Weathered (2020)
From wildfires to hurricanes to tornadoes, Weathered will teach you about natural disasters from the people who have survived them, as well as what you can do to prepare.
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Weathered
2020Seasons & Episode
The 2020 fire season is devastating communities, forcing thousands to evacuate, and choking the air with smoke. In this episode of Weathered, scientists and Native leaders tell us what we can do to reduce the harm fires can cause through design, building materials, and listening to the land. We’ll even watch researchers burn a home in their lab to identify weak points and make them stronger.
Hurricanes are the most powerful and destructive storms on the planet. And 2020 surpassed all expectations, becoming the most active hurricane season on record. Have you ever wondered how they form? Or how climate change is affecting them? And, what can we learn from a lab that creates hurricane-force wind and rain to test the strength of houses?
The Colorado Basin provides water to over 40 million people in 7 US states and it is currently experiencing its worst drought in 1200 years! But unlike other droughts, our actions may have real impacts on the outcome and it’s very likely that we can make things better.
Landslides occur in every US state, killing dozens and costing around $4 billion each year. One of the most devastating in US history struck on January 9, 2018 in the town of Montecito, CA. We traveled to Montecito to speak with experts and survivors about what they’ve learned following the tragedy as well as the lessons we can all apply to be more prepared for these common hazards.
Over the last decade, the American Northeast has seen more than a 200% increase in the frequency of large, disruptive snowstorms. This trend surprised nearly everybody, including many of the top experts, as they had been expecting a warming planet to translate into milder winters. But in many locations, we have seen just the opposite. So what’s going on here?
What are the most important essentials you’ll need to comfortably survive a disaster? In this episode of Weathered, Maiya explains the basics of disaster prep and shows you what she keeps in her own go-bag and pantry. She also explains her thought process behind why she’s included each item to help you get started on your own path to preparation!
The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a sleeping monster lurking just off the Northwest coast of the United States. It extends 600 miles between Northern California and Vancouver B.C. and experiences a massive megathrust earthquake every 250 years on average. The last one happened 321 years ago and scientists say there is a 30% chance we’ll see another in the next 50 years. It’s expected to rival the 9.0 quake that shook Japan for 6 minutes, which was the most destructive natural disaster in human history. It unleashed a tsunami that reached 100 feet in some areas, caused an estimated $360 billion in damages and claimed some 16,000 lives.
Each year, flooding kills around 100 Americans and displaces some 75,000 from their homes. And as sea levels rise, storms dump more and more rain, and dams and levees continue aging and increasingly failing, the cost of flooding is increasing. So what do we do? Well, it’s not an easy question to answer. But there are many innovative solutions that communities are taking.
A fire tornado, or “firenado,” is exactly what it sounds like: a tornado made out of fire… and it is truly the stuff of nightmares. The most famous example occurred when the 2018 Carr Fire spawned an EF3 fire tornado with estimated wind speeds of 143 mph! And as climate change drives increasing wildfires around the planet, it only makes sense that we see more fire tornadoes as well.
In the 1930s, the US experienced what has been called its greatest ecological disaster, when the dust bowl ravaged the midwest, eroding topsoil, destroying crops, and displacing millions. As climate change exacerbates drought across much of the US in places like Phoenix and the larger Colorado River basin, damaging dust storms and haboobs are becoming more common, leading many experts to ask whether we might be heading into another dust bowl?
Have you ever wondered how hail is formed? Or just how big it can get? The largest hailstone ever recorded, the size of a volleyball, fell in Vivian, South Dakota on July 23rd, 2010. Large hailstones often shatter windshields, destroy crops, and can even smash through roofs. And while hail might not terrify you in the same way a tornado or earthquake does, each year hailstorms cause between $10 and $20 billion across the U.S.
For decades we’ve been planting trees in hopes of reducing carbon pollution. But when it comes to carbon sequestration, have we actually been getting it all backward? As the UN Climate Conference (COP26) approaches this November, the topic of carbon capture and storage will be hotly debated. In this episode, we travel to the Pacific Northwest forests of Oregon to see what we can learn about forest carbon sinks from Beverly Law and her groundbreaking research with Oregon State University’s Department of Forestry.
