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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this podcast, we take questions from curious kids all over the world, just like you, and we find answers. On this episode, we're thinking about the weather. Well, kind of. Today's show is about the weather, but we're not really going to be talking about wind, rain, and snow. We're going to be talking about the weather.
We're going to answer the questions you've sent us about the people who predict the weather, meteorologists. Hi, my name is Ira. I'm seven years old and I'm from Austin, Texas. How do people predict the weather and how do they know what it's going to be next from day to day? My name is Maya.
I'm five years old. I live in Montreal. How does the weatherman know what it's going to be like every day? My name is Hannah and I'm from Inland, Florida and I am five years. How does the weatherman know if it's going to rain or not?
Good questions. We can all look up at the sky or look out the window and see what's happening with the weather right now where we are. But how do those people on TV and radio or running that thing your adults might check on their phone, how do they predict the weather that's going to happen in the future?
We found someone who can help us understand this. My name is Jessica Neelis, and I'm a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Burlington, Vermont, and I would love to teach you guys about weather forecasting today. In your questions, a lot of you asked about how a weatherman forecasts or predicts or makes an educated guess about the weather. The actual term for the job is meteorologist, and both men and women can, of course, be meteorologists.
My name is Dylan. I'm five years old. I live in Florida. Why is a meteorologist called a meteorologist? Meteorology has nothing to do with meteors. Meteorology is the study of the atmosphere, the air above us. Meteorology is also sometimes called atmospheric science. And people go to college to get degrees in atmospheric science or meteorology.
There are lots of different kinds of work you can do in atmospheric science. So let's get into it. Here are a few more of you wondering how this all works. My name is Preston, and I live in North Carolina. How do weather people know how the weather will be? My name is JC. I'm nine years old. I live in Colchester, Vermont. And my question is, how can people predict the weather?
Hi, my name is Cooper. I am seven years old. I live in Warrenville, Illinois. And my question is, how do meteorologists know the time of when the storm's coming or the tornado's coming?
Boy, a lot of you are wondering about this. Jessica Nielis says a weather forecast starts with information gathering. The National Weather Service is an agency of the United States federal government, and it makes weather forecasts, warnings of hazardous weather, and other weather-related things for all of us, and for other organizations to use for protection, safety, and general information.
And that organization, the National Weather Service, has a lot of tools it uses to gather data. There are observers who send us their reports every day and also people who call us after different weather events happen. They're just using their eyes. That's how they observe what's happening? Sometimes just their eyes, but they also have official equipment from the National Weather Service. They have cameras.
thermometers and they can read temperature and dew point. They also, some people have anemometers in their home which measure wind speeds and directions. And most importantly, they tell us about how much precipitation has fallen and also measure snow in the wintertime. And precipitation is the stuff that falls out of the sky, right? Exactly. Rain, sleet, freezing rain, snow.
And there's also drizzle and there's other variations on those. But all of those observations we gather together to know what's happening on the ground before we can start thinking about what's going to be happening soon.
And there's also ways that we get information from the sky. So there's weather balloons that are launched, not at every weather service office because they're actually quite expensive, and they space them out across the country so that we get a good idea of what's going on everywhere. And as the weather balloons go up through the atmosphere, they measure those different elements going up through the sky so we can have a vertical profile knowing what's happening. And that also, all of this data will later help us
With our computer modeling, that helps us know what will happen. What does a weather balloon look like? Because in my mind, I'm...
trying to figure out whether I should be picturing the kind of party balloon that you might have at a birthday party or like a hot air balloon that a person could be in. But if it's measuring things, it has to have tools on it. So can you describe it? Sure. I used to launch these weather balloons in one of my previous jobs and they're really big. The balloon itself is a white or tan or yellow kind of shade and they're very large. I'm not sure how many feet across, but
at least like six feet wide, huge balloon. You could fit a person inside of it? You probably could. And then there's strings attached to it. And from the strings, we have a box, which is called a radiosonde. And the radiosonde has different weather instruments attached to it. And then there's also another string and a parachute. So when it eventually comes down, the parachute helps it from crashing too quickly to the ground.
So, as the radio sound attached to the weather balloon goes up through the sky, it takes observations and it talks to the computers in our office to tell us the different levels and the different observations going up through the sky. We also have radar, which are also spread out across the country.
