Inside the Eye of Forecasting & Communication with Matt Lanza

Kyle David chats with Matt Lanza, a meteorologist based in the energy sector who has recently joined the CenterPoint Energy team as the Manager of Meteorology. Matt shares his experience communicating the weather in a wide array of channels, including his work with social/digital media and his weather blogs.

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About the Everything Weather Podcast

A weekly podcast where we talk with people about the weather world, explore and discuss everything weather and the many things that connect to it, and have a little fun along the way. The podcast is hosted and produced by Kyle David, a meteorologist and digital science content producer based in New Jersey.

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Transcript

Kyle David 0:17

Hello and welcome to the Everything Weather Podcast, where we talk with people about the weather world, explore and discuss everything weather, and have a little fun along the way. I'm your host, Kyle David, and on this episode, I got the chance to talk with Matt Lanza. He was a meteorologist over at Seneer Energy, but I wanted to share real quick he has since left Seneer Energy, and he is now the manager of meteorology over at Center Point Energy. So popping in to quickly update that and let you know what he is working on in the weather world. So again, congratulations, Matt, on your latest, greatest role at Center Point Energy and wishing you the best of luck. That said, our conversation that was previously recorded before he moved over to Center Point Energy still stands. He does a lot of work in the energy sector, and he also is very active on digital and social media. And we'll talk about that a little more in the interview coming up. Also, if you're listening to this on November 18th, this is the final episode of the mega release batch of episodes that I have dropped on release day. But don't worry, we still have plenty of everything weather podcast content coming for you down the pipeline. We're going to be going to every Monday a new brand, brand new podcast episode. We'll have new weather discussions, new guests, new on this day in weather history for each podcast episode, and just a whole ton of new stuff. So if you haven't already, make sure you are following us on social media. We're basically everywhere Facebook, Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, you name it. We are on there. Also, subscribe to the podcast as well for the latest Everything Weather podcast episode that will come out every Monday. All right, with all that out of the way, let's get into the interview with Matt Lanza. And today on the podcast, we're very excited to have Matt Lanza. He's a meteorologist at Shaneer Energy. He is also a certified digital meteorologist, very active in the digital and social media realm with the Eyewall blog, Space City Weather Blog, and all of his social media platforms. Welcome, Matt. Thank you for joining me on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Hey Kyle, good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kyle David 2:46

Of course. So let's kick it off with our first fun section of the podcast. What is on the weather person's playlist?

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Yeah, uh, that's a good question. All right, so I live in Houston and we get flooding religiously down here. So the first song that I'll put on the playlist is When the Levy Breaks by Led Zeppelin. Number one, because it makes sense from a Houston perspective, but it's also a good song.

Kyle David 3:08

I'm a Led Zeppelin fan. I didn't realize there was a weather-themed Led Zeppelin song.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Yeah, I don't know if it's necessarily weather themed. Sometimes it's there's some metaphorical stuff thrown in there, but I view it as such. It just reminds me of being by a bayou that was about to flood. Um so I get it. And then I'm gonna add Hurricane by the Band of Heathens, okay, which is the same vein as Lloyd Zeppelin song. Pretty good song overall. There's a song by an artist named Beast that's called Mr. Hurricane, it's a little bit more up tempo, a fun song. And then beyond that, boy, I've got like this whole playlist that I'm developing on Spotify. That's like anytime I hear a song that's got some sort of theme about weather, I throw it in there and and and add a song or two to it. Right now it's a whopping eight songs, so I've got work to do.

Kyle David 4:05

I will admit I'm also working on a similar playlist. I'm gonna be adding those to the weather playlist because I'm always discovering new weather themed songs and Mr. Hurricane. I feel like if you had an entrance theme song to any sort of like weather event or discussion, that's gonna be your intro song.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Yes, absolutely. You'll definitely walk in and hype up the crowd a little bit. Um, yeah, I'm sure we can find some other songs like Billy Joel or something like that. I like uh Downeaster Alexa, because that's not about weather, but it's that sort of theme in the northeast with boaters and and people that go out to to fish and that live off the sea for a living. And um, even though it's not weather themed, I think it's tangential enough.

Kyle David 4:48

Just there's enough to draw a connection there. Yeah. And I think with that said, I think we should introduce you a little bit more and talk about what got you interested in the weather. And the one question I always ask people on the podcast is tell me about your weather story. What got you interested in all things weather?

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Yeah, it's great because so many meteorologists have so many different origin stories. So for me, it was actually probably Hurricane Gloria, uh, which was in 1985. Shh, uh, don't tell anyone, aging myself a little bit, but yeah, I grew up in New Jersey and uh my grandmother lived on Absequin Island in Atlantic City. And during Hurricane Gloria, that was like a massive evacuation for coastal parts in New Jersey because it looked like they might come inland, make a run like up the Garden State Parkway. Ended up going to the east and going into Long Island, but it was still like the biggest storm in like several years to threaten threaten the Jersey shore. Uh, and so I just like vaguely remember, I was only three years old, so you can only remember so much, but like I remember evacuating my grandmother, my dad taping up windows, which is not actually very effective in hindsight, but that's what she did then. So that kind of something about that I think planted the seed. But more than that, it was like I liked maps, I liked geography. We got the weather channel, and there's a whole bunch of maps on there, and there's stuff on the maps that I'm like, this is cool, I can do this. It's I think the whole combination of those factors fostered my interest in weather, and it just took off from there.

Kyle David 6:17

And I give you credit, three years old remembering those specific details. Like, there wasn't a specific weather event for me, but I remember the Boxing Day Blizzard in 2010. I don't remember specifics of that, and I was like 10 years old at the time. So for you to be able to remember that at three, that is it, that is quite impressive. So, with that, what got you, what made you connect the two that you could go into the weather and make a career out of this?

SPEAKER_00 6:42

I think watching enough weather on TV and just like being interested in you know the snow forecasts and stuff like that. I always like to joke and say that when I was in South Jersey, yeah, I grew up on the wrong side of the rain snow line. So like most of the time we got rain um and mix. And I remember like the blizzard of 93, we got six inches of snow right out of the gate, woke up that morning and it was already raining. So I was like, all right, well, this is a bummer. Uh, but then finally in the blizzard of 96, we got a whole bunch of snow. So watching those forecasts on TV from a weather channel to the local meteorologist in Philadelphia, all those things really helped uh make it clear to me that I could do that. And I thought it was really cool. Like in kindergarten, I gave a forecast to my class. I don't exactly remember the details, but it's a story that's lived in in the family for a long time. But there are also there's a lot of people that um offered me like their time when I was younger. I remember from Clark, who used to be, I don't think he was technically a meteorologist, but he was a weather forecaster on one of the Philadelphia channels. He took time out of his day to just talk to me on the phone and talk about all sorts of things, weather when I was younger, I don't know if it was like third or fourth grade or something like that. Um, there was Jim Eberwine, who was at the National Weather Service in Mount Holly. He took time and I got to visit the NWS when I was a kid. He gave me a whole bunch of these like NWS materials that they uh used to like be public interest things and all this stuff I could look out and think out about weather. It was just awesome. So seeing all these people that were really helpful and all these little in instances helped build the you know create the building blocks for me to really want to be in the community.

