Ep#25 - Jay Anderson - Climate Turns To Weather '26

Leticia Ferrer and Chris welcome back returning guest Jay Anderson, a meteorologist known for producing cloud-cover forecasts for solar eclipse chasers, ahead of the upcoming eclipse in Spain, Iceland, and Greenland. Visit Jay’s website for all things eclipse weather:

http://www.eclipsophile.com

Topics covered:

• 1:16 — Introduction: Jay Anderson, "the Eclipsophile"
• 2:37 — Jay's eclipse-chasing history (25 total + 10 annular eclipses since 1979)
• 6:19 — Forest fire smoke risks in Spain for the upcoming eclipse
• 12:11 — Saharan dust storms and their effect on eclipse viewing
• 19:55 — Jay's forecasting toolkit: why he relies on Windy and multiple weather models
• 33:02 — The "chinook effect" and how it could clear clouds over Greenland's fjords
• 41:31 — Successfully chasing the 2021 Antarctica eclipse from a National Geographic ship
• 51:08 — Jay's other passion: teaching storm chasing at the University of Manitoba
• 55:29 — Plans for the 2028 Australia eclipse with a four-wheel drive camper
• 62:12 — Closing story: the "hand of God" moment during the 2009 China eclipse

Leticia Ferrer's site: 

https://texassolareclipses.com/

Host Chris Chotas Alexander's Site
https://www.chotachrome.com/
IG: @chotachrome

Totality Talks is created by Leticia Ferrer and Chris Chotas Alexander.  

Totality Talks is produced by Chris Chotas Alexander.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:40

Welcome back to Totality Talks. In this episode, we have Planet Earth's Eclipse Weather Expert, J Hand. Today we chat Eclipse weather, hear stories of eclipse weather past, and discuss the approaching event. Here we go.

SPEAKER_04 1:04

Alright, we're hot. It's working right. Hi everyone, I'm Letitia Ferrer, and with us today is Jay Anderson, the eclipse of file, the eclipse weatherman. This is the man that for all the eclipses, he puts out a cloud cover report as to what are your chances to seeing the eclipse. He has these great charts and graphs. It's key to helping me plan my eclipses. I actually ran, did some AI AI stuff today about future eclipses and everywhere else and locations and everything else. And it referenced Jen A site where I should go see my eclipses for the next, oh, for the next 50 years. Until 2065 for me.

SPEAKER_03 1:57

Welcome back. This is your second time. We've that uh you've been with us and you had a great chat in 24. So welcome back and can't wait to talk about what we have in store for for this eclipse coming up in less than a month.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

SPEAKER_04 2:16

So we'll ask the first go ahead and just do some of the summary stuff of how many eclipses now have you seen? And oh and when did you start doing this the weather for us? And what and where are you going in Spain? Those are three questions there. Or Spain or wherever for this one.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

I think I'm up at twenty-five totals now, and ten and the others, so it's thirty-five pretty close. I think that's the right number, but I I didn't count them up before we got online here. So started in 79 when actually here in Winnipeg, flips went over top of me. And then about, I guess, four months ahead of that I did a little summary up, mostly for my own use on where might be the best place to go watch it. So I just went through all the weather stations in the neighborhood and looked at their cloud cover statistics, and turned out didn't matter where I go because they were all pretty much the same when you average them over ten or fifteen years. So it was a good eclipse. Weather turned out to be almost perfect, and that was it. We got two things going. It got me going doing these little weather studies, and it got me going eclipses myself.

SPEAKER_04 3:41

Awesome. That's wonderful. So 25. Wow, that's a great number.

SPEAKER_02 3:50

Yeah, it's it's by no means the most. There's people that are counting up in the 50s, but it certainly gives you a different perspective on an eclipse. The G Wiz factor is muted a little bit. It isn't gone, but it's muted a little bit. And you tend to view an eclipse with more of a uh, let's say, uh, scientific perspective or an observational perspective. You look for certain things instead of the overall getting swapped with corona, prominences, chromosphere, shadow bands, and shadow coming in, shadow going. You tend to focus on one or two things and say, Well, I'll watch shadow bands at the next eclipse. Doesn't always work because somebody will come along and shout out shadow bands 30 seconds before totality, and you force yourself to have a look.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

You do.

SPEAKER_04 4:54

You do. Well, you've just probably seen so what do you go ahead and tell us a little bit of how s how this path is looking for people traveling.

SPEAKER_02 5:03

I have a lot of concerns about this path. Although when I looked at today's satellite picture over Spain, it looked like a pretty good day to have an eclipse. We've still got a month to go yet. The problems in Spain are mostly the low sun angle of the uh of the eclipse itself. You're looking, especially in the end of the track, pretty much down on the horizon. On the other hand, up in Iceland, in Greenland, there's uh a lot more cloud cover to have to contend with. And so finding the spot, particularly in Iceland, is going to probably rely more on luck than on planning. Although if the Icelandic Weather Service happens to have a particularly good forecast of cloud cover that for the next day, those people that are mobile will probably be able to do something about it. It's not like the United States and Canada, where there's a road going everywhere or they're they're pretty limited. And it's it'll be the same sort of thing in Australia, too, when it comes along in a couple of years. So mostly what I'm focusing on right now is watching forest fire smoke in Spain, which is a problem. Today it looks pretty clear, keeping us sort of an eye out for dust storms because they can come roaming in across the Mediterranean from Africa. And again, that seems to be not a problem right now. But and then when I'm looking up at Greenland in particular, where the way the satellites work, they're looking at Greenland from over the equator. So Greenland is wrapped around the top of the earth, and you get a very long slant angle, and it doesn't really show cloud very much because I plan to be there myself. And looking things over, seeing what I see in the satellite picture, and then waiting until I get a satellite that looks straight down on it, and seeing how well I can match up the two satellite images, just preparing for my own change of position if it has to be done.

