Episode 176: Weather Prepping

Salty and Spice talk about prepping and the weather... Go to Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You by clicking HERE!

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spk_0:   0:00
Hello, everybody.

spk_1:   0:00
Hello, everybody. And welcome to the show The Big Show, the most important, critically acclaimed podcast that is recorded in our living room. Hey, we got another living room episode today. So welcome. Welcome to our living room. We're sitting here all comfortable with everything as the freezing rain goes pitter pat outside her house and we're going to do something today. There's a mystery episode spice, although she's starting to suspect you suspect what the episode about mystery up. So we called that because my co host Spice does not know the subject of the broadcast, but not knowing of the subject of a podcast has never once stopped her from was spouting off about the subject. I

spk_0:   0:51
can just make stuff up all day long. So we go, Uh,

spk_1:   0:56
this one I got admit she's gonna know something about What are we going to talk about today? Well, this is North Missouri. This is Missouri. It's rural Missouri. What is the number one subject of discussion all the time here in rural Missouri? Whether the station of the weather, that's right, especially

spk_0:   1:14
northern Missouri. It's farm country

spk_1:   1:16
farm country. That's right, the weather, because the weather is everything out here whether may not be that much of a big deal. Thio. Y'all who don't live here in the country or it may be a huge deal when it's like snowy type weather and you live in places that don't normally gets. No. So I know like D. C shuts down. If they get an inch of stone, so does Atlanta to shut down. So, yeah, and if you're in in the northern part of the country, Hibbing or or Duluth, you know, six inches of

spk_0:   1:54
little that's what's the on foot here.

spk_1:   1:55
They don't they call six inches of snow in Duluth Tuesday or Buffalo with Lake Effect snows? No. Oh, my God, Feed it. So what's the point? What's the prepping point of weather? Well, I have several points I'd like to make about weather. Um, and some of this is based off of a really bad book that I do not recommend. It was a free giveaway for Audible. They have several free books to give away a month. Well, this was a book about the weather and the National weather service of the government, and it was a totally political book. I mean, it was all about the politics. I mean, this guy had an ax to grind. I'm not gonna mention I don't want people buying this book. I'm not gonna mention the author. Um, but he did have, you know, like everything we're going. I personally don't like political discussions, and I don't I don't agree with a lot of this guy's point of view. Anyway, I believe that if I'm going to read something, I gotta set my own biases aside and just listen to what he has to say. And, you know, several things he had to say made a lot of sense. And they make a lot of sense to preppers who need to pay attention to the weather. Because while I'm not a big, huge fan about paying attention to news because I think mostly it's a waste of time, weather is kind of a different story. And this book outlines the National Weather Service. What? It is what it does. And it did it compared to trash, too. Uh, like a commercial weather service. In the book, they used AccuWeather. I believe if I recall correctly, which is a commercial service, so it's actually competitors in a sense of the National Weather Service. They sell their forecasts to subscribers and they money off of this and the political point. But I'll go ahead and say What the police report book with political point of the book WAAS. They're using our resources to make money and okay, that's fine, whatever that was his political point pig. But in actuality, the real point of the book is no matter where you get your weather, well, that's from AC. You weather the weather dot com whether dot gov the Weather channel weather underground, you name it all these places, they're all All of this is based upon the weather satellite system that the United States government put up in orange. It all comes from the same data source. The differences between all these other service is, and the National Weather Service, which is the main service for whom the Noah, the 1,000,000 service or who the satellites were put up there is they're all using the same sources and then taking their own experience in going from there. My point being that spice and I learned a long time ago that everybody has an opinion and everybody's opinion seems to, uh, effect their biases, but the least biased when it comes to actual format forecast or the statistics and the maps that come from the National Weather Service. So we basically least I do. And she said, to an extent, basically think that what a prepper really needs to do is not to figure out which the company has the best thing, but learn how to read the maps for yourself. Learn how to read the data yourself because the data is available and free all. It's out there, you know. And you've got all these different people who only ask their experts. Yes, there they see things that we don't. But the process of learning how to read this stuff makes us much more educated about the weather that's going on around us.

