Award-winning meteorologist Rob Perillo shares insights about navigating social media, humanizing weather forecasts and reminding listeners to stay tuned for changes.

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Transcript:

00;00;01;07 - 00;00;35;02
Hal Needham
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the GeoTrek podcast. We're back in Acadiana, that French speaking part of Louisiana for a second podcast with award winning meteorologist Rob Perillo in the first podcast. And if you haven't listened to last week's episode, really listen to it. It's a journey of how Rob Perillo went from New York State, where he grew up and studied meteorology all the way down to the Gulf Coast, where he did some work in Houston and eventually over to Lafayette, Louisiana, where he's been doing meteorology for more than 30 years.

00;00;35;02 - 00;00;49;24
Hal Needham
He's won a lot of awards and he shared a lot of insights with us on how to predict the weather and how to communicate those forecast with his audience. It was a great podcast episode last week. This week we're doing a part too. There was so much substance to this. We thought, this is really a two part episode.

00;00;50;05 - 00;01;15;10
Hal Needham
This week we'll be talking about advice on navigating the overwhelming world of social media, not only for weather forecasters, but I think for any science communicators they'll find a lot of good substance in this conversation. We're also going to talk about the importance of humanizing weather forecasts and science communication. Really bringing that forecast into impacts for people and helping them understand what this means for them and their community.

00;01;15;16 - 00;01;36;25
Hal Needham
And then finally, we'll be talking about personal responsibility, about how people really need to stay tuned to changing weather forecast, weather forecast like economic forecast and traffic forecast. If you're forecasting the future, sometimes things are going to change. And we're going to talk about the importance of people staying tuned and really looking for those changes as we forecast and communicate with them.

00;01;36;25 - 00;01;57;22
Hal Needham
It's going to be a great episode today. Again, we're on the Go Track podcast. If you're new to the show, Geo Track investigates the impact of extreme weather and natural disasters on individuals and communities. Our goal is to help you improve your decision making, risk assessment and communication related to extreme events so you can take action to make yourself, your family and your community more resilient.

00;01;58;01 - 00;02;17;10
Hal Needham
Hey, you can help us stay on the air with the Geo Track podcast by subscribing to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform, your subscription helps us make more professional partnerships moving forward and ensures many more episodes of the Geo Trek podcast in the future. Well, hey, we're getting into winter time, we're talking about Louisiana, and I love food.

00;02;17;10 - 00;02;38;00
Hal Needham
I love eating. I mentioned gumbo last week. Did you realize there are a lot of different kinds of gumbo now? People in northern states sometimes don't know what gumbo is. Gumbo is really like a soup. You put rice and then you have this amazing concoction of great flavors. There's seafood gumbo. Often you'll find chicken and sausage gumbo, but it's really a winter thing when the cold weather sets in.

00;02;38;00 - 00;03;01;08
Hal Needham
People along the I-10 corridor in south Louisiana, they say, hey, it's gumbo time. And so pull up a warm bowl of gumbo as the weather cools down. And you listen to the second episode of the Geo Track podcast with Rob Perillo, a more formal introduction of this week's guest. Rob Perillo is the chief meteorologist for ATC Tv3'S Acadian as News Channel.

00;03;01;20 - 00;03;38;16
Hal Needham
Rob has 33 years of experience in forecasting Acadian, his weather and has tracked hundreds of tropical storms and hurricanes during his career, including major Louisiana and Acadian storms such as Andrew, Lili, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, Laura, Delta and Ida. It's a lot of storms that have impacted the region in recent decades. Rob is the most honored meteorologist in Louisiana and the recipient of more than 25 Associated Press awards, including the best weather cast, breaking weather and best meteorology categories in Louisiana and Mississippi.

00;03;39;03 - 00;04;02;19
Hal Needham
Most recently, Rob was nominated for an Emmy Award for hurricane coverage. In the year 2020, Rob was named Broadcaster of the Year in 2020 by the National Tropical Weather Conference, was a finalist and the only broadcast meteorologist in the country for a weather person of the Year in 2021 by the Federal Alliance of Safe Homes. Rob, so great to have you on the Geo Track podcast.

00;04;03;15 - 00;04;25;02
Hal Needham
Rob, do you have this intimate knowledge of coastal Louisiana? You have this amazing relationship with the people there for four decades now. So clearly, if there is a powerful storm or hurricane in the Gulf, probably, you know, thousands of people are reaching out to you. Can you walk us through what does that look like when there's a category, whatever, storm a day out, your social media has to be blowing up.

00;04;25;02 - 00;04;37;01
Hal Needham
I mean, do you just kind of glanced through the messages and then try to address the main ones on air? Do you try to personally message people back? I mean, that has to be overwhelming. How do you handle that messaging in the days before a hurricane?

00;04;37;09 - 00;04;58;23
Rob Perillo
Yeah, it is. It is overwhelming. And you want to be able to answer everybody and you possibly can. There are people, though, that are sending you messages through through Facebook that are trying to make life decisions on their home. And I try to I try to answer those. You know, it's like I'll have something to get out, please, because I think it's going to be bad or whatever.

00;04;59;01 - 00;05;16;05
Rob Perillo
But what I've done in the past, and I'm not sure how well it works, I'll put it in a way, a message like, Hey, I'm looking at your messages. I can't respond to each and every one. I'll try to answer as many as I can on our on air coverage or digital coverage. I'll see those messages and try to do that.

00;05;16;05 - 00;05;39;23
Rob Perillo
But it becomes an exercise in and stamina because I'm up at, say, eight or 9:00 in the morning. Look at models. I'll go ahead and I'll brief our corporate. We're owned by Scripps, so I'll be briefing Scripps Corporate on what we're expecting. And they need to make decisions. I'm building people, hotels, that sort of thing, bringing in extra reporters, producers.

00;05;40;08 - 00;05;55;26
Rob Perillo
Then I get to work. And then there's another briefing at 130 or 2:00 in the afternoon, and then you're just trying to hit on the major points of the storm. It is very difficult to put together a weather forecast for then the engineering may have questions, Hey, what are you expecting wind wise at the tower and that sort of thing?

00;05;56;13 - 00;05;56;25
Rob Perillo
And they're.

00;05;56;27 - 00;05;57;29
Hal Needham
Standing upright.

00;05;58;05 - 00;06;21;24
Rob Perillo
It's 16, 18 hour days. And of course, you get home at about midnight, take a shower. It's like, well, I guess I'll just wait until the the GFC and the euro come in and do. The euro comes in at 2 a.m. during Daylight Savings Time, so I'm up till 2 to 30 AM because I'm the type of guy like, yeah, I can look at the models tomorrow morning, the day after my wife says, Well, you could look at that same model tomorrow morning.