SPEAKER_04 7:22

So are you a lecturer then on a cruise or something?

SPEAKER_02 7:26

Yeah, I'll be giving a talk on a cruise boat and and looking after weather things, but cruise boats have an ability to move, but they don't move very far very quickly, so you have to rely on computer models of weather forecasts than you do with looking out the sky and saying, hey, sunny over there, let's go there. If that over there is more than 10 or 15 nautical miles away, it's probably out of reach, or you want to ship. So I I'm apprehensive about the whole thing because everybody can have problems. On the other hand, it can be completely clear across all of Spain. Iceland can have one of its spectacular sunny days, and and Greenland might work out. It's happened before. I've been places where I was guaranteed to have sunny skies, and it wasn't. Particularly remembering a Leonid meteor shower, I went to Australia to see because it was the sunniest place in the whole world to watch the shower, and I missed um the first 20, 40 minutes of of darkness, and I lost about 40 minutes of viewing in it. But it worked out in the end.

SPEAKER_04 8:49

40 minutes is not bad. 40 minutes of the shower going I'll not be able to do that.

SPEAKER_02 8:54

40 minutes of an eclipse is is no eclipse.

SPEAKER_04 9:00

Only during the partial phases it's cloudy and then it clears up. That's that's okay too.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

I've I've seen enough eclipses that cloud doesn't bother me, but what really bothers me is people who are going the first time and being clouded out. It gets me a little bit right here, and I wasn't able to find them a place to to watch this thing. And all you can say is, well, there's another one coming.

SPEAKER_03 9:26

Yep. Well, 24. You know, we had the in Texas, it was supposed to be, you know, pretty pretty darn good chances and for clear, and then in Maine, where it was supposed to be socked in, they had that front go through and had crystal clear blue skies for the equipment.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

Yeah, not that the Texas situation was reasonably easy to see coming. So people who paid attention to the weather could could find a way out of it. But that's not always the case if you have a hundred people in a tour group and uh things like buses were in short supply in Texas because of the number of people and things like that.

SPEAKER_04 10:10

So how what's your record then on totality versus cloud?

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Oh, I hate to talk about that because I'm gonna jinx myself, aren't I?

SPEAKER_02 10:22

I had a look actually because I've done some statistics by looking through the the eclipse chasers log to see what percentage or frequency of eclipses are clouded out by looking at a bunch of other people's experiences, I came up with one out of eight. You typically when you average it across all the eclipse chasers, you you miss one out of eight. Something like and I'm just running off the top of my head here, but something like fifteen the last fifteen have all been successful.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

So I'm due to crap out. If you work on laws of averages.

SPEAKER_02 11:03

Gotta work a little harder on these this eclipse. Next year's eclipse for almost everybody is a piece of cake as far as cloud's concern. But this year is the challenging one for all of us, I think.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

And just hope Mother Nature is gonna be kind to us all.

SPEAKER_04 11:23

Yes, I hope so too.

SPEAKER_03 11:25

Yeah. So when you say piece of cake, we do have the you know what, 99% or something crazy that's it's clear, but that one percent, it's not rainstorm, it's it's the uh the s sandstorm.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

I mean, is that yeah, they when you look at the satellite pictures, there's almost always some place that's got sand in the air, but it actually takes quite a bit of sand to really block the sun out of it in some respects, if it's a fairly light dust storm or just dust settling from a previous one, I think your cameras are probably gonna have more of a problem than you are watching the eclipse. So it depends on where you are. The the main sort of dust source for most of these sandstorms tends to lie over south of Algeria, south of Morocco, in that area, western part of Africa, where there are huge basins of sand in the Sahara that are so willing to blow around. And those are the ones that's in the right kind of winds and send plumes of dust all the way across into the Caribbean and into the southern United States. When you get over into Egypt and Libya, the dust storms are still there. They tend to come from the Saudi side, which is a less frequent occurrence for them. The deserts in Egypt and Libya and that part are fairly stony, so they don't have all these great big piles of deep, deep sand and dust to blow around.

SPEAKER_04 13:04

You mentioned forest fires though in Spain. I didn't realize there were any right now.

SPEAKER_02 13:11

Yeah, they're having on-again and off again problems. When I looked at the satellite picture this morning, there wasn't any obvious plumes of smoke that I could see. But of course, it's been in the news recently for Spain and Portugal having some forest fires. They they may have a little bit less this year because it's been wetter than it has been in the past, although it's still very dry. But last year and and the year before, we traveled from into Barcelona, from Madrid, and we were actually passing flames on the side of the railway track. And when you look at that, and I got a lot of forest fires where I live right here. But the the sun disappears when it's still ten degrees above the horizon sometimes. So it can it can really get to you, and certainly in past years there've been times when you looked at those satellite pictures, the whole Spain would be covered in a blanket of smoke. And when you think about, you know, looking at the sun straight up is pretty easy to do, even in smoke. Looking at a sun that's almost on the horizon through all of this immense amount of smoke, things disappear before they touch the horizon. So forest fires are a man-made thing. Once they start, they have to be brought under control. So if they're there, you could have a problem with them. Weather, on the other hand, is one of those almost semi-random things that can happen to you that uh um well, that's why we why I do these these weather studies give you at least a little bit of a of a step up on the law of averages.

