[Music]

it's a category 2 hurricane out here did the Western eye come ashore yes it did it came right across right down over top of us right there there is the hurricane landfall project truck it's all set up strapped down we're going to turn all the switches on in just a little while standing outside of the Chevy Tahoe we are getting into the eye wall of hurricane Jean right now core came in on Shore here along the Southeast coast of
these little bullet cams right here that we will use to record that
[Music] surge hello again and welcome to another edition of stories from the hurricane highway I am your host Mark suth great to be here with you again as we continue our journey Back In Time time travel
yeah right here on the podcast looking back at 2015 and we're going to start things off with the solving of a mystery

remember towards the end of the last episode I was looking through different pictures and I was like hey what is this
picture of me on an airplane I'm flying back I was trying to get a picture of a thunderstorm out the window and I couldn't figure out what it was from there were no tweets about it it's very odd and I was like does anybody remember where I went towards the end of June 2015 and I just kind of left it at that like oh well maybe it's just some random pictures that apple had mixed into the
the folder there the way I save all these things off my camera roll on these old portable hard drives so I was doing show prep for this episode going back
through that folder it's called 103 apple on my Seagate portable hard drive
you get all these subfolders 103 Apple 104 apple and each of those has hundreds of jpegs andov files and miscellaneous

stuff screenshots you name it they have metadata you know that tells you the date the location the image type how big it is the pixels and whatever and um lo
and behold there were more of these pictures in that folder the subfolder or whatever it is folder Apple 103 and I was like oh yeah that's what
it was and the answer is I forgot I had

gone to Bermuda in 2015 uh towards the end of June just kind of as a followup to see what was
happening in the wake of Hurricane Gonzalo uh in 2014 so that's what that
was I had gone over to Bermuda and I stayed um with Jamie and uh his family
they had a guest house I spent a couple of days there I met uh and saw Jay Korea
again over at the Swizzle the Swizzle Inn and bar or whatever it's called
Swizzle in and Swagger out um and I had
a good meal over there I remember that I went back to grot Bay and I actually went swimming in the Crystal Caves or whatever it's called um in the grot Bay
Resort and uh walked the rail line it's really safe in berm rarely does anything ever happen to anybody over there so I was able to walk around at night and do time lapse pictures at night um with my GoPro at least I was trying to um anyway
that's what that was I went back uh just checking on the weather station that was left over there after Gonzalo I didn't
bring it back I left it I mean Jamie had mounted it up on his chimney and yeah I
know it's like why do they have Chimneys in Bermuda but he did he had a chimney and uh he mounted it on there with hardware and you know he's in construction Bermuda Soler so forth and so on so you know just kind of checking on it uh the little computer it was like an Acer or whatever um and um I think we all went
to dinner I can't remember where we went it was somewhere in me to Jamie my wife my wife took care a few years later his
wife and me we all went to dinner I
remember I got like I think they call it Rockfish or something like that it was really good uh caught right there off the the shores of Bermuda so that's what
that was all about mystery solved Mark
went to Bermuda that's what that picture was from let's see who's texting me all
right nobody of any significance right now now they can wait um I don't know if
you can hear that but when the phone anyhow 2015 Hurricane Season

moving along and I was looking at Wikipedia again here you've got the hurricane Center's tropical Cyclone report and reports plural um the advisories you know there's a lot of data and historical
information on all of our past hurricane Seasons out there Wikipedia and the people that help to build the Wikipedia
content generally do a pretty good job especially with rather geeky stuff like
hurricanes and weather celebrities people get in and they fuss with it yo get all kinds of nontruth information in
there right but most hurricane stuff is pretty straightforward cuz who's going to who's going to futs with that right and that's a good forl a word Fu TZ futs

all right so um um 2015 Hurricane Season

this was interesting uh the first paragraph here it was the last of three consecutive
below average Atlantic hurricane Seasons
so 2013 which you know that was like a 9
minute episode right something like that
2013 was nothing we remember 2014 for me

I was busy but it was a Down Season in
2014 2015 we ended ended up with 12

tropical Cyclones 11 of those remember
depressions count 11 became name storms
and then we had four hurricanes and two majors and we only had about 68% of the
normal Ace that year to just kind of jump way ahead that's how it all ends so
between June though and the last system

and when it dissipated which was November 11th got to love the stats man just right here I can read them off yeah the first system formed May 8th of course that was Anna in my backyard the last system dissipated November 11th and
our strongest hurricane of the Year almost a category 5
waen and um we're going to end this
episode with waen this will be a fairly long episode lots to talk about including the very stressful situation in and around Walkin

but yeah so hurricane season is getting ready to start in Earnest as they say
you know we're in June we're getting into July things should start picking up in August and September climatologically speaking and
you know is that El Nino going to just shut everything down um we didn't know
you know you don't ever know for sure uh
but we were going to be ready so Carrie and I still working on projects related
to these new remote cameras testing a
different color of uh remote camera box
uh a yellow one in fact of the Pelican 2050 case and those we still use even

today in uh many situations actually they use they are used for our GoPros now um but yeah we were testing that and

just making sure we were ready in case
as I like to call it one of these storms
you know they say it's it only takes one uh maybe that one gets past the goalie it's like the perfect shot so to speak to use a sports analogy we wanted to be
ready so yes I go to berm at the end of
June now we are into the first part of July and it's kind of Stormy as yo would expect in the summer in and around Wilmington and um various pictures here and there on my Twitter and it's funny

there is the picture I'm looking at the advanced search on Twitter storms off to
my West as I fly into ilm from Charlotte
and I remember that's the what I was asking about in the last episode like where was I that's so funny I was in
Bera but I didn't tweet about being in Bermuda I don't know why but whatever it
wasn't secret it's like all right so
anyway now we're into July and the first thing that catches my
attention here is Eric Blake National
Hurricane Center forecaster and an acquaintance of mine uh good guy got a
family I like family people you know they're awesome I have a big family Eric's a good family man very smart forecaster and he was posting on Twitter

remember I call it Twitter formerly known as X he was posting on Twitter uh

about the CFS the good old climate forecast system the monthly output in a
gif animation and it showed uh lots of
greens deep greens and dark Blues

