kind of staying warmer longer. So it's kind of interesting to kind of have that mark. I, you know, I think the biggest thing may be an easier way to compare year to year. Like temperatures, okay? Because it's like it's warmer. There's a lot of implications even summery with fisheries and stuff like that. It's like whoa, this is the warmest The lake has been at the buoy, you know, ever in July 1 or November 1 When it gets pulled, but they can stop because the pole dates you have to go back to usually is probably like October 25 is probably the most last date that you probably don't have a full dataset right now