Kyle David 8:20

So you got all these influential role models in your early stages of your life and ultimately your career. So walk us through a little bit where you went for school and what were your experience was like.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Yeah. So much like you went to Ruckers, uh go scrolling. Yeah. And for me, it was funny. Like when I was growing up at that point in time, it was like for most of our high schoolers, Ruckers was a safety school. And for me, it was like, no, this is one of the few schools that actually has a meteorology program. This is a legit choice for me. And I think that perspective, at least I hope that perspective's changed a little bit since then. But I applied to a few different schools, Linden State, which is now northern Vermont University, Florida Tech, and there were a couple others in there, Western Connecticut State and Um Georgia Tech, I think was the other one. And and so I applied to these schools and trying to decide where I wanted to go, I wanted to stay close to home, but not so close as to be like right there. So Ruckers was a perfect choice, and that's where I decided to go. And it was a good uh straw four-year program. What I liked about Rutgers was that they made you do other things too. Like it wasn't just like you're you're in the door day one, and you're taking all these meteorology classes. It's like you're in the door and we require you to take chemistry and physics, and you have to take uh some electives and some other things. So it gives you a more of a broad perspective, and you learn some other things along the way, which I think for the meteorologist of tomorrow, you need to be almost like good and fluent in other areas besides just meteorology. So that sort of academic preparation really is helpful, I think. It was good four years, learned a lot, obviously, graduated and uh decided that I wanted to go into TV, and that's where I started my career.

Kyle David 10:06

So, did I hear you right? You said you wanted to go into TV. I did.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

I wasn't sure that that's where I wanted to go, but it was like logical. Like I want to at least give it a try. I had an internship. Uh, this is actually a good story. An internship while I was at Rutgers, which Rutgers also has a great internship program. And I got to intern at WMGM TV, which was a little TV station in Atlantic City. It served basically Atlantic, Cape Main, and Cumberland counties down in South Jersey. So, like, not the Phil like in the Philadelphia market, but not really Philly. And uh I was interning under the person that was doing weather casting at the time, and she at one point in the middle of my internship took another job. So she left. And they were like, Hey, do you want to do this? And I'm like, We want me to actually go on air and do the weather, like, yeah. Oh, okay, sure. And so for the last two weeks of the internship, I was actually the only air forecaster there. I got to make the forecast and present it. So it was an incredible opportunity. And to do it in my hometown was like amazing. And so that sort of cemented the idea that okay, maybe I will try TV out of school.

Kyle David 11:15

I know a lot of people who would kill for an experience like that, not just in the weather world, but in general with an internship, because you're oftentimes shadowing people, but to get the actual experience that people would kill for that in an internship. You basically learn that, okay, let me give this a try. Where was your first stop?

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yes, after applying to a whole bunch of different jobs, I actually took a part-time job and it was in Stirritfie, New York. I went to a TV station up there that have their own DAPA radar, which is really cool. And there's reasons for that. We could talk a little bit more about that, I'm sure, because of Lake Effect Snow. They had their own radar because sometimes Lake Effect is so shallow in terms of where it develops atmospherically that the traditional NWS radars don't always capture that. One of them, the closest one to Syracuse, is actually on a hill or on what we call the Tughill Plateau, which is like an elevated region in downwind of Lake Ontario. And then the other one was down in Binghamton. And so neither of those would actually do a real adequate job of picking up Lake Effect, but they have their own radar. So I thought, well, this is not a bad opportunity because I can intern at a TV station, not intern, take a job at part-time at a TV station and learn how to use a radar uh a little bit more. And I thought it would just be a good experience. And it was, but it was just a part-time job, and I had to supplement that. I worked at a Barza Noble part-time as well to get a little more income. I had a great apartment. It was a studio apartment that had everything covered. It was a little bit of a rough area of Syracuse, but like all the utilities, cable and internet, were included in the price. So it was like, it was great at that point in time. It was exactly what I needed to afford. So but it was a really great experience I learned from some very good meteorologists, uh, a couple of whom I still talk to today.

Kyle David 12:54

So that's really great that you still keep in touch with those people from Syracuse. What would you say is your most memorable experience? I would have to guess it's going to be lake effect snow for you.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

Yeah, absolutely. And it was actually we had a coastal storm, and this would have been probably January of 2005. It was a pretty substantial coastal storm. It flew back a whole bunch of snow into Syracuse. And I remember leaving my apartment with just a little bit of snow on the ground and then coming back. We probably had eight to 12 inches of snow by that point. But it wasn't just like the nor'easter that was doing it, but it was lake enhancement. So what was happening is the wind was coming off the lake and you were getting a little additional moisture from a lake, not so much the same process that drives lake effect, but you were getting a little bit of lake effect intermixed with the whole synoptic or big picture elements of the storm that was helping to enhance the snow downwind of Lake Ontario. And Syracuse just happened to be there. And I just remember that. And I remember trying to drive home in that, and that was the first time I'd really driven in a big snowstorm. And I was like, this was crazy. You know, Syracuse is like that they do a great job cleaning up the roads, but not while the storm is happening. It's usually like right after the storm. They get out and they clean it up. But I was driving in the storm, it was not fun. So I remember that very well, and then how to maneuver your way around in a very tenuous situation.

Kyle David 14:16

I can't say I've driven around in Lake Effect Snow, nor have I seen Lake Effect Snow. And I hope someday that I'll get the opportunity to, because it really is its own phenomenon and it's very special in the weather community. So talking a little bit back to your career, um, you were an on-air meteorologist in Syracuse. Where did you go from there that led you to your current work?

SPEAKER_00 14:41

Yeah, so from Syracuse, I actually took a full-time job in TV just down the road in Newick in New York, about 40 miles east of Syracuse. So still in Lake Effect country, still got to deal with some big storms. Uh, I got to work alongside the chief meteorologist there and uh learned a lot. She actually uh was back and forth with some health issues, so I got to fill in a lot for her, which was really a good experience, a lot of repetition and a lot of a lot of responsibility too from a full casting perspective. So it was a great experience there. After being there for about four years or so, it just struck me that number one, I was getting impatient because I was applying for some other jobs. I wanted to see if I could move to like a Buffalo or an Albany, which would be like the neck logical step up. I thought there weren't a lot of openings, the ones that were getting filled. And so I just grew impatient. But I had a friend that was working in the energy industry, and I found what he was doing very interesting. So I started applying for jobs there too. And eventually one of them came through, and I actually moved from upstate New York to California in the middle of the winter of 08-09, and took a job in LA working for a utility out there called Southern California, Edison. And basically my job was to forecast temperatures and how it was going to impact energy demand on their system out there, which they're the largest uh electricity supplier in Metro LA. And we've got a lot of good experience in just shifting into that whole different element of forecasting from having to forecast like effect snow to having to forecast like Santa Ana winds or how far the marine layer was going to extend inland. And like a lot of people joke and say it's so easy to forecast in California, anybody can do it. Yeah, it is pretty simple from a like a regular person's perspective. Like there's really no difference between 84 and 87 degrees. But from an energy forecasting perspective, there's a lot of money between 84 and 88 degrees, 87 degrees, whatever it is. So it was a whole different slew of responsibilities at that point.

Kyle David 16:37

And there's also microclimates in California. You've got you know the people that are close to the shore. That's its own kind of microclimate. You have the mountainous areas, you have valleys. There's a lot with California, even though it's simple, 76 and sunny for like the most populated areas. It's very diverse in terms of what you can see in the state of California in terms of weather. So, and also that's a big adjustment, New York to California. What are some things that you had quickly picked up on in terms of weather forecasting, communicating the weather in transitioning from an on-air role to in behind the scenes energy role?