indicating positive anomalies in the
Western United States the Southwest coming up through northern Mexico and Eric says the latest CFS offers lots of Hope for El Nino that El
Nino is coming easing the California and Southwest us drought and then of course I'm always looking for the clues about the Hurricanes um and I was like well I do
see some deep Greens in the Gulf of Mexico too yeah maybe that's hinting at
something so that started July we were just all kind of waiting to see what was going to happen and not much happened in
the early part of July so I'm going to kind of bounce back and forth between my Twitter and the Wikipedia stuff here uh

so yeah we had Anna and of course that was in May and then we had tropical storm bill that was in
June talked about that last episode Carrie went out to High Island and the
Boliver Peninsula and that area and kind of covered it on Ustream for us at the
hurricane track family then in July we had claudet and

this is one of those situations where you know yep we're in an yo year cuz yo
get these weird mid latitude developments right off the Carolina coast we saw that in 1997 with a couple of systems and I
think that one of might have even been a Claudette maybe even bill in '97 where
they formed like right off the Southeast coast and then out they go they get caught in the Westerly and they head out into the Atlantic sometimes they can curve North quickly enough to clip the
Canadian maritimes um claudet came close to doing
that so claudet was a shortlived system 50 m per hour tropical storm formed right off the North Carolina Outer Banks and it it just got caught in a
mid- Latitude trough and out it went and
it only lasted for a day or so then we
had um a big break not much at all for

over a month until we got to Dany
and it's interesting Dany was way out in the open deep Tropical Atlantic and that was August 18th and this one kind of gave us this
Vibe like oh that's that that's out in the Deep Tropics it made it to 125 mph
so a solid Category 3 and it was headed toward the northern

Lesser Antilles area right and it was like all right maybe we're going to have a cap bird season we'll see and then
Danny it was a small system and that's important when they are small and compact like that man they can ramp up really quick and it did it made it to 125 Peak intensity 125 milph but they

can also get hammered by wind shear and
dry air very quickly and the negative
effects of that dry air and increase Shear largely due to the increasing El Nino in the Pacific just C it off and it
never made it past the islands so there's that category 3 though nevertheless added a few Ace points and
then we had Erica and Erica was one of
these that like looked like it could have some potential of being like a sleeper yo
know like it could get through and it could be 2015's Andrew there were the
long range computer models that suggested that Erica could make its way toward toward um Florida you know coming
up kind of stair stepping its way up out of the Caribbean that kind of thing and
um this is a good kind of point to bring
up sort of a subtopic another little tidbit of information regarding 2015 as I'm tracking Erica I do remember communicating with
Brian Norcross at the uh The Weather Channel
all right and this is important because
I didn't have a contract with the Weather Channel in 2015 and there was really no Rhyme or
Reason to it they were kind of reorganizing some things there was no
it's just business that's what Brian told me um we stayed in touch with each other and I was like you know when are the powers that be are going to you know
are we going to do do another contract is are they seeing the AL Nino and they're like eh we don't want to fund that and whatever and again look if it's a business and they can do what they want and if you take it personally yo need to move on cuz you know unless you're just having beefs with personalities and I certainly I don't think I've ever done that in my career maybe once or twice with people but it's mainly them not me you know how they say
it's not you it's me usually in the situation it is them that I don't get along with but you know it wasn't that it was just strictly business they were the weather channel was doing more of uh buying footage when necessary um I think and not necessarily
Contracting with people like me and and
that hurt it's like well come on man 2014 was great but they opted not to so

I did not get A99 in 2016 for 2015 work with the Weather Channel and it's just factual you know that's just like you won't hear me mention the Weather Channel and me working with them in 5 because we did not have an official relationship but that's what I'm saying it's just kind of neither here nor there yes it's a negative for me because I could have used the income and the support for whatever I wanted to do but it just didn't happen and it's like all right well bummer uh and which actually
there's a couple things about it it really helps to inform there's that word again I learned that from Mike Watkins that helps to inform and motivate and whatever something that's going to happen in 2016 that's just hugely important which
we'll get to all right and it you know

really motivates me to continue to work
with the support that I do have people
like Carrie that were helping out other folks in the crowdfunding world we did have a couple hundred people in our hurricane track premium side um and you know you you just yo
take what you got got and you just worry about what you can control and you move forward to the best of your ability and so that's what I did and I would certainly make sure that we we were going to be darn ready because now that I was not tied to the Weather Channel in 2015 if another Network CNN MSNBC Fox

anybody AI weather Weather Nation didn't
matter if they said hey we'd like to pay you $5,000 to cover such and such
hurricane for us I could do that I'm just saying so I was I was a free agent all right so we get through uh you know

July no Atlantic activity that's going to threaten the US to speak of but there
is one important thing that happened
related to kind of directly I guess the
elino in the Pacific and we'll get to that very important and impactful event
after the little bit of a break here [Music]

[Music]

all right and we're back now stories from the hurricane Highway Talking impacts out west from Hurricane Dolores

in the Pacific um nothing in the Atlantic you know July was pretty dead
for the most part and um so we're backtracking a little bit I know I got into August there with Erica but July

was impactful and I tell you I wish I had gone out there for this that would have been great another reason why it would have been really nice to have the support of The Weather Channel again in 2015 but yeah like I said it is what it
is you do the best with what you've got you just move forward um but yeah Dolores was a big deal interestingly enough it never made landfall it was paralleling the Mexican Coast the Baja and then it died out over the colder Waters Southwest of Southern California however the
remnants moisture that's pretty much what that means right brought tremendous
rain to Southern California and the
Southwest us 4 in in San Diego and Los
Angeles and that doesn't sound like a lot in some of these deep southern US
states I get it you know you can get 4 Ines of rain in an hour and it's like hey we got 4 Ines woohoo but the desert
Southwest you guys should know that is a really big problem and those rainfall rates among other things caused a bridge on Interstate 10 to collapse injuring a person one person and a road was watched out on the California state route out there 78 near the California Arizona border and this was about $50
million worth of damage like the actual

damage that it caused but then the side effects the lingering impacts IND direct impacts economically because I 10 was bleeped for a while you know and that's
a major Corridor I took it uh in