SPEAKER_04 15:05

Yeah, because 2017 there we had the fires in Oregon, and I was in Oregon, and we got up that morning and I was with a couple other eclipse chasers, and one of them was just ready to bolt. He was he was like looking at the man up and trying to see where else I can go. He was gonna leave. I had to set up a little camp in a KOA campground. I had to set up a KOA campground, and he was just ready to bolt, and then finally the the the high-level smoke started disappearing. And it was on time for the eclipse before the eclipse. But he was he was ready to bolt because because they were in the morning, that smoke was very heav a heavy pull over the whole area.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

Yeah, the smoke was still there, it just dispersed through a great big depth of the atmosphere, so it it tended not to be as noticeable. Makes for a lovely pink sun, so yeah, maybe if somebody gets us enough smoke, they'll have a pink eclipse. I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but fairly used to having a pink sun around here in the summer months.

SPEAKER_03 16:13

So has there been an evolution of the way that you approach modeling over the years as if you if you as the technology has has improved over time? Like how would you describe that?

SPEAKER_02 16:31

The the technology's a bit approved, but the models are still a long way from being totally reliable. You know, I do the biggest test of a model is storm chasing, and I do a little bit of storm chasing. And you're trying to cement down a position of a particular thunderstorm. You want to be there before it happens. And it's the same sort of challenge that's gonna happen in Maine is grow so tall, they have an influence hundreds of kilometers downstream. So if you happen to have one growing even a hundred kilometers or two hundred kilometers away, it might be high enough to affect your view of the sun.

SPEAKER_05 17:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:16

So, in some respects, what I do on the prairies here is sort of what I would be doing if I were gonna be in Spain is trying to predict thunderstorms the way a storm chaser would. Now you can go and get a computer model that'll say here's where the storms are. And they're good for this is an area that's gonna have thunderstorms, but it's not good for this is where the storm is gonna be, so you can't really avoid them until you see them. When it gets into sort of big scale weather systems, which is the kind of stuff that I'll be dealing with in Iceland and Greenland, the s they models are better. Big things are better to forecast than small things. But next year, where I'm gonna be in Morocco, the challenge is fog. And models are really bad at forecasting fog. One of the biggest problems with using models is deciding which one of the models you want to use, and you look for common elements in maybe two or three models, and so it gets complicated. It really needs somebody who's looked at the models day after day for two months ahead of time, who's chasing an eclipse and saying, Well, I have some feeling how this model works, how that model works. And there's a number of nice little tools that have come out from other people making in their websites that will actually show you where the clear skies are, how far you have to be away from the cloud that the model is forecasting to be able to see over it. Um, those could be valuable, but I still keep a pretty jaundiced view on models. So I was using the way I overcome. I I can find storms when I see the storms. So to me, it's it's once I see it, I can get to it. But to do that with cloud cover, to see the sun shining on a hillside somewhere and figure out how to get there. And that's a little too late for an apps.

SPEAKER_04 19:36

Yeah. So what tool you mentioned tool, the models and the tools. Which one, which apps would you use for that? Because during 2024, I had Wendy open, I had accurate one, I had everything, I had like four or five things open, and nothing was really converging on clear skies anywhere.

SPEAKER_02 19:54

There's I'll use Wendy, partly because I can get many models in Wendy. In Iceland, they use their own model, and one presumes that they have it tuned up for their own situation. And Greenland is also forecast out of Denmark, so they have their own model. The only reason I use Wendy is because it's easy for me to go from looking at a satellite to looking at a model. And there's also features that allow me to look at five models in one big spreadsheet on right on the screen and move the cursor along and saying all of them are forecasting cloud in this location for that day.

SPEAKER_04 20:39

So that's Wendy?

SPEAKER_02 20:42

Windy.

SPEAKER_04 20:43

Okay, Windy, okay.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

I have the paid for version of Windy. But it isn't that Wendy's any better because all these companies that give you models are all giving you the same models. So it doesn't matter which one you use. What matters more is what model do you use. And in that you you go to the as you get closer to the event, you go to the fine resolution models, and they're all marked on them, whether they have a 25 kilometer resolution or a three-kilometer resolution. In particular with thunderstorms, you want to go down to the small resolution, the fine details that come out, not because you need that so much, but they tend to be able to capture weather systems more accurately when they calculate on smaller little grid points. And so Windy, I can just click buttons and pull up these different models and look at them one after the other. And but I know of a couple other programs that work as well, too. I tend to I like to look at the European model, the ECMW, first, because it's well known throughout the community that for long-range forecasting, it's it's way ahead of all the other. Others. But I always compare it to the USGFS model as well. They're both fairly coarse resolution models, but they go a long way into the future. So you can go 15 days out, although you'd be not advised to believe it completely. So I I just tailor the model as I'm getting closer and closer to the to the event. If you're seven days out, there's gonna be a mix. You're gonna get some of them say cloudy, some of them say sunny, and some will be in the middle, and you won't have any idea which ones. You just have to wait until they start to come together a little bit. I'm forecasting for some people for the weekend here for an event. And the models only came together yesterday. So Monday to Friday, four days out. I'm beginning to see consistency in the model, so I can say to them, your rain's gonna end on X morning at about 6 a.m. Now, tomorrow I'll look at that again and I'll see, oh, they're all ending it at 8:30 and they want to start this event at night. But all still have the rain in them.

