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I still have that photo (above). I still remember exactly where I was standing when I took it. I could not tell you a single other thing that happened that week, but I do remember the transition in life, the new and exciting changes, and learning to love the beauty and excitement of my new city.

Working on this week’s episode of Atmosphere about sunsets has put me in major nostalgia mode. Did you know you can search “sunset” in your iPhone photos and it shows you every sunset photo you’ve ever taken? Hello, rabbit hole! Needless to say, it’s been nice to take a break from editing heavy content, thinking about natural disasters and how the world feels like it’s on fire.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about how freaking beautiful and resilient it is.

The episode is about the science behind sunsets, the atmospheric mechanics of why the sky does what it does. But somewhere in the middle of putting it together, the question that kept nagging at me stopped being how and started being why this one stuck. Why do we remember some and not others?

Sunsets are not rare. They happen every day.

And yet. Put a decent one in front of a group of strangers and people stop talking mid-sentence. Phones come out. Ohhs and ahhhhs are heard. I have a distinct memory of sitting on a beach in Menemsha - it’s on the western coast of Martha’s Vineyard. When the sun went down, everyone clapped. I laughed at the time, but part of me wanted to join in. Beyond that light moment, the reason I remember that sunset has nothing to do with what it looked like. It was a turbulent time in my life - I had just graduated college, I was grieving a loss, starting a new relationship. I remember the people I watched that sunset with, the food I was eating, the peaceful moment in an uncertain time. I think I needed that sunset. And I still need that memory now.

So this episode became the epitome of Atmosphere’s theme: what happens when you combine the science plus the people? Just like every week, I don’t have the answer, but it sure is fun to explore the possibilities.

The recipe nobody can actually write down

My guest Cameron Hewitt, who has been to about 45 countries and has genuinely thought harder about this than most people ever will, tried to build a checklist for what makes a great sunset. Face west. Water helps. Clouds help more than you’d think, which feels backwards until you remember the best color show happens after the sun disappears, when the light is hitting the underside of the clouds instead of blasting straight into your eyeballs.

But here’s the thing about his checklist. It doesn’t actually work. He said it himself, some of his best sunsets ever happened on days that should have been a total loss. A gray, drizzly, forgettable afternoon on the Oregon coast that broke open at the last possible minute into what he still calls one of the best he’s ever seen. You cannot plan for that. You cannot book a table for it.

I keep half-joking that there should be a formula for this. A new app, perhaps? Feed in temperature, humidity, cloud layer height, whether there’s a front moving through, whether there’s leftover moisture from an old tropical system, and out pops a Sunset Score for tonight. Forensic meteorologist and sunset photographer Jan Null could probably get you 80% of the way there: mid-level clouds, some inversion near the surface, a break on the horizon so the light gets underneath. But that last 20%, the part that turns a nice sunset into the one you’re still talking about twenty years later, doesn’t seem to show up in any of the variables. Which might be exactly why it still gets a reaction. If you could predict it perfectly, I don’t think anyone would clap.

Home wins, every time

Here’s the part that actually surprised me while making this episode. I asked Cameron, a man whose job is finding the best sunsets on the planet, where his favorite one was. Not Santorini, which is possibly the most famous sunset real estate on Earth. Croatia was a strong contender. But his favorite sunsets occur on the Oregon coastline, where his family is. Jan’s answer was the same - his home near Half Moon Bay in California is where he prefers to watch the sun go down.

Which, small world. Mine is Charleston, South Carolina. The farm town where I grew up in Northern Connecticut is a close second. Is it sentimentality at play? Or maybe it’s loyalty and pride?

Or maybe… it’s easier to stop, sit, and watch when you feel at ease. When you are with the people you love.

When you feel at home.

Your turn. What sunset do you remember? Maybe it was a place you loved, someone you were with, a big moment in your life. Or maybe it was simply one of those sunsets that made you stop whatever you were doing and look up. Drop a photo and tell me why you remember it. I’d love to feature a few in a future post.

In this episode of Atmosphere, we're exploring the science, stories and emotions behind one of nature's most beautiful daily spectacles.

Cameron Hewitt, director of content at Rick Steves Europe, has traveled the world chasing and photographing sunsets. He'll share what makes a truly spectacular sunset, where he's found the most memorable ones, and why a sunset can mean something completely different depending on where you are — and what is happening in your life.

Then certified consulting meteorologist and green flash photographer Jan Null takes us into the atmosphere to explain what's really happening as the sun drops toward the horizon. Why do sunsets turn red and orange? How do clouds and atmospheric particles shape the colors? And what creates that fleeting, elusive green flash?

It's a conversation about travel, memory, physics, perspective and the simple act of stopping to look up.

Links from the Show:

Jan Null's Green Flash Photography
Cameron Hewitt's Website

Cameron on Instagram

Cameron on Facebook

Subscribe to Atmosphere on Substack

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That role belonged to his younger brother, Nelson. While Nelson grew up glued to local TV forecast updates, Louis was outside flying drones. By college, he was semi-pro in competitive FPV drone racing, spending his weekends in goggles, navigating tight courses at ridiculous speeds. He never even saw the movie Twister until after he’d already flown a custom drone into a real tornado.

When I sat down to talk with Louis about the OTUS Project, I was expecting the usual childhood storm chaser story– two little boys chasing adventure together. What I got was the story of two brothers with very different passions who found connection at the dinner table one night.

In his senior year of college, Louis was looking for new ways to push drone tech. Nelson was deep into atmospheric research, talking about the missing pieces in severe weather science… specifically, the lack of direct measurements near the surface inside a tornado.