Out of the 1,500 or so active volcanoes around the world, one erupts every week on average. And the hot plumes of ash they spew into the atmosphere are the most dangerous part of these eruptions, threatening downwind communities and even planes. It turns out these plumes also form lightning! Tune into this episode of Weathered to learn how the volcanological community is using this terrifying weather phenomenon as an early detection system that might just save your life!
With climate change making temperatures more extreme each year, like we recently saw in the great Texas freeze and the Northwest heatwave, large-scale power outages become a matter of life and death. In 2003, a few transmission lines went down in Ohio leading to cascading failures across the Northeast and over 50 million people losing power. This event points toward critical vulnerabilities in our aging power grid. Could a power grid failure during an extreme weather event be the most deadly weather disaster in US history? And what can we do to prevent this kind of catastrophic blackout? Watch to find out.
We asked six experts where the safest, or least risky, places will be to live as the climate changes and weather becomes more extreme. And the answer is pretty surprising. In this episode, we look at many hazards from temperature, storms, drought, farming, wildfire, polar vortex, hurricanes, sea-level rise, crop failure, extreme heat, and even economics. We look at the effect of climate on future migration patterns in the US and talk to someone who left New York City after Hurricane Sandy and identifies as a climate migrant. She ended up moving to the safest county in the United States from a weather and climate perspective. We’ll reveal where she went and why.
Sea level rise is a problem that is garnishing increasing attention among both scientists and the media. And as climate change continues to warm the earth, the current rate of 1.4 inches per decade is projected to increase, with NOAA predicting another foot of sea-level rise along US coastlines by 2050.
Both climate models and the laws of physics are clear: more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere means warmer air and oceans, which means more energy for bigger, stronger hurricanes. So why is it that we haven’t seen a clear signal from climate change in the hurricane record over the last century? This episode explores groundbreaking research on this question and looks ahead at what we can expect in the coming decades.
Wildfires have been consuming homes at a staggering pace over recent years. In fact, structure loss in these fires has grown by 10,000% in the last 13 years! And as climate change further warms the air and dries out the land, this trend seems to be going the wrong way. For decades, conventional wisdom has told us that fuels reduction is key to protecting communities. However, the latest research shows that weather actually plays a big role as well. In fact, the vast majority of structures are destroyed in wind-driven fires. Tune in to learn how we’ve been focusing on the wrong problem and what we can do about it.
A “tipping point” is when a system, with just a small amount of additional energy, is pushed from one stable state to another suddenly and dramatically. This can be a chair falling backwards. Or it can be a major earth system collapsing.
Rivers and reservoirs around the world are drying up this summer as record droughts rage on. Lake Mead along the Colorado, the largest reservoir in the nation, hit record lows. And experts fear the dreaded deadpool – where the reservoir can no longer provide water or hydropower to downstream communities – may only be a couple years away. The Yangtze river in China, the world’s 3rd largest by volume, got so low that Sichuan province experienced rolling blackouts as hydropower had to be severely rationed. And the Danube that runs through eastern Europe is currently at half its usual levels for this time of year.
Subduction zone earthquakes are the largest and most destructive on earth. In 2004 a 9.1 megaquake hit Sumatra off the coast of Indonesia, unleashing a massive tsunami and killing 227,898 people. And in 2011, the Tohoku earthquake struck Japan, killing around 20,000 and triggering the infamous Fukushima nuclear disaster. In the Pacific northwest lurks the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which has been dormant for centuries and is overdue for its next “big one.” In this episode we’re going to tell you what experts think is the best way to survive this inevitable disaster.
Massive floods have been sweeping the globe lately. British Columbia flood of 2021, Pakistan flood of 2022, Hurricane Ian, New Zealand, Las Vegas, Kentucky, Yellowstone National Park flood, and floods in California are all recent examples of such tragic flooding. And many are blaming climate change. But at the same time, we’re also seeing record lows in rivers and reservoirs all around the world. So what’s really going on here? Is the answer Hadley Cells changing? Is it the moisture capacity of the atmosphere?