SPEAKER_04 23:14

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:16

We have a saying in the weather office that the models look more like each other than they do of the real weather. That's changing a little bit now. So if you're close in the day the next day, the models are pretty good. You can plan, you can drive the next day. Two days out, you can still plan. Three days out, you hedge your bets a little bit. And when you get into particularly volatile weather situations like Iceland, where a sunny day across all of Iceland is rare thin. But sunshine in Iceland is not. So you've got all these little clouds that pop up and they last for 30 minutes and they're gone. And how do you deal with it? Well, you just see what the forecast says the day before. Say, I'm gonna go there and just take my chances. You're gonna get close enough to look at the sky and say, that looks like a good spot over there. You just take it in stages, and it's the same thing with time. You look a week and a half out, you look a week out, you look three days out, you say, hey, look, they're all starting to say this. Let's take our chances and go sit there and we'll we'll be a little closer. Or you go to Egypt next year and you don't have a problem.

SPEAKER_04 24:40

Well, we're doing that anyway. I've just got people coming with me to Spain, and they're I've tried picked out three sites, and I have us on along the road that I can move. So hopefully I can get clear skies somewhere along the way.

SPEAKER_02 24:57

And providing there isn't 13,000 other people driving down that road, too.

SPEAKER_04 25:03

Well, it's actually a farm to market and a freeway. It's a farm to market and a freeway. So hopefully one of the two is not going to be backed out.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

Spain's a big place. There's a lot of room for everybody.

SPEAKER_06 25:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:14

But you know, it's two years ago I was storm chasing and I was on a side road trying to get on the main road, and I had a 25-minute wait until the line of other storm chasers opened up enough that I can pull onto that highway. So just multiply storm chasing by eclipse chasing, which is much more focused than it could be a problem moving around. But if you're not on, I don't know. I don't know whether being on next to the main highway where things flow smoothly or being on a little side road with nobody else, I don't know what worked best. Um I think um just keep just make sure there's no big hills, especially forested hills, between you and the eclipse too closely.

SPEAKER_03 26:05

We were talking about the Baselian elements fellas yesterday, and they had the maps of, you know, don't get behind this this spot or you will get a you will not see the eclipse. You'll be behind a mountain.

SPEAKER_02 26:19

Yeah, I was uh I was working with them a little bit on their project. It's I'm kind of at the stage now where I'm thinking about withdrawing from eclipse chasing, but it's also an appropriate time because AI systems are coming in and other people are coming in that are taking over this the stuff I've been doing. I'm almost up to 50 years of this now. So it stands to reason that technology and and knowledge and things like AI are going to come along and and do everything that I'm doing, and probably a lot better. So I'm willing to pass the baton to whoever wants to take it up. Um I've certainly got Eclipse studies done out till 28, and I'm working on 30. Now we'll see when we get there whether it's still uh necessary that I do this. Um I rely on the model not being particularly accurate to still need the touch of a human being in it to, but I may be um fooling myself on that one.

SPEAKER_04 27:30

No, I don't think so. I don't think so. But I'm glad to hear that you were working with those guys to set up the site because I did notice they have all the cloud maps, they've got the satellite view, they've got a whole ton of information on their site around Spain because that's where they're gonna be. And I thought that was I I'm glad to hear that you've been working with them so that that knowledge has transferred over to the next generation.

SPEAKER_02 27:54

Well, I'm pushing them to do what they're doing, they're way better at programming than I am. They're the kind of guys who seem to like to get their fingers deep into this stuff, so more power to them.

SPEAKER_04 28:06

They are they are nerds with the weather. They get so deep into it, it's so fascinating. You know, they go to the edge, right? They don't go to center line, they go to the edge to take a look at the floor.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

Let me tell you if you're gonna be an eclipse chaser, once you got the first five under your belt, then you start thinking about other little things. It's got a telescope, it's got a ship that's the sun's gonna be almost on the horizon, and it's a gamble. But I've seen an eclipse that's one degree above the horizon, and boy, is that ever spectacular. Annular eclipse, watching an eclipse rise above the horizon as an annular eclipse is another spectacular thing. So after a while, you you kind of have to get your jollies by extending the the adventure that you have for this eclipse.

SPEAKER_04 29:05

They almost have me convinced for the next hybrid to get right there where it turns in from annularity totality.

SPEAKER_03 29:14

We have a new adventure unlocked.

SPEAKER_04 29:15

We have a new adventure on the horizon. Well, the hybrid just where it turns in from annularity totality.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

You have another complication with that one because there's a lot of debate on just where exactly that point is. The transition is so gradual until the last bead disappears. Well, where exactly is that? Because if you're five meters out, you're not a magical moment. The best eclipse chase was Glenn Schneider years ago, went to watch an annular eclipse that was only visible for one second between Iceland and Greenland. He and some friends chartered a little plane and flew out to it, and they didn't quite get to the point. So they think they uh they saw something that went down to the last bead and then came back out again, so that they just missed by several kilometers in the aircraft the point of of totality. And and the reason they missed is because it just couldn't be calculated quite that precisely. Maybe now it can. That was a few years.

SPEAKER_04 30:28

The Baselian elements guys have have got the they got the more accurate model, and we they have on their little website, they have all three lines of where theirs is versus everyone else's.

SPEAKER_02 30:41

Yeah. And somebody else somewhere is sitting down and thinking about how can I get it even more accurate? You know, the satellites going around the moon are going to give you just a little bit more information about the topography on the limb. Um yeah, well, you know, eclipses are adventures, and for some people the adventure is the calculation, and I guess to some extent for me it's the weather a bit. But although I'm just as soon do without it and go see the eclipse in a nice clear spot. But for other people, it's the travel and you know, I know that if we get clouded out in Greenland, it's still gonna be a fantastic trip sailing in the fjords and looking at the terrain and seeing Iceland and things like that along the way. And next year it's gonna be I'll be in Morocco, probably take a couple of side trips and things like that. Maybe take my wife out into the desert, which I've seen in other parts of Africa, but she hasn't yet. So it's it's kind of a to me it eclipses travel.