2023 that's an episode far down the road
but I've done that route where I've driven from Palm Springs to Phoenix and you know I know it's like
wow you can imagine this getting washed out and it certainly was from Doris once
again emphasizing rain is an impact

and a major one at that luckily um
nobody was killed from the flooding actually somebody was killed from a lightning strike from some of the convective activity in California but
yeah $50 million of actual where stuff as damaged or destroyed and then I don't know how they measure the economic impact of the supply chain you know we
weren't really talking about supply chain much in 2015 we certainly would 5 years later and Beyond um
but uh that's got to be disruptive all those big tractor trailers and I again I saw it in 2023 a little glimpse into the
future future episode hurricane Hillary I went out for the remnants of that same kind of thing copious rainfall lots of flooding not luckily nothing washed out uh along I 10 or whatever other areas were but that was a big deal hurricane Dolores back in July it formed on July the 11th and it finally dissipated on the 21st stayed offshore of the whole
Pacific Coast out there but the remnant moisture doing its damage literally in the Southwest United States
so yeah back to Erica in the Atlantic we're into August now towards the end of August this one I remember talking with Norcross down at the Weather Channel and there was just something about it that it looked like it might try to sort of

make a comeback you know we saw with Harvey in 2017 again a future episode that's going
to be an epic episode or two by the way
but uh Erica just kind of had that it gave us that feeling and that's what Andrew did in um 1992 these systems kind of EB and flow
they battle the shear if they break out of it and the dry air they find a pocket
that's two or three days long TimeWise of favorability I mean maybe they Venture into a past ing what we call Kelvin wave a favorable interaction with a Kelvin wave uh they call it constructive interference interesting way to put it um I mean it's true it's interfering but it's constructive it's good interference sometimes that'll happen and these things will really ramp up like Andrew did in '92 so there was a little bit of concern that that could happen and that a lot of people would basically be as sleep at the wheel publicly National Hurricane Center isn't I mean Weather Service isn't they're never going to be asleep at the wheel but the public yeah it's an El nin we're not going to have a big season whatever you know um so Erica
was just one of those ones that we had to really stay on top of and I remember
Norcross telling me that he kind of had
a little bit of that Vibe like you just you just don't know you know like man if it breaks through that could be a big problem so um trying to scroll through
here and see what else else was happening I know I'm in August looking
through my Twitter there was one point though I know maybe it was July had to be July yeah it was definitely going to be bouncing around on this episode but as long as we get through all the times whatever right um another thing that was
going on in July backtracking a few weeks here um my son Nathan oldest son
in the family uh we took him up to
orientation at uh NC State so there's
that he was going to be a freshman at NC State and um shortly after that towards
the end of July I went down to Miami and

I did a seminar at the National Hurricane Center and at the hurricane
research division what's a seminar uh
it's me putting on a presentation just catching up all the scientists and forecasters down there about the state of our project what are we capable of what can we do and I showed off The
Limited I mean cuzz there just wasn't much uh new capabilities of the new live
Ustream broadcasters that we had in these small Pelican boxes I drove down I had an F-150 rental so we did the orientation for Nathan up at NC State
and um I was in my rental so I headed south drove from Raleigh to Miami in one day yeah try to do that now no thank yo

um maybe 9 10 hours tops uh is is good for me anyway did
that I went to the Hurricane Center hurricane research Division and uh down to the Florida Keys just kind of checking stuff out nice down there of course in Late July and I had dinner with my good friend Stan Goldenberg from the hurricane research division uh so that was part of July again just staying
in front of everybody even though we're
in supposedly a down year at least that was the prediction we're we going to be ready just like everybody else is that was the idea Carrie was really helping out Mike Watkins with ideas Jesse our
hurricane track Community we're always bouncing ideas around always testing stuff you know de Steve Delaware Steve

always talking preparedness with us make sure you're ready make sure this is ready test this test that they do it in
emergency communications a lot of the folks in amateur radio know all about that you know you don't just wait that's reactionary we want to be
proactive because even in a down year you just never know and so that was good to be able to go down to the hurricane center and uh hrd hurricane research
division um and just stay on top of stuff stay in front of them as I said uh saw an iguana while I was down there and by the way there will be pictures I
haven't mentioned any yet but make sure you look at any pictures that accompani this episode on patreon and on Discord they are there and they're in chronological order so picture whatever the first picture is would match up to well just check them out that's you know I know I haven't rattled them off like oh this will be picture number one or whatever but there are a few pictures for you to follow along in this episode in fact I'll call
your attention to one right here this is August 18th and it's a picture of this

calibrated like traceable like the that's a scientific term from the nist people the National Institute of Standards and technology or something like that nist traceable digital barometer Carrie and I got it
highly accurate not that Kestrel isn't
and certainly not that RM young is it but R young they their their barometer is like $700 and I think this one was like $150 or something like that and it was nice it was a nist traceable certified I mean literally came with a certific ific had a certificate number and that's important because if we go into a hurricane and we get a
92277 that would be low wouldn't it just saying it's got to be accurate and we have to have the documentation because there's so much oh we got a whatever and the and the the instruments are not calibrated so this is calibrated right out of the box literally uh still have it still sitting in the garage uh actually it might be in the Tacoma but anyway we still have that barometer from way back in 2015 so yeah we were going to be ready
for the season whatever happened it
wasn't going to be Erica uh Erica Came
in Like I said Norcross had a little bit of a little bit of a bad feeling about it it was active out there there another picture make sure you check this one out now I'm going to talk about the pictures uh looks like a screenshot or something like that and we did have the yellows and the oranges out of in the tropical Atlantic so it wasn't like the Atlantic was just dead 1997 it was just dead we
had an Erica in '97 that's pretty much
it I mean 97 was like a ghost town 2015

we had the Big Al Nino coming on like 97
but the Atlantic was still fairly busy with potential systems the tropical waves were coming off but they ran into sheer dry air subsidence all that stuff
and just never could really get going and thus we didn't really have much of an Atlantic hurricane season with any impacts to speak of uh in the
United States so yeah we get towards the end of August and as I've mentioned a few times already Erica was the big like close call if you will and it really

didn't amount to anything now speaking of era specifically though just spend a little time on it I did mention it on Twitter obviously tropical storm Erica
uh is one to be watched closely in the coming days um and what else I know it was just

a little bit more yeah so there's a low confidence forecast in the long range and that
again is what Norcross was concerned with that these