“Nobody knows what the wind speeds are near the surface in a tornado,” Louis explained. “Especially the vertical component. There’s just never been a measurement on it.”

At the time, published academic literature suggested getting a drone into those winds was effectively impossible. But Louis was convinced it could be done.

Along with Tanner Beard (their chief engineer and fellow drone racer), the team set out to make history. In 2024, they successfully flew a drone into a tornado for the first time.

I asked Louis what it feels like to strap on FPV goggles and focus on his mission while chaos ensues around him.

To put blinders on with a tornado at close range, he decided early on that he had to put his complete trust in his team to keep him safe—allowing him to focus entirely on the flight. He described the experience as “holding two realities together at once.”

“This is something that I developed through racing drones,” he told me. “You’re really locked in on being kind of one with the drone, but then you’re also kind of aware of the environment and people telling you things.”

That reflex didn’t come from meteorological field work or textbook studies. It came from racing through obstacle courses at 100+ mph.

The hardware tells the same story. The drones aren’t off-the-shelf commercial quadcopters. They are small, ultra-light, hyper-powerful builds protected by 3D-printed TPU filament—the exact flexible material racers use because it bends instead of shattering. The frames are built to withstand up to 15 Gs in a turn.

It’s an unexpected crossover: a high-adrenaline hobby filling a decades-old blind spot in atmospheric research.

Today, OTUS is working with researchers at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) to turn these flights into hard data that could eventually redefine structural engineering and building codes.

When you watch their footage, it’s easy to get caught up in the sheer thrill of it—the raw adrenaline of a drone dropping into the core of a monster. But as Louis and I kept talking, the real “aha” moment for me wasn’t about the technology or the speed. It was about why you put yourself in front of a tornado in the first place.

Louis recounted a chase in Crowder, Missouri, where the drone was inside a tornado as it moved directly over a small neighborhood, tearing through homes and throwing live power lines into the street. Sitting in that car, holding the controls, the thrill vanished. In an instant, the abstract science became deeply personal.

A racing background gave Louis the technical skill to conquer a tornado, but it’s the quiet realization of what’s at stake on the ground that keeps him going back. Drones don’t care about building codes, and tornadoes don’t care about data. But the families sitting in storm shelters need both.

More data equals better forecasting. And in a time where observational networks are stretched thin and research budgets are continuously slashed, the weather community desperately needs innovative, outside-the-box thinkers like the Tucker brothers.

Nelson handles the heavy forecasting. Louis still doesn’t claim to be a meteorologist. He’s just the guy who learned how to hold a tornado in one eye, a chaotic chase car in the other, and keep his hands steady on the controls for the people who need that data most.

The full interview with Louis Tucker is live on the podcast now, where we break down the engineering behind their custom sensors, what the inside of a multi-vortex tornado actually looks like from the air, and where OTUS is headed next season.

The heat index was around 120 degrees, and he still had it on. He wears that thing everywhere. It doesn’t matter what I say or how hot it is outside.

A while back, I talked to Dr. Marshall Shepherd about why teenagers wear hoodies when it’s hot. He’d written about it—identity, comfort, confidence, peer culture, all sorts of reasons that have very little to do with temperature. I thought it was kind of funny at the time. This week, it felt like a very small piece of a much bigger issue.

My kids went back to school in South Carolina with temperatures around 100 degrees and a heat index near 120. Some of our district’s buses started the year with air-conditioning problems. These are buses that collectively travel nearly 31,000 miles every day across the district.

And it’s not just us.

Louisiana had 96.8% of its school districts back in session by August 17. Houston ISD started August 10. Phoenix Elementary started August 3. New York City doesn’t start until September 10. Same country. Very different calendars.

And this year, the school year is overlapping with some serious heat.

A heat wave this month put roughly 97 million people under heat advisories across parts of the Plains and Southeast. In some places, temperatures reached 100 degrees or higher, with heat index values even higher.

A lot of those communities were already back in school.

In Charleston County, our superintendent sent families a letter explaining that some state-owned buses were having air-conditioning problems during the excessive heat warning. The buses belong to the state, and under longstanding policy, local mechanics weren’t permitted to diagnose or repair them.

After conversations with the state superintendent, that changed. Mechanics were authorized to work on the systems, and repairs began between bus runs. In the meantime, drivers were told to lower windows when conditions allowed, and students were encouraged to bring water. I’m not trying to throw anyone under the bus here (sorry, had to do it) – the district was dealing with a complicated system and moved quickly once the problem became clear. It’s just a good example of how easy it is to overlook the infrastructure that gets children through an ordinary school day until something doesn’t work.

And the buses are only part of it.

Classrooms can have HVAC problems, too. Research has found that hotter school days can negatively affect learning, and one large study found that air conditioning appears to reduce that effect. That makes a broken air-conditioning unit more than a comfort issue.

Then there is everything happening outside the classroom. Recess gets moved indoors. Sports practices get shortened or canceled. Schools have to pay attention to heat index and, for athletics, sometimes the useful Wet Bulb Globe Temperature rather than simply looking at the thermometer. In South Carolina, some football scrimmages have already been canceled because of the heat.

I have kids who need to move around to focus. Keeping them inside all day doesn’t work particularly well for them. Sending them outside to exercise when the heat is dangerous doesn’t work either. I don’t know what the answer is to this dilemma… and it’s frustrating.

There is another piece of this that deserves more attention: what happens after school.

A child who goes home to reliable air conditioning gets a chance to cool down. A child who goes home to a broken unit, or no AC at all, doesn’t get that same break. That can mean a hot night, poor sleep and another hot day waiting in the morning. School can actually help here. It can provide a cool building, food and water. But that only works when the buses and buildings can keep up with the heat.