SPEAKER_05 31:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 31:56

Once you've seen well, it isn't one. I don't know how many. Once you've seen the number of them, you start to say, well, it may not be the greatest weather there. I haven't been there before, so I'm gonna go. In Morocco, I've got 10 or 15% chance of being clouded out. I could go a thousand kilometers down the track and have guaranteed sunny skies and get into Tunisia, for instance. But I wanted to see Morocco.

SPEAKER_03 32:30

You know, there's there's these uh I think we were talking to Nick, I believe, uh Nick James, but uh for people going on a cruise to Greenland, I hear there are certain types of weather scenarios where the wind can come in over the fjords and blow out the clouds. I'm kind of curious if uh you can tell us a little bit about that scenario. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:58

Yeah, I'm sort of relying on that. Um it's just like a Chinook in western United States and Canada. It's as air comes down off of a mountain and drops down, it warms up. And when it warms up, its humidity declines. So basically flushes out cloud. It cloud evaporates. And it's quite takes very little descent in the atmosphere to do this a few hundred meters. And the Greenland ice caps at 10,000 feet, so it's the air coming down off of that is going to warm up as it subsides, just like some of the best Chinooks you ever see off the Rocky Mountains. So if the flow is right, if there's no high-level cloud, because the high-level cloud just sails over top, it doesn't come down that much. But if there's low-level cloud, there'll be places where it can flush it out. Um, it's actually pretty detailed. I've I've just recently started taking a look at where this air might come down, because it can come down and get funneled into a narrow channel, in which case it'll build cloud right away again. But if it comes down and spreads out into a little more open spot in the fjord, it'd clear the cloud out. And there you're dealing with the delicacies of little bits of terrain and things like that. And um I've found a few places I think that have a little higher probability. I mean, I went through the old satellite pictures two days ago just to sort of refresh my memory about what the situation looked like right about eclipse time and where the cloud cover was, and I I found a few places that when everybody else is partly cloudy, they seem to be the ones that have no cloud or very little cloud. And and then I could as far as I could tell, they're related to just exactly what the terrain was, especially um upstream from them, but also all around them. So even in those fjords with this descending air, there's still some places better than others. And um I get a little anal about these things, partly because people ask me for advice, and I have to do it from a, well, I've had a look at that, and here's what I found type of situation. Um in some respects, when I quit doing this, I'll suddenly have an awful lot more time on my hand. But um what do I do with myself if I put some working on this or something else for somebody else?

SPEAKER_04 35:57

You should keep working on it.

SPEAKER_02 35:58

Yeah. And Iceland I haven't looked at very closely in terms of trying to outsmart Icelandic meteorologists. And I've seen nothing on the island that would lead me to say, well, gee, that looks like a really good little spot. Because in Iceland, the cloud can pop up anywhere. There's there's no people ask me, where's the best place to go in Iceland? There isn't a best place. You you've got to play it by ear when you get there.

SPEAKER_05 36:31

And that's basically what it boils down to.

SPEAKER_04 36:38

So that's the way it's gonna be on the ground in Spain too. We're tipped to sea when we get there, and look at the satellite maps and look at Wendy and look at everything and plan for the best, because I'm actually doing I'm actually doing a trial setup the day before. So with Spain, I can do the trial setup the day before, have everybody test their equipment and everything else, but it may not be that location the next day.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

People have to know that, but you know, my feeling is if you try your best, people will forgive you for the uh 'cause after all, uh you know, it's it's not you in charge of it.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

The worst thing I can make is taking people someplace that turned out to be worse than the place we left. Yes. So far I haven't done that.

SPEAKER_04 37:34

I've made that decision before. I was in Palau, Palu, Palu in Indonesia, and we were at the hotel, bathrooms, and everything else, and we went inland to get away from the clouds. They worked, but we saw it kind of peeking in and out of the clouds. It ended up with some we ended up with some dramatic video and stuff because of it. But we would have much rather have stayed at the hotel. It had a clear sky.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

We stayed in Palau. So and we saw it, but we saw it through clouds too. So don't feel too bad because you really didn't go into much of a worse situation, you just went into a different one. Unfortunate, it was nice and clear, but you know, that last 15 minutes before the eclipse, that high-level cirrus drifted in over top. So it happens. It does. You try your best, and if people see that you're doing that, they'll forgive you. In the end, it isn't your fault. I try not to give too many false hopes though, to learn. I don't want to be caught out saying guaranteed clear tomorrow and having it turn cloudy. I have hit the other situation where I've said, gee, it looks like we're gonna be pretty cloudy tomorrow and have it flush out and clear off. But these days with global satellite pictures out of Wendy or one of the other uh folks that present that stuff, but there's there's global satellite pictures. And most of the times where I've been caught out is where I had no satellite imagery. Uh these days that usually means there's no internet connection where you are. Um even that's getting pretty rare where I can't find an internet connection.

SPEAKER_04 39:27

Yeah, that's getting pretty rare, Dale. There's um the the worst one we had for weather was 2005, and we were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And one of our other Ecos chasers literally had a satellite phone. I have no idea how much it cost him. Just doing line by line by line on the satellite picture. It was like watching 25 bond internet drawing a satellite picture.

SPEAKER_02 39:56

It was it was painful to watch, but like everybody was like the biggest problem with those is knowing where you are on that satellite picture over the ocean.

SPEAKER_04 40:07

That's true. That's true.