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Yeah, so it's a good question. And I get that I still get that question a lot from a lot of people like, well, how much how's that adjustment? Like, that's got to be hard. And my answer to them is no, it was actually super easy. The adjustment in terms of communicating is very easy because you're still doing the same thing we were doing on TV. You're communicating the weather forecast, but now you just have a different set of customers. Instead of the general public as your audience or your customers, now your audience is internal stakeholders, people that are trading, people that are making decisions based on the weather, in terms of how they're gonna manage the energy uh operation of the system. And so you just have to learn a little bit more of that language, and it becomes very simple. Like forecasting wind power and wind generation is obviously a lot different than forecasting what the weather is going to be like out five days for you know rate or precipitation temperature. But ultimately, once you get comfortable with it, then it's still the same. You're just doing the same thing, it's just a little bit different, and ultimately it's the same kind of end game that you're trying to go for. Adjusting the forecasting was definitely interesting, but it was cool because like lake effect snow is a very small-scale process. It's driven by a lot of what you know what we call in meteorology mesoscale uh factors that go into it that help to drive where lake effect snow bands are going to set up, how heavy they're gonna be, and what weather conditions are even right for. When they're forecasting in a place like LA, it's the same idea. Like you said, a lot of microclimates. There's a lot of mesoscale or small-scale features that you have to just be on the lookout for. How far is the marine layer going to clear? Is it gonna clear all the way into downtown LA by late morning? And then we get up to 90 degrees instead of 85, something like that. From water of the desert's gonna be like, is there gonna be a strong downsloping wind from Santa Ana's that get the San Gabriel Valley, for example, really hot? Just all these different little features that kind of go into play. And it was just fascinating to learn about them and learn the different drivers that that that that force them and the nuance that goes into play with trying to forecast them. So it was again, it was just taking some of the lessons that you learned from LakeFX and applying them a little bit differently into these other factors. And I think that was that's the really cool thing about this, is that you can make that adjustment and it seems super drastic, but in reality, you're just you you're learning a skill set and you're just fine-tuning it to a different place.

Kyle David 19:37

Phenomenal advice. I definitely agree with you on that. So at this point, you have gone from on air to energy. And how do you how did you get to your current role at Shaneer? You because you went from New York to California and now you're based out of Texas.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Yeah. Um, it was uh a very interesting evolution. I got into the energy industry and my wife and I talked about like where we wanted our end goal to be. And my argument was well, we should probably consider Houston, um, because there's a lot of energy jobs in Houston. It's the energy capital, you know, we call ourselves the energy capital of the world. And we figured that, well, if something were to ever happen job-wise, like there's other opportunities there to fall back on. And it also happens to be a very significant medical research hub, uh, which my wife does uh biomedical research. So she uh got involved, she uh ended up getting a job here before me. I took a job that required us to move to Jacksonville, Florida for one year. So like bouncing coast to coast all over the place. You have to have some flexibility if you want to be in this industry. So I mean, yeah, it's definitely required. And so, but the stipulation was that to get to Houston, I had to work in Jacksonville for a year. It was with Deutsche Bank, they had an energy trading group. A global investment bank had an interview trading group, and some investment banks still do that because they want to know how weather's impacting commodities, oil, gas, agricultural commodities, things like that. All this stuff is impacted by weather, so they have an interest in it. Um, Deutsche Bank actually had a whole group dedicated to trading that. And so I helped work with them on understanding how power demand was going to behave nationally and whether it's gonna be heat waves, cold snaps. Basically, the bottom line question you're trying to answer is that the fundamental driver of how much energy demand there's going to be is based on weather. How cold is it? How hot is it? And they just want quite answers to those questions to help them position themselves, make better economic decisions and things of that nature. So I worked at Dorset Bank for almost three years before they decided, you know what, the regulatory environment's getting too dicey for us, we're out. I mean, they just shut down shops. So I ended up getting laid off, which really annoyed me, not just because I got laid off, but it was a winter of 13 14, which was the first winter that was the polar vortex winner when it was just like a constant blast of cold in the Midwest and the Northeast. And I actually had made a good seasonal call on that forecast. I didn't get to see it through to the end. So that kind of stuff. But what was great was that one of the connections that I made at that job, I had taken the job at Shaneer. And he was like, Look, I need to be a urologist. I know you're available. What do you think? I'm like, yeah, uh, please hire me. Um, and so that's what I did. I moved there in the spring of 2014 and I've been with Shaneer ever since. So over 10 years now. It's phenomenal. And it's been a great opportunity to be in this hybrid environment of Shane's main business is exporting liquefied natural gas around the world, countries in Europe, South America, Asia, the whole thing going on with Russia and Ukraine has led to uh energy instability in Europe. So they've been relying on US natural gas to help them through that. And so my job for them is to do the same thing I was doing at all these other places, which is forecast weather. When is it going to get hot? When is it going to get cold? But in addition to that, how are weather going to impact our operations? I've got really into the wheeze of operational forecasting as it impacts business or anything from fog to hurricanes to winds, and not just how it impacts our day-to-day operations, but also how it impacts our people when we get hurricanes and things like that. So there's this whole element of like business continuity that's that's been new to me in the last 10 years that is becoming a very expansive role, I think, in the field and beyond energy too. So I think we're going to see more and more jobs of that nature as we go forward.

Kyle David 23:24

Absolutely. And just to dive in a little bit about the energy sector and weather forecasting, the people who work to communicate the weather forecast to the public, they communicate it so that they know, okay, how do I dress for today? Do I need an umbrella? Am I going to need my snowplower for some cases in the north? What is that like for the energy sector? Like, what do you try to communicate the weather for?

SPEAKER_00 23:49

Yeah, so it's a lot of it is what is the weather going to do from a subseasonal perspective? So you really want to try to get in on that two to four week period and you want to try and make a call on whether it's going to get hotter than normal, colder than normal, because that will influence how the price of U.S. natural gas, power, whatever your variable is that you're forecasting for, how that's going to behave. Like I said, the number one driver of all this energy use is weather. And that has been this way forever and it will continue to be this way. And now, not only that, as renewables come into the energy picture, it's becoming forecasting supply as well. So you're just trying to forecast demand and forecasting supply as you're dealing with wind power and solar power. How's the wind going to blow? How much sun are we going to have in Texas and California where these big solar hubs are? Um, and it's uh really fascinating to me to see how much emphasis is being required now to place all these things compared to what it was when I started. Uh, when I was at SoCal Edison, we had like three wind farms, I think, that we forecasted for. And it was just basically taking a look at a vendor forecast and you know what I call sanity checking it, making sure it looked okay. Uh, and then what you would do is say it gives a thumbs up, thumbs down, or just tell them what hours you thought the wind might underperform, overperform. And we're still doing that to some extent, but it's becoming such a big scale now that it's becoming critically important to understand how these renewables behave in certain environments. So a lot of wind forecasting, a lot of solar forecasting. And then, like I said, for for this company in particular, there's a lot of we do things on shipping, on vessels. So, are the winds going to be too strong and move vessels? Is there going to be too much fog with the ship channel's gonna close? Is there a hurricane in the Gulf that's gonna prevent ships from getting into the Gulf or getting out of the Gulf alternatively? So, how is that gonna impact our schedule? How is that gonna impact our operations? Are we gonna have to shut the facility down because we're under threat of a hurricane? All these different variables that just go into it. So it's a lot of specific things for a lot of specific end users, and it never it never ceases to amaze me how deep into the weeds that gets when everybody's got a weather interest of some sort for their business plan. And just being able to contribute to that is is a lot of fun and really interesting.