So what do we do with a school calendar that assumes summer politely ends on schedule? Starting earlier doesn’t fix it. Starting later doesn’t necessarily fix it either. May and June can be very hot, too. And canceling school every time conditions become dangerous creates a whole different set of problems for families.

So what's the answer? I'm not sure there is one, not a single one anyway. Maybe it's a bunch of smaller fixes, tackled together, by a community instead of a bunch of people arguing about whose fault it is.

And while we should absolutely be doing the bigger work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing the warming that’s driving these extremes, we’re not there yet. In the meantime, the heat is here, and kids still have to go to school.

I’ve spent decades communicating heat index values to the public. This week, I watched what that number actually means when it follows kids from the bus stop to the classroom and back home again.

Jean jacket and all.

Sources:

_{National Bureau of Economic Research — “Heat and Learning”
This is the important academic research source. The study examined 10 million PSAT retakers and found that hotter school days reduce learning, while school air conditioning mitigates the effect.
NBER: Heat and Learning}

_{Harvard Kennedy School — “Heat and Learning”
A useful, accessible summary of the same research, including the finding that the effects were larger for low-income and minority students.
Harvard Kennedy School: Heat and Learning}

But after a month traveling through Europe with my husband and our two kids, I realized something that surprised me: I don’t remember the weather. I remember how the weather made me feel.

I remember hot days causing arguments, and cool water inducing relieved grins. If you asked me what the exact temperature was in Tuscany while we were there, I’d probably have to look it up. But I remember the shock of cold water after a hot hike. I remember the relief of shady streets. I remember sleeping well on cool nights, and poorly on hot ones.

Experience, not data, is what stays with us.

Tuscany

Objectively, Tuscany was hot. Steep, stone-paved, unshaded piazzas—the kind of heat that makes every hill feel steeper than the last. But my memory goes way beyond “hot”. I remember gelato as a frequent coping strategy. I remember weaving back and forth across old Tuscan streets to chase the narrow strips of shade provided by ancient stone buildings. I remember getting back to our villa each afternoon, dropping into the pool, and sleeping like a rock thanks to air conditioning that felt like a genuine luxury after long days of sightseeing.

Mostly, I remember the Diborrato Waterfall in Elsa. Limestone-lined, fed by springs, it was the kind of cold that steals your breath. We swam anyway. That stark contrast—baking heat and shocking cold, back to back—is the whole memory in one place. Beyond that, it was a unifying moment for the crowd: a shared, unspoken experience of joy and relief.

Switzerland

By the time we hit Zermatt, after a full day of trains, one of which lacked air conditioning, we were desperate for a cool-down. We found it in this quaint town nestled in the shadow of the Matterhorn. We wrapped ourselves in restaurant-provided blankets as we ate hot cheese fondue in the chilly evening air.

Switzerland is where I became a little obsessed with water. Cold tap water that tasted great and felt like a revelation after Italy’s warm, questionable version. Fountains dotted the towns where locals casually refilled their bottles, and glacial lakes invited us to dip our toes after long hikes—a welcome contrast to the bacteria-laden bodies of water we left behind in South Carolina.

Lucerne complicated things a bit. It was beautiful, clean, and remarkably well-run, but it was also where it felt like everyone was smoking or vaping directly next to my kids without a second thought. Our hotel room overlooked a busy street with no AC, forcing us to leave the windows open all night. Add “sleep quality” to the list of things weather quietly controls.

When I look back on Switzerland overall, I think of relief. Not because everything was perfect, but because, at least for a little while, nature—rather than food, wine, or history—was truly the star of the show.

Paris & Colmar

We jumped right back into the heat in France. Maybe we’d adjusted, or maybe we’d just gotten better at hunting for shade and carrying water. We averaged about ten miles a day, and the kids were absolute troopers.

The memory that won’t leave me, though, is the Paris Métro at rush hour. Packed in like sardines with zero air movement, we faced a wall of humidity and body odor just as my own claustrophobia decided to kick in. My whole family is tall, and Paris often felt built for people considerably smaller than us. Every time we left a café, the routine was the same: peel my skin off the tiny metal chair I’d glued myself to, then carefully maneuver through the crowded terrace without knocking over anyone’s espresso or wine.

As a meteorologist, I couldn’t stop doing the mental math on what Paris summers will look like in thirty or fifty years—a city defined by open-air cafés, un-air-conditioned apartments, and a Métro system that turns into a sauna the second temperatures rise. The heat wasn’t just weather there; it was architecture. It was infrastructure. While I love Paris, I can honestly say I don’t think I’ll ever go back in the summer.

London

London surprised me. Bigger than Paris on paper, it didn’t feel like it, mostly due to the sheer volume of green space. Huge parks everywhere changed how we experienced the heat. Trees provided shade, dampened the urban noise, and gave the city room to exhale. We were still walking constantly and still living without AC, but it felt manageable because there was always somewhere to recover.

By the time we boarded the Caledonian Sleeper train for the overnight ride to Edinburgh, I was fully done with navigating crowded streets… and strangely excited to fall asleep to the rhythm of a moving train.

The Highlands of Scotland

Scotland is where my nervous system finally exhaled. Cool nights, fresh air, rolling green hills, clear water everywhere, and fewer people. My Oura ring stopped sending stressed alerts and started congratulating me.

It was also the only place we saw real rain the entire trip, and I welcomed every drop. For the first time since leaving home, I found myself lingering outside just to exist in it, not because we had somewhere to be. I spent time watching clouds move across the hills and feeling the rain spitting onto my face and wind whipping through my hair.