SPEAKER_02 40:08

Windy at least will put you where you are if if it gets enough of a signal. So you have no idea how much that makes forecasting over the ocean easy. You're in something that's always changing its position. So knowing where you are moment by moment is incredibly valuable. Even in offshore Africa a couple of years back, we're looking at satellite pictures and we see cloud ahead of us, and just being able to say, well, that dot is where I am, and there's the cloud, and we've got air moving at this speed, and so on, and so forth. We could give advice on how to avoid it.

SPEAKER_04 40:52

Um did you avoid it? Did you avoid it?

SPEAKER_02 40:56

Okay, that was the captain that boiled down to the captain said, Well, there's a clear flash, let's go into it. Uh there's a limit to how much I can do it. Sometimes it's the guy in charge on the on the bridge who makes the final decision.

SPEAKER_03 41:13

So will you have a great uh relationship with the captain coming up here?

SPEAKER_02 41:18

Well, usually, yes. Um I'm on a National Geographic boat in Iceland, and I believe the certainly the captain we had in Antarctica wanted to come to another eclipse. I don't know if it'll be the same one here. Um, I do know that after a total eclipse, the captains are immediately engaged. They want to do it again, and they start talking to the tour operators. Well, you know, where's the next one? And would you come with us if we set it up and that sort of thing? So it's um it's a magical experience because for most of them it's the first one, and if it's successful, um and of course the whole of the ship just blows bananas afterwards with the the celebrations and everything. So it's it's a captivating experience. Um no pun intended, but um yep it catches you and they want to do it again, and if they've done it before, and I've often sailed with captains that have done other eclipses, they're totally willing to compromise and help us.

SPEAKER_01 42:39

I remember.

SPEAKER_04 42:40

So um were you suc you said you went to Antarctica, were you successful last year? Or 2021?

SPEAKER_02 42:46

Yes, we saw that.

SPEAKER_04 42:48

You were the one that was successful.

SPEAKER_02 42:51

Yes, we I think we were the only boat that saw it. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Um and uh you know, oh boy, you had Jay Anderson there.

SPEAKER_02 43:02

We were lucky because I'm sitting there on the stern. I'm not watching what's up in front of us, and all of a sudden I look up and there's a cloud above us and beautiful blue sky. And I'm thinking to myself, why haven't somebody turned us around? So I I went running up to the bridge and I shouted, Turn us around, turn us around. Well, I guess it was the first mate. He didn't know who I was. Who the heck's this guy that's coming up saying, turn this ship around? So I went back to the tour representative and said, we have to turn this thing around. Only it was I was not calm and collected. And so we turned around and everybody moved to the other side of the ship. And we saw that eclipse one degree above the horizon, a solid layer of clouds. So it just peered out from behind this tiny little gap on the horizon. What a beautiful eclipse.

SPEAKER_04 44:06

Oh man, that's awesome. That is awesome. Because there were eleven that I think that they said the it was like a ten percent chance you would see the sea totality on that. And eleven ships was out, and you were the only one that saw it. So that was that was like the the step.

SPEAKER_02 44:22

We were quite a long way away from everybody else. So to see an eclipse that low down, we had to be very close to the edge of the track. And we were so we were up near the Falkland Islands where everybody else was closer to the Antarctic coast. Um and some of them were pretty close. There were big holes in the cloud, they just weren't quite in the right place. I know.

SPEAKER_03 44:48

We had sea fog rose up because we were like 10 minutes before totality, 15 minutes. We had broken clouds, but it looked like we were in good shape, and then everything just turned gray. And we were probably halfway between Antarctica. We went out towards South Georgia Island, and we're way out in the middle of the sea.

SPEAKER_02 45:10

There's a front in the ocean in there, which divides the warmer water in the north, colder water in the south, and right along that front line is where the fog forms, pretty heavy fog. So you may have been close to that. Um it's simply because uh the air from the warm side flows over top of the cold air side, and there's quite a difference in water temperatures, and it just turns into fog. I know we sailed through it, and then once we got to the warm water side, it's completely disappeared. You may have just been caught on that you know, little nuance.

SPEAKER_03 45:50

Yeah, we tried. We were zip zigging and going all over the place every day. New update, new direction, new update, new heading. We tried, but uh and then there was the bucket of champagne at the bar. I remember this vividly. Like the the bottles of unpopped champagne sitting there waiting, and everybody was you know, nobody was in the mood.

SPEAKER_04 46:19

Well, we grabbed we grabbed a couple of bottles and went back to the room. We grabbed a couple of bottles and went back to the room and commiserated with the uh some of the other eclipse chasers.

SPEAKER_03 46:30

It got dark. It got darker until there were other eclipse in the room.

SPEAKER_04 46:34

Oh my god, the video, the video I have of that one, it it it looks like somebody threw a blanket over at the camera. It looked like somebody threw a blanket over the camera. It got totally, totally dark.

SPEAKER_02 46:47

Time-lapse videos of the shadow coming in are really quite interesting. And the funny thing is, is you look for the shadow coming toward you when you're underneath the uh the eclipse track, and you don't really see it. It's really just a wall of darkness that comes over you. There's no sharp edge or anything like that. But if you take a wide angle video and you play it back, especially if you increase the speed a bit, you see there, gee, there is a shadow. You can see that sort of pencil like darkening in the sky and sometimes pretty wide, and the sun moves across it as it from first or second contact to third contact. And I have videos of that happening, and in the middle of the video I say, Where's the shadow? Because I couldn't see it by eye.