ones that kind of are hard to figure out

those are the ones that can come back and bite you and certainly Harvey did that in 2017 just 2 years later almost at the exact same time slightly
different area of the Atlantic Basin not too far off but still the similarities are there if you can break through the Hostile the hostile environment what's waiting on the other side is often times
ideal in 2015 that was not the case so
there was a low confidence forecast um and uh you know they were

talking about just kind of reading um
that there could be I quoted this here Richard Pash he has since retired was talking in the discussion about the possibility of stronger Shear uh so you know like Erica could just be nothing and that's what it ended up being it sheared out but it was a close enough call overall the way the track was and I'll save this image for you as well make sure you check it out it's a probably a screenshot or or a direct um just an image save of the
5-day forecast from the National Hurricane Center this was 11:00 p.m. this is the first advisory for Erica and it did it went north of the islands and it was in the Southeast Bahamas 8:00 p.m. Saturday if this was issued on the 24th uh so the 29th so you knocking on the door of the Katrina anniversary and you got a tropical storm in the Southeast Bahamas yeah you can see where Brian Norcross you where have I seen this before you know like yes you you don't
just write them off and say well nothing
will happen because we know patterns can change in 5 days and you only need a
24-hour window of favorability and we've seen it time and again Michael in 2018 2023 with Otis you know all stuff that we'll get to in the future in more detail but Erica tried to open that window and it
was quickly shut all right so that should be the end of the eraa discussion but it was it was on our minds all right
so uh we round out August again that's
pretty much it for Erica and um let's

zoom up here zip up here whatever so
there's Erica again on the Wikipedia yep then we had Fred and Fred
started right off the coast of Africa
very quickly August 30th through September 10th it was a hurricane and I mean it just stayed out in the Eastern Atlantic added a few a points and that was it so again that was
August 30th through September the 6th then we had tropical storm Grace uh and I'm going to save this picture for you I got to make sure I do it right now or I'll forget uh this one I do have to sort of
like call your attention to it or whatever so this is Grace there we go I'm saving this satellite picture of Grace because this is a great example of a system that very welldeveloped on satellite you know just strictly speaking of structure it's beautiful I mean it was that s shape Central dense overcast the outflow but
you look at that picture look at the north side of it all those little speckled clouds you know the cumulus
clouds as a big what we call CU field cumulus field folks that is stable air
there is nothing favorable about that
and er um Erica that's on my mind isn't it um Grace not Erica was it had a lot

of potential but again it's another one of those ones that went through the main development region and it just because
of the alino and all the Hostile conditions related to that Grace well
Grace had no Grace

[Music] all right continuing on now with our look back at the 2015 Hurricane Season Grace not meant to be succumbing to the
Hostile effects of the growing El Nino and growing it did very warm anomalies
in the tropical Pacific it would go on to become what we call a super l noo and that led to a lot of marine um mortality rates or whatever they call it there's a special word for it um a big die off of marine life

mammals sea lions that kind of thing uh in Southern California and elsewhere so a lot of negative impacts flooding rain
I mean alino is like a huge thermostat getting turned up and the linia kind of
the opposite not exactly the same
correlation but when you do heat that El Nino up and it's really strong and Bas and wide and this one was I mean was right off the coast of South America Colombia through the galapagus:

and others there was definitely there were attempts made as they say whoever they are um you know at the season

trying to amount to something that anything that got going was quickly sort of brought to its knees by this burgeoning El Nino case in point a
subtropical storm well I say subtropical
it formed in the subtropics but it wasn't subtropical in its classification want to make that clear uh um but that was HRI with an H it's like Henry but it's pronounced HRI and um it was a 50

mph tropical storm in the subtropics you know forming north of 30°
latitude and uh very small very shortlived 3 days whatever then we had a depression and by the way we're into uh September now so Grace was also
September probably should have mentioned that we finished August with Fred and
that led into early September now we're into September so Grace was September 5th through the 9th and again that track
of Grace right through the main development region it was making a beline for the Caribbean huge
circulation uh very very well positioned in any other year without an El Nino that would have been a powerful longlived hurricane but it wasn't meant
to be because of that El Nino so yeah then we had HRI September 8th through the 11th and then TD number nine again
out in the main development region but uh you know way out in the tropical Atlantic there September 16th for a few days ending on the 19th and I mean yo know you're at the peak of hurricane season and you get a depression out in the main development region that never goes further well there you go must be an elino and that's exactly what it says in the Wikipedia entry unfavorable upper level winds caused the appearance of the cyclone to become disheveled almost immediately after formation and despite
sporadic burst of convection at top the storms Center the depression dissipated
at 18 UTC on September 19th without ever

attaining tropical storm intensity got
to have
those well hey there you go I did it um
sound effects courtesy of Mark yep so td9 was not meant to be either and then Ida 2015 6 years later Ida would come in and

uh boy that's going to be a one heck of an episode by the way just a small
little insert of a nugget for you here
at the conclusion of this season season
five of this podcast series I'm going to
have an announcement about the future of it which is going to be incredible that's all I'm going to say all right so I'll
say one more thing actually I'll add to that so when we get to Ida in
2021 you'll see literally all right so
there you go good stuff is coming this podcast is evolving and it will evolve after this season even more so tropical
storm Ida another one out in the Deep Tropics made it to 50 mph all beat up
looking out there like it had been whisked around literally like from a
whisk that's why they say that right but
yeah another failed attempt but there were that's the point here there were so many that tried to get going out in the
Deep Tropics but that's what these El ninos do they cut down on that development they put a lid on it almost literally and it just wasn't meant to be
now now we're up to one of the biggest

pains in my rear end that I have ever
had to deal with that just caused me so much stress and anxiety wow and you know that's not to

say anything what do they what's the expression to say nothing there we go I got it right of the people that had actually affected you know but for me tracking it this was a very very

stressful event and that was Hurricane

Wen allow me to explain because you're
probably wondering mark why was it so stressful for you well let me tell yo
that's the whole point of this so remember we're going through this season that is not supposed to be on paper a

very impactful season odds are everything's going to sort of be held down and then there's that whole thing of well it only takes one sort of the
the first part of this the formula here of getting me all wound up it looked like waen for the United States will be

the new poster child of it only takes
one that's part of it so let's dig into

this so Walken I'm going to use wikkipedia to help me here we first talk about the meteorology and then we'll kind of blend that in with how it impacted me and the project so much so