All over the place, we have radars, and that tells us where and when it's raining, and it can also tell us how hard it's raining. And our newer radars, which are really great, have a lot more capabilities looking through precipitation as it's falling to tell us different things about the rain. And this is very helpful, especially during severe thunderstorms.
We won't go too deep into it because we could do a whole episode on radar, but can you just explain a little bit about what radar is? Sure. So there's a big dome and inside it is radars.
rotating instruments that look outside and they look up, they look at a level close to the ground and then they go up little by little by little in increments and keep looking through the sky. So we get like a profile of what a storm looks like as the rain is falling and the radar will send out a signal which then bounces back to the radar and as the signal comes back to the radar it tells the radar what it's seeing.
We also have satellites, which are rocketed into space, and then they reach their orbiting position, and they rotate around the Earth. And it's like a giant camera in space that is taking a picture of the Earth. So we use satellites very extensively in forecasting to see what's happening across the whole world, and especially over the oceans, because over the oceans we don't have all these other observations that I mentioned to you.
though there are boats and buoys that will also report back. But the satellite is very helpful over the ocean. And also just to give you a really big picture, the satellites are the first thing I look at when I sit down is to see what is going on.
across the country. When she says she looks at the satellites, what Jessica means is she's looking on her computer at the pictures the satellites are sending back to Earth, which can show precipitation. So they're showing pictures from above of what is happening on Earth, like rain and wind and clouds and other things that a satellite might be able to see from above. There are websites and apps where you can see the weather satellite and radar pictures as well.
So meteorologists use all of these tools, radar, satellites, weather balloons, buoys, observer reports, so much information. Now how do they put it all together to make an educated guess about what the weather tomorrow might be? So all of those things you mentioned help give us an idea of what's happening right now or what just happened. But then all of these measurements are taken individually.
by computer models that give a forecast of what they think will happen. And then we are able to look at the different computer models and help to get a feeling for which one might be performing best for a particular storm. And we use the models to look for patterns based off of climatology, which is what you would expect to come up with a forecast, which is what is going to happen.
A computer model is a computer program that uses past weather data and information about weather patterns to predict what is likely to happen as the weather develops into the future. Climatology is looking back at weather that has happened and recognizing patterns that may happen again in the future and recognizing different things that cause different patterns to happen. So a forecast, we look at
each day, what's going to happen over the next week. And sometimes the forecast follows climatology and we're able to say, I remember an event like this five years ago, and this is how it played out. And that can help you in your process of forecasting. But
Also, we have to learn to expect the unexpected because lots of things change. Weather's very changeable, so we're constantly updating our forecast all day. And the science is evolving, so we're learning more and more about it as well. I think the important thing to understand is that that's what you're talking about. All of these tools and all of the research that's been done on patterns and how weather typically behaves...
gives you an idea of what is coming in our direction. Because it's not just that the satellite shows you that there's rain somewhere else and that you can tell that the wind is moving it this way, because you then have to know whether the rain is going to stop or get harder or move in a different direction. And so all of those things that you've just been telling us are what come together to make you be able to say, I think this is what's going to happen, and then for the National Weather Service to put that out to people so they can be prepared. Right? Right.
Right, there are a lot of little pieces to the puzzle that have to come together in order to create the forecast. And a colleague of mine here likes to describe it as making chocolate chip cookies.
And he describes it as you have a lot of different ingredients that are all separate to make cookies. You've got flour and sugar and butter and chocolate chips. And you don't have cookies until you bring it all together. So when you bring it all together, then you can come up with a forecast to go forward with and to share with all of our partners in the public so that they know what will happen. And since the National Weather Service is a United States government agency, it belongs to everyone. So its forecasts go out to the public.
In fact, whatever source you or your family uses to get your weather forecasts, they probably use data from the National Weather Service. Coming up, we'll talk with someone who brings the weather forecasts to life on television. ♪
This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm. In this episode, we're answering all of your questions about weather forecasting. I am Addie. I am six. I live in Maine. And my question is, how do people know what the weather is the next day? Hi, my name is Alex. I'm six years old. I'm from Richland, Michigan. And my question is, how does the weatherman know what's coming?
We now know how the government scientists at the National Weather Service make their forecasts. But many of you wanted to know how the people you might see, say, on TV giving that weather forecast, how do they do what they do? I went to one of our local TV stations here in Vermont to talk with a meteorologist who's probably one of the most well-known people in our part of the world.