Kyle David 26:08

For being uh specialized in one specific topic industry, that is the weather, you do a lot of different things. And we haven't even talked about the Space City blog, the IWOL blog. We're gonna talk about that a little bit more about your social media experience, and then at the end, we'll talk a little bit more about insights into the future of weather communication. So stick with us right here. We'll be right back after this break. A powerful extratropical cyclone near the North Sea coast slammed parts of the modern-day Netherlands on November 18th and 19th and brought with it strong winds and heavy rain. The storm caused stormwaters to surge up rivers in the Groot Hollandese ward area or areas of the modern-day Netherlands, causing multiple dikes to overflow and break through. The storm surge completely swallowed a number of villages and caused widespread devastation in Zeeland and Holland, which are part of the coastal region of the Netherlands. The floods caused an estimated 2,000 to 10,000 casualties and also separated the cities of Hieftredenberg and Dortricht, which had previously fought each other in a long civil war. Most of the flooded land that separates the two cities remains flooded to this day. These floods would forever be known as the St. Elizabeth's Flood of 1421, getting the name from the feast day of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, which was previously on November 19th. Hello and welcome back to the Everything Weather Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle David, and today I'm joined with Matt Lanza. He's an energy meteorologist with Shine Air Energy, and he also runs the Eyewall blog and Space City weather blog for the Houston area. We've been talking a little bit about his experiences, his weather story, and we're gonna get back into the conversation with particularly the blogs that he runs and more about weather communications. But before we get back into that conversation, we have our next fun section, which is forecast frenzy. With that said, you ready to give it a go, Matt? Let's try. All right. Create a fun and creative forecast for this location. First up, we have Chew and Swallow from the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs book. The book, not the movie, because there I've learned that there's a distinction between the book and the movie. So we're just going off of the book for this.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

Yeah. So as a parent, I read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to my kids, and I love it because it's almost like a perfect allegory for climate change because what's like they live in a place and they're expecting certain food all the time, and then uh all of a sudden it changes and starts coming crazily at them with all these different things, pancakes falling on schools and stuff like that. So my perfect forecast for chewing swallow would be probably pancakes in the morning falling from the sky with a little bit of maple syrup. We can do turkey sandwiches with pepper, black crack black pepper on them for lunch with the sided chips and maybe a drizzle of soda or iced tea. Let me say iced tea. And then for dinner, chicken par following from the sky with a little bit of uh a drizzle of soda or some wine to go with that and some pasta as well. So that's my perfect chew and swallow day. And then the sky's clearing at night.

Kyle David 29:44

No dessert in the forecast, man.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

Oh, no, man. Oh. You're talking to a dessert king over here. Yeah, how did I forget that? We're gonna look at chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

Kyle David 29:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

Nothing beats a chocolate chip cookie.

Kyle David 29:58

I like that. Very good forecast for a chew and swallow. Next up, we have Game of Thrones in Westeros. We're actually gonna do two forecasts because you have the normal weather and then you have winter. If you've not seen Game of Thrones, basically there's this long winter where the White Walkers come and other stuff. If you haven't seen or the show or what read the books, I highly recommend it. Um, so first we'll start off with a normal day in Westeros.

SPEAKER_00 30:27

Yeah, so a normal day in Westeros is probably it's probably like any mid-latitude location, right? You're probably gonna have cold and snow up north of the wall. You're gonna have probably some uh chilly rain in King's Landing, and then you're gonna have super nice weather, tropical weather in the south. And I think that it it doesn't seem to me like it would be any crazier than that for the most part. What I love about Game of Thrones and the weather there is that it it really plays into the story, obviously, from just from a day-to-day perspective, but then also just this whole understanding that everybody has that oh, winter's coming, and like it's like nobody has to say anything else, like everybody just knows what that means. And I'm trying to think of what is that for like us in in reality, and I don't know what that is.

Kyle David 31:16

Poor vortex is coming, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

I don't sure we can go with that, but but it's just understood by everybody, they get it. Um, so yeah.

Kyle David 31:26

So we've got the normal day in Westjurus, now you got winter's coming. White walk is coming. What's the forecast, Matt?

SPEAKER_00 31:32

We've got ice dragons in the north, we've got heavy snow. My my guess is that all that snow would dump out though into the to the middle latitudes of of Westeros into the south, uh, and then it would be dry and cold in the north. Uh, so you'd have just there, like light snow, but not heavy snow. But I think that somebody's gotta get blasted during winter with snow. Like somebody's gotta get a good old-fashioned blizzard or two from this winter that that's coming, in addition to the the ice dragons, the light walkers, and all that. But yeah, I mean, like that there was the only thing that was disappointed. It was a good old-fashioned nor'easter somewhere in Westeros. I don't know who's gonna get it, but someone has to, right? I would love to see that by the castle or one of the castles just buried in three feet of snow.

Kyle David 32:15

Yeah, maybe even some ocean bay effect snow down towards King's Landing.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

Absolutely. Yeah, and I I think that would make that would give King's Landing such a different personality. I think it would be fun.

Kyle David 32:28

It may even rival real life lake effect snow for some areas in the U.S. too.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

Yeah, exactly. I say institute it and see what happens, add that to the story.

Kyle David 32:38

All right, George R. Martin, if you're listening, you got some uh weather inspiration for your next book. We've got one more for you. This is back to the real world now. Okay. We have Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on the night of December 5th, 25th, excuse me, on 26th in 1776. So you're a Revolutionary War meteorologist. What's the forecast for the crossing?

SPEAKER_00 33:01

So so that was the one where it was all the surprise of the fog, right? That it kind of helped to get them across and get them in unseen. So you have to have basically you've had to have had a cold, cold winter up to that point, or at least cold air. We've got snow on the ground, obviously, because like there was always snow on the ground in the 1700s. Like that's just gnome, right? Like every depiction of winter in the 1700s, there's snow on the ground in New Jersey. So it's like almost gives us like this mentality that always used to be like snowy, but now the reality is like it's you know months at a time, but that's the very winner. Um, no, but you've got a warmer weather coming in, and so that's helping to bring the fog up to to disguise their movements. And somebody recognizes this and says, this is the night that we're gonna do it, and then we go across the Delaware, and but it didn't necessarily change the entire direction of the revolution, but it was instrumental, at least in that phase of the war, to help give the the Americans a real boost of uh morale at that point and make the British take them even more seriously. And it is funny, like you you go back and if you read about revolutionary history, uh, there are so many instances where some type of weather event has an instrumental role in helping something like when when Washington fled New York, New York City with his army, uh to go, I think what was to go north and come back to into New Jersey or the upstate New York, there was fog that moved in. And again, here we go again with the fog, and that threw the British off and Washington got away. And like if you think about it, that fog isn't there, what happens? That's a whole different story now that we're looking at. So it's just it's fascinating to me. And there there are so many instances of that, particularly the revolution, but also just generally throughout history.

