Dwight Silverman

Yeah, we know, we know. There was no Q&A in November. We really have no excuse, other than inertia and maybe a food coma late in the month.

Yeah, that’s it: Blame the turkeys!

Anyway, that was then and this is now. Here’s our December Q&A all wrapped up with a pretty bow for the holidays. If you’ve got a question about the weather you’d like answered, drop it in the comments, or hit the Contact link at the top right of the page.

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Q. On Sept. 20th, my family went to an Astros game, where 3-4 home runs were hit by Houston. Of course, the train gets moving and there’s the cannon/fireworks. Eventually, a “cloud” forms inside Minute Maid Park. My daughter, Winter, was fascinated. So how do clouds form? And how did a “cloud” form in Minute Maid?

A. The reader above told a good story about this whole experience and how it fascinated their daughter, which we trimmed down for length. It’s a good pair of questions! First, let’s talk about soon-to-be Daikin Park (so weird). We’ve all seen it at a game where the Astros do anything. The pyrotechnics go off and the “cloud” usually hangs around at some fairly consistent height.

So what’s the deal? Well, Minute Maid Park is mostly an indoor ballpark, so the cloud stays inside and just gradually disperses. But sometimes that process takes a little while. The reason is likely because MMP is acting like its own little atmosphere. As you go up in altitude, the air typically gets colder, right? Well since MMP is indoors, and the A/C is always running, that cold air actually sinks. Hot air rises, denser cold air sinks. So within MMP, you have setup what we call a temperature inversion where it’s actually warmer as you go up in altitude.

Sit in the nosebleed section of the ballpark for one game and then in the front row downstairs in another and you’ll notice a bit of a comfort difference. Unless you had the ability to sample the interior “atmosphere” of the ballpark, I’m not sure at what height that inversion would occur, but it probably varies from game to game depending on the ambient temperature outside and how the A/C is running inside. So smoke from pyrotechnics probably gets “trapped” under that inversion and just sort of stratifies and lingers. This is a microcosm of what occurs in places like California’s Central Valley (tule fog) or in the Salt Lake City area in Utah. Cold air gets trapped in a valley, and a steep inversion forms and pollution and clouds and fog are all trapped under that inversion.

So, how does a cloud form? Well, the ballpark “cloud” aside, an actual cloud needs two basic ingredients: Rising air and moisture. Moisture evaporates from the ground, lakes, oceans, etc. As it does so, it turns from liquid to gas, or water vapor. That vapor rises, and at a certain point, when the air cools enough, it can no longer hold that moisture, so it has to convert back to a liquid or solid. For a cloud, the air cools, condenses, and you are seeing the formation of liquid or ice crystals on what we call condensation nuclei. This can be anything from dust to salt from the ocean to volcanic ash. Earth is big, and there is lots of stuff floating around suspended in the atmosphere. When this process occurs, we “see” the cloud.

I’ll point you to this NASA site for more information. No need to rewrite an already good explanation! There’s also a link at the bottom to an experiment you can run to form your own cloud in a bottle!

– Matt

Q. I have appreciated Matt and Eric’s weather forecasting and coverage for several years. I have a 7th-grade son who over the last year has become very interested in weather and has expressed an interest in becoming a meteorologist in the future. He followed the Atlantic and Pacific hurricane/typhoon information this season and even looked at websites that show various weather forecasting models. I say that just to confirm his strong interest in this science. I just wanted to ask if it would be possible to get any kind of feedback on things to know at this point as we begin to explore this career and even possibly what universities we could look at that have strong meteorology programs.

A. There are so many paths into meteorology and at your son’s age, I would just encourage his curiosity at this point. He should continue to look at weather forecasting models and get a sense of when they’re accurate, and when they’re not. During hurricane season I encourage him to follow the National Hurricane Center and read their forecast discussions. There’s a lot of good and understandable information there. The Tropical Tidbits YouTube channel is also very informative and, again, something he should be able to digest. For a little bit more of an academic perspective, the standard introductory textbook is Meteorology Today, and it is available online if you don’t want to find a used copy.