Maybe Vermonters just really like to talk about the weather. I'm Tom Messner, chief meteorologist at NBC5 in Burlington, Vermont, in the United States. And where are we right now? We are in the studio where we broadcast during our newscast the weather segment.
So what I'm looking at here is there are a lot of cameras. There's what you would call a set where people might be standing at a desk and they might talk to you in front of a screen. And then there's this really big green screen. Do you use that, Tom?
I do use that, and that has changed everything in the world of weather since I started. I've been at this for quite some time. Back in the old days, you had a real weather map behind you, and I know on TV in this day and age, it looks like there's a map there, but there actually isn't. What we do is we have computers that have weather maps in them, and we're able to massage the maps and draw things on them and make kind of...
It's kind of like a super PowerPoint presentation.
where we put things in order to show you how the forecast is going to play out over the next 10 days in our case. So much like the National Weather Service does, we take a look at all the data that comes in. We take a look at things on the computer. What is the radar saying? What's the satellite saying? Is it colder where our weather is coming from? So we can kind of make a prediction of what's going to happen. So we take that information. We then make the weather maps.
that would help us tell that story on television. So we then have our super PowerPoint, a bunch of weather maps and graphics in a row. Then the third part of our job, after we put makeup on our face, which is kind of weird, by the way, we go in front of this green wall to present it to everybody at home.
And the way this green wall works is that in the back room, they have all kinds of fancy machines that have buttons and levers and things like this. They can take the maps in our computer and make them look like they're behind us with that fancy green wall. They're actually not there. So if you're in the studio, you're looking, you don't see the maps because they're not there. But when you're watching television at home, they are put there electronically.
All right. So we heard from the National Weather Service about some of the tools that they use, that they deploy to try to get a sense of what the weather is actually doing now and then how their computer models help predict or guess what the weather might be in a couple of days. So if the National Weather Service, the government, is putting up weather balloons and satellites, what do you do? Are you a scientist? Are you a broadcaster? I mean, how do you think of your job? Hmm.
Well, I think of my job as both those things. I kind of think it has a three-pronged approach, which is to say we do what they do at the National Weather Service.
which is to say we do our own forecasting here. So we have the same data that they have, and much of it comes from them. National Weather Service keeps an eye on average temperatures, what was the high, what was the low, all this kind of thing. So we actually work with them to a certain degree and use their information.
to put on TV. Oh, you know, we had a record high today. The old high was, you know, throw out a number from 1945 that came from them. But in addition to that, I know you mentioned the data that comes out from the government. We can get our hands on all of that same stuff. So we are making weather forecasts very similarly to the way they do.
So you're using that data and then you're saying, here's what I think is going to happen based on the data that the government has or that is coming out that's available to me. And so your job is to then...
look at all of that, know what it means better than maybe I know what it means, and then tell me so that if I'm sitting at home watching you on the broadcast, I know whether I need to wear my jacket to the bus stop tomorrow. Yes. And that's where we get to get a little fancier than, say, the National Weather Service because we get to deliver that information to you in our own special way. So we might go in front of the Green Wall,
and say, hey, you're going to need a jacket tomorrow, and you might see some silly little drawing of a shivering person or something like that. Sometimes you see some of this, and that's what makes it really fun to do our job. So we do take that data, and we're very serious about trying to make an accurate weather forecast. Then we put it all in that super PowerPoint, and that's kind of the second thing we do. And then the third thing is to present it on TV.
And what we do try to be very conscious of is to not be too overly scientific, which is to say we're using science every day, day in and day out. But we kind of try to make it a little relatable for the average person because what you said, Jane, is exactly right. Do I need a coat tomorrow? Is it going to rain? Will I need my umbrella? Is it going to be a great day to ski? We have a lot of super mountains around here today.
So we try to get into that kind of thing, lifestyle stuff, in addition to just giving you the scientific outlook of the forecast. So what happens? I mean, people who see you on TV think that you're giving us...
the truth about what's going to happen. But what we've learned in this episode is that weather prediction is an art and a science, and it's a prediction. It's a guess. It's a best guess based on the science and based on all the information we have and based on what has happened in the past about what might happen in the future. But it's impossible to be totally accurate. So what happens when you get it wrong? Now, wait a minute here. First of all, one thing we found
One thing we found for sure is that weather forecasts have become way more accurate than they were when we started, which is to say we feel like we have a very good handle on the next day. And then the second day is very good still. Third day, starting to get shaky. You know, you get it into day four or five and then beyond.