spk_0:   6:48
You start to see the patterns yourself, you d'oh! I actually took a free online course. It was run out of Britain, so it was mostly focusing on British weather. But it was all about how to read the weather maps, and I took it just cause I was curious. Frankly, that's what I do sometimes in the evening, instead of watching TV, is they take free online courses on random things. But I recommend that sort of thing because you could really see. Now I can look at one of these radar images and have a sense for what it's gonna do and why it's going to do that thing. And I don't. I know there are built in bias is to these commercial systems because they are. There's some things that make people matter than others when they're wrong and you're never gonna be right 100% of the time when you're predicting so. They shaved their predictions toward things where if they're wrong, people aren't gonna be mad at

spk_1:   7:41
him. For example, if you say If you say, um, there's a 30% chance of rain and it rains well, there was a 30% chance, you know, you know, 30% is not insignificant, right? But if you say that there's, you know, a 5% chance of rain arrange, people get mad. They always wear high on the percentages of chance of rain. They always air Hi, not the National Weather Service Now thes the commercial service is dio they always they always go high on the bad stuff So there's a bias to, you know, How many times have you gone? Well, they're saying it will be 68 inches of stone. We only got three. That's far more common than if you were to say Well, is that we're gonna get 2 to 3 inches of snow. We got nine. You don't very very, very, very rarely see that second instance, it's almost they almost always over predict. The commercial service is weather dot com AccuWeather whatever. Because that way, if they miss a little, they still say that, right? You still say they're more accurate than done. The National Weather Service were, in fact, the National Weather Service gives her actual prediction because they have no skin in the game. They're getting paid by the government. Either way, now, I am not talking about anything other than the day today. What is it going to be doing the next eight hour of 16 hours, 32 hour storm tracking part of the National Weather Service? I'm not talking about the oceanic service I am not talking about. They're, um they're somewhat controversial to some people, climate forecasts and something not. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the day today. Here are the weather maps. This is what we expect to happen. Sort of deals. Okay. Even they will always error on the side of caution. They'll put out a tornado, watches when they're not, really, you know, it's kind of maybe sort of. You know, that's kind of iffy.

spk_0:   10:19
Well, they they put him out about three times as often now as they did when I was a kid. And it's not because the weather patterns are three times more common.

spk_1:   10:27
But to be fair now, this brings up another point I wanted to make. There's something most people don't realize, and this is very, very, very true today. And I could explain it with tonight with an iPhone. Okay, I was a kid in the 19 sixties and the 19 seventies. I graduated from school from high school in 19 eight. So I was a kid in the seventies and I was kidding that sixties okay, when I was a kid and I lived overseas, my dad was military. In the sixties, NASA had the world's biggest computers and those computers I didn't have the capacity of my iPhone right here.

spk_0:   11:27
Nothing like the data set

spk_1:   11:29
and nothing like today. So Okay, in the seventies, my father worked for an aerospace. After he left the service, he would work in the aerospace industry. In fact, I went to school in Ferguson, Missouri, As I've mentioned before, we lived in Ferguson and he worked for McDonnell. Douglas had mentioned the company does a major company that doesn't really and McDonnell Douglas used to do the computerized report cards for the Ferguson Florissant school system. The contract it out because they had the big computer. Okay, again that McDonnell Douglas big Computer, my iPhone, the weather forecasts that we get today are based on modern satellites using modern electronics, sending modern image ing down to modern computers, which have 45 50 Maur years worth of modeling to base it off. It's not the same as it was 20 years ago, you know, go back and take a good look at the history of the warning systems. Even we are able today to get warnings out. I say we have the the weather service. I'm not part of us that they were able to get the warnings out that are accurate. Whereas 30 years ago. They weren't. They simply didn't have the modeling. They didn't have the computer power. They didn't have the processing where they didn't have the satellites. They didn't have the information resources they do today. So you know people who say, Well, you know, they never weather never gets it right. That's changing a lot. This is something that I think people need to know. If she was just mentioned. Well, you know what? It doesn't really. This is like comparing the phone you had when you were a kid to your iPhone. The phone you had your kid had When we have our work, it had a rotary dial on it. It plugged in the wall with these four big silver times. Our times it was owned by A T

spk_0:   13:56
and T, and we had a party line.