00;06;21;24 - 00;06;30;07
Rob Perillo
Nobody's like Naomi. There's going to be two or three model runs. Since then, I'm building a culture of what the models are telling us and do. Are there?

00;06;30;29 - 00;06;31;14
Hal Needham
Yeah, right.

00;06;31;21 - 00;06;58;29
Rob Perillo
Right, right. So that's a typical day. I go back to Hurricane Andrew. That was kind of my first storm that I covered on air and television and, you know, it hit Florida on the weekend and it hit Louisiana 2 to 3 days later. And I didn't sleep from Sunday night till Tuesday night after the storm passed. I was I was up for 44 hours straight.

00;06;58;29 - 00;07;21;11
Rob Perillo
And you find out a lot about what your what physically happens to you and mentally happens to you when you do not stop. It's very hard to go to sleep. And so you have a little PTSD going and then you finally fall asleep and then your phone rings in eight in the morning, hey, we got a helicopter lined up and you want to go check out the damage is like, what are you going to say?

00;07;21;11 - 00;07;34;04
Rob Perillo
You know, and you're out in a helicopter or in 100 degree heat and and you're not feeling too good, but you're there because you're assessing the damage and trying to get a real grip on what happened last night.

00;07;34;18 - 00;07;43;24
Hal Needham
You find it hard to turn it off, too. I mean, you're going 20 hours straight answering the life and death question. It's like, how do you say, okay, I have 4 hours of sleep, go, you know.

00;07;43;24 - 00;08;05;29
Rob Perillo
Right, right. And it's and and I will not sleep at the station. I can't sleep at the station because isn't you know, I'm off shift. The morning show is going and there papers are flying and people are talking overhead on the air and everything else. So I'll, I'll do whatever I can come hell or high water or high winds get to a hotel room nearby.

00;08;06;09 - 00;08;26;21
Rob Perillo
And I'm driven through some pretty gnarly rain bands. And in Hurricane Hurricane Rita, where I was in between 80 mile an hour rain bands and got home and and closed the garage door. And the next thing I know, I'm here. I'm seeing shingles coming off my roof and and, you know, you're seeing a solid 80, 85, 90 mile an hour gusts outside.

00;08;26;21 - 00;08;37;02
Rob Perillo
And it's like, okay, I'm good here for 4 hours. We'll see how it is in 4 hours from now. It should be a little better. And then I'll navigate going back to work and do it that way.

00;08;37;02 - 00;08;54;10
Hal Needham
Yeah, you're doing what you can to protect yourself and keep your audience informed. Obviously, it's a it's, I think, really admirable what you're doing there. Rob, I want to ask you, you've you've won a lot of different awards for excellence in broadcast meteorology. I wish we had time to go through them all. But you've won two. Yeah, unfortunately.

00;08;55;14 - 00;09;00;09
Hal Needham
Which which award stands out to you as the one that's most meaningful to you and why?

00;09;00;09 - 00;09;23;12
Rob Perillo
Well, yeah, that's a you know, I'm going to go right away to the National Tropical Weather Conference. They they gave me the John Coleman Award for 2020. Alex you know, Alex and Tim, who have put on a very good program down at South Padre every year in April, you know, they gave me the John Coleman Award, won it.

00;09;23;14 - 00;10;05;21
Rob Perillo
John Coleman was such a trailblazer in television weather casting from being the first to use Chroma Key and making weather so interesting. And I remember growing up as a kid watching him on GMA, listening to my weather radio in my Captain Crunch and watching John Coleman on the air. And they established, you know, award for broadcasting. And I know that when that when it's awarded to you by your peers, your fellow meteorologists, the National Hurricane Center directors, people that you're intimately involved with and the meteorological enterprise and see on such a regular basis that a lot of them are very close family and friends.

00;10;05;21 - 00;10;27;01
Rob Perillo
To me, that to me meant the most to be recognized by your peers. It's nice to get the awards. I've never been in this business for awards. I'm competitive. I don't want the other guy to win the award. I want to have I want to have the more accurate forecast all the time. And I want to cover the storm better than any other guy or girl.

00;10;27;17 - 00;10;50;03
Rob Perillo
But that one to me was really it felt pretty good and feels like, okay, I guess I'm kind of like the mediums of the world, you know, somebody who's an expert in my own little realm or whatever. I don't have the Ph.D., but I do have the experience and glad that was recognized and I can die tomorrow and be pretty happy about it.

00;10;50;03 - 00;11;08;13
Hal Needham
Yeah, that's awesome. The National Tropical Weather Conference, great little community and on winning that, I think it's well-deserved. Rob, I want to ask you to just with all your experience for broadcasting and just doing excellent weather communication through the decades, what advice would you give to a young forecaster coming out today?

00;11;09;02 - 00;11;26;21
Rob Perillo
Well, it's not a job. It's a commitment. You know, a lot of people, you know, we see whether it's the television world or any of, you know, it's punching in the clouds, going in and punching out the clock. Well, meteorology is a whole different animal. One where you go, you have to get so invested in the community is so hard to learn.

00;11;26;21 - 00;11;44;24
Rob Perillo
The areas and the local micro and meso meteorology that may interact with the area. And I always say, one, you have to be passionate about it. You can't be. Yeah, I'm a meteorologist, but I like to water ski all the time or you know, that's my real passion. But meteorology is my second passion. It has to be your passion.

00;11;45;04 - 00;12;12;15
Rob Perillo
And in this day and age, which is increasingly harder and harder, is being a master of your information. You know, the old days it was teletypes, die, fax machines. You had one or two models to work with. It was much simpler times. Nowadays there is so much information available to you just to make a forecast, not even listening to the noise where somebody is posting a 384 hour map on your on your Facebook page.

00;12;12;24 - 00;12;32;24
Rob Perillo
It is. It is. You do have to be really on top of these, you know, defense. Okay? These are the main issues that we need to worry about. Yeah, that's a that that might be an issue. Rainfall might be an issue, but it's all going to be about wind and storm surge. And then all of a sudden the rainfall becomes an issue or whatever.

00;12;33;03 - 00;13;07;29
Rob Perillo
So it's all about staying on top of it. Stay up to date with the mesoscale discussions that you get from, well, from the WPC or even the Storm Prediction Center, and it's going that extra mile, whether it's satellite imagery or just looking at the trends, it's really, you know, you got to be 100% all in as much as you can because there are people that are asking you very important questions on whether they should evacuate their mobile home or should get a way out of the storm surge.