What I Carry Home

Along the way, I noticed patterns that had nothing to do with any single stop. Europeans walk more and drive less. They ride bikes. They carry reusable shopping bags everywhere, hang laundry instead of running dryers, and live with far less air conditioning than we do in the States.

Observing these daily habits reshaped how I view my own privilege. Cool, restful sleep isn’t a given; it’s a luxury that many people—even back home in the US—don’t have access to, an inequity that shapes far more lives than most realize. I felt a flicker of guilt, too, about flying across an ocean and hopping train after train just to have this experience, especially after reading this year’s Condé Nast “do not travel” list and seeing what overtourism actually costs some communities. I don’t have a tidy answer for that, so I’m choosing to sit with the question.

Here is my core takeaway from all of it: Nobody remembers the average seasonal temperature on a climate chart. They remember the flood that overwhelmed their street, the wildfire smoke that trapped their kids indoors for a week, the ski trip with no snow, the beach vacation too scorching to enjoy, or the one cool night in five weeks when they finally slept well.

We interpret weather through human experience, and we build our understanding of climate out of the accumulation of those experiences, one uncomfortable Métro ride or one icy waterfall at a time. As science communicators, we need to return humanity to our narrative. Stop relying solely on steep curves on graphs. Start inserting yourself into the story. Share something personal... and you just might make a lasting impact on the future of our climate.

There’s sonar. There’s tomography, which is basically a CAT scan for the earth. There are seismographs and gas sensors and years of ash deposits to read like tree rings. What there isn’t, according to ocean scientist and author Dr. Ellen Prager, is a window.

“We just wish we could see the plumbing,” she told me. Every bit of what we know about what’s happening beneath a volcano comes from the outside in. Earthquakes, gas, tremors, the shape of the last eruption. Indirect evidence, stacked up until it forms a picture nobody has actually looked at.

And even then, the picture lies to you sometimes. Some volcanoes rattle for weeks before they erupt. Some don’t rattle at all.

Watch: Ellen on why volcanoes are so hard to predict, and what monitoring actually buys us

That gap, between what we can detect and what we can actually know for certain, is the thread running through almost every topic Ellen and I got into on this episode of Atmosphere. Not because scientists are stuck. Because the earth is genuinely, structurally hard to read. And the response to that hasn’t been to wait for certainty. It’s been to build better ways to prepare anyway. If you listen to this episode, you’ll notice this as a running theme - while you can’t always predict the future, you can always prepare for the worst.

Take Mount St. Helens. When the volcano started stirring in 1980, the US Geological Survey had exactly one seismic station on the mountain and no budget to add more. So the scientist running the response put the monitoring equipment on his own credit card and hoped Washington would pay him back later. It worked and it saved lives.

Geology holds a lot of secrets but don’t have the atmosphere completely figured out either.

Hurricane track and intensity forecasting has gotten really good…. but why do they wobble sometimes? Small shifts in the atmosphere or the ocean nudge a storm’s steering currents just enough that landfall stops being a single point on a map and becomes a stretch of coastline. Forecasters aren’t chasing a model that eliminates the wobble. They’re building the uncertainty into how the forecast gets communicated, so a “direct hit” further down the coast doesn’t catch anyone off guard.

That shift to probability forecasting is bigger than hurricanes. Meteorologists used to hand people a single number and a confident graphic. Now you're seeing more "here's what we know and here's what we don't." As it turns out, people can handle that. Social science research on risk communication shows that audiences trust a forecaster more, not less, when the forecaster is upfront about their confidence (or lack there of).

The ocean’s circulation might be slowing down, so what does that mean? The system some people call the ocean conveyor belt, the one that helps transport heat northward and influences climate patterns across the North Atlantic and Europe, shows some signs of slowing. (This made me think of The Day After Tomorrow… future episode perhaps?) Whether that’s a blip or the start of something bigger depends almost entirely on whether the instruments tracking it stay in the water, funded and maintained, long enough to tell the difference.

And climate change is outrunning the people whose job is to measure it. Glaciologists told Ellen, more than once, some version of the same thing: the last time the planet lost this much ice, there was nobody around to watch it happen. So the pace of what’s coming isn’t a settled number. It’s a trend line built from a past we know mainly through geological evidence rather than human observation. It’s also a line being determined by today’s decisions.

None of this is a story about scientists falling short. It’s a story about what happens when you take uncertainty seriously instead of pretending it away.

Ellen put it better than I can. She spent years asking researchers across every one of these fields the same question: what keeps you up at night? Almost none of them said the unknowns. “What keeps me up at night is the knowns and people not understanding and preparing for it.” The mystery of how a volcano’s plumbing works isn’t what costs lives. A monitored volcano with an evacuation plan people ignore is what costs lives.

As a science communicator, that’s most of my job too. Not resolving the uncertainty. Just making sure the things we do know, incomplete as they are, actually reach the people standing in the path of them.

Personally, I think it’s beautiful. A planet that still holds secrets. If we had it all figured out, I’m not sure I’d still love science the way I do. I know this podcast wouldn’t exist.

So we keep going: observation, preparation, education.

And of course, wonder.

Dr. Ellen Prager is an ocean scientist, chief scientist at Storm Center Communications, and author of Dangerous Earth. You can hear the full conversation, including how she talked her way into her first marine research job and what a fifty-year forecast for the planet looks like, wherever you get your podcasts.

In this episode of Atmosphere, meteorologist Emily Gracey sits down with marine scientist, author, and science communicator Dr. Ellen Prager to explore some of the biggest mysteries in science and the natural world. What happens beneath a volcano before it erupts? Can we ever truly predict a tsunami, rogue wave, or rapidly intensifying hurricane? What is happening in the deepest parts of the ocean—and why have we explored so little of it? And how quickly will climate change reshape the planet?