the first key to this it was a non-tropical low and I remember watching
this thing on satellite and in the modeling we were talking about it at storm 2K and on our chat of course the
seab boox that you had this upper level low mid latitude low whatever or not not
mid latitude well it was in the mid latitudes but um it was in the middle part of the atmosphere middle to upper level low cold air Loft you know not a warm core all that kind of stuff and it sat out over the very warm Waters of the

subtropical Atlantic uh well almost the

subtropics well north of Hispanola
Puerto Rico kind of in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle right so the beginnings of this system were tucked in there Southwest of Bermuda by a good chunk a good track whatever and Northeast of the Bahamas and it was this upper level low just sitting there and day after day went by and it didn't move and it gradually warmed itself up and became
warm throughout the column and transitioned over to a purely tropical
system and that was it it was like uhoh

here we go and early on the forecast

suggested and the modeling um the National Hurricane Center advisories you name it you all of us on social media everything related to that forecast it looked like there was a
chance that uh waen could sort of go Southwest feeling
the ridge to its north kind of pushing it to the southwest and then kind of turn that corner and move up towards the
Southeast coast and then get captured by
a big upper level low over the southeast United States pinwheeling it in possibly

to North Carolina maybe Norfolk in Virginia somewhere around there the sounds as we call it of North Carolina or maybe the Chesapeake Bay Delaware
Maryland Jersey like this could be sort of a Sandy type scenario but about a month earlier with
much warmer undisturbed ocean water temperatures so we were really focused
on this and so this thing quickly intensified over very warm water and um

got down near the Bahamas and just battered that area let me see if I can find find some details here I want to make sure I know exactly where cuz the Bahamas is you know bunch of different Islands um so yes it says battering the
Bahamas Southern islands for two days
Wen caused extensive Devastation especially on ackland's crooked Island Long Island rum K and San Salvador
severe storm surge inundated many communities cuz this thing was like
really really strong almost a category five and it looked like as I said the possibility and the models were generally showing it the GFS leading the way the European the ensembles many of
them pivoted this thing as an upper level low sort of captured it and brought it in the Mid-Atlantic and in fact there was a forecast or two from

the uh National Hurricane Center that showed that that scenario could happen it was in the official forecast that it brought it up just off the Mid-Atlantic
Coast if memory serves so just reading through this a little bit more here this will really helped to sort of um sort of
set the stage here so we got all that severe surge the impacts in the Bahamas
just a a severe situation for them down they're very unfortunate but you know
there was more right you you've heard of the AL Faro or Pharaoh e l
l I think it's the L Faro uh 33 crew
members were lost CU they sailed right into it coastal flooding all the way down to the Turks and cost but because it was a threat and it
specifically says that here Wen also posed a threat to parts of the east coast of the United States state of emergencies were declared in Maryland New Jersey North Carolina and South Carolina and Virginia mandatory evacuation which always makes good sense it really does in Okra Coke North Carolina very small island uh you know isolated from Bridges or whatever it's all fairy um it like everybody was ready

and I thought all right Carrie too like
this is the one and Carrie being my main

field partner in 2015 he was available
he had his truck helping with some of the funding the knowhow he helped to develop a lot of this equipment he got on the road I don't know exactly what day it was um to come up in fact let's let's figure
it out all right don't know exactly what day it was I'll tell you what day it was so let's go to the Hurricane Center site let's look at these advisories for 2015 all right so Wen uh let's look at the map I think the
the uh the maps of the graphic archive will be the best 5day forecast uncertainty cone Perfect

all right so yes um the official
National Hurricane Center forecast let's see here oh yeah I mean they actually
made landfall with it I'm glad I'm looking at this H this was on September the 30th so by by this point I'm sure
Carrie is either getting ready to leave or has already left all right come on up from Houston meet me in Wilmington we've got I think at this point in time we had
at least three and probably

four maybe five of these remote cams

that were the size of lunchboxes right these new Pelican cases uh with the Ustream broadcasters in there and I was like all right this
thing is a powerful hurricane or it will be I mean the time that the advisory was issued it was not yet but it was going to be uh already 85 that's strong enough
right and the official for and I'm saving this one absolutely going to save this one let me make sure I do that now before I forget save image
um yeah so this put us in motion and I thought

all right we are going to nail this one

in fact I was you know tweeting about it
making plans people knew I was going to head up to the Outer Banks the official forecast track and I really want you to look at this as I've saved it um brought

it right across the Outer Banks of North Carolina into the Chesapeake Bay a truly
devastating landfall track massive surge

all along the Outer Banks into the Chesapeake Bay Norfolk into areas on the

Bayside of Delaware Maryland all the way
up to Baltimore I mean this looked like
the potential of a generational hurricane so you bet we were all in on
it and I thought man the GFS and its

ensembles sometimes the Euro was UN on it too but the Euro was a little bit less you know convinced if you will but
I was like wow you know the Hurricane Center is explicitly forecasting this of
course they mentioned in the forecast discussion the uncertainty you know wasn't like oh the GFS is going to be right we have a crystal ball we know the outcome no no no no no no there was always that uncertainty but this really looked like oh man here we go so Carri
was coming and uh the hours tick by and

said let's let's look at this cuz this is important here you you sort of feel the anxiety build up this is 5:00 p.m. this is the 12th advisory it took a while for Wen to get going it was a slow process so this is September 30th 2015 and 5:00 p.m. so by the 11:00 p.m.

advisory um still has it moving out of
the Bahamas a very slow mover down there like I said battering the Bahamas and then it turns North I mean it's it's very much like a Sandy track and then right into the Chesapeake Bay by 8:00 p.m. Monday you know 5 days later into
early October right so let's now fast forward to the 500 a.m. advisory new
information and you know the story coming out and it was like H and then
this is great for people I want you to make that very clear super duper news
for people along the Mid-Atlantic but it now looked like oh the Euro was probably on to
[Music]