Kyle David 34:56

For sure, yeah. A lot of instances of weather in the revolutionary war and teasing one of our weather or not questions later on the podcast. So stick around to see what that question is for those that are listening. So we've got Matt Lanza, we're talking about Juneer Energy, we're talking about his career, very diverse career from Rutgers to on-camera meteorologist up in New York to energy meteorologist in California, a little bit of time in Florida, and now you're in Texas. But we haven't even talked about your other stuff that you work on. You do social media, you're on digital media, you even have your own blogs. Talk a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_00 35:32

Yeah, so particularly when I had gotten laid off from my job at Deutsche Bank, I was like, all right, well, what am I going to do next? And it just so happened that Nate Silver's website, 538, was starting up at that point, and they were looking for freelance writers about weather. So I applied for it and I actually got and asked to contribute an article to their launch uh when they launched the site, and it was about the winner of 1314, the Polar Vortex winner, and like all the crazy stuff that had been happening. And that just reinstituted my enjoyment of weather. Now I had had the job offer not officially given to me, but it was there at that point in time when I'd started doing this with Cheneer. So I knew I was gonna eventually get employed, but I at this point I was like, I need to make sure I keep my keeping myself fresh. And one of the things we did when I was in upstate New York is we started a blog. And this was back when blogging was still new. We started a weather blog up there and had some success. I had a real fun time working on that and helping to launch that. So I enjoyed writing about the weather, and then it was only natural that one of one of my colleagues who was in a mutual friend or we just friends with Eric Ferber, who was writing at the time about weather and space for the Houston Chronicle and Science, he had already developed a weather blog there that had a good audience and he needed some help. And so through this mutual friend, we uh got in touch with each other and decided to start helping him out. And then he left to go write for write about space for Ars Technica, which he's still doing now. He's a great space writer, he's written two books uh about SpaceX and stuff like that, they're really interesting. Uh, he was like, Look, we've got this following that built out over these years at the Chronicle. Do you want to continue working on this with me? And we can do Berkeley, we'll call it Space to the Weather, blah, blah, blah. Like, sure. All right, why not? Let's do it. We had like this niche audience of followers and people liked it. We just do a daily forecast. And for our whole launcher is no pipe. We're just gonna tell you what the weather is, we're not gonna sensationalize it, we're not gonna tell you to go crazy on a day when there's only a 30% chance of rain or something. Our goal is to be a sea of boring in a world of noise most of the time. And we were able to do that for a while, and then Hurricane Harvey happened in 2017. And we went from just this little fun niche weather site to all of a sudden, like actually, people are relying on us, like hardcore. They're in their closets hiding from tornado warnings, they're somewhere on their upper floors trying to be safe from flooding, and they're looking at our site on their phones because that's the only thing that they have to do at that point. Uh, and so we're just constantly updating them on what's happening, where the rain is, how bad it's gonna be, when it's gonna end, et cetera, et cetera. And it just blew up from there. And so now we have this great following of people. We've continued to grow it since then. Anytime there's a hurricane in the Western Gulf, we can easily get uh hundreds of thousands to to millions of page views, which is blows my mind that people are that reliant on us. And it's just wild. And so one of the things we did was we started this companion site called the Eyewall last summer 2023. And uh after seeing how Hurricane Ian was communicated in Florida, where it was like all this focus was on Tampa, but like myself and some colleagues were like, no, this is going to Fort Myers, this is gonna go south. I hope those people were ready. Um, we wanted to bring a different voice to tropical weather in particular, and how that's handled. And you just wanted to make sure that people knew what was going on and knew what to focus on. And so, with the same idea that we were gonna be hiking things up, because that's an issue now, too, and social media storms get hyped up, that 384-hour GFS model showing a hurricane slamming in New Orleans. So that's gonna obviously happen, and people freak out. And so you have to bring them in. And our job, but I see our job is doing is to help hold their hand through hurricane season and let them know, like, hey, this is what you need to worry about, this is what doesn't matter, and and just do the best we can with that. And I think we've had some success. We've had a lot of test cases this year with all the different storms that we've had, and I think they've been for the most part successful.

Kyle David 39:28

So and I want to explore the eyewall blog a little bit in a second, but I want to go back to the space city weather forecast because you've experienced forecasting in upstate New York, out in California, in different areas of the country. And now you're forecasting for an entirely different area. What is that like?

SPEAKER_00 39:47

Yeah, it's been an interesting, it was an interesting adjustment when I got here. Uh, but again, it's the same thing. Uh a lot of the thunder shores that we get in Houston are just driven by sea breeze mechanisms and a lot of, again, measur scale features, a lot of small scale features that impact them. So for 80% of the days of the year, it's just looking at things like that. Or it's sunny and quiet. But there's 20% of the days of the year where we all of a sudden get a stalled-out cold front. How far is that front going to get? Is it gonna get offshore or we're gonna stall out before it gets here? And then are there gonna be any disturbances that run off? Are we gonna have uh a training of that with thunderstorm after thunderstorm repeating over the state areas? And so that's where our focus ends up being. And we have to look at a lot of, again, mesoscale features to help predict precipitation. Um, with a storm like Harvey, it was unique uh in that it was like all the models were just showing 40 to 60 inches of rain, and sort of becomes less about the mesoscale process is more about okay, do we believe that this is gonna be this crazy? And eventually we had to. And so it was that was definitely one of the stranger forecasts we've ever had to put out, I've ever had to put out for sure. Like, yeah, I'm forecasting 40 to 60 inches of rain. Like, could it be less than that? Sure. Does it matter? Probably not. There's gonna be a lot of flooding. Um, so that was crazy in and of itself. But yeah, I mean, it's just getting comfortable with the the different things at play here. Uh, you learn about certain biases. We know that that hold fronts in the plains are pretty interesting because they have a really shallow layer of air. The cold air that comes down the plains is not really deep coal that comes through. It's like literally 1,000 to 5,000 feet deep, and you go above it and it's like 40 degrees. But at the surface, it's 20 degrees. And so these different processes that influence how far south that's gonna push, how fast we'll frontscape through, all things like that can make a big difference, like especially a couple days in advance. Is it gonna be 65 degrees and sunny uh and humid, or is it gonna end up being in the 40s all day with a 40 mile an hour wind out of the north? All these things are possibilities down here in the wintertime, and then in the summertime you're just putting on the hat of forecasting daily thunderstorms based on the sea breeze and based on disturbances, and then hurricanes. It's all about hurricanes. And so Houston's a very interesting place because now we've had multiple flood events, so people are very skittish about flooding, so we have to ring them in, whatever there's precipitation in the forecast, and help them understand again the same sort of idea. What matters, what doesn't, um, when not to be scared, but when to you know pay attention. Uh, and so we figured out when to to press the buttons that we have to get the response that we want for people uh and of storms.

Kyle David 42:29

Phenomenal, yeah. I mean, you guys do I've read a couple of your articles, and for those that are listening and are in the Houston area, or even if you're not in the Houston area, some of these articles that Matt writes are pretty great reads. They're educational, informational, and most importantly, they alert you to any weather that is going to happen for the Houston Metro. Uh, same thing for the eyewall too, and actually I want to segue into that a little bit more because you do the eyewall blog. That actually is more of a recent development for you. What is some of the things that you've learned with doing the eyewall blog and what is that like?

SPEAKER_00 43:05

Yeah, that's been interesting because here we are, we're fairly well known in Houston, but you know, you go to Dallas, you go to New Orleans, like nobody really knows who the heck we are, which you would just do. Um and so what we've decided to do is now we're gonna test and see if this whole idea of being like no height, very down-to-earth, very personable communicators can translate to a broader audience. And so what we've started to do is like we decided that we were gonna do this site and we're gonna post just daily updates on the tropics, basically a tropical discussion every day. You can go to the National Hurricane Center site and you can see where the disturbances that we're watching are. You can go to social media and see rampant speculation about all these things 10 to 14 days from now. Um, but nobody, at least I don't think anybody does a really great job of kind of covering that space in between and being like, all right, well, here's what we're watching. Here's why we're watching it. Here's what might happen. Here's why you shouldn't pay attention to this model that's showing this ridiculous solution. Um, and so it's just meant to hold people's hand through hurricane season because it's a marathon. I mean, it is a long season. And anybody that's listening to the Northeast may not necessarily quite grasp just what the Gulf Coast has been through in the last seven years. I mean, it's just been one storm after another, and it's hit everywhere. It's Texas, Louisiana, the Central Gulf, the Eastern Gulf, Florida. Uh, you know, all these places have been hammered by major storms. So every hurricane season, everybody's on edge. And to just survive that season without driving yourself insane is really hard. And that's what we want the eyewall to be is this sort of like it sounds really corny, but beacon of light in a season that's really hard. Or logo is a lighthouse. And so it makes sense. And you know, it's been a very interesting time. I mean, it's a different uh type of writing, a different type of audience because like we're not getting hyper local because we can't. And I what I tell people is that like, look, we don't want to be your only source for information. You got to have local sources. You have to have people in your area that you trust because they have local knowledge that will never have that can help you. And so, like, we do a good job communicating what might happen, what we're watching, what's going to be interesting. I try to focus on things that concern me personally that may not be getting as much attention, like the flooding that hit during Hurricane Haley. We were talking about that several days in advance that this was going to be a significant threat inland and that people need to take this seriously further up the coast. And so just all these different things. I think it's always a constant learning experience. Every store offers us an opportunity to reassess what we're doing and learn something new. And this year has been no exception. I've heard learned a lot of valuable lessons from Beryl, Helene, Milton, all the storms that have been very helpful in terms of both forecasting them and uh communicating those forecasts.