From Mount St. Helens and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to rogue waves, rip currents, sharks, hurricanes, deep-ocean exploration, and a changing climate, this conversation explores what scientists know, what they still don't know, and why those unknowns matter.

But perhaps the biggest lesson is that the most important thing keeping scientists up at night isn't always what we don't know. It's what we do know—and whether we're paying attention, preparing, and taking action.

Because science doesn't begin with what we know. It begins with what we don't know.

But the length isn’t the interesting part. The range is.

Somewhere along the way, Shepherd noticed something about his field that most people never think to question: science and science communication get treated like two different jobs, done by two different kinds of people. The researcher stays in the lab. The communicator stays on camera. Rarely does anyone expect one person to do both, let alone do them well.

Shepherd thinks that split is a mistake.

“I think that kind of ivory tower mentality can often constrict or constrain scientists,” he told me, “because they’re so narrowly focused on the studies and their research and their labs.” He does that work too. He’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences, with the research credentials to match. But he’s spent just as much of his career thinking about how to actually explain what that research means, to the people it’s meant to help.

There’s a name for the resistance he ran into along the way. It’s often referred to as the Carl Sagan effect- the old assumption that if you’re popular, you must not be that serious. Shepherd doesn’t buy it. “I have dropped the water balloon bomb on that theory,” he said, “because I’ve written and shown that you can be a successful scientist and still post on social media and engage, host a podcast, do a TV show, testify before Congress.”

His case in point is his own career. But he’s also got the data to back it up, drawn from years of watching how the public actually receives weather information.

Because here’s the part that makes this more than a nice idea: most people only ever meet one scientist. “The television meteorologist is the only scientist most people see in a given day, period,” Shepherd said. By his estimate, only eight to ten percent of the meteorology community works in broadcast. Everyone else, the modelers, the researchers, the people building the next generation of forecasting tools, mostly work behind the scenes. The broadcaster is the face. Whether that face can translate the science determines whether the science reaches anyone at all.

It’s why he brought up the old AMS (American Meteorological Society) “station scientist” initiative- a model where meteorologists weren’t just forecasting rain, they were the go-to expert for earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, any science story that landed on the newsroom’s desk that day. The expectation wasn’t just accuracy. It was range.

That’s the version of “well-rounded” Shepherd is actually describing. Not someone who knows a little about everything. Someone who can do the deep technical work and then turn around and make it make sense to a person standing in their kitchen deciding whether to take a tornado warning seriously. Depth and clarity, in the same person, on the same day.

It’s a high bar. It’s also, according to Shepherd, an achievable one. Not because every meteorologist needs to host a TV show or write for Forbes, but because the instinct to explain your work, to treat communication as part of the science rather than a distraction from it, is a skill you can build no matter where you sit in the field.

The research still has to be right. That part never changes.

But somewhere out there right now is a kid building a barometer out of things they found in the garage, the way Shepherd did in sixth grade, with no idea yet what they’re going to become. What they need isn’t just a path into the science. It’s a model for what a finished scientist looks like, someone as comfortable in the data as they are in the room with the people who need it explained to them. Because when the sirens go off, that second skill isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between a forecast that’s technically correct and one that actually gets someone to safety in time.

Shepherd never set out to be a communicator. He just refused to be a scientist nobody could reach.

Dr. Marshall Shepherd is my guest on this week’s episode of Atmosphere. We get into his path from a sixth grade science fair project to NASA to the University of Georgia, the future of AI in forecasting, and the two-hour tornado warning question that doesn’t have an easy answer yet. Full episode linked below.

In this episode of Atmosphere, Emily Gracey sits down with Dr. Marshall Shepherd, former president of the American Meteorological Society, former NASA scientist, associate dean and director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, Forbes contributor, and host of Weather Geeks.

Together they explore Dr. Shepherd's concept of the "end-to-end scientist" - the idea that great research isn't enough if scientists can't effectively communicate it to the public. They discuss why science communication matters more than ever, how weather forecasts can save lives only if people understand and trust them, and why scientists must engage beyond academic journals.

The conversation also tackles some of today's biggest issues in meteorology, including weather equity, disaster vulnerability, language barriers in severe weather warnings, the future of artificial intelligence in weather forecasting, growing tornado risks in the Southeast, and the ongoing debate over public versus private weather data. Dr. Shepherd also shares his thoughts on mentorship, increasing diversity in atmospheric science, and how the next generation of meteorologists can better serve their communities.

Whether you're fascinated by weather, climate, science communication, or the future of forecasting, this wide-ranging conversation offers an inside look at the people and ideas shaping modern meteorology.

Topics covered:

• Dr. Marshall Shepherd's journey from sixth-grade science fair to NASA

• Science communication and the "end-to-end scientist"

• Weather forecasting, AI, and the future of meteorology

• Weather equity and protecting vulnerable communities

• Public vs. private weather forecasting

• Building trust in science and improving public understanding

Links:

Marshall's Forbes Articles

Weather Geeks Podcast

Weekly Weather Brief Podcast

Anthony Yanez said that almost offhandedly, near the end of our conversation, and it’s the one line from this episode that left me thinking. We’d set out to do a fun myth-busting episode. Lightning takes the fast lane, earthquakes have their own folklore, hurricanes apparently only hit at night. We got all of that. But that single sentence turned out to be the real subject of the whole conversation, the thing every myth we busted was actually about underneath.

Because none of these misconceptions are really about weather. They’re about what the human brain does when it can’t stand not knowing something.