[Music] something all right we're back talking hurricane Wen and all of the stress and
anxiety that this major hurricane yo
already had sunk the cargo ship uh 33

people lost the devastation in the Bahamas and now it potentially had its sights set on the Mid-Atlantic States you know I'm anxious about it people that follow my work were all anxious about it my family people along the Mid-Atlantic National Hurricane Center you know this looked like it could be I got to emphasize it the it only takes one for 2015 this could be the one and
it was aimed up at us so it was time to
go so Carrie's on his way and we're going to activate and we're going to do our thing I even got an email from Sandy Sanderson D County Emergency Management
you know kind of warning me of what it's going to be like up there you know look at the 1933 hurricane he said make sure make sure you really want to do this I was like well yeah I mean we we set up the equipment and we're going to get out of there I'm not staying in rhany I'm not going to stay at hatus Village or okra Coke you know like I I choose life

or my vehicle not to be washed away of course uh but I appreciated that he was looking out and being pretty Stern about it you know looking out for my well-being the well-being of Carrie and anybody that would be assisting uh but this was very serious
and there was also sort of this looming
prospect that if Walken is going to
happen like the National Hurricane Center forecast suggest it might in a
lot of the computer models were showing and we're going to read one of the discussions in a minute I'll read it to you very interesting how all of this evolved um but I thought you know wow
I'll really be able to show The Weather Channel like you missed out you know and
when I get these cameras up and running we've proven that these Logitech will work you know we've had a good chunk of time to test them the winter of 2015

some testing in 2014 certainly he had been using them since 2013 so we're ready and again I think we had five of them ready to go and they would run for about 40 hours if memory serves and I
was just thinking you know yeah this will be you know when the weather channel is like hey we'd like to use these cameras on the air well you know here's what the fee will be I wasn't it's just business right absolutely so I
was looking at it from that perspective but also how to you'll be able to help people I'm not in it just to money but what the footage could show the live video could be very useful especially for people that evacuated that they know why they evacuated they see the results in you know Living Color as they say the cameras don't lie not these some do but
these don't um so there was a lot
writing on it and I thought you know
bias here but I was like this is it this is the one of the year if not maybe if

it's a really devastating event this could be a generational hurricane but the Euro had a lot to say
about that all right so let's talk about that this is the 5:00 pm. September 30th
forecast discussion from the National Hurricane Center and this is the paragraph about the track so reading it
more or less verbatim the initial motion is 225 at 7 so that's a compass heading

and um the seven is the knots you know
so the compass heading and how fast it's moving seven knots the shortwave Ridge causing this motion is expected to weaken during the next 24 to 48 hours as
a strong deep layer trough develops over
the South Eastern United States all right so let me just kind of pull this apart for you so that's the key that deep layer trough some of the modeling was suggesting that it would cut off and become basically a giant upper level low
and then so instead of it because of that instead of it moving through and it kind of pushes Walken out into the Atlantic the cut off low would capture
Wen and spin it into the United States
basically so that's what we were watching so um the forecast discussion continues

with thus a generally southwestward motion is expected for the next 36 hours or so followed by a turn towards the north as the trough becomes the dominant
steering mechanism there is an increased
disagreement between the GFS UK met Canadian nav gy models versus the ecmwf

boy that battle right just always there

year after year after year all those different models versus the ecmwf the Euro since the last advisory the ecmwf
has continued its for of showing a
northeastward motion after 3 days taking

Wen just west of Bermuda and out to sea

the other models have all shifted their forecast to the left and now call for
landfall in the Carolinas in the Mid-Atlantic States followed by merger with the barel

clinic trough so that big arper levelo would capture it pin wheel it in and it
was like all of those models against the Euro the official forecast showed it into the Mid-Atlantic Carol you North Carolina Outer Banks and then up to Chesapeake so you bet we were on all
cylinders ready to go I thought we're going to show the world it's been 10 years since Katrina since I first worked

with Watkins to set these camera systems
out the first generation the big bulky boxes the bullet cams all that trial and
tribulation all the stress all the perseverance the loss of the Lowe's partnership the economy collapsing me
you see where I'm going like this could be the Redemption of my career and so

you also see where I come from on this I
don't cause the Hurricanes but you bet if they are going
to happen to quote Jack Nicholson's
character from A Few Good Men you want
me on that wall right you want these cameras there I would assume you do we want to see what happens we want to see it live if we can it's curiosity it's

you know hey what's happening to my property we we want to know and it's a Natural Curiosity for a lot of reasons and it is scientifically valuable to know how the process happens how fast it happens you know
like what can we do maybe to mitigate better there's just a lot of science that can come out of it later later on
it shows the Hurricane Center even in real time how high the storm surge is I

mean you know the drill by now I don't need to sell you on it but that is where the excitement comes in we've worked so
hard to have all of this technology ready for this so I was up like ready to

go and then you know you see that one little like the Euro just that hold asset come on like and this is where I
get conflicted you know if the models
and the forecast and everything are showing a landfall obviously the best outcome for everybody except me is to not have a
landfall and I understand that you know
like I'm the one person that if that if I don't benefit from it because it is my business it's what I went to school for we you know all this but I'm just reiterating it that's okay you know I
can live with that truly if if hurricanes just stopped hitting the United States I would go on and figure something else out to do I don't know what it would be but I would be all right I wouldn't go jump off a bridge or oh my life's over you know my wife has
this expression you will be okay and I would but we know that's not going to happen all right it's not you're going to have ones that hit and hit hard and
we know which those are we' we've done them and we know that the ones that are going to miss even when they look like they're going to hit like waen but the gravity of the situation
for waen was such that everything felt like it was riding on it you know like if this really happens it'll be a career making
event it'll prove that the camera systems really do work it'll Advance a

lot of stuff for the future funding to get more equipment you know like I want make this bigger and better you guys know like we want to grow we want to be able to do more and this could really help to launch that it won't just be concept or whatever so with all that

being said there's this Spectre that the ecmwf with this insistence of a northeastward turn and out to sea was
there so the forecast continues to say
given the shift in the non ecmwf models
a major Westward adjustment has been made to the for for track at days four and five bringing the center of waen
near or over portions of the Mid-Atlantic States due to the use of
the ecmwf and the consensus models the consensus uh the new track lies near the various consensus models however it lies
well to the east of the GFS and other similar models interesting the Noah G4 jet is
currently flying a synoptic surveillance Mission which along with special uh and
on launches so upper air soundings from
balloons hopefully will reduce the spread of the guidance yeah so that was 5:00 p.m
September 30th let's go to 11 11:00 p.m. looking at that