00;13;07;29 - 00;13;12;08
Rob Perillo
And you want to you want to provide them with the best knowledge possible. And.

00;13;13;03 - 00;13;25;09
Hal Needham
Rob, you brought up an interesting point, too. There's almost too much information now. You almost have to sort through it and say, okay, out of these 15 things people are talking about, these are the two major impacts. Right, right.

00;13;26;02 - 00;13;48;22
Rob Perillo
Right. And I do two things when I'm presenting on the air. One, I'm a heavy duty user of mobile data. I will show the OR her model wind gusts. I'll show we have a proprietary model, a graph model that's produced by IBM show the wind gusts and show for each individual setting because we always get, well, those are going to be at my town.

00;13;48;22 - 00;14;03;10
Rob Perillo
What's it going to be at my town? And I might show you an 80 mile an hour gusts and CROWLEY And I might show you to show you on another model, a 105 mile an hour gust. They both may not happen, but average the two together. That's probably the higher end of what you're going to see coming up.

00;14;03;17 - 00;14;26;28
Rob Perillo
And then I'm a big proponent of riding getting a timeline graphic out that shows, okay, what are the major threats, wind surge, rain power outages, people, you know, you talk about what the wind is going to do, but you have to humanize that. Well, that's going to take power. That's going to take tree branches down. That means you're going to lose power.

00;14;26;28 - 00;14;48;08
Rob Perillo
And, you know, I try to even use a power outage index as provided by the weather company to show that, you know, be thinking about losing your power and what are you going to do after that. So and I like to put a timeline up there on when you're going to see the highest winds, the high surge, the the power outages and the rainfall.

00;14;48;08 - 00;15;08;11
Rob Perillo
Where is it going to be the worst and when can you expect potential flooding? And that's a graphic that serves so well, not only on the air, but also it speaks volumes on social media as well. So in this day and age, you have to find the happy medium of what you're producing on air. And how is that going to translate into a digital format as well?

00;15;08;27 - 00;15;25;12
Hal Needham
Hey, Rob, it sounds like you like to have a timeline that helps people know how they can prepare and really when they need to prepare. But it sounds like you also like to tie impacts into this as well. Instead of just saying a miles per hour wind speed tie that ended, maybe tree branches coming down, power outage going out, things like that.

00;15;25;15 - 00;15;27;22
Hal Needham
Right. Like you said, humanizing the forecast.

00;15;28;27 - 00;15;51;11
Rob Perillo
Is very important. And whether whether it's a sunny, gorgeous day, there's a beautiful you know, you can describe as much as you pan on how it's going to impact people. You know, just the forecast lately is cloudy. It's cool here on the Gulf Coast. It's a gloomy weather pattern. This is akin to anything you'll see in December, January, February, where you have this subtropical jet.

00;15;51;11 - 00;16;06;21
Rob Perillo
So kind of a gloomy chili pattern. Those who like cold weather, great. But it's also going to be it's not going to be my son. And I know sooner than later after a couple of days of cloudy skies, people are are messaging me. Hey, why don't we get to see the sun again? I'm a cane farmer. I want to get back on the field.

00;16;06;21 - 00;16;34;16
Rob Perillo
I need it to dry out, that sort of thing. So it's always about humanizing the forecast and I try to be like everybody, the weather nerd at home. And I think we have in this area, I've been fortunate enough that we have tons of weather nerds in our audience that see that. And sometimes it's interesting. I'll see the community on our on our Facebook post adding value adding to something that I posted that it's like, oh, yeah, I should have said something about that.

00;16;34;16 - 00;16;55;23
Rob Perillo
But somebody did say something about that and that's great. So there's, there's, there's a little crowdsourcing of not only forecast information, but what's going on right now and what people are seeing. And that is so valuable. So even during our hurricane coverage, I'm not only looking at my inbox, but I'm looking to see I'm trying to see when I can is very hard to do.

00;16;55;29 - 00;17;17;16
Rob Perillo
What people are posting on on my posts and are they giving me real time information to have pictures of whether it's a rain gauge or a storm surge video? And then it's always fun to see what there's always people offshore, still offshore during these storms. And I get some videos, some incredible video from folks offshore that are riding out the storm.

00;17;17;22 - 00;17;25;28
Rob Perillo
And sometimes in the case of the last year, right in the eye of the storm, just unbelievable that somebody would be riding that out Rob.

00;17;25;28 - 00;17;31;12
Hal Needham
So beyond your forecast, you're doing a lot of engagement on social media. What platforms are you on?

00;17;32;19 - 00;18;02;29
Rob Perillo
Primarily, I'm on Facebook and Twitter. I've always liked Twitter. I don't follow everybody that follows me. I follow maybe a thousand people that are in the meteorological or astronomical or science sphere. And I leverage that information because it's much more immediate. And the Facebook algorithms, rather than going back and checking my page or my messages, Twitter is great from bridging that information on Facebook for getting the message out.

00;18;04;02 - 00;18;26;27
Rob Perillo
And outside of that, I don't do Instagram. Studies say Instagram. People want to know more about you, which I have an Instagram page, but it's not a weather page. I never post any kind of forecast data on it. And I don't know. TikTok keeps knocking at the door. I don't know if I got the time for that, but I think I would need a social media director if we get to that point because I can't do it all.

00;18;27;15 - 00;18;39;05
Hal Needham
Yeah, for sure. Sometimes it's finding that balance. I like that. You said it can be interactive. You can have good exchanges with your audience, but then at some point it's like, where do you draw the line? Right? Because there are so many different platforms out there.

00;18;39;26 - 00;18;59;08
Rob Perillo
It becomes really actually an important tool after the storm because power is out. But we are getting people reporting through their cell phones and that sort of thing. So it's always nice to have that information because, you know, you go wall to wall with the storm and your wall to wall after the storm and the sun is back out.

00;18;59;20 - 00;19;20;03
Rob Perillo
But you're you're you're trying to get people out into the field, but you're also getting a tremendous amount of feedback. So we know where we need to go in the field, where the worst damage is or there's still high water, that sort of thing. So it's a great way to crowdsource. I think social media gets such a bad knock, and rightly so, in many different realms.

00;19;20;18 - 00;19;36;07
Rob Perillo
But for me it's better than waiting from the old lady from Cancun to call up and said that there's a tree on her home because the phone would ring. It's only one call at a time. Whereas Facebook, you're harvesting a thousands of points of information in an hour.

00;19;36;17 - 00;19;54;25
Hal Needham
And the interaction between some of your audience and other people. You said sometimes you'll do a post and someone might add to it or something like that. There's that, that interaction that you can't get on on phone calls. Rob one When I'm for our young professionals out there graduating from college with a meteorology degree, they're going to get into the industry.