spk_1:   14:00
Well, there was times we had a party line, a party line, and for those of you don't know what a party line is,

spk_0:   14:08
they're not that much of

spk_1:   14:09
a party. Actually, here where we live, party lines have only been gone for about 12 years. The last of the party lines are gone. Party lines And no, that doesn't mean you'll get Taylor. How big party. Yeah, that's the difference. So modern weather service forecasts are much, much, much better. So another part of that is we have the Internet. Now. People use the Internet to go out and check the check the weather. I mean, it's an app on your phone, right? You check the weather. My contention is that preppers should do the following instead of just looking at the weather app, which is fine. I I do that. Go out and get the information and learn how the forecasts are done. Study the charts and look out your window. Study how to predict storms and how to predict storm pass. Learn what high pressure is learned with low pressure, is learned with barometric pressure. Learn all these things and really understand him and all that information to teach you. That stuff is right there in your in your Internet, and I highly recommend we're big fans of a, uh, of a novel Siris that was based in the Napoleonic era. Patrick O'Brian's mattress, uh, Aubrey in Mattress, Siri's of Naval Warfare books were huge fans. They're amazing books and the characters in those books They're just for sailors just everyday sailors. But they are reflective of their based off of real people and based off Rheal logs and riel writings. To show that the people who were sailors in the 1800 they could take one glance at the sky and tell you what it was going to D'oh! The thing is, just knew it was immersive.

spk_0:   16:35
If you only look at the abs and you don't bother looking at the sky that you don't have any ability to look at the sky and have any suggestion or what's going what's going on. But just this morning and I was walking out to the gym, no one is gonna get nasty later. So I'm walking up to the gym and the winds coming from me particular angle from the Northeast. And I just saw in my mind the big rotating weather system it would take for us in our part of the country to get weather from that direction. I'm like, Yeah, no kidding. We're going to get slammed, and we know that's the looting at

spk_1:   17:12
Northeastern Wind. You're like worrying, especially in the winter. We're going to get it.

spk_0:   17:17
We're going to get it's warm now So we're gonna get water and then we're going to get sleet, and then we're gonna get snow on top of that. And then we're gonna go into a hard cold for about four days.

spk_1:   17:26
Any time we Northwest, wind or northeast with me in the winter of the winter, we're in for it

spk_0:   17:32
in the summer. It's nice and cooling because it's bringing cool air down from Canada, still bringing cool air down from Canada. But it's not nearly as much fun when it's

spk_1:   17:43
she's right. Well, I think you'd agree. We know we're on the backside of that spin. Now here's another. Here's another thing that I recommend that you could d'oh! If you live in an area of the country, the offer's storm spotting courses take one. I've taken two of them. They're really good. They're really fun. They're interesting. They show you a person for the National Weather Service that come in and they train you. What the various different clouds are, what the various different storm front. And it's just a really it's a very entertaining couple away. A couple of evening's worth of study so high I we recommended. We're almost always free because they want storm watchers in the in the various different areas. Yeah, they train you exactly what to look for so that you can. This is where they know they could tell by the radar where tornadoes may be forming. But they need to know if that tornadoes on the ground and storm watchers of the people who tell him hey, that tornado is on the ground six miles west of Centerville. Well, that's how they that's how they know that stuff. So I highly recommend taking one of those classes, too. So anyway, personally, Spice and I when we want to know the information, we just want a quick look. We goto weather dot gov We skipped the commercial service is and we look at the maps when we see what it looks like.

spk_0:   19:19
That's what's drawn upon my other window right here so I can see what's coming.

spk_1:   19:24
Yeah, see, that's why I This is what prompted me was she was looking at that, and you could just see that's where she was going with the which the radar. The radar says every it's does it all. So the radars today are immensely better than they were 20 years ago. I am Well, I TV weather tries me nuts, drives me up. A wall cannot stand that. I have a couple good friends who are actually TV weatherman. And I tell him, you know, Yeah, you drive me nuts because it's so formulaic. Exactly what you know. No, just stop. I don't care that there's a low weather low pressure system in South Carolina. I don't care. I'm not in South Carolina. And not only am I not in South Carolina, that low pressure system isn't coming my way. Okay, low pressure system over the Rockies that matters. South Carolina does not matter to me.

spk_0:   20:29
And if I want the rest of my life without somebody telling me to wear a coat when I know it's two degrees out there, that would be okay.