Kyle David 46:01

And the cherry on top of that is you're, I'll use a term that's used in the meteorology world a little bit for forecasting tropical weather. You are hyperactive on social media in communicating the weather, talking about what is going on in the weather world. What is that like? And what are some of the things that you've learned in communicating the weather on social media?

SPEAKER_00 46:22

Yeah, that is a whole kale words, my friend. There's a lot going on right now. And so what the problem is that there's just this whole distrust of like expertise, right? And so anybody who's anyone can put something out there and say, like, oh, this is what's going to happen. Um, so the American Meteorological Society, National Weather Association, these organizations that help professionals uh in in the field of weather, have started to come up with this system of certifying meteorologists, much like you see on TV, the certified broadcast meteorologist. Well, the AMS now has certified digital meteorologists. That was the designation that uh I picked up this past uh spring, uh, which I'm happy that I did. I also need to go for my NWA uh digital seal as well. Um, but what it does is it it adds to that level of trust, I think. So that's one way that I think we're working to combat some of this stuff because the problem is that the average person goes onto social media and they see something. And what they see something from like a group that they trust or uh a person that they trust, and they don't understand necessarily what it means, and the person posting it doesn't necessarily understand what they're posting. Um, on the one hand, they could just be accidentally misleading people, uh, be like, here's a this is I looked at the GFS today, and this is what it showed. And uh operational GFS models, among other models, um, are extremely uh sensitive to producing ridiculous-looking tropical storms, hurricanes at late hours of a forecast run. And so they don't necessarily understand why that is or that it is. They just know that it's there and they see it. And um they they just want to share it with people and they think they're doing the public service. Then there are the people that want to do that, but they want clicks, page views, they want engagement, and they're doing it somewhat nefariously, maybe because they don't understand and they want to be the one to tell people it, but also because they want their paycheck for their engagement or whatever, and especially like with platforms like Twitter X, whatever you want to call it, that monetize engagement now. I mean, it's a very that the there's incentive to do that. And then you've also got people that want to be first, they just want to be the first one to say, I called it first. Like, no, you showed a model run that showed something that actually just happened to verify. So you've got this whole world of noise right now, and the average consumer is just really confused by it. They don't know necessarily what to believe or what to trust, and at the same time, they want a lot of information. So they want to see all these possibilities. And so what ends up happening is you just get this stoop of stuff with like good credible information mixed in with nonsense, mixed in with the lunatic for calling the people that think that we're controlling hurricanes or something, that is just something we you know that that just is not possible. And so all this stuff comes together to confuse people and make it very difficult to be level-headed and rational in a sea of norths. And so what we're trying to do is combat that, and that's one of the reasons I do stay active on social media. It's one of the reasons that also almost pushes me away sometimes. But it it I try to stay there because I feel obligated to try and help people navigate this world that they're living in that's full of a whole bunch of misinformation or disinformation or just information that people don't realize is that, and they're trying to come from an honest place and they're not, they're not presenting it appropriately. So it is a very confusing world. Unfortunately, I think it's getting worse instead of better. Uh, but we've been dealing with it for a long time, and now a whole bunch of other scientists are dealing with it too. Uh, and I think it's incumbent on us to keep at it and keep trying to inform people as best we can.

Kyle David 50:08

Absolutely. I I've noticed it become a very prominent issue, especially with recent hurricanes like Helene and Milton. And it's just it's a blessing in a way because you get all the information that you can, but it's also a curse for the same reason. So, to that note, like what do you think is the most challenging thing of communicating the weather on digital and social media?

SPEAKER_00 50:32

Yeah, I I I think the most challenging aspect of it right now is trying to make yourself relevant when you're not the type of person or group or agent or agency, but but whatever organization that is prone to wanting to be very boisterous and noisy, and there are uh storm chasers out there. People like Ryan Holy, people trust him implicitly because he is them, he's one of them, and so he's also flamboyant and very boisterous, and that that's how he gains traction. Um, and so he has a responsibility to provide good information, and I think we all in the industry have certain elements of I don't want to say distrust, but certain things that make us cringe a little bit. But at the same time, he's got the trust of his audience, and how he goes about it is we can do we can disagree on it, but he gets through to people, and so it's our job when we're not that type of individual or that type of organization to be able to get through to people the same way, but just without all the bells and whistles. So it makes it really difficult to stand out to see a noise when you're not the type of person that's going to be very loud. And so when we're operating as a blog that is intentionally gonna be like, look, on a boring day, I don't care if you visit our site, whatever, like there's nothing to talk about. It's gonna be sunny. We're not there's no reason for us to drive traffic to our site, whereas all these other media organizations still have to get people visiting their site or watching their programming or whatever, because that's their business. For us, it's just a side project and we don't need that. So being able to still stand above and tall in that crowd is not easy when you're doing a site like this. So for me, to me, that's the biggest challenge. And and trying to get people to trust you, I think, is also a big challenge. And that I understand trust is earned. So for people that trust us in Houston, it's one thing, but for somebody following us now, the eyewall in Tampa, if they're just starting to follow us now after these storms, they may not trust us. Um so trying to build that trust with these people that don't know you is a whole other element of things too. I'm I'm not a resident of Tampa. I am a Houstonian, so Houstonians know that they can trust that what I'm telling them is there because I'm one of them. And so it's interesting just to see how that whole space is evolving. And what is trust and how do you build that trust in a world that's so fractured like we are today?

Kyle David 52:57

Absolutely. And to build upon what you said about trust and the changing role of social media, where what do you see the role of the meteorologist? Well, let me rephrase this. What would you say the direction is the evolution of the meteorologist on social and digital media in the next year, five, or if you're bold and you want to try it 10 years?