Global sea level is rising at about 0.14 inches per year. This gradual change may seem small until something catastrophic happens. That’s what happened when category 4 hurricane Ian made landfall at Fort Myers on September 28, 2022, bringing with it some 15 feet of storm surge.
RCP 8.5 has often been referred to as “business as usual.” It describes a world in which the world chose to take no action on climate policy and fossil fuel use continued expanding unchecked, leading to a truly apocalyptic future for our climate and everything living on our planet – including us.
Arctic air is warming, causing scientists to worry that melting arctic ice and snow could also lead to a sudden permafrost thaw and release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) that forms a climate tipping point or feedback loop. Thawing of permafrost has been linked to releasing zombie viruses not seen in millennia and the feedback loop mentioned in the recent IPCC report and COP27 focused on the release of CO2. This is something that US leaders hope the 2022 climate change bill (Inflation Reduction Act) could help avoid, but the trigger temperature may be coming sooner than expected.
The Arctic is experiencing global warming much faster than the rest of the world. A new study shows four times faster, in fact! One of the effects of this accelerated warming is the melting sea ice in the Arctic. And researchers off the southeast coast of Greenland have started to notice some surprising and alarming new guests.
We’ve all heard that we should keep global climate change under 2 degrees of warming, but did you know that there are many places around the globe that have already surpassed that? Some places around the globe are experiencing extreme warming, while other places have actually seen some cooling. So what’s with all the variation?
As climate change continues warming the planet, a new and invisible killer is emerging: extreme wet bulb temperatures. This refers to a potentially lethal combination of heat and humidity that, until now, have appeared somewhat infrequently around the world. But models predict that they are likely to become an increasingly big problem in the coming years. In this episode we explore the intersection between climate science and meteorology to tell you where in the world is most at risk of these increasingly dangerous conditions.
With unprecedented heat waves and record-breaking global temperatures, it’s hard to believe that there might be a place on earth that has actually COOLED since the industrial revolution. But, it turns out, there is such a spot. The COLD BLOB off of Greenland mystified scientists for years, but new studies have uncovered a scary reality - this cool patch might be a warning of the impending collapse of a vital earth circulation system. And the consequences would be dire.
As our world gets warmer and our climate gets more extreme, the weather isn’t the only thing that’s changing and becoming more dangerous. Disease vectors are also spreading and becoming riskier to humans. In this episode of Weathered, we delve into some of the world’s biggest killers, like Malaria and Dengue, but also discuss some smaller, and creepier threats that are becoming more common.
If you take a look at global temperature graphs that span millions or billions of years, you can see that our planet’s temperature has made wild swings. In fact, the Earth used to be completely covered in snow and ice! So, what’s the big deal about a few degrees of warming today? In this episode of Weathered, we take a deep dive into Earth’s climate history in order to better understand our current moment.
While tsunamis happen all over the world, really big ones are rare. But, they can be truly devastating. And what’s more, the West Coast of North America is overdue for a subduction zone earthquake and tsunami that has the potential to be the biggest disaster the U.S. has ever seen. So, what is the single most important factor determining whether or not YOU survive a tsunami? Watch this episode to find out.
For decades, Antarctic sea ice trends seemed to defy climate change, until…they didn’t. In just two years, Antarctica lost as much sea ice as the Arctic lost in three decades. And a new study asked the question: does this represent a STATE CHANGE? And what would that mean for one of our most iconic species, the emperor penguin? Watch this episode to find out.
Flooding is getting worse, and not just from hurricanes or rising tides, but from increased heavy rainfall. In this episode, we dive into the changing landscape of flood hazards. First, we journey to New York, to visit Hoboken, New Jersey, and Hollis, Queens, two communities facing different flood challenges. Then, we explore First Street's groundbreaking new risk map, pinpointing high-risk areas. Want to take action against flooding in your area? Watch this episode for insights and solutions.
From wildfires to hurricanes to tornadoes, Weathered will teach you about natural disasters from the people who have survived them, as well as what you can do to prepare.
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