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Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here.
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Here's the episode.
You're listening to shortwave.
From NPR.
Angel Adamas Coraliza grew up in San Sebastian, on the northwest side of Puerto Rico.
So from childhood, he was used to windy weather, thunderstorms, heavy rain.
But nothing really prepared him for Hurricane George in 1998.
So in Puerto Rico, we cannot evacuate from hurricanes because we're on an island.
So we had to kind of weather the hurricane.
So we were up all night and I just remember the winds roaring and the house shaking.
My family had to put these like wooden panels to protect the windows and the doors.
And I remember like the wind just hitting those those doors.
And that really left an impression on me.
That hurricane really etched into his memory.
I was 10, so I was a child.
I couldn't believe that something so powerful and destructive was in nature's arsenal.
And this memory became a driving force for Angel's career.
He pursued his curiosity about weather all the way to a PhD in atmospheric science and meteorology.
He graduated in 2016, and the following year, In 2017, another storm hit.
One that changed Puerto Rico forever and that Noah said was the 10th most intense Atlantic hurricane on record.
Maria was...
A life-changing experience.
Like, I was not able to contact my family for weeks.
It was kind of like a grieving moment.
Like nobody in my immediate family passed away from Maria, but it almost.
It was like something died.
With that storm, Angel again felt nature calling him, pushing him.
I was already like a dedicated tropical meteorologist, trying to understand how humidity, circulation and rain interacted with one another.
But I felt like this bigger desire to really want to understand what are the big driving forces.
What is it that causes tropical weather to tick?
And so I felt this drive to serve my community even more.
I wanted to be able to go back to Puerto Rico or go to any other community that's in the tropics and be able to tell people these are the things that matter.
These are the things that drive weather and climate in the tropics.
These are the things that you need to pay attention to.
Angel went on to research tropical weather systems.
And he's the person who has really popularized why water vapor in the tropics humidity is such a key player in tropical weather and climate.
His work was so notable, it caught the attention of the MacArthur Foundation.
Full disclosure, the MacArthur Foundation is a financial supporter of NPR.
On Wednesday, the MacArthur Foundation announced that Angel and 21 other people at the cutting edge of their different disciplines have been chosen as recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, unofficially known as the Genius Grant.
I was like, what?
And then my brain just completely melted and I don't remember anything else from the call.
Angel told us it meant a lot to be chosen, to get this kind of recognition and bring it back to the island.
You know, coming from Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico is a small island.
We do have our contributions to society.
We're kind of known for the arts and for like music, for example.
But we don't often get recognition for science, especially in my discipline.
You know, like as a community, we've been invisible.
And and to be able to receive this award, where somebody comes out to you in this case the MacArthur Foundation and they tell me like no, we see you, you know, and we see what you're doing and we think that what you do matters.
It's not just what you're doing, but what your community is doing.
To me, this is everything.
So today on the show prize-worthy knowledge of tropical weather, why the tropics are so different from weather at the poles or the mid-latitudes of the globe, and how Angel's work is contributing to make weather forecasts better for everyone.
I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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What happened in Iowa today?
Probably a lot.
Hey, I'm Megan McKinney.
It can take a while to follow all of the news, but it doesn't have to.
Have you tried Here First?
It's a daily news podcast from Iowa Public Radio, part of the NPR network.
It's your quick stop for Iowa news, culture, and community.
Listen where you get your podcasts.
All right.
Let's talk about the weather and atmospheric science.
I know early research into atmospheric dynamics began in the 20th century and it mostly focused on countries in the mid-latitudes.
Between the tropics and the poles in the northern hemisphere.
The mid-latitudes cover North America Europe, a lot of Asia.
And in the southern hemisphere, the mid-latitude covers the bottom of South America, a little bit of Australia.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's most of Australia, like a good chunk of Australia, New Zealand, this very southern part of Africa and kind of like the southern half of South America and almost the entirety of like first world countries in the northern hemisphere, which is something that is relevant to the research that I do.
Okay.
The majority of the developed countries.