Given the rapid advances in AI weather modeling it is a little bit difficult to predict what the field will look like five or 10 years from now. But as long as your son has a good grasp on the fundamentals, and can communicate with his audience (whether it’s in videos, reports, or whatever) than he should be well suited for success in forecasting. I have found that it is as important to be able to communicate your findings as it is to be able to make a credible forecast. So encourage him to write as well!

– Eric

Q: My sister lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., and this year bought a home there facing the Gulf. (Bad timing!) When Hurricane Milton came through, it went in just south of them and they had less damage than Hurricane Helene just before, which passed by them to the west. I know the “dirty” side of a hurricane is on its right side, but what happens when a storm like Milton comes ashore, moving directly west-to-east, rather than south-to-north like most Gulf storms. Is the dirty side then to the south?

A: This is actually a question we get often. During hurricane season we usually tell people not to necessarily focus on the exact track of the storm because the impacts of the storm usually extend far from the center. Well, for certain impacts, like storm surge, the exact track of the storm can matter a LOT!

In Florida’s case, specifically Tampa, we’ve now seen multiple instances of why storm track is so critical. Storms like Idalia last year caused some moderate flooding around Tampa, but Helene was much bigger and stronger this year, thus it caused much more significant flooding because Tampa was south of the storm receiving winds out of the west, which pushed the Gulf water into Tampa Bay.

When Milton hit, although Tampa saw some rough wind and flooding from rain, they did not see much surge. Why? Because Milton went south. Winds in Tampa were out of the east and northeast, which actually pushes the Gulf away from Tampa. Back during Irma and Ian, Tampa Bay saw such wind out of the northeast that Tampa Bay actually drained out and people were (unwisely) walking “in” the bay! Both those storms missed Tampa, again to the south. So for Tampa specifically, it’s all about geography and exact storm track.

But because of how the earth and atmosphere work, the “dirty” side with the strongest winds and worst hurricane conditions will always be the northeast quadrant of the storm. The implication for us in Houston? A storm coming into our south, like Beryl caused impressive storm surge in Galveston and Surfside Beach. A storm coming in near Galveston, like Ike, caused impressive storm surge in Galveston and on Bolivar but not nearly as much down in Brazoria County. The situation here is a little more straightforward than in Tampa that has its worst storms coming from the west. The rules are a bit different there.

– Matt

Q. What’s SCW’s view on the time changing stuff? I HAVE to take insulin at the SAME time every day. It takes me 3 days to adjust my dosage time EVERY time the clocks reset. I really don’t see any point in resetting clocks 2x a year. Why would it be beneficial? …. from a meteorologist point of view?

A. I don’t think a meteorologist’s viewpoint is any more special than that of anyone else. But speaking for myself, I don’t like the time change. It definitely confuses my larger dog, Mars, who is accustomed to eating dinner at 4 pm, sharp. And for humans there are a whole litany of reasons, including your insulin needs, why changing the time for even an hour is problematic. So my view is we should choose a time, and stick to it.

The origin of daylight saving time makes sense, in theory. It is an effort to align the daylight hours to the time when most people are awake. So in the United States we have “daylight time” during the summer months (hence we use CDT for Central Time) and “standard time” during the winter months (CST). I am writing this on Dec. 21, the winter solstice. Sunrise today (standard time) where I live in Houston was 7:11 am, and sunset was 5:26 pm. Six months from now (daylight time), with much longer days during the summer, sunrise will be at 6:20 am, and sunset at 8:23 pm.

So what would happen if we picked either standard time or daylight time, and stuck to it? Here’s how those times would look in each scenario.

Standard Time	Daylight Time
December sunrise: 7:11 am	December sunrise: 8:11 am
December sunset: 5:26 pm	December sunset: 6:26 pm
June sunrise: 5:20 am	June sunrise: 6:20 am
June sunset: 7:23 pm	June sunset: 8:23 pm

So the question is, which would you prefer? For me the answer is clear. I would prefer Daylight time for the entire year. But opinions will vary.