Take the lightning distance rule, the one where you count the seconds between the flash and the thunder to figure out how far away the storm is. Almost everyone knows there's a rule. Almost everyone gets the math wrong. Here’s the clip:

Anthony told me about moving to Los Angeles during a drought, and a neighbor informing him, with total confidence, that the drought meant the San Andreas fault was about to let loose. Then a wet winter came along, and someone else told him that meant the same thing. Dry year, big one. Wet year, big one. The logic didn’t have to hold together, because it was never really about logic. It was about turning something genuinely random into something that felt explainable.

We do the same thing with hurricanes and snow. I hear it constantly in Charleston: big hurricane this year, snowstorm next year, like clockwork. Anthony hears the exact same claim in Houston, just flipped. Snow this winter means a hurricane is coming. He actually went back and checked the data on this, because he’d heard it enough times to wonder if there was something to it. There isn’t. It happens together once, it’s memorable, and memory does the rest of the work convincing you it’s a pattern.

The flood insurance piece of this conversation is the other sticking point for me. Southeast Texas is basically one enormous floodplain, yet people anchor their sense of safety to a line on a map, or to the fact that “we already had our hundred year flood.” Tropical Storm Allison hit Houston in 2001. Twenty some years later, Harvey put three quarters of its flood damage outside the official hundred year floodplain, and most of the homes that flooded didn’t carry flood insurance. The math behind “hundred year flood” was built for insurance actuaries, not for the way a homeowner’s brain processes risk. Told a number, most of us hear a promise instead of a probability.

The fascinating thing is that none of this is really a knowledge problem we can fix by handing people more facts. Anthony can stand in front of a fourth grade class and correct the shiny-object lightning myth every single year, and next year’s fourth graders will believe it too, because the instinct underneath it isn’t ignorance. It’s the very human need to feel like the world follows rules we can see. Weather, especially the violent kind, resists that. So we supply the rules ourselves, string together a drought and an earthquake, a snowstorm and a hurricane, a flood ten years ago and a sense of safety today, and we hold onto the story because the alternative is admitting some of this is just genuinely out of our hands.

If there’s a practical takeaway buried in all of that, it’s a small one. The myth you’ve been repeating for twenty years probably isn’t really about the lightning, or the fault line, or the floodplain map. It’s about whatever made not knowing feel unbearable in the first place. We do not, as human beings, like uncertainty. Worth asking yourself which myth you’re still leaning on to avoid it.

And if you're not ready to let go of yours just yet, that's fine too. Needing a story to make an uncertain world feel a little more solid isn't a flaw in your thinking. It's just proof you're human.

Full conversation with Anthony Yanez, chief meteorologist at KPRC Houston, is up now wherever you listen to Atmosphere.

Rubber tires protect you from lightning. Heat lightning is a different kind of lightning. A hundred-year flood only happens once every hundred years. If the weather changes, a big earthquake must be coming.

But how many of these weather myths are actually true?

In this episode of Atmosphere, meteorologist Emily Gracey is joined by fellow meteorologist Anthony Yanez for a fun, fast-paced conversation separating weather fact from fiction. Drawing on decades of forecasting, television, school visits, and viewer questions, they unpack the myths they've heard countless times, and explain why so many of them continue to stick.

We cover some of the most common weather misconceptions, including:

• Lightning Safety: Can lightning strike the same place twice? Do rubber tires or shoes really protect you? And is the lightning crouch still recommended?

• Heat Lightning: Is it actually a different type of lightning, or something else entirely?

• Hundred-Year Floods: What does the term really mean, and why is it so widely misunderstood?

• Rain Chances: What meteorologists actually mean when they forecast a "30% chance of rain."

• Earthquake Myths: Can weather trigger earthquakes, and why do these rumors spread after major events?

• Why Myths Persist: The psychology behind why we believe - and pass along - weather misconceptions.

Whether you're a weather enthusiast, a science communicator, or someone who's repeated one of these myths without thinking twice, this episode will leave you looking at everyday weather in a whole new way.

Resources & Links

Anthony Yanez's Weather Lab: https://www.click2houston.com/weatherlab/

Anthony's documentary, Garden in the Gulf: A Reef Rescue Mission: https://www.click2houston.com/weather/2025/04/18/garden-in-the-gulf-a-reef-rescue-mission/

Shorely Safe: www.shorelysafe.live

Connect with us:

Facebook: Emily Gracey Meteorologist

Instagram: @AtmospherePodcast

Substack: Atmosphere Podcast (Subscribe for a deeper dive into this week's content!)

Now that we’re staring down another strong El Niño cycle, I couldn’t help but wonder what that means for ecosystems still trying to recover from the last hit. To walk me through what’s actually happening beneath the surface, I called up my friend Dr. Tracy Fanara, an environmental engineer and ocean scientist.

Kicking out the life support

The fundamental misunderstanding about coral is that it’s a plant or a rock. It’s an animal that relies entirely on microscopic algae living inside its tissue. It’s a symbiotic partnership that gives the coral both its primary food source and its vibrant color.

When the ocean gets too warm, that partnership breaks down. The algae get stressed, start producing toxins, and the coral goes into survival mode, kicking the algae out. What’s left behind is bone-white. It looks dead, but it isn’t… at least, not yet.

Whether a bleached reef survives depends entirely on a ticking clock: how fast do the waters cool, and how much time does the coral have to recover? That recovery window is where the climate crisis is actively breaking the system. Bleaching events used to strike roughly once a decade. Now, with natural cycles like El Niño stacking on top of a relentlessly warming baseline, reefs are getting hit before they can even catch their breath.