They're used to the stuff that I see here in Madison Wisconsin, which is like it gets really cold some days.
Some days it gets really warm.
Weather is very, very changing.
Temperatures change very dramatically.
It can be really, really, really dry.
Got it.
Yeah.
So it sounds like the majority of weather research historically has happened in mid-latitude countries, these wealthier countries.
And there's been an absence in understanding about tropical weather.
What do we know?
What has been known about tropical systems in the past?
So there was a lot of common knowledge.
For example, the indigenous populations of the Caribbean knew about hurricanes.
So the Taino, for example, they had the Semí, which is kind of like their entity of destruction.
It's Huracán.
That's where the hurricane name comes from.
And so there was knowledge of these things, right?
And then same with the Peruvian natives.
They knew about El Niño.
So local communities did know about the major phenomenon, maybe not necessarily what drove them, but they knew about their existence.
But of course the mid-latitude countries that were actually pushing the research.
They didn't really know much right.
And so there was knowledge in India, China and other communities as well, but there wasn't that much conversation.
So it's actually.
I don't think it's incorrect to say that people in North America and Europe knew nothing about the tropics until World War II.
What changed in World War II and what did they figure out?
So World War II came, and what happened was that the US and the allied countries got into war with Japan.
And Japan had taken over a lot of islands in the Pacific.
So a lot of the war actually happened in the tropical Pacific.
And early combat was actually kind of catastrophic.
Because typhoons, actually, a typhoon came and sank a Navy ship, for example.
Before all this happened, people had just assumed that the tropics were kind of like this paradise.
It was just sunny and beautiful all the time.
And then maybe every now and then you'd get a hurricane.
But then people started realizing oh, oh dang, weather in the tropics does actually change at a substantial scale.
And this is all summarized in the first tropical meteorology book ever written by somebody in the Northern Atlantic, by Herbert Riehl, in the 1950s.
So his first paragraph of the book is like, oh, we didn't know that this was serious.
And then we realized that it was serious in World War II.
And in some ways, I suppose you and colleagues like yourself, you are deepening that knowledge.
You are figuring out what weather is in the tropics.
What do we know so far?
How is it different?
It's super different.
So the first thing, that's like there are some really guiding principles for the mid-latitude dynamics that we teach in the classroom.
For example, we have this thing called uh, this very important balance.
That's called geostrophic balance.
So it's actually uh.
So if you look at the major weather patterns, you have the jet stream right, the jet stream, that is that big current of wind that moves from west to east over the atlantic yeah, yeah so.
So commercial aircraft take advantage of the jet stream and then they fly along the jet stream to to make the flight faster, but then they have to fly against it on the way back, so it's actually slower, right.
So we know that these currents exist and they're actually in a very, very elegant balance.
The winds want to accelerate to the poles.
But then the Coriolis force, which is the bending effect that you get from the planet being in rotation.
It bends it the other way.
So it causes all the combination of these forces creates the jet stream.
And the jet stream goes from west to east.
And in this jet, you get these waves.
So you get these undulations.
And these undulations are the troughs and ridges that create our day-to-day patterns.
So that's why temperature fluctuates a lot.
The colder side of the jet is really cold.
The equator one is warm.
And the jet is waving all the time.
So you just get days that are warm and days that are cold in alternation.
Oh, so that explains the mid-latitude variability.
Right, right.
But the tropics is not like this?
It is not like this at all.
So the tropics are pretty warm year-round.
So you don't really see that temperature variability that you see here in the mid-latitude.
So things like cold fronts and stuff, that barely exists.
In the tropics, you don't really worry about that.
But yet you still get these periods where it's really really rainy and alternating with dry periods.
So instead of thinking about temperature variability, it gets really cold or it gets really hot.
In the tropics, it actually gets really humid or it's really dry.
That's really kind of the big thing that drives weather patterns.
So you're saying in the tropics, it's all about the moisture.
It is about the moisture.
Yeah, yeah.
There's other things that matter too, right?
Because it's always more complicated than that.