00;19;55;05 - 00;20;00;24
Hal Needham
What do you think it's going to look like maybe 15 years from now? I mean, what skill sets are going to be most important for them?

00;20;01;24 - 00;20;27;16
Rob Perillo
You know, I've been asked that question like once over the last three decades because, you know, we we we see it all going to digital for sure. Broadcast television is is losing ground in a lot of markets in Lafayette. It hasn't really done so much that as well, because we're a bedroom community. Everybody knows everybody. And it's it's it's a little bit of an enigma in the TV business.

00;20;27;16 - 00;21;01;11
Rob Perillo
But where where, you know, we we we've moved to digital. We have dot.com, the web, social media is a very important part of it. If you're getting started in the business, you want to develop a social media following. But where I see things going going is obviously what's called OTT over the top digital, where whether you have a Roku, whether you have the CTSI weather app or whether you have Apple TV or Android or whatever consuming our information, just like it's running on television, it's not quite there yet.

00;21;01;11 - 00;21;25;21
Rob Perillo
Where we're looping, we repeat newscasts. We do have an ad new content during the course of the day, but I see all of our thrust going into that space because this is the first digital space that they can monetize better. We can't monetize social media, not that we're here to make money. We're here just to pay salaries, to keep the operation going and maybe turn a little bit of a profit.

00;21;25;21 - 00;21;54;18
Rob Perillo
But I think the over the top transmission is where things are going. So all the digital apps, just like people are cutting the cord on cable or direct TV or they're getting our signal antenna. So that's free. But it's about getting the information in a much more useful form. And the phone, as it's turned into our primary digital source of information, more so than the television, anybody that's under 40 for sure.

00;21;54;18 - 00;22;04;19
Hal Needham
Ira, when you talk about digital and OTI, you're talking about eventually getting away maybe from a broadcast on a TV and more on phones and and tablets and things like that.

00;22;04;28 - 00;22;30;16
Rob Perillo
Yeah, I don't know about that. I still think there is still space to deliver over the air. 4K picture and entertainment. I think you know how many people are looking at using their phone and then and then streaming it to their big TV. So the TV is not going anywhere because you got that big screen. It's how you get the information, the information and the conduit of that information.

00;22;30;26 - 00;22;50;19
Rob Perillo
So I'm not I'm I'm not an expert in the TV business. I just know that digital is very, very important. And I love it too, because I get to send out updates through the phone. And on a good month we have maybe seven or 8 million impressions on the phone, which is which is certainly monetizable. I don't know if we're monetizing it.

00;22;50;19 - 00;22;55;14
Rob Perillo
I don't care. But I like it because I'm getting information out and to people's phones.

00;22;55;20 - 00;23;12;14
Hal Needham
It does sound like a broadcast. Meteorology is a rapidly changing field. You have to at least stay in touch with the changes in technology and stay up to pace with that. But what I love about it too, on the other aspect, the science doesn't change. Like physics is physics. What drives atmosphere is going to be the same 200 years from now.

00;23;12;14 - 00;23;22;05
Hal Needham
So that element is really cool, I think for for an undergrad studying meteorology, physics, math, meteorology, all that stuff, that's not going to change which is cool.

00;23;22;15 - 00;23;44;19
Rob Perillo
Yeah, it's not going to change. And there are going to be folks that are going to just bag doing television and just do digital digital stuff, whether it's the podcast, whether it's a website that provides video updates. I always love We Buy Phones page on tropical tidbits when he is putting out a blurb. And I see that being not only more important but maybe monetizable as well.

00;23;44;26 - 00;24;06;24
Rob Perillo
And I think B, you know, if people are starting out, I, you know, I barely made it through Fortran and assembly language. I kind of majored in computer science for a thick six, six, two semesters. You know, I was just thinking like, I got to be I'm not going to be a meteorologist and get paid one quarter of what these computer guys are getting paid.

00;24;06;24 - 00;24;32;09
Rob Perillo
That was my thinking in college. But learn a little code if you need to. I think that's really, really important and and be a master of and you know, there are people that are really good on and and on Instagram. But and who knows what platforms are going to be coming down in the future. Tick Tock seems to be getting a lot of attention these days, but it takes a lot of time to produce, too.

00;24;32;09 - 00;24;55;28
Rob Perillo
And I don't have that time, so I'm hoping I can retire before I have to succumb to the tik tok crowd. But. But, you know, I will do it if if, if it means getting information out to the most possible people and the people that may least understand tropical systems or the younger people that, you know, remember storms as kids and they were fun.

00;24;56;08 - 00;25;01;05
Rob Perillo
Until you own a house and you have a piece of property that you have to worry about protecting.

00;25;01;22 - 00;25;11;19
Hal Needham
Sure. That that's true. That changes everything, whether it's hurricane, snowstorms, whatever. A lot of this stuff is fun when it's a week off of school, but all of a sudden when it's your house in the crosshairs, it's a little different, right?

00;25;12;01 - 00;25;36;14
Rob Perillo
That is I didn't care as much about Hurricane Andrew because I lived in apartment. I had a keyboard. So for a TV, if I go as it goes, I can replace that. Now I have a house. I have, you know, you have so much more to protect. So and and and when when it comes to our line of work, we got to be more prepared than the general public because we get sucked into a 20 hour shift and then nothing's getting done in my home.

00;25;36;14 - 00;25;52;27
Rob Perillo
We're not getting them, you know, but we my wife is very good about we get our hurricane supplies at the beginning of the summer. We get cases of cases of water. I have my generator ready to go. My window unit on my AC ready to go. So I'm prepared every season. If we lose our roof, we lose our roof.

00;25;53;15 - 00;26;05;00
Rob Perillo
But that's, you know, that's that's everybody's that way. So you prepare to a certain degree, but you do have to be prepared for long hours and no help for days.

00;26;05;04 - 00;26;30;21
Hal Needham
Yeah, exactly. Rob, we've covered a lot and you've given a lot of very practical and useful insights, not only in meteorology, but also just living in a hurricane country and in a disaster prone place. I hear a lot of perspective on just being prepared and not waiting till the last minute getting out ahead. And I think this is true for meteorologists, but also for first responders and people that during a disaster they have to be working right.

00;26;30;21 - 00;26;39;05
Hal Needham
That's not the time right to be preparing their house. They have to be on the job. I think meteorologists definitely fall into that as well as other professions as well.

00;26;39;27 - 00;26;59;06
Rob Perillo
And one of the things that's kind of just a side job here, but just talking about emergency preparedness officials and how they have to be prepared, I think we need to do a better job of, you know, a post in better job of transmitting what is a 4 to 7 foot storm surge going to look like on the west coast of Florida, which is in some areas.