It's not as good. So the farther out you're looking, you know, the rougher it is. We now do a 10-day forecast. And when we talked about should we do this, there was a lot of back and forth about, I don't know, because day nine, day 10. But what we found by talking with people is that they want it anyway. And here in Vermont, people are just very weather savvy and they realize, okay, we're
They're giving it the best shot right now, so we'll see how this goes, and they're very forgiving. But to get back to what you asked, yes, there is the odd occasion when it's like, oh, you know, we're going to see rain tomorrow, so watch out. And all of a sudden, it gets three degrees colder than you thought it was going to be, and it's a bunch of snow.
I find that here people are usually pretty forgiving about that, but you do have to keep your head low. You know, if you go to the grocery store, they're going to give you a hard time. Usually, you know, it's a needle situation as opposed to really getting mad at you, which is kind of nice. Coffee shop, they know where I'm going to be in the morning, so they'll give me a hard time. But I think that because more often than not we do a pretty decent job, people are having more fun with it than being mad about it.
I asked both Jessica Neelis and Tom Messner why they wanted to study the weather. Well, I've always loved science and math as a child growing up. And then I took earth science when I was in high school in ninth grade. And we did a unit on weather. And I just thought it was so neat that we could look at weather maps and know what type of clouds would be moving in. And at that point, I thought, I could do this forever.
So that's what I ended up doing, and I love it. My job is different every single day, and it's always challenging, especially in Vermont where we are because the weather's really hard to forecast. I think it's fun. It was really important to me to do something as a career that I really thought I would enjoy doing. I'm a real people person. As my grandma used to say, she goes, Tommy, you should be a salesman because you're very good at talking and
And I think that you would really sell a lot of things. And that's always stuck with me. I mean, we're going back so many years. But in a way, that's kind of what I do. You know, we're trying to sell the weather forecast to people. And our job is to get viewers to
It's just, to me, every day coming to work is something new, different, and fun. And with the weather changing every day, you know, it keeps things interesting. And we here in Vermont, we get it all in terms of, you know, the four seasons are truly four seasons here. So it keeps, I think, things really interesting. And Tom Messner says there are a lot of ways to be a meteorologist or a climate scientist without being on TV. If you're interested at all in weather forecasting,
The person you see on TV, that is just one tiny avenue you can take to be a
A weather scientist, you know, the National Weather Service, the military, a lot of companies in this day and age, higher meteorologists, maybe power companies, they need to know if there's going to be ice on the lines. They need to know when there's going to be, you know, a lot of wind because they could have power outages, things like that. So if you are thinking to yourself, I don't know if I want to be on TV, I don't know if I want to put magic on,
makeup on every day. I don't know if I want to be, you know, if that fits into who I am. If you're still interested in atmospheric science, there's plenty of other avenues to take and still use that knowledge. And it's, they're all great jobs. So now you know a little bit about how people are able to predict the weather.
Let's recap. They use all kinds of tools, from satellites to buoys to weather balloons, to find out what's happening with the weather around the world right now. And then they use their knowledge of weather patterns through history and computer models that give some ideas of what the weather might look like in 5 hours, 24 hours, or even a week from now.
and then they find a clear way to communicate that information to all of us. Remember, when you're listening to a weather forecast, keep in mind that it's likely to be more accurate, more right, for the weather that's coming up later today or tomorrow than the forecast for the weather a week from now. A lot can change in a few days, and it's hard to predict weather four or five days out.
So you can probably bet that if a meteorologist says there's a 100% chance of rain tomorrow, you're going to want to wear your rain boots and maybe your rain jacket to school. But they won't know how much rain is going to fall a week from now with anywhere near as much certainty until closer to the day. Got it?
Okay, that's it for today. Now, if you have a question about anything, really anything, have an adult record it. It's easy for them to do on a smartphone. And then your adult can email the file to questions at butwhykids.org. Tell us your first name, where you live, and how old you are, or any of that information you want to give us, and what you're wondering about. We will do our best to get an answer for you. But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public Radio.
Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, you know what I'm going to say, right? Stay curious. From PR.