spk_1:   20:39
Okay, now, now we're gonna get into this side. Kim, tell me anything more annoying to me. Can you tell me anything that I get? Just roll my eyes about worse than windchill factor. Ah, windshield cowboy

spk_0:   20:56
index heat indexes worse.

spk_1:   21:00
Yeah, that's right there. Yeah, he did that. Okay, here's my beef with wind chill factor. Okay. Windchill factor is just because is for one purpose only

spk_0:   21:14
to make it sound worse

spk_1:   21:15
to make it sound worse than it

spk_0:   21:16
and never mention it in the summer. Although as a cyclist, I love wind chill in the summer.

spk_1:   21:21
Absolutely. Yeah, that's one thing you get. You get a good sweat on, you know, it was 92 degrees higher, you know. Yeah, well, I got a 15 mile an hour breeze. It is already a five on our briefs. I got a 25 mile an hour breeze. Cool of me. That works up to about 92. After that, it's just your big but, you know, yeah, exactly. It's wind chill factor, but you never hear about that. You hear heat index when it feels like it's unprotected. Skin feels like it's zero degrees, but the wind is blowing 15 miles. Hours of the unprotected skin. What are you doing out in the winter of zero degrees and have unprotected skin? What windshield factor is a fabrication? Only good to make people. I feel like the weather is worse than it actually is. If it zero degrees, it doesn't matter what the wind chill factor is. It's bloody cold.

spk_0:   22:15
I'm surprised you can stand all that soap box on one foot.

spk_1:   22:19
I just had it tries me and how many times I couldn't get my car to start because the wind chill factor your car has nothing to do with the wind chill factor. When Joe Factor on Lee effects animate objects,

spk_0:   22:33
well, I have more trouble starting my car when the wind chills really low cause you know, my fingers get numb faster

spk_1:   22:42
because your car windows rolled down

spk_0:   22:46
both. My car started the first time. I wouldn't be out there with the hood up. We're going on the battery and put my jump back on there found we know too well. But anyway

spk_1:   22:59
so, yeah, that was a sign. I just and I know somebody's there. Good. Bark me in the comments about this and if you listen to it. But, you know, I just hate which factory just spies that Give me. Give me a riel. You know, if the winds blowing 25 miles an hour in it's 20 degrees, I know it's cold. Come on, seriously, It's cold. It was just like, Okay, there's degrees of cool. Okay, it's cold. It's Dan cold. It's really rankled. Very dangle you know,

spk_0:   23:31
it's spit cracks when it hits cold.

spk_1:   23:34
Yeah, you know, we were watching, um, coldest town in the world. There's a YouTube video is really fun. The coldest town. What? Some place in Siberia I've read about it before. It's out in the middle of nowhere. It's in this, like valley, and we're the guys that did the did the test. He took a pot of boiling water outside, threw it up in the air. It was like 40 degrees below zero, and it's no snow. The boiling water turned instantly to snow, which that's cold. That's really cool. And then they have to use out houses there. Mmm, Anyhoo not moving there. So, yeah, that's our That's our taking on the weather. Anything else you want to

spk_0:   24:24
add? It's good to know about what's coming, even when there's not any service about there to tell you. And the only way to really do that is to pay attention to the correlation between the forecasts and the weather, you see, and the conditions you've got in the area where you live. Your mind makes the connections. If you pay attention to both things,

spk_1:   24:49
that's one very good point I haven't one other point when somebody declares It's not a fit day orbit night out for man or beast. Staying where it's warm took dreads. Tuck your heads underneath the covers. You know, if you have to break out the break out the monopoly game, the battleship game. Whatever you've got.

spk_0:   25:10
I've got tons of respect for those guys who are out there trying to fix our power lines and stuff in this weather. I don't have tons of respect for people who are out there wandering around, see how bad the roads are. Bad guys,

spk_1:   25:22
That just drives me. I'm watching, and it's always almost always. Not always. Almost always. People have no business being out in dry weather. The little old ladies they're driving around in their in their 77 Buick Europe. Crazier. Newport's you know, snows flying away, back off those rear wheel drive cars, man their use fishtailing all through Tallahassee, half with the weather like let's see what the weather's like. Not that I'm talking about any woman in particular. Lucia Well, already. That's right. That's right,