The fallout doesn’t stay underwater, either. Tracy shared a working hypothesis she’s investigating that connects the 2023 bleaching event to a tragic wave of critically endangered smalltooth sawfish washing up dead the following year. Her theory? The massive ecosystem imbalance left by dying coral allowed a specific toxin-producing algae species to surge unchecked.

A ten-million-to-one shot at survival

Shachar Damari didn’t take a traditional path to marine biology. He spent over a decade working as a software developer and product manager before co-founding V-Corals. His credentials weren’t an academic degree; they were a childhood spent maintaining a home aquarium and a lifelong obsession with the reefs off the coast of Eilat.

Most coral restoration projects today rely on a process called microfragmentation which is essentially cutting a healthy coral colony into tiny pieces to stimulate rapid growth. It works, but it has a massive evolutionary flaw: the fragments are genetic clones of the parent. If the exact same heatwave returns, the clones die just as fast as the original. We’re essentially mass-producing the same vulnerability.

Shachar’s team is trying something much rarer, betting on the sexiest night of the year.

Once a year, under a specific moon phase, certain coral species broadcast-spawn, releasing millions of eggs and sperm simultaneously into the water column. V-Corals has figured out how to harness a rare anomaly within that window: a phenomenon where multiple distinct coral larvae with completely different DNA fuse together into a single organism.

There is no CRISPR or gene editing involved here. It’s a naturally occurring event that scientists have observed for years but never fully utilized. The result is a single coral carrying the genetic toolkit of multiple parents at once, making it radically more resilient to heat and disease.

Instead of just cloning the past, they are actively breeding coral for the future.

The shrinking timeline

This isn’t just about saving pretty places to snorkel (though, that’s a huge part of it). Reefs are frontline infrastructure. They absorb up to 90% of a wave’s energy before it slams into the coast, protecting millions of people from storm surges. They host a quarter of all marine life. Lose the reef, lose the fish, lose the coastal protection, and you eventually lose the economies built around them.

When I asked Tracy what we can do on an individual level, her answers were surprisingly local. Yes, global emissions are the bigger problem, but local stressors like fertilizer runoff, lawn herbicides, and chemical sunscreens are the immediate suffocating forces. What you put on your grass and your skin matters.

But more than that, both Tracy and Shachar emphasized that public awareness is the actual lever that moves policy. Twenty years ago, the consensus among scientists was passive: leave nature alone, let it take its course. That hands-off approach changed not because the ecological science changed, but because the timeline became personal.

While everything I learned from Shachar about coral reproduction was mind-blowing, the part of the conversation that was most impactful was when he told me about taking his twins snorkeling at the exact same reef in Eilat where his father had first taken him decades ago.

He was emotional. But not in a joyous way.

“I remembered how I saw it when I was a child with my father,” he told me. “And now how my children see it. And I know that their children are going to see less and less.”

We tend to look at climate change through the lens of cold, sterile data: global anomalies, baseline shifts, and centuries of planetary history. But science only tells us what is happening. It’s stories like Shachar’s that tell us why it matters. We aren’t just losing a set of biological coordinates or frontline infrastructure. We’re losing the connective tissue between generations.

The secret to saving the reefs might be hidden in a single, chaotic night of raw biology underwater. But the drive to go look for it? That comes from a father who simply wants his children to see the world the way he did.

Full conversation with Dr. Tracy Fanara and Shachar Damari is up now on Atmosphere. Listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

This year's strong El Niño is pushing already-stressed reefs past their limits. In this episode of Atmosphere, host Emily Gracey sits down with Dr. Tracy Fanara, an environmental engineer and ocean scientist, to break down what's actually happening inside a bleaching coral, why El Niño and climate change are attacking reefs from two directions at once, and a striking theory she's developed linking the 2023 bleaching event to a mysterious die-off of endangered small tooth sawfish.

Then Emily talks with Shachar Damari, co-founder of V-Corals, a Red Sea-based biotech company rethinking how reefs get rebuilt. Instead of the industry-standard method of cutting coral into genetically identical clones, his team works with a rare natural fusion event that combines multiple coral genotypes into a single, hardier colony.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• The Bleaching Process: Why a "bleached" coral isn't a dead one, and what determines whether it bounces back.

• A Two-Front Attack: How long-term climate change and short-term El Niño patterns are compounding to hit reefs from both sides at once.

• The Sawfish Mystery: Tracy's leading hypothesis connecting reef collapse to a mass die-off of a critically endangered species.

• The Restoration Problem: Why most reef restoration doesn't hold up long-term, and what "resilience" actually requires.

• A Different Approach: How V-Corals uses a rare natural phenomenon, not genetic editing, to build coral that can survive future heat waves.

Connect with the Show:

• Follow Emily on Facebook: Meteorologist Emily Gracey

• Follow the Show on Instagram: @AtmospherePodcast

• Deep Dive on Substack: Subscribe to the Atmosphere Substack for weekly science breakdowns.

• Listen to the Weekly Weather Brief: Catch Emily and meteorologist Kerrin Jeromin every Friday for a quick rundown of the week's biggest science stories.

Links:

Follow Dr. Tracy Fanara on Instagram- @InspectorPlanet

V-Corals: https://www.v-corals.com/

Then he used it. Four times that day. 6 a.m.: 68 degrees. 9 a.m.: 72. 1 p.m.: 76. 9 p.m.: 73.5. Clear skies, light wind. By Philadelphia standards, then or now, a genuinely pleasant day to found a nation.