SPEAKER_04 47:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:47

Once the video went, I said, Oh, sure, there it is. Wasn't obvious, it was subtle, but it was there, noticeable, but just couldn't see it. I mean, you look around you and you see the bright sky over there and the bright sky over there. You're actually seeing the edge of the shadow, but you don't think of it like that. You think, oh, I'm in this all-around sunset horizon here. Just take a wide angle video if you can. A cell phone will work just fine with it. And yeah, we keep it pointed toward the sun, and and you just might find out that the shadow is quite spectacular in the video.

SPEAKER_04 48:25

I actually did that for 2010. I just stuck a camera in the ground, went and walked and watched the eclipse, and stuck it on video, and then came out with this. I had this beautiful, you see the shadow just kind of coming in like this as it goes over the eclipse. It was just beautiful. You just see just the shadow coming on the eclipse and then moving off. It's beautiful when you can see the shadow like that. And with the 4K video cameras now, too, you can pull pictures off of that too. I still have high quality prints. That's one of the things I really like about the changes in technology that we've gone through. And the fact that travel is somewhat a little bit easier than it used to be. I mean, the first total solar eclipse I saw on Antarctica, I it was we had a choice of a 30-day cruise on a Russian icebreaker back in 2003 or the flight. I picked the flight, but this time, but 2021, the the next Seros, right? The next 18-year sorrows, there were 18 ships and like three or four flights with one landing and on the ice in Antarctica. So it's it's the whole travel con the whole travel with the popularity of eclipse has changed for a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 49:47

Yeah, I keep wondering what the next big thing is gonna be, you know, or uh used to be storm chasing, and that was unique, and you pull your storm chase vehicle up in front of a McDonald's, and the people that were working there would come over and say, Are you guys stamp chasers? Nowadays, you go in, they sell more of those bloody stamp chasers. They never stick around, they grab something and they run away right away. So and eclipse chasing used to be pretty unique and uh back in 79, even though when over North America, but then you started to get places like New Guinea and Indonesia and that were people didn't travel to that often. And no. Well, after going over North America twice in the last decade, or just over, you uh you suddenly realize that there's a few tens or hundreds of millions of people and they've seen an eclipse. And yeah, you ain't so special anymore. Yeah. I'm not sure what's next.

SPEAKER_04 50:53

Well, tell us a little bit that you're not the only you're not the first star ch storm chasing eclipse chaser I've ever met. So apparently it's like a secondary hobby for a lot of us. And I know it's on my bucket list. So tell us just a little bit about the storm chasing.

SPEAKER_02 51:07

Well, I teach storm chasing at the local university here, the University of Manitoba. And I've been doing that for uh with a bunch of other fellows from the local weather office and in the university, so you kind of get immersed in it. And you take the students storm chasing for a week or eight, nine days after the course is over. So they get to put into practice what they're taught in the classroom. And we almost always get the best reports going back to the university, best course I ever had, particularly if we find a couple of tornadoes. I think the last time there were six of them or something like that. So it's um uh but storm chasing is a battle with Mother Nature where you start out in the morning by gathering all the information you can. A lot of it is model information, but we we try to work with real information for as long as we can. And once you sort of analyze these models, which you you would have done by 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning, uh most tornadoes or thunderstorms will start up late, four in the afternoon. So in my case, it usually means I have four to five hours to grab my passport and get over the border into North or South Dakota. I can make it to South Dakota for a storm chase if I get away early before the storms kick off. Normally, yeah, if I'm going any farther than into Nebraska, I have to plan on several days.

SPEAKER_04 52:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:00

It's the kind of thing where you say to your wife, while I'm going storm chasing, and if she doesn't say, Can I come? Then I say, Well, uh, we might come home tonight, but we might stay a week. It depends on what it looks like when we get there.

SPEAKER_05 53:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:18

And so it checks the way it works. But it's it's an intellectual battle to do it, and the it's not so much seeing the tornado, because usually you're surrounded by hundreds of others. And if you want to find a tornado, all you do is turn on your cell phone and see where everybody else is going and just go to the same place. Because the collective intellect will find you where the most severe storms are. The challenge is to find one that nobody else is going to. And there's a bonus if you don't see a tornado, because the storms themselves are beautiful.

SPEAKER_04 53:57

Beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 53:57

They're beautiful and spectacular photography alone.

SPEAKER_04 54:01

I love watching a storm come in on the horizon. I used to live on a on a farm in near Corsicana, Texas. And I just loved watching just the storms come in over the horizon. They just, they're just beautiful and majestic with the lightning and everything else. And I would actually I would actually wait till the last minute. I wouldn't even be in the house. I would go to the barn. We had a barn. And I just loved watching it from the barn coming in, and then just sitting in the barn and listening to the fury of it going on top of the tin roof and everything else. It's they're they're beautiful in their own right. They are just beautiful in their own right.

SPEAKER_02 54:41

And well, they have their tragic sides too, which eclipses don't, other than being plowed out, or usually be mollified with two coronas afterwards, and maybe your bottle of champagne.

SPEAKER_04 54:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:59

And everybody's in the same bucket, so you kind of hold each other's hands and promise you'll see them again at the next one.

SPEAKER_03 55:07

Excellent. Yeah. We gotta.

SPEAKER_02 55:11

We have quite a ways to go before we see our next one in North America. The Australians are getting them all right now.

SPEAKER_04 55:18

Yeah. I need to retire there. I need to retire to Australia so I can be there for and not have to travel.

SPEAKER_02 55:26

Well, I've um I've already booked a four-wheel drive camper for the 28 Eclipse in Australia. Uh most outfits won't do it, but we found one that would. And uh so we have we're all set to go, and we're gonna be doing our old thing, camping in the outback and and photographing the stars and watching an eclipse.