00;26;59;06 - 00;27;17;03
Rob Perillo
It turned out to be a 12 or 15 foot storm surge. And not only get the emergency managers understand that, but get that to the general public. Okay, now we're issuing an evacuation. Why? Because the roads are going to be impassable. We're not going to be able to come save you if the water gets up into your home.

00;27;17;03 - 00;27;39;24
Rob Perillo
And I think there's going to be a little bit of a perspective thinking post Hurricane Ian on the on the Florida coast because, you know, every meteorologist knew it was going to be a bad situation for a large chunk of that west coast of Florida. And and being able to go back to humanizing the forecast, what does it mean?

00;27;40;00 - 00;27;49;21
Rob Perillo
You're going to have hip deep water in your street and maybe a foot of water in your home? Do you want to stay for that or do you want to get out? And of course, in some areas it was a lot worse than that.

00;27;49;23 - 00;28;05;26
Hal Needham
Rob That was one of the big lessons I learned. I'm so used to giving a range of feet of water and maybe I learned after a year and we need to make this descriptive, you know, that not only is this so much water over the ground in in your house, but it's it's fast moving seawater full of debris and full of pollutants.

00;28;05;26 - 00;28;20;10
Hal Needham
And I began to realize, well, people don't understand what this is even about. If you're mentioning eight feet of water, their frame of reference, maybe they're thinking the deep end of a swimming pool. That's all nice and clear and right. But that's not what this is about, right?

00;28;21;21 - 00;28;59;20
Rob Perillo
Yeah. There's massive current. There's massive waves. And and, you know, Louisiana, I think we we know what storm surge is all about. But you look at that part of Florida hasn't been impacted by a big storm in a long time. You have a lot of transplants that moved down there. And I think and I'm sure in the TV business, as we follow up in the future, is that we're going to hit on those things because we have a nice trend of storm surge fatalities diminishing over the last decade, 15 years, Jamie Romo has been a great part of that with the storm surge warnings and inundation levels.

00;28;59;20 - 00;29;21;03
Rob Perillo
And we're still trying to figure out how to depict inundation levels the best we can and television. But but also making that translatable and that I always like the Weather Channel when they do their graphics on what six feet of water looks like in their immersive augmented reality environment. And I think that's what people need to see. And how is that?

00;29;21;03 - 00;29;30;04
Rob Perillo
What is six feet of water? Look at my street. The cars are completely buried. You're not going anywhere. So you are going to be on your own island for days at a time.

00;29;30;16 - 00;29;38;02
Hal Needham
Yeah, those computer animations, I think to just visualize what this looks like, people can begin to say, Wow, do I really want to stay for this?

00;29;38;12 - 00;29;39;24
Rob Perillo
Exactly. Exactly.

00;29;40;03 - 00;29;49;07
Hal Needham
Rob, we covered a lot today. Really. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Right before we sign off, any last big pictures, anything to leave our audience with?

00;29;50;17 - 00;30;18;27
Rob Perillo
Yeah. You know what you were I was thinking about that. It's personal responsibility. You know, we we hear about a storm. The storm is heading in this location four days out. I'm not going to worry about the storm and I'm done thinking about it, whereas it's on you. You owe it to your spouse, significant others, your family, your grad, your parents, your grandparents to know that things change in meteorology.

00;30;18;27 - 00;30;43;06
Rob Perillo
And what we might have said three or four days ago is it's a completely different story two days ago or yesterday or what we're talking about today. That was yesterday. There's nothing more useless than an old forecast when you have new data and data that supports a forecast that you can't just assume that it's not going to be a big issue.

00;30;43;06 - 00;31;06;25
Rob Perillo
I know you talked about that in your last podcast, how people tend to get something that, okay, I'm not in danger, so I feel better about it and I'm not going to be as invested in staying on top of that information. But the onus is on you, the citizen, to know what's going on because not everybody in your neighborhood is going to know you're going to be the town crier, you're going to be the street crier.

00;31;06;26 - 00;31;43;23
Rob Perillo
Say, you know, Perillo is saying we're going to have four feet of water in the street. Are you staying or, you know, and that sort of thing. And just trying to get I mean, we do all of this social meteorology, whether it's social media or understanding social interactions and the psychology of transmitting information. And that's where a lot of work is being done in the weather enterprise, but is still what do people do with that information once they get it, or are they just tuning it out after they've already decided how the storm is going to be in their location?

00;31;43;23 - 00;32;02;28
Rob Perillo
And and I always say hurricanes and severe weather events are like a box of chocolates. We have a pretty good idea of what we're going to get, but it's like you really don't know what you're going to get until you have chocolate. You know, there's something that always rears its ugly head where? Well, that was a factor. I knew could be a major factor.

00;32;02;28 - 00;32;23;14
Rob Perillo
And it turned out to be a major factor or, you know, and you know, you do a post mortem on any storm on how well that I covered this or how well did I miss this or or that sort of thing. But the onus has to be on the consumer on the other end, on on taking action. And it's on us to suggest the actions that need to be taken.

00;32;23;22 - 00;32;43;16
Hal Needham
Rob, you touched on the concept of anchoring. There were people here at first message, they decided, right? They decided on Tuesday they're not leaving. And there's nothing you could tell them on Thursday to change their mind. That's where a lot of people can die or get in really bad situations. Right. Because they predetermined, maybe based on an early forecast, what they're going to do and they're not going to change your mind.

00;32;44;03 - 00;33;00;22
Rob Perillo
That is correct. And that happens in any day in time. You know, I have a ten day forecast. So you have a seven day forecast. But no, all the apps are doing ten days. Well, I guess we got to get in that realm and make day eight, nine, ten forecast is going to be better than the NAP forecast, but not by much.

00;33;00;22 - 00;33;19;07
Rob Perillo
But people will complain, hey man, you were going for 20% on the week on Saturday, six days from now. And now you're telling me it's a 50% chance? Well, you know, it's looking very likely that we're going to have rain. In fact, I might want to say it looks like an 80% chance, but, you know, you're doing the stats and the time away from the forecast.

00;33;19;07 - 00;33;43;04
Rob Perillo
So people complain when you just change the forecast one day to the other. So there's no amount of education that we need to do. Well, hey, we have new data. That new data we have to put into our forecasts now. And that new data supports this. The data that we were showing yesterday doesn't support that. So I'm not going to stay with a 20% chance of rain on Saturday just because I was going with it yesterday, you know, that sort of thing.