discussion uh Wen continues to move slowly excuse me the hurricane is forecast to movees slowly southwestward just trying to remember it looks like it's about the same 12z ecmwf Remains
the outlier by showing a track towards the Northeast out to sea so not much and
you wouldn't expect much because the the Zer Z models had initialized but they hadn't um run yet in fact it says right
here the Noah G4 aircraft has recently completed its synoptic surveillance flight the data collected during this Mission should be assimilated into the ZZ models hopefully reducing the spread of the track guidance so that's 11:00 p.m. September 30th I went to bed who
knows when Carrie is driving from Houston to North Carolina and we're we're going to do this and I go to bed I get up the next morning and the overnight models have run and I read the uh 5 a.m.
discussion on October the 1st and it says right here um the initial motion of the hurricane is still towards the Southwest under the influence of a narrow Ridge to the north a slow motion with a bending of the track towards the west and then the West Northwest is expected during the next 24 hours as the ridge weakens during this time the NHC track has been adjusted Southward following the latest Trend and guidance the slow motion of wae will mean a prolonged period of hurricane conditions over the central Bahamas and so forth uh by 36 hours
Walkin should begin to move faster towards the north as it comes under the influence of a d player trough that cuts off so that part verified the trough
cuts off over the southeastern United States and then there's this huge gut
punch to all of my aspirations to

document this potential disaster and
that's what it comes down to you guys understand that you know I'm ready I'm ready to do it and then nope the rug gets pulled out from under me for the science part the proving of the project
you know I hate to keep trying to sell you on it but you know where I'm coming from on this there have been big changes in some of the track guidance overnight perhaps due to the data from the synoptic surveillance mission for the Z Z Model in particular the GFS and uket
has shifted Eastward by several hundred miles in 3 to 4 days relative to their previous Solutions overall for this cycle there has been a spreading out of the guidance envelope Beyond two days with a r wide range of solutions shown
the latest ecmwf is still the slowest and the farthest east with a track just west of Bermuda in four to 5 days so forth and so on they do mention that confidence remains very low in the eventual track of waen and any potential impacts for the United States so forth and so on and eventually as time went on
you bet it eventually you know that's
what happened it moved very slowly and then it you battered the Bahamas and it made a Northeast turn and the Euro was right and Carrie got here um I believe it was

Wednesday evening the 30th maybe even
Thurs I think it was Thursday now that I'm trying to remember deep deep deep inside my head he got here Thursday yeah
yeah I know it was Thursday and uh um we went to dinner because I I
wanted one or two more forecast Cycles before I knew that we're not going anywhere so we had the 11:00 advisory and it was more of the same oh more Eastward adjustments and then by the 5:00 p.m. advisory that was it it was not going to happen waen was not going to affect the United States so that's the 5:00 a.m. I'm looking at the graphics here 5:00 a.m. October 1st I'll save this one for you you'll see how this evolves and uh and then there's 11:

a.m. it's a little bit more to the East
and then uh 2:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m. then
5:00 p.m. you know they just keep pulling it more and more to the East and that of course is eventually how everything ended up
however as stressful as all of that was
that we're ready we're ready we're ready here we go five alarm fire whatever and nope it's all canceled there was another opportunity to do something because a

very strange phenomenon was going to happened the upper level low that had cut off over the southeast somehow kind of got a finger into
Wen and pulled a plume of moisture that

looked like literally a fire hose and
dragged it into South Carolina into the
upstate and parts of Central North Carolina for days 2 or 3 days maybe more

and and just fed almost like an atmospheric River but different but Brad
penovich at WCNC Charlotte he might have coined it like a fire hose and it was just this Relentless plume of moisture training over Charleston into the upstate Colombia uh Greenville spart andberg that area and caused just unbelievable

flooding and the pressure gradient the
difference between the high pressure building to the north you had the cut off flow over the southeast high pressure over Canada and the flow is going to steer waen out past Bermuda but you did have onshore flow because Wen was a deep strong hurricane um I mean it's 35 mph down in
the Bahamas for goodness sakes so he had strong onshore flow so he had the buffeting of the Outer Banks big waves overwash so I told Carri I said you know what let's at least put the camera
system that we've got out there and
we'll use this as a wet dry run if that
makes sense I think it does let's take what we got there are impacts and hey rain is an impact let's do it and that's

exactly what we did over the next several days we put uh a camera system

up in Kittyhawk uh in North Carolina along the Outer Banks right near this place called called The Black Pelican it was a restaurant looking right out at the beach uh and that would run for like 40 hours or something like that might have even been longer I don't remember I think the Run yeah the run time back in 2015 was about 40 hours uh and then we went down into South Carolina and um really studied the

forecast information from the WPC back then it was called the hydrometeorological Prediction Center but the idea was this big flood that's going to happen in parts of South Carolina you know do we go to Colombia do we go to parts of the upstate yo know Greenville Spartanburg area do we just focus on the low country you know Myrtle Beach even uh Georgetown you know
Mount Pleasant all that area Charleston proper so the answer was kind of yes do it all so for the next like 2 or 3 days
we basically ran around from the north
Carolina Outer Banks all the way down through Newburn you know Wilmington even
cuz there were thunderstorms all around you know the moisture was was all around but it was focused these big fire hose
mechanisms if you will were just focused on basically charston all the way up

i26 into the upstate of South Carolina
that was the area that was the hardest hit so we went in and we put cameras
wherever we could put cameras down near the Citadel in charl
um and we just worked it you know we looked at the guidance we read the discussions from HPC again it used to be
called the hydr meteorological prediction center now it's just the WPC cuz nobody wants to say hydr meteorological but weather it's a lot easier so it's the weather prediction center and uh we did the best we could we covered it and um uh yeah I don't

know if we ever had anything on the Weather Channel or not I don't think we did um I'm just kind of looking through my Twitter here I me I know we didn't because I would have invoiced them for it and I would have gotten a1099
miscellaneous in 2016 and I didn't um

but it was big on our Twitter our Facebook whatever and uh I'm just
looking back through my tweets here I mean it was just maddening watching this
unfold and we did everything we could
you know we we put our best effort in we had live video from the Outer Banks down to Charleston um and captured whatever

impacts that there were but it was this really interesting lesson in the track forecast the forecast
impacts for people uh the model Wars again you know
like just the anxiety of it all like so
many people like I'm sure a lot of
people remember Wen for how close we
came to just utter disaster along the
Chesapeake now what ended up happening it goes by Bermuda bringing them let me
just look at the graphics here I want to make sure I get this right I don't know if they had hurricane conditions but uh it just goes through sorry about the clicking so Bermuda pretty close

call uh they were under a hurricane warning so it stayed west of Bera with most of the core this is October the 4th

uh and then out it goes it made a pretty good close pass to Berita nevertheless we were able to see some of those effects on our weather station over at Jie's house in Shelly Bay so there was
that but yeah man Walken was just gosh

it's one of those ones that like man like we we don't want the result that could have happened I and I don't sincerely of course I don't I'm I'm not an evil person but had it happened yo

know I think we would have been ready or would we have you know we'll never know you know because that would have been a really devastating event massive Surge
and overwash of Highway 12 in North