But if I go to a classroom and I teach people, what are the things about the tropics that make the tropics different?
That's going to be one of the things that I'm going to mention.
Probably the thing that I'm going to mention.
In light of the fact that the tropics are so different from the mid-latitudes.
What's surprising to me and I you said this elsewhere in some of your work is that there's no.
For a few years there, there was no textbook on tropical atmospheric dynamics.
There kind of wasn't like a comprehensive theory of the tropics.
How did that affect weather forecasting in the tropics?
So I don't think we still have a comprehensive theory of the tropics.
At least when you compare it to the mid-latitudes, where we have multiple textbooks, we have mature theory.
The vast majority of weather forecasting models were initially built to tackle mid-latitude weather, not tropical weather.
And, as a result, forecasting weather and climate events in the tropics is more daunting, to the detrimental to people that live there right.
Because sometimes you do get extreme events like floods heat, waste and things that actually are very costly, not just in infrastructure but in life.
And they're not very well predicted, you know?
And so that's the big thing, right?
Like.
Ultimately, it is A problem of human safety and well-being that we cannot forecast things in the tropics as well as we do in the mid-latitudes.
Got it.
Okay.
Well, in pursuit of a comprehensive dynamical theory of the tropics, you have studied many things.
And one of the earliest things you focused on was something called the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO, which is this large region of thunderstorm activity in the tropics.
Right.
So...
So the MJO is actually the most important tropical phenomenon that you don't know, that people don't know about.
That's the way that I would like people to think about.
It's comparably as important as El Nino.
Really?
The MJO?
Yeah.
Okay.
And it has not just massive impacts in the tropics, but it has impacts throughout the globe.
It actually modulates weather in the Mid-Atlantis.
For example, atmospheric rivers that cause flooding in California are modulated by the MJO.
So it's a global phenomenon.
It's rooted in the tropics.
It starts in the Indian Ocean.
It is about the size of Russia.
So it's huge.
And it propagates eastward pretty slowly.
And in that movement, it modulates hurricane activity.
So when the MJ is active, hurricane activity increases and so forth.
Fascinating.
So you started studying the MJO.
What did you find?
And what does the MJO tell us about the tropics as a whole?
When I started studying it, I started kind of learning about the importance of water vapor in tropical rainfall.
And then after that I started realizing how all these insights about the MGO translate to all sorts of other tropical phenomenon.
For example, when it's humid, it starts to rain, but then all that rain actually changes the wind patterns, and the wind patterns then change in such a way that the movement, that moisture gets moved around.
And so the moisture gets moved around, and so the rain moves with the moisture.
So all these three things get coupled together.
The moisture, the rains, and the winds, they couple together.
They're playing off each other.
Yeah, they play off each other.
So they feed back on each other.
And so that causes the MJO to move, you know, or according to the theory that was being proposed at the time, which I contributed to.
And so I was like, what if other tropical weather phenomenon worked the same way?
Right.
With the idea being that these winds move the humidity, the rain changes the wind patterns and it becomes this recurring feedback loop of weather.
Cool.
Well, I have one last question for you about tropical weather.
You are obviously not alone in studying it.
There are a lot of other atmospheric scientists who study the tropics and who are pushing for a greater global understanding of this area of this region.
What future are you all trying to build?
I would like to see a role in which, when we're making climate reports and when we're making forecasts, that everybody is being equally represented and that everybody's being done justice.
Because at the end of the day, everybody deserves to have the best possible weather forecast.
Everybody deserves to know, to the best degree possible, what's going to happen in the climate in their region right now.
And right now we don't.
We don't equally have the knowledge about climate and the atmosphere for everywhere.
I think that speaks volumes to where we are right now, and where we should be is a place where everybody knows the same amount about everywhere.
Angel, thank you so much for coming on to our event.
Congratulations again.
Thank you.
On your grant.
Thank you so much.
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez.
It was fact-checked by Tyler Jones.
Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer.
Beth Donovan is our senior director of podcasting strategy.
I'm Emily Kwong.
Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
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