00;33;43;13 - 00;34;00;05
Hal Needham
Some of these models now all run out. You get your 384 hour. I mean, it's crazy. It's two weeks out in the future. Do you but do you try to only show like so many days just because you don't want people to get fixated on a model ten days out in the future that probably will not verify?

00;34;00;05 - 00;34;29;11
Rob Perillo
Yeah, it depends most of the times. Also the GFS or the euro, maybe out seven days. But I'm not showing that unless I've been looking at the ensemble members. I've been looking at data that supports the deterministic solution. So and I don't try to show it maybe specifically as a hurricane, I'll just show look at the Pacific water, look the way it's pooling here in the northwest Caribbean, and then it gets more globular in the Gulf of Mexico in seven or eight days.

00;34;29;11 - 00;34;41;06
Rob Perillo
So there could certainly be something up. I do like to let people know that I'm dialed in. I'm looking at the ten day forecast. Anything beyond ten days, though, is ridiculous. If 77% is even, it.

00;34;41;06 - 00;34;51;11
Hal Needham
Sounds like you don't give them a heads up. Something in general may happen, but in very general terms not to fixate on something that may happen a week from now or something.

00;34;51;11 - 00;35;09;21
Rob Perillo
And I never I never show. I try not to add a storm making landfall anywhere. So say there's a hurricane that's going to make landfall in seven days on the upper Texas coast. I'll stop my model at six days where the storm is, somewhere in the central Gulf of Mexico, because that's that's the famous point that you can bet on.

00;35;11;01 - 00;35;20;10
Rob Perillo
And you don't want to you don't want to definitively start that whole feedback mechanism where people anchor on that one forecast. We saw that with Rita, you know, so.

00;35;21;20 - 00;35;34;14
Hal Needham
Five or six days out, we're looking at a major hurricane in the Western golf. And even if the model run show it making landfall in Galveston or Beaumont or you'll hold back from that because you don't want them to say, oh, it's going to Texas. Right.

00;35;34;15 - 00;35;56;24
Rob Perillo
That's that is correct. That is correct. And, you know, sometimes you get into meteorological nirvana when the GFS and the euro are on the same page and they're showing the exact same features, seven or eight days out, well, then I'll push it that far out. But yeah, anything beyond that. And in the wintertime, forget about it. You know, much of the U.S. is the same way.

00;35;56;24 - 00;36;18;07
Rob Perillo
You know, there are just too many changes. The subtropical jet stream will bite you every each and every winter, and it does each and every winter. So the whole idea is just to develop, you know, and we talked about this earlier, you know, you're developing and Dr. Gray used to call this a culture of understanding the models. You know, you're developing a culture of what is going to occur.

00;36;18;07 - 00;36;39;26
Rob Perillo
And that, at least, I think, gives me an advantage in forecasting it, at least staying with some of my contemporaries who are very good synoptic regions and don't do what I do for a living. They're very deep in the weeds of of the thermodynamics of the atmosphere. I'm kind of less of that and more about translating that information to the viewer at home.

00;36;40;02 - 00;37;00;25
Hal Needham
Rob What I like and what you're saying, it's not just cut and dry like you have a rule, like you'll show the model out four or five days. It sounds like you're really customizing this. You're trying to understand this culture of models and how things are lining up sometimes. Obviously, we have a lot more confidence than others, and it sounds like you incorporate all of that into not only how you're forecasting, but what you're sharing with the viewers.

00;37;01;09 - 00;37;23;19
Rob Perillo
And I don't think it's wrong to say, hey, this is a low confidence forecast. A lot of people, you know, when you get at the television, be sure of yourself, exude confidence. And I do. I'm too confident in my forecast. But I want to let people know that if we're we're entering a situation where, well, my confidence in the forecast is actually below normal, because I think there's a myriad of things that can happen.

00;37;23;28 - 00;37;43;11
Rob Perillo
And Piotrowski, in South Carolina does a good job where he does different hurricane scenarios. One, it goes out to sea. Two, it goes to the west, the one that comes this way. What's the most likely that sort of thing that I think that's really good value. But just about every system that comes in the Gulf of Mexico looks to come to Louisiana half the time.

00;37;43;11 - 00;37;59;19
Rob Perillo
So we don't have too many options. Then two of the three options are going to be very bad for us. The option hitting Louisiana, often hitting Texas. We could have the same dang effect, whereas storm maybe heading over by the Florida panhandle, we could have sunny skies and not a drop of rain.

00;37;59;28 - 00;38;20;18
Hal Needham
Well, Rob, talking about confidence, look at hurricane in a large, powerful, slow moving hurricane coming into the shallow waters of the west coast of Florida. I would say nearly 100% confidence that somewhere is going to get hammered by a monster storm surge would be the code. That's where we start to get less confidence. But somewhere is going to get it.

00;38;20;18 - 00;38;37;13
Hal Needham
And I think breaking down the forecast into this is what we're confident maybe maybe we have less less confidence in the exact track, but somewhere near and to the right of that track almost certainly is going to get a big surge, you know, kind of breaking down for viewers what we're certain about and what we're not certain about now.

00;38;37;15 - 00;39;00;05
Rob Perillo
Absolutely. And when you say this confidence, this is going to be a high end event for someone, I think people pay a little bit more attention. Yeah, I think people got a little fixated on the cone, a little fixated on the line. I draw the line myself because I like to see how the line moves and our viewers here know what the difference between 50 miles makes a huge difference in where the storm is going.

00;39;00;05 - 00;39;15;22
Rob Perillo
You know, at landfall, 50 miles away from 60 miles away from the eye is a lot better than being 20 or 30 miles away from the eye by a magnitude a magnitude of four or eight or ten or 12. Ten. When you're talking about damage and impacts.

00;39;17;00 - 00;39;36;12
Hal Needham
Rob, our our listeners are just going to eat this stuff up and we've covered enough content here. I'm hoping we can make this into two podcast episodes. Actually, I appreciate you taking so much time experience. I mean, we covered a lot from tropical meteorology to snowfall in upstate New York. We covered a lot on the show today. How can people find you lastly online?

00;39;36;12 - 00;39;40;07
Hal Needham
How can people, if they want to follow you, if they want to follow your forecast, how can they find you?

00;39;40;12 - 00;40;03;04
Rob Perillo
I'm sure I'm on TV in Lafayette. Okay. Etsy.com, a social media wise is just Rob Perillo and on on Facebook it's the Rob Perillo and you can find me that way. And, you know, if you just search a short, balding meteorologist in southern Louisiana, my name should come up as well.