SPEAKER_04 55:53

So would you send me the link? Because that's my plan for 28 also. I plan to do the whole camper in the northwest.

SPEAKER_02 56:01

Yeah, Vince said you were to well, you can camp. There's a lot of rules about renting cars in Australia. You have to get a company that will let you go off raid because a lot of them won't. And in fact, one of the roads we plan to take, to have been down partly, the word I'm getting is oh, you don't want to do that. You don't want to go down there at all. So anyway, it's fun. I've done it twice already in spectacular skies at night in the Australian outback.

SPEAKER_05 56:37

That's what I'm looking forward to doing.

SPEAKER_01 56:40

The Aussies are easy to deal with. They're certainly a very happy-go-lucky lot.

SPEAKER_04 56:52

That's what I planned on doing.

SPEAKER_02 56:56

The um if you're gonna do four-wheel drive stuff, you probably pick a vehicle up in Darwin. Yeah. The bigger cities. Um Alice usually has some places that'll have a vehicle or two. Most of them just won't make a uh reservation this far. I have the uh advantage of having friends in Adelaide who can approach the dealers for me and and they're coming along, so there's more than one vehicle involved in this. What's surprising to me is they quoted price because you would normally expect that, yeah, you have a reservation, well, we'll let you know what the price is later. We'll see how that works. Australia has a disadvantage of being wide open with beautiful weather and no place to stay.

SPEAKER_01 57:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 57:54

But the uh Australians are also very quick to realize the market when the market is available, and so you will find that there'll be many places starting to advertise that they're gonna have an encampment and they'll have all the necessary facilities brought in and things like that. Even bringing water into some parts of Australia is kind of a a big endeavor, so you know it takes a lot of planning to do it.

SPEAKER_01 58:24

They've got several coming and they've done it before, so they know what's what it entails.

SPEAKER_04 58:33

Chris, you want to say something?

SPEAKER_03 58:35

Oh, that yeah, just uh that we have a mess going on down here in Texas right now with this.

SPEAKER_02 58:42

Uh yeah, I heard about that.

SPEAKER_03 58:44

Uh expecting 20 inches. We are lucky. We had a tornado outside of San Antonio this morning.

SPEAKER_02 58:52

Too much water or too much heat, it seems to be the rule these days. Um, in a way, I'm not too unhappy being at 50 degrees north because we've had our hot days, but we've also had some good rains, in fact, flooding rains in a few places, so um nobody's too dried out, and I guess it's mostly the flood peaks are passing right now. See we some of the bigger cities have escaped. I live in a city that back in 1950 dug a ditch around the city to divide divert river water. So we don't flood anymore.

SPEAKER_01 59:37

It just goes around us and about a hundred kilometers and dumps it into the lake, so a billion dollars well spent.

SPEAKER_03 59:50

What's your favorite eclipse weather miracle? Do you have one where it was like something completely unexpected?

SPEAKER_01 59:59

Pure blind luck in China back in 2009? Yep. Yeah, that sounds about right.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:09

We were in a spot and the weather's forecast didn't look good, so I moved us out of it, and day before the eclipse I jumped in car with a couple of guides and we went driving 200 kilometers away from where we were gonna go and found a truck stop. You know, truck stop in North America's got a a store with fast food in it and and a bunch of other sort of trucker type things for sale, but in China a truck stop can be pretty darn big. So it had a restaurant in it and things like that. And we had nine busloads of people. So I said, okay, this is a bit chancy, but we'll go to it. So the next day we abandoned our band and we drove down to this place and we pulled in. And in due course, a couple other busloads, I think of Norwegians, came by and they pulled in with us. And then the police arrived, and they said, Well, you gotta get out of here. You can't stop here. We don't want all the I don't know why. They're being police. But we also had a television reporter from the Shanghai news channel, and she started to interview the police officer in charge, and all of a sudden everything was just fine. But we didn't go far enough. It started, it went over CAS, and then it started to rain, and everybody took tarps over top of their telescopes and raincoats, and they all rushed into the restaurant and sort of took shelter. And darn if it wasn't five minutes before totality, it broke open. And we saw totality. It was a long one, it was a five and a half minute one. In the middle of it, it clouded over again, and then it cleared again. And it was through cloud and it was fuzzy, but we saw it, and then it started to rain again, and it rained my solar way back to there if it fitted the scale. That was the the hand of God, as Maradona would say, that came out and parted the clouds for us, and we just got there. Take them along with you to Spain, it just might work for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:34

Anyway. That's great. This has been great.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:38

That's a great stere that's a great story. I think we can end there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:44

Well, good luck to both of you.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:47

Thank you. Good luck to you. You're gonna be watching everybody's weather, even though I'll be I wouldn't say stuck on a cruise boat, but uh enjoying a cruise boat in Greenland. Possibly the only thing for me is that where everybody else is taking shorts and t-shirts, I'm gonna be taking a light carfan and some heavy boots where I'm going. And I don't really need that in August because I get enough of it in January.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:20

That's great. Well, good luck, clear skies to you.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:24

And uh you'll be mobile, you'll be nice and mobile. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'll be with this with adapting, you're in good shape.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:34

It's probably gonna be clear, so worry about that.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:37

Yeah, there you go. That's the attitude.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:39

All this way, it'll be clear. Yeah, it'll be clear across the whole path. There we go. Clear across the whole path.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:53

Well, that's it for this episode of Totality Talk. Hope you enjoyed our chat with Jay. In the next episode, we have Astronomer and Eclipse Guide from AstroTrails UK, Nick James. As always, Clip Sky.