SPEAKER_00 53:22

Yeah. Right now, the the big challenge, I think, for all meteorologists is where are you gonna post and how are you gonna find time with a data post? Because we had Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and like Snapchat or TikTok. Some meteorologists get involved in that, some don't. That's a whole niche thing. But now you've got with Twitter becoming X and fracturing and its audience going to Blue Sky or going to Mastodon or going to Threads, you've got this audience now in a million different places. How do you update all those social media sites if you want to have a presence? Like we have a presence for the eyewall on on Mastodon and Threads and Blue Sky and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. I'll do stuff on Instagram that I cross-post to TikTok just because I'm I don't do a whole lot of video, but what I do, I want to at least push it there as well. And so, like, how do you manage that workload now? It's a lot to do that. And there's no like good tool that says, all right, I'm gonna type this in here. Uh I'm gonna tweak a couple things for this site and this site, but I can otherwise just copy and paste and then click one button and it sends to all those platforms. It doesn't work that way. Like you have to go to each individual platform, you have to update it, and there's a lot of copying and pasting involved, and it takes time, it's a headache. And like, especially if you're doing like almost like wide-watering the event in in like it used to be on Twitter, you can't do that in all these different sites because it's not possible to do that. Because as soon as you're done that, you're on to the next one. Um, and it's it it you you you're wasting time posting instead of paying attention to the weather. So I think time management is going to become very important for meteorologists in the social media space and just deciding where you want to devote your resources. Where's your audience? If 80% of your audience is on Facebook and Instagram, and 10% is on Twitter, and 10% is on these other sites, well, you know where you're gonna focus your attention. Uh, it's gonna be on Facebook and Instagram. But for everyone else, it's different. How much of a presence do you want to invest in TikTok? Because that's becoming a rampant source of bad information as well. And you want smart information to stand out there too. You don't want people to go to these platforms and constantly get bombarded with crap, like you want them to go and get good information. And you know what that means getting on TikTok. And then you have the whole element of, well, what if TikTok gets banned anyway in the US with all the stuff going on? So, like, how much do you want to invest in these things? These are all really important questions. There's existential questions to ask about social media, as well as just regular everyday questions. How much time do you want to devote to it? Do you want to is your goal to push people to your social media platform, or is your goal to push people to your website or blog or whatever it is? And so, what is the best way to do it? I'm finding that like I think I need to invest more time in Reddit because I think Reddit is becoming a source of more news and information for people now that Twitter's kind of fractured a little bit. Um, but I still like I can't play Twitter. Like I'm still on there and I'm still getting followers on there, I'm still engaging with people on there, and I'm not getting compensated for it, which is fine. That's not what I want. Like, I just don't want to be able to provide good information to people. So it's gonna be a real interesting journey the next few years to see where this all goes and what happens with how we have to communicate.

Kyle David 56:30

If anybody from the the company that runs Reddit, I don't know if it's actually Reddit or like named something else, you got an opportunity here. Reach out to us. But I'm glad that you brought up all these other platforms and especially TikTok with Helene and Milton. It the amount of misinformation and disinformation is alarming. And you've mentioned a couple of points that like meteorologists need to work into their workflow overall with using social media. But I wanted to ask you like, what is the most important lesson in all of your experiences on air, energy, social media, blogs, what is the most important lesson that you've learned, not just in weather communication, but with the weather in general?

SPEAKER_00 57:12

Uh, probably twofold. Number one, you've got to be honest with people and you have to not be married to a forecast for too long. In other words, if the forecast changes, don't stick to your guns, change. I've worked with some meteorologists in the past that have been very reluctant to change their forecast because they were so convicted about making a call. It's cost them trust with their audience. And so from that perspective, you to build trust, you have to be willing to adjust when needed. We had to do that with Barrel this year. Originally it looked like it was gonna go toward Mexico, and then it was Corpus Christi, and then it was Natagorda Bay, and then it done been being Freeport just south of Houston. And Houston obviously went through what we went through during that. And so that was a forecast that was really difficult, uh, but it was one that we had to adjust with. And we're working to continue to say it was gonna go to Mexico when it looked like it was gonna come to Corpus. Like, no, we had to move with where the data was shown. So it's important to be flexible with that. And then I think the other thing is it's important to admit when you're wrong, um, because I think that builds trust and transparency too. Like, hey, we screwed this one up, that's on us. Here's why it happened, here's what we would do differently next time. And taking some time to do that, you don't have to do that, but I think it really does earn trust with your audience. If you said it was gonna rain one weekend and it ended up being sunny, don't come in on Monday and be like, Well, I hope you enjoyed the weekend. It was beautiful. Let's see what's coming ahead. Like, no, you said it was gonna rain. Why didn't it rain? I had to adjust my plans because of your forecast. So why didn't it rain? And so doing things like that, I think, really helps to build this level of transparency and trust with people that I think can benefit you in the long run.

Kyle David 59:05

Absolutely. And I'm glad that you brought that up because there are cases where the forecast is wrong and is very good to own up and talk about why the forecast didn't go the way you were thinking. But there are also times where the forecast may be correct and people for some reason, it could be a whole slew of reasons, they don't they misinterpret the forecast. What would you say in those instances is the solution?

SPEAKER_00 59:33

Yeah, that's a tough question because you're obviously not going to admit you were wrong when you weren't wrong, but you I I think the important thing is to understand why people get that message when you were saying something else. What were they hearing? Where did they hear it from? A lot of times people will people like to always say they are saying about meteorologists when there's five different meteorologists with five different forecasts out there, and they are saying, Well, who's the day? I wasn't they. Who who is your they? Uh so I want to understand that. And so I think it's important to understand what your people are saying. Uh, it's real easy to just throw up your arms and say, I don't want to deal with this, I don't want to deal with having to call people back from the ledge when there's a 384-hour model run that shows something. I'm tired of dealing with that, and somebody's hyping it up. But you have to understand that people are seeing this stuff and they're gonna lump you all together, whether it's bare or not, into that day category. And they're all they're always wrong. Well, no, somebody said something that was not correct, but I wasn't wrong. So the instinct is gonna be to defend yourself, but rather than do that, try to address it ahead of time and also try to understand what people where people are getting this from. So you can say, oh, you're probably referring to this. This is what they said, but we actually were saying this at that time. And you know, you don't have to, you're not being a jerk about it, correcting them, but um, you have to do that. But then there's also the element of how much time do you want to spend trying to convince people because there's a lot of people that do that that are never gonna be happy. They're gonna always think you're wrong no matter what you do. And so, how much time do you want to spend on that? I think that's a really important question, and that's really up to everybody individually, um, in terms of how they want to time manage and do certain things. So it's an important, really challenging topic that we're gonna have to spend a lot of time kind of filtering through and living and learning from going forward.

Kyle David 1:01:30

Absolutely. And it's also you're not just trying to combat the misinformation, but it's also trying to educate people, get them to learn and understand with you what the forecast is, and hopefully that they'll pass that understanding on to make the right decisions in terms of protecting themselves, their property, and then also to others as well who may not be as well informed. I think with that said, I have two more questions for you that I want to ask. This one is more of a career question for you, and this could be for weather people, non-weather people that are listening to the podcast. If you had the DeLorean or some sort of time machine, do you go back in time to your younger self and have a conversation with them or even talk to people today that were in a similar station that's are in a similar, excuse me, in a similar situation as you were when you were younger.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:24

Is it?

Kyle David 1:02:24

What advice would you offer? What would you say?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:27

Great question. And I love that question. I would tell that person that there's a couple things I would say. Number one, if you are going to go into the field as a public-facing scientist, you have to accept the fact that you are not talking to other scientists. And you have to be able to communicate in everyday person language. And your job is to not stand up there and be, I'm a scientist, and I'm telling you what's going to happen. When I came out of school, like that was what I thought. Like, I'm a scientist, like I'm the expert on this, and I'm informing and educating my viewers. The reality is they don't really care. Like they care about how the weather's going to impact them the next day. One of the rain. Well, what do I got to wear going out of the house? And so you have to recognize that it's not no fault of yours that if you just go into that public-facing field, you have to face the public and you have to be able to relate to them. You're not at a conference uh talking with your, your, your colleagues. Um, that's just not what it is. So that's one thing I would tell people. And the other thing I would tell people, particularly those that are starting out in their career, the instinct when you start out is going to be to say yes to everything because you want to show that you're a committed employee, that you're hardworking, that you are going to bust it for your company. And I think we're in a world now that's a little bit different than it was when I came out of school 20 years ago, where things like mental health are more prioritized, where things like taking a break is more acceptable. It doesn't make you less of a worker. It just means that you need a minute. You need a little bit of time. Um, so don't always feel like you have to say yes. If you're swamped and you know that if you take this on, you're going to do a terrible job with it. Tell your boss that. Let them know, like, I wish that I could do it. I want to do it, but unfortunately, I am not able to just devote the amount of time that I would need to do it correctly or do it the best because I'm doing this and this. Um, and you know, as long as you explain it that way and you you don't do it in a combative way, I think it's more acceptable. And I think it's more tolerable. And I think they'll be okay with it more often. Now they'll don't say no to everything. It's like you want to take the extreme of that, but you know, just don't feel the pressure to always say yes. I've done that before, I've been there. It's stressed me out physically ill over certain things sometimes because I'm just afraid that I'm gonna screw something up. So don't do that for yourself. Just try to give yourself a break because you deserve it, you need it, and to do the best job, you need to be able to do that.