– Eric

Q. I love your Space City Weather app on my iPhone and check it frequently. I also look forward to the notifications each morning when you have a new post. They recently quit coming, and now I don’t get them anymore. I’ve turn notifications off and on again in the settings, and even deleted and reinstalled the app. Nothing works. Can you help?

A. Unfortunately, we can’t help, at least not yet. The tl;dr to your question is: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We’re aware of the problem and have looked at several possible causes. Our developer, Hussain Abbasi, has played with potential fixes but so far: No joy.

It’s a mystery. And while everyone loves a mystery, this is an exception.

We do know this: It seems to mostly (and maybe only) afflict Apple devices.

Hang in there! Once we figure it out, we’ll let everyone know. And thank you so much for reading us and using our app, even if notifications have gone silent on your iPhone!

-Dwight

We’re cutting it so close to the end of the month that it’s … scary! 👻 But here’s October’s SCW Q&A post, just in the nick of time! As usual, Eric and Matt address a wide variety of topics from the solar flares and the damage they do; to the damage a Hurricane Milton-type storm might do locally; to classic weather maps with front lines … and more!

Got a question for next month’s entry? Drop it in the comments below, in the Contact link above, or on social media at […takes long breath…] Facebook, X, Threads, Instagram, Mastadon or Bluesky.

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Q. Whenever there’s a solar flare big enough to push the Northern Lights as far south as Texas, I always read that they can also disrupt communications and even affect power lines. But I have never seen reports of that actually happening. Are there any instances of flares disrupting these things?

A. I recently wrote about solar storms for Ars Technica, so I’m familiar with the issue. Just to recap: solar storms are triggered when the Sun ejects a significant amount of its magnetic field and plasma into the solar wind. When these coronal mass ejections reach Earth’s magnetic field, they change it and can introduce significant currents into electricity lines and transformers, leading to damage or outages.

The solar storms we’ve been seeing of late, earlier this month and back in May, were very strong, rated G5 or ‘extreme’ on the most commonly used scale. There have been some modest effects, such as on satellites. But by and large, our planet’s strong magnetic field has shielded us from the worst. The sobering thing to think about is that these recent storms, although strong, are far from the strongest storms imaginable. The most intense geomagnetic storm on record occurred in 1859, during the so-called Carrington Event. If such an event were to happen today, it likely would be rather damaging to our power and telecommunications systems. But just how damaging? We really don’t know for sure.

– Eric

Q. After seeing Hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton and seeing all the damage, what would have happened if we had been hit by Helene or Milton? I live on the border of Bellaire and Houston and love living here. I am seriously considering moving.

A. What would happen? Bad things. It really depends on where a storm makes landfall, but for the purposes of this question let’s say the storm makes landfall at San Luis Pass (the southern end of Galveston Island), perpendicular to the coast. We’ll focus on Helene, since it was stronger at landfall (140 mph sustained winds). This is what I consider to be a realistic worst-case scenario for the Houston region as it puts a significant storm surge into Galveston Island and Galveston Bay, potentially also pushing a large surge into the extensive chemical facilities along the Houston Ship Channel. This is an environmental disaster waiting to happen.

Worse, however, would be the winds. Such a track and landfall intensity would put a majority of the greater Houston area under Category 1 to 2 winds (approximately 40 mph higher than experienced during Beryl). This would likely knock out electricity not for days, or weeks, but rather months for some people. Damage to roofs and structures would be catastrophic, likely exceeding $200 billion. The long-term consequences of the power outages, future insurance costs, and damage would likely forever alter our community. Sorry for going so negative, but a powerful Category 4 hurricane striking Galveston Island and moving into Houston is exactly the kind of storm that keeps me up at night. I very much hope to never live to see it.