00;40;03;14 - 00;40;12;27
Hal Needham
Rob, I just figured out why you had so much time to spend with us today. This was the first year in like 25 years that Louisiana hasn't had a major hurricane. You probably don't know what to do with all your time.

00;40;13;02 - 00;40;37;22
Rob Perillo
And I've had lots of projects. I'm going. But we did not even get a whiff of a tropical disturbance that happened a few years ago as well. It's so interesting where all you know, between 2019 and 2021, we had ten storms, five majors and a couple of tropical depression thrown in in between. And then this year, we didn't even get a tropical wave.

00;40;37;22 - 00;40;38;28
Rob Perillo
Not that I'm complaining.

00;40;39;18 - 00;40;46;00
Hal Needham
But you're like just having such a off, basically, in that sense, right? Of not well of heightened forecasting.

00;40;46;03 - 00;41;06;03
Rob Perillo
Well, you know, everything works out for a reason. We actually just redid our studio. Okay, see, so I had to move my entire weather department out of an old studio into a conference room during the month of September. And knowing that this is the worst time of year to do it, it was a project that we were going to start in June, but it got pushed back supply chain issues, but we got to get it done.

00;41;06;03 - 00;41;30;26
Rob Perillo
Okay. And then I got all my systems back into the new studio. We started broadcasting from there like the first week of October, and I received what I asked for a quiet season because I had so many other projects going on the side. Sometimes that works out in your favor and and you have a quiet season. Even though the forecast was for a busy season, the metrics were up there.

00;41;30;26 - 00;41;53;02
Rob Perillo
And I think the will I'm looking forward to the research that shows us how how did we wind up with a normal season with a La Nina? But, you know, if you want to start talking philosophically, I think that big heat dome in the West and up towards Canada took away the need for the tropics to take excessive heat away from the tropics and send it to a northern latitude because the heat was already there.

00;41;53;26 - 00;42;09;22
Rob Perillo
I'd be I'd be really interested to find out why the forecast didn't pan out, but we still had a major hurricane hit the United States. And I don't want to minimize and it comes back to home. It just only takes one storm at your location to make it a horrible season.

00;42;09;22 - 00;42;27;15
Hal Needham
That is true if that storm hits you. It was a busy season or it was a catastrophic season. And in some cases, Rob, it sounds like of all seasons to be a quiet one this was a good one for you and Louisiana. Best wishes to you. And I'm looking forward to seeing you at the National Tropical Weather Conference online and and hopefully in person as well.

00;42;27;21 - 00;42;29;29
Hal Needham
Thanks for taking time to come in the geographic podcast.

00;42;30;11 - 00;42;35;03
Rob Perillo
Thanks so much. Our thanks for having having me again and look forward to our next visit for sure.

00;42;36;12 - 00;42;55;01
Hal Needham
Rob SA said t magnifique to a BFM on me. That was really great stuff there. Rob, you did really well on this podcast. You gave me a lot to think about. I think our listeners are going to love this content. I wanted to dig a little deeper into three things that Rob had shared in. The first is how he responds to social media.

00;42;55;09 - 00;43;20;29
Hal Needham
Boy, the landscape has really changed in science, communication and weather forecast communication over the past decades. We know the rise of social media has really revolutionized communication and on many platforms, I know some people love social media. Some people hate it. Someone just told me last week, I really hate Facebook. I know people feel that way. But in the weather world, in broadcast communications, science, communication, social media is everywhere.

00;43;21;09 - 00;43;41;29
Hal Needham
And so it was really interesting. I know for some of us it's a huge platform to reach people, but it can also be really overwhelming. I like that. Rob painted that picture of what it's like for him as a Gulf Coast weather forecaster when there, say, a hurricane in the Gulf, how he's working maybe 18 to 20 hour days, still checking the models at 2 a.m. And he hasn't even gone to bed yet.

00;43;41;29 - 00;43;58;09
Hal Needham
And he has to get up early to brief his audience. It's just you're working around the clock and then I know what it's like to to pull those days. And then notice you have nine new messages on Facebook Messenger and just overwhelmed. You can't get to it all. I really like how he said that. He scanned through the messages.

00;43;58;18 - 00;44;19;09
Hal Needham
He may reply personally to some life and death decisions, but then he'll put it away message and he'll do his best to maybe address some of the major concerns on air. So in other words, it sounds like if he's getting a lot of inquiries about a certain parish, a certain area, maybe a certain hazard, like storm surge or heavy rainfall flooding, he'll try to address that on air.

00;44;19;09 - 00;44;45;17
Hal Needham
It sounds like he's really going through social media, using that to get a pulse of his audience and then trying his best to communicate and back to people personally if he can, if not to address it on the air. I really like that approach a lot and that's something that I think I want to incorporate as well. He mentioned as well a little comment here that I thought was interesting how sometimes he may forget to say something on a Facebook post or on social media, but then someone in his audience will mention that.

00;44;45;28 - 00;45;15;18
Hal Needham
And that's something about social media, if you think about it. Back in the day 20, 30 years ago, a weather forecaster was really on screen doing a monologue. It was all of them communicating with their audience and no communication back from the audience and no interaction with social media. Now, one of the nice things, if we create and we foster this community, this, this environment for dialog and exchange of information as we grow our audience, we may forget to say something in the forecast.

00;45;15;24 - 00;45;38;07
Hal Needham
Like, for example maybe there's flood water over part of a major road. And we forgot to mention that in the forecast, someone in our audience may mention that on a comment in the social media feed. And so as we create this in this interactive culture, I think there's really an exchange of information that goes both ways. And sometimes even to listeners on our audience will be responding to each other in a healthy, constructive way.

00;45;38;13 - 00;45;58;03
Hal Needham
Social media really gives this ability for a lot of dialog and a lot of interaction, and it reminds me, too, I don't need to do a perfect forecast. I can go back and add comment or I can I can still interact with people. If there's something that I forgot to mention in my original forecast, which is what Rob touched base on, and I thought that was really great insights for our audience to hear.

00;45;58;09 - 00;46;18;16
Hal Needham
A second topic that Rob touched on in this in this interview was the importance of humanizing the forecast. So if we're communicating the wind speeds going to be certain miles an hour or the flood water is going to be a certain depth, what does that mean? What are those impacts? I think the more that we can really connect forecast to impacts, that's really going to help people out a lot.

00;46;18;16 - 00;46;39;29
Hal Needham
So a hurricane's coming in or if, say, a tropical storm, sustained winds of 65 miles an hour. What does that mean? Right. And even mentioned that he'll get into talking about maybe tree falls or power outages, maybe structural damage on homes, but trying to help people really paint a picture of what this means for them, whether it's a wind forecast, flood forecast or something else.