He’d actually started the habit a few days earlier, on July 1st, right in the middle of the Continental Congress. Sunrise readings to catch the overnight low, afternoon readings around 3 or 4 when he figured temperatures peaked. Cloud cover, wind direction, humidity. He called these “indexes of climate,” and he carried that thermometer with him everywhere.

John Adams was having a very different experience of that same Philadelphia summer. He wrote to Abigail that he dreaded the “melting heats” of the season and feared his constitution might not survive it. Later he’d describe the city’s air as feeling like the breath of an oven. He wasn’t wrong, exactly. Philadelphia in July is no joke. He just wasn’t taking notes about it the way Jefferson was.

That difference matters more than it sounds like it should. Adams was reacting to weather. Jefferson was building a record.

A Founder’s Obsession Becomes a Network

Jefferson didn’t stop at his own thermometer. In 1784 he wrote to James Madison urging him to start his own weather diary, systematic columns twice a day, temperature, pressure, wind, with notes on first blooms and first frosts. He understood something that’s still true: you can’t know a climate from a single reading. You need time, patience, and a lot of people paying attention at once.

That’s exactly what happened. Two and a half centuries later, the habit Jefferson started has grown into a nationwide web of observation that lets us ask a question he could only have guessed at: how different is America’s weather today from the world the founders actually lived in?

I sat down with Kaitlyn Trudeau, an applied climate scientist at Climate Central to find out what 250 years of data actually says. You can listen to the full conversation on this week’s episode of Atmosphere, and I’m dropping a short clip below where Kaitlyn and I dig into the records, Jefferson’s surprisingly modern theory about deforestation, and what the founders’ weather really looked like.

What the Founders’ Weather Actually Looked Like

Here’s the twist: 1776 wasn’t some balmy baseline. The country was founded near the tail end of the Little Ice Age, a multi-century cooling period centered on the North Atlantic. New York Harbor froze solid from Manhattan to Staten Island in the brutal winter of 1780. A string of volcanic eruptions over the following decades cooled things further, culminating in 1816’s “year without a summer,” when Mount Tambora’s ash dimmed the skies worldwide.

But that’s not to say it was hot. At the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey, soldiers fought through what was recorded as 100-degree heat in full wool uniforms. Nearly as many of them reportedly died from heat stroke as from combat.

Before instrumental records were widespread, scientists like Kaitlyn lean on paleoclimate data, the natural archives that were quietly recording the atmosphere long before anyone thought to look. Tree rings. Ice cores with tiny trapped air bubbles, literal time capsules of ancient atmosphere. Lake sediments. Coral. Even pollen counts. It’s how we know what the planet was doing millions of years before anyone owned a thermometer, let alone Jefferson’s.

And an interesting fact- Jefferson himself suspected the climate around him was shifting. He wrote about it in his Notes on the State of Virginia, attributing it to the clearing of forests along the eastern seaboard. He had the wrong mechanism, deforestation rather than greenhouse gas emissions, but he was right that human activity was changing the air around him.

The Rate of Change Is the Story

A natural pushback to all this: 250 years is nothing in the planet’s history, so why does it matter? Kaitlyn’s answer cuts right to it. The climate has always changed, but what’s different now is the rate. The bulk of the warming we’re measuring has happened in just the last 50 to 75 years, a blink compared to the natural cycles that came before it.

That warming isn’t evenly distributed either. The Southwest, places like Reno, Phoenix, and much of Nevada, has warmed dramatically, while the Great Lakes region has seen comparatively little change. Part of that comes down to Arctic amplification: as sea ice melts, dark ocean water replaces reflective ice, absorbs more heat instead of bouncing it back to space, and melts even more ice. A feedback loop that the founders’ world simply didn’t have to contend with.

Two charts from Climate Central put numbers to all of this. Zoom into Philadelphia specifically, the same city where Jefferson was taking his readings 250 years ago, and July has warmed 4.4 degrees since just 1970. The hottest Independence Day stretch on record hit 103 degrees in 1966; the coolest was 52 in 1986. That’s the kind of swing that makes any single hot summer easy to dismiss as normal variability, which is exactly why the trend line matters more than any one data point.

Zoom back out to the full 250 years and the picture gets even clearer. Global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels stayed close to flat for most of the record, then bent sharply upward starting in the mid-1900s, and global temperature followed the same curve right behind it. We’re now 1.7 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 baseline, and the two lines on this chart, emissions and temperature, track each other closely enough to make the causal story pretty hard to argue with.

What Will 300 Look Like?

There’s a phrase Kaitlyn kept coming back to that stuck with me: “when we turn 300.” Not as a distant milestone, but as a kind of deadline for the story we’re currently writing. Her point is that the next fifty years aren’t predetermined. What we do now still bends where that number lands.

This got me thinking about my own life and my family. My kids will be about retirement age in fifty years, and I wanted to know, realistically, not the worst-case version and not the best-case version, what they might actually be dealing with. Kaitlyn didn’t dodge it: somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three degrees of additional warming is already looking likely on that timeline, more extreme weather, added strain on food and water systems, the spread of vector-borne disease into places that haven’t had to think about it before.

We got into what individuals can actually do about any of this, and Kaitlyn was refreshingly honest that a lot of the standard advice, buy an EV, put solar on your roof, assumes a homeowner with money to spend. She rents. She can’t do either of those things right now. What she pushed instead was something smaller and, in her view, more available to everyone: talk about it. Say out loud why it matters to you, to the people around you, to whoever has power to act on it.

When America turns 300, my kids will be the ones living in whatever world we’re currently deciding on. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but it’s their future being written right now, whether we sit with it or not.

Listen to the full conversation with Kaitlyn Trudeau on Atmosphere, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop weekly on Tuesday mornings.

Subscribe now

Sources