Kyle David 1:05:00

And that last piece of advice is very applicable, not just to the weather world, but to anybody in general. Exactly. For sure. And then another question, this is act this is actually something that was asked to me in a job interview recently. And I'll be honest, I didn't know how to exactly answer the question, but I thought it was an excellent question. So I'll ask it to you. I want to know what you're what you would say to this. If you could go back in time and change one thing about social digital media for the betterment of weather communications, what would you change?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:31

That is a very big question. If I could change one thing, uh I would say that probably this is so hard to say. I I think the one thing, and this has really become evident to me personally just in the last few weeks with a lot of the misinformation around Helene and Milton and all the uh nonsense going on with that. People saying that we can control the weather, um, and that the government's controlling it and they're Deliberately hurting certain places. Um it's just to me, it sets up this idea that we have in this country a First Amendment right to free speech, but you also can't yell fire in a theater. And what a lot of these people are doing is yelling fire in a theater, but it's on social media. So number one, I I would say we either have to uh not be afraid to moderate uh content and just commit to it and be like, look, we're gonna annoy a certain base of our users, but too bad for the betterment of the platform, the betterment of humanity, you know, we have to moderate. We can't have people making threats against other people because they think the government is manipulating weather, uh, because they don't understand the difference between cloud seeding and a thunderstorm and large-scale modification. It's not possible in any sense of the word. Um and I wish that we were that the government would have picked up on this together, and that they, I don't want to over-regulate industry, but I wish that they would have seen this and anticipated that this was going to be the that what happened and require some of these platforms to do more moderation or more regulation of whatever their users to just prevent it all free-for-all, that it's impacting the real world. Like it's not just impacting their day on social media, you're just a bad day on Twitter. Like, no, like this is impacting your quality of life, uh, it impacts how you have to communicate. It just touches all these facets and creates so much work that there has to be an explicit moderation policy for these sorts of things. And it it has to be firm and it can't change just based on certain things. So the people know that if they flagrantly break those rules that they're out of trouble. And it's a slippery slope and it's messy. And I don't know how you do that, but I do know that somebody probably needed to think about this a while ago and stick to it.

Kyle David 1:08:09

It's I mean, it's hard to predict the future, not just for the weather world, but with anything, you don't know what things are going to be like in five, ten years for certainty. And I've been seeing that social media companies, platforms have been getting a little bit better with that content moderation, making sure that some things are fact-checked. But to your point, yes, I do agree that we need a little more of moderation so we could combat the misinformation, disinformation, because it does a great amount of damage, not just to weather communications, but it with everything. Yeah. I think with that said, we're gonna end on a lighter note with our very famous what I wouldn't say very famous, hopefully maybe famous, whether or not trivia. We're gonna be asking you some weather-themed, non-weather-themed trivia questions, and we'll see how you do with these. You ready for these, Matt?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:01

Let's do it.

Kyle David 1:09:02

All right. This is whether or not your question is historical nor'easters, which I have a feeling you're gonna get very quickly with this question. The storm of the century occurred in what year? A 1993, B, 1893, C, 1957, or D 2003.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:22

If we will for 2000, there for me it was 2003. That was President's Day 2. That was a great storm. No, the answer is 1993. Final answer? Final answer.

Kyle David 1:09:32

No doubt in your mind you are correct. It is 1993 when you were mentioning the storm of the century, 1993. I was like, oh, yeah, he's gonna get that in like three seconds for sure. This one may be a little bit harder. We'll see. This is whether or not your question is wrote Well, let me do that one again. This is whether or not your question is related to weather in revolutionary history. Wintry weather was often a common theme for revolutionary war battles, especially in the Northeast. However, this one battle was known for a heat wave that affects soldiers on both sides with high temperatures and oppressive humidity. Is it A, the Battle of Baumbrook, B, the Battle of Brandywine, C, the Battle of Cow Pens, or D, the Battle of Monmouth? The Battle of Monmouth. Final answer? Final answer. You are correct. It is the Battle of Monmouth. And there's a lot of different battles that were affected by the weather. We can honestly do a whole episode on that in the future. Yes. Um next question. This is whether or not your question is related to baseball, specifically the Philadelphia Phillies. Oh boy. Which Phillies player holds the franchise record for most career home runs? Is it A, Ryan Howard? B Cy Williams, C, Mike Schmidt, or D, Bryce Harper? G, Michael Jack Schmidt. Final answer for that? Final answer. You are correct. It is Mike Schmidt. I didn't know that was his middle name.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:05

So Harry Callis, the play by play guy for the Phillies for so many years, who was wonderful. Um, that was Michael Jack Schmidt, was how he would refer to him when he would do a home run. So Home Ron, Michael Jack Schmidt. Yeah.

Kyle David 1:11:22

All right. Well, I mean, it goes to show you're very knowledgeable with the Philly stuff, and I can't stump you with any Phillies question that I would have come up. I got one more for you.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:31

Okay.

Kyle David 1:11:31

This is whether or not your question is related to lake effect snow. The Great Lakes are no doubt the most iconic bodies of water when it comes to lake effect snow. But this other lake in the United States has been known to produce lake effect snow between September through May. Of these lakes, which is known for their own lake effect snow events? Is it A. Lake Okeechobee? B Great Salt Lake, C, Lake Winnebago, or D Teshkepu. I'm gonna mispronounce that. Te Teshikpuok Lake. If I butchered that, I'm sorry. Sorry. Teshapuk Lake. I cannot say that. But it's O T E S H E K P U K.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:16

Okay. I've never heard of that. Lake. I I'm gonna go the Great Salt Lake. I believe that was B.

Kyle David 1:12:24

Final answer is Great Salt Lake. Final answer. You are correct. It is the Great Salt Lake. And for those wondering what that last lake was, that is the largest lake in Alaska. Oh wow. So I'm sorry again if I butchered the name of that, but that is all we've got for Weather or not and for this interview with Matt Lanza. Before we go, though, tell us where we can follow you on social media.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:50

Yeah, so I'm on uh Twitter X is at Matt Lanza, and I'm on Instagram as Matt Lanza WX. I have a Facebook page you can search for, but it's not really useful. Uh but I would recommend you follow uh the eyewall on uh any of the major uh social media platforms, just the eyewall wx. And if you're interested, space city weather or space city wx uh on it depends on what platform you're on. So uh we're we're out there, we're posting regularly, and um, we'd love to hear from you.

Kyle David 1:13:23

Fantastic. And we'll be linking all of those social media accounts as well as Matt's blogs in the show notes for this podcast. With that said, that wraps up our episode of Everything Weather for today. Thank you, Matt, for joining us on the podcast, and thank you to the listener for tuning in. And we'll catch you on the next episode.