Carolina unbelievable flooding probably 10 ft or more probably 15 ft or more in
the Chesapeake Bay Area of which I know nothing about with experience you know
I've not been there for a landfall so
Carrie and I would have had to figure it out as we went there would have been just insane evacuations for areas that have not experienced a significant hurricane since 1933 really Isabelle was a a
wakeup call up in that area in
2003 but yeah I mean
waen you know a lot of energy was put into that one and we kind of uh you did
sort of the honorable mention if yo will of covering the indirect fire hose

flood whatever uh but you know what came
out of it was real time real world proof

that these camera systems these new Logitech work because everything ran for
the full prescribed time uh like I said
I think it was 40 hours something like that um the Kittyhawk cam ran the full 40 something hours and ran out that was it we had a camera down there in Charleston like I said near the Citadel looking right down one of those streets I can't remember which one it was couple feet of water cars getting stranded people floating by on a mattresses kind of having fun if you will I guess uh
making the best of it we did not get
near any of the catastrophic flooding we were just just couldn't you know like always too far away or whatever you know where the water will come in and just gouge out of roadway never saw any of that that's always been fascinating to me how floodwater does what it does but again this word inform all of this
would inform the next year in uh 2016 which

we'll get to a couple of episodes from now but first we had one more chance in

2015 and it would be in an area of the

country that I would learn a lot about
and you talk about informing the future well this was definitely going to be that

[Music]

so hurricane Wen would go on to be 2015's close call for the United States
and obviously it did not make landfall
but you know there was a time there that
we thought it might and there was all that anticipation and anxiety over that waen

obviously devastating a portion of the Bahamas very slow moving lingering high
impact event for that area passing by Bermuda it left you know thousands without power but otherwise minor damage but the real Legacy I guess of waen was that moisture that got peeled off of it and funneled into South Carolina and elsewhere um in the Carolinas as a whole
and I think Carrie and I did a great job covering those impacts from the Outer Banks down into South Carolina especially the Charleston area and yo know we were able to really test these Logitech cameras the Ustream broadcaster
that was the brand name for those cameras in Earnest I mean we really did we were that was a realworld live fire test under rainy windy long duration muggy conditions running
those batteries down till they ran out you know and it it worked and we thought all right well at least we got that yo know we we had tested them to some extent in 2014 and the winter of 2015 uh with all those winter storms that I talked about in a couple of episodes back but this was the the real
deal as close as we could get to a hurricane situation and they were great you know
um so we were very excited about the future and how we could utilize these cameras the Pelican cases were like I said a little bit larger than a lunchbox so very portable very easy to deal with
I could Airline them and uh that would become important as we got deeper into October I'll bring that up in just a moment as we start to wrap up this episode but uh after waen on the
Atlantic side we had one more and that was Kate and that was actually in November um an 85 mph hurricane also

close to the Bahamas they were probably like you got to be kidding me and it very similar track to wen it sort of did this hook and then went on out to see
also coming pretty pretty close to Bermuda Bermuda just always seems to be
in the way out there and sometimes they get run right over but poor Bermuda um

they're built out of literal Rock though so don't feel too bad for Bermuda they always seem to come out doing just fine
and it was good to be able to go to Bermuda as I mentioned earlier in this episode to just kind of revisit everything in the wake of Gonzalo in

2014 um so yeah Walken came and went and

my anxiety levels came back down from
that you know very engaging event of
just anticip ating this major landfall
that never happened such a weird feeling cuz again I think you know me enough by now that I don't want it to happen but if it's going to happen if it's going to happen I want to be there and we want to do the best we can so that was just a weird situation now as we move through

like I said towards the end of October
the Atlantic Basin not much else and of course nothing until Kate in November but we weren't done at least
with field missions in the Eastern Pacific there would be a hurricane that would sort of Define everything for 2015 we had this major El
Nino coming on the abnormally warm Pacific all that stuff related to it and
a hurricane brewed up by the name of Patricia and if there could be a category 6 this would be it Patricia
makes landfall in Mexico the remnants
come across and get into the Northwest Gulf of Mexico some small chance of regeneration
possibly but a lot of that energy was still intact and it brought a lot of moisture to the Greater Houston area and
then on up into Northeast Texas the
coastal areas and then Southwest Louisiana and I would go not to Mexico

nope that would be Josh morgerman who did that and um he yeah I mean talk
about a nuclear hurricane so to speak people were actually saying that on Twitter I remember they were like Josh this thing's going nuclear but um no not me I'm not going to be there for that uh I wanted to deal with the rain side and this would really begin this era of several years

of me working with Carrie working with different people in the Houston area Jeff Lindner from the Harris County Flood Control District um literally getting my feet wet to explore and observe and study and document all that stuff report on this major city the fourth largest city in the country and their ongoing struggles with sometimes catastrophic flooding and
that all began with the remnants of
Pacific hurricane Patricia and we will
cover that amazing story in the next
episode of stories from the Hurricane High way all right so that wraps up this Edition as always I appreciate yo tuning in great to have such a supportive community of this kind of a podcast where I can just rattle off all of these stories and use Twitter advance search to go back in the archives thank goodness that's still there I'm telling you and don't forget check out the pictures that I do Post accompanying this episode on patreon and I put those on Discord as well several of them they're in chronological order so the you know the top picture so to speak everything just kind of falls into place as I talk about different things and reference different photos I just think it's neat to include them to help augment and bring to life a little bit more of these stories that I'm telling you all right all right well that's it for this episode of stories from the hurricane Highway again I'm your host Mark suth thanks for listening I'll be back real soon [Music]

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