– Eric

Q: I have been astounded by the sheer volume of, for lack of a better term, hurricane denial following Hurricane Milton. Aside from the weather control/manipulation “preposteria,” there has been a great deal of discussion of Milton being a lesser storm at landfall (Cat 1 or tropical storm) than the 120-mph Cat 3 figure given by the National Hurricane Center. The basis for this claim is focused upon observed sustained wind values on land as the storm moved inland. With a storm like Milton, what are reasonable expectations of observed wind speeds given the 120mph max sustained values at landfall? How does the interaction with land affect observations? How do observed values in other storms correlate with NHC figures?

A: This is a great question, and it’s a great opportunity for education. In terms of “weather manipulation,” we’ve already addressed how this is simply not possible to do with a hurricane. So I won’t dwell on that. But there is a huge, huge misconception on hurricanes and wind speed.

Land affects wind speed. Because there’s so much “stuff” on land (trees, buildings, rocks, dirt, etc.) there is friction to slow the wind down. Compare running your hand over the surface of a bathtub to a surface of sidewalk concrete. There’s a difference there. Wind will slow down significantly over land than water. So when you have hurricane hunters measuring the intensity of a storm over water, they’re getting what is basically a “true” capture of what’s happening because the surface winds are dramatically less impeded by friction when they’re over the ocean surface. But every hurricane will have lower wind than that on land. With every storm, we have people, even meteorologists complaining that no one observed wind on land at the levels the NHC said the storm was at. Scientifically, that’s what is supposed to happen! It’s not always easy to explain to people though. Some even say it’s “their” way of hyping up a storm.

Every so often a storm will be able to mix down stronger winds over land, something that is dependent on a number of things. We probably saw this with Beryl here in Houston where we had 80 mph wind gusts make it well inland. That doesn’t mean that Beryl was a category 2 storm at landfall (that will be assessed in the postseason), but it was a case where the measured intensity of the storm over water matched what was observed over land as well.

There’s a broader point to be made here that would qualify the Saffir-Simpson scale for hurricanes as an antiquated way of measuring a storm’s true intensity and power. But the simpler point here is that measuring wind is hard, and the system we have now is what it is. So now you know: Friction is usually your friend.

–Matt

Q: Does the surface temperature over land have any effect on how quickly a hurricane/tropical storm abates? Nighttime temperatures fell to the mid-40’s in Asheville, NC. If it had been that cold on September 26-27, would the storm damage have been less severe to any significant extent?

A: Simply put, the answer is that it has little impact. If a hurricane is coming, the circulation ahead of it will almost always usher in warm, humid air concurrent with the heavy rain and stronger winds. In this case, Helene approached from the south and tracked just southwest of Asheville. Because of this, winds were out of the southeast ahead of the storm, which tapped into much warmer and humid air. Had Helene tracked 250 miles east of where it did, winds in Asheville would have been out of the north and it would have been much cooler and less humid. Basically, the track of the hurricane helps dictate the temperature, but the intensity of the hurricane is unlikely to be impacted in any way by the actual land temperature.

Now, land can impact a hurricane via the brown ocean effect. Essentially that’s when the ground is either so saturated ahead of a storm or so much rain falls in front of the hurricane that it acts more like a shallow body of water than land. It also needs to be warm. In that case, a tropical storm’s intensity can ebb more slowly or in some cases it can even maintain intensity. It’s unlikely that happened during Helene, but we have seen that in other storms before. This was most notable during 2007’s Tropical Storm Erin in Oklahoma and north Texas.

–Matt

Q. Love your reporting. Just curious, is there a map that shows where fronts are on the map and their path? I see it on tv weather all the time and with all the talk about fronts pushing through, I was just curious the best way to see those fronts on a map.

A. The best such map available online comes courtesy of the National Weather Service, and it is updated daily during the pre-dawn hours. Here’s a direct link to the national map, and here’s the overview page. Note that if you click on the “animated forecast maps” link from this second page you can see a seven-day forecast that includes fronts. Enjoy!

–Eric