00;46;40;17 - 00;47;12;12
Hal Needham
Imagine you're a weather forecaster in Colorado and we're expecting a big early season snowfall. Well, are the ski resorts going to open and, you know, start in earlier season or not? I know ski culture is huge in the Rocky Mountains, so people may be wondering, wow, already a big snowstorm in October. Are the ski resorts going to open up if you can tie the forecast and an extreme weather event into impacts whether that's negative impacts or even positive impacts like skiing in a in a ski area, that can really help people get a context for this.

00;47;12;12 - 00;47;32;06
Hal Needham
What this means for them and their lives. And that's really what climatology and climate science is all about. It's all about painting context for what this weather event, what does this mean? How unusual is it and how does this change things? I remember when I moved to the Gulf Coast, I was living in Baton Rouge, and I think when there was a forecast for some drizzle and mist with a low temperature of 31 degrees.

00;47;32;16 - 00;47;50;29
Hal Needham
I grew up in northern states that didn't seem really that strange or exceptional at all. It shut down south Louisiana because they don't have a lot of plows. They don't they don't really salt the roads or the bridges. And so 31 degrees with mist and fog can really ice up the bridges. And there are a lot of bridges in south Louisiana.

00;47;50;29 - 00;48;20;19
Hal Needham
So that's just really like shut down all of society, even though it was, you know, Misty and some freezing drizzle at 31. So the more that we can really paint the picture of what this means, that can help people interpret the forecast and keep in mind, the United States, we have a very mobile, transient society. So if you're a say, a forecaster in your area, you may say, well, this is obvious to everyone what this means, but of the new people that maybe moved to your area that haven't been there for an ice storm before, haven't been there for a snow storm or a hurricane.

00;48;20;27 - 00;48;40;10
Hal Needham
So it's always good to remember people may be visiting on vacation or people may be new to the area. So, again, south Louisiana, 31 degrees. I didn't even think that would be a big deal. It really shut down society for a whole morning and it makes sense, right? We have a lot of snow plows. When you get maybe one or two freezes a year that that maybe shut down some bridges.

00;48;40;10 - 00;49;01;29
Hal Needham
So the more that we can tie to the impacts, the better. Rob really did a great job of explaining the importance of that, how he tries to do that, really stay engaged with the audience and try to paint a picture of what this weather forecast means. Lastly, I really like what Rob shared about the personal responsibility. People have to stay updated, especially on on a forecast that has a lower confidence.

00;49;01;29 - 00;49;26;23
Hal Needham
You know, sometimes we have a very high confidence forecast. We see higher pressure, high pressure setting over our area. We know it's going to be a sunny day. Light winds almost 100% chance we're going to nail that other. The forecast gets quite complex and there might be low confidence things may change. And he mentioned you know to encourage the audience stay tuned uncertain forecast we have less confidence in this or the models show disagreement so we can expect some changes.

00;49;26;23 - 00;49;44;22
Hal Needham
Stay tuned. So important, I think, and we saw this a lot with hurricane in this last that the original forecast showed landfall north of Tampa really impacting the Tampa metro area. A lot of people in Fort Myers had Tampa on the brain and said, hey, this storm is going to be a Tampa event. And all of a sudden things changed, things shifted.

00;49;44;29 - 00;50;09;10
Hal Needham
And I like that. Rob mentioned that data change as new data and information come in. We update our model and we update our forecast. And he mentioned to you that that he will communicate to his audience it's really their responsibility to stay tuned in, to stay updated. With that, I think of when I've flown on airplanes, you know, sometimes we get we check in to a flight and we get a we get a boarding pass and it shows the gate number.

00;50;09;10 - 00;50;27;11
Hal Needham
And sometimes we see that gate number and check out I know sometimes people have nearly missed flights because the gate changed and they just had in their brain. They looked down once. They didn't stay in touch with the latest information. They didn't keep looking at the screens when we travel and we fly, it's good to keep an eye on those screens because sometimes the gate changes, right?

00;50;27;11 - 00;50;49;28
Hal Needham
Things change. And it's our responsibility to stay tuned for those changes. This was a really good reminder of Rob that we need to for our science communicators, for our meteorologists out there, encourage our audience, especially on a low confidence forecast. Stay tuned. Things may change. And Rob does a great job of explaining why there is uncertainty in the forecast, what the models are saying, and trying to unpack that a little bit for the viewership.

00;50;50;08 - 00;51;17;08
Hal Needham
So they can understand not only what the forecast is, but how confident the forecaster is in that and how things may change, keeps them engaged, keeps them tied in so that they're not blindsided, that if things change. Rob, thank you so much again for coming on the Geo Track podcast. We got a lot out of this two part series with you, learning a lot about how to communicate the weather, how to stay engaged with your audience, and really communicate high impact forecasts that that touch a lot of people and can help people make great decisions.

00;51;17;25 - 00;51;39;07
Hal Needham
Thanks to our listeners for staying tuned to go track. I know we have listeners all over the country and this is really going to wrap up a lot of our our podcast focused on hurricanes. We've been very hurricane heavy over the last several months, in part obviously because it was hurricane season. And we just have so many great communicators like Rob and others that that are engaged with audiences along the Gulf Coast, in the southeast US coast.

00;51;39;13 - 00;51;57;23
Hal Needham
We're going to pivot next week. We're going to go underground. That's right. We're going to talk about sinkholes, caves, fissures, tunnels in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. We're going to do a two part series on what happens when the ground opens up underneath your buildings, your roads. It's going to be really interesting. New episodes of geo tracked podcast that are going to get into some different hazards.

00;51;57;23 - 00;52;19;09
Hal Needham
So but Rob, what you shared on this podcast I think relates to people that deal with any hazards and any disasters, whether you're in tornado country, big snow country, earthquake country, this concept of understanding our risks and how to communicate that that never gets old. And that's something we love to focus on here. On the Geo Track podcast, special thanks to our marketing and development and publicity team.

00;52;19;09 - 00;52;43;11
Hal Needham
Many of them are based in South Alabama, but we have really partners all over the country that help us to get this message out and to really develop these podcasts as well. But special to our GEO track team that does a great job every week helping to disseminate this podcast, and especially Jeremiah Long. He works with me every week, putting a lot of music to it, editing the audio, and he does an amazing job of making the sound very professional and cleaning up where I make mistakes.

00;52;43;17 - 00;52;57;12
Hal Needham
On behalf of Geo Track, this is Dr. Howe. I'll be back with you next week with this two part episode. Sinkholes, Caves, and what happens when the ground opens up underneath us? This is Dr. Howell signing off from the Geo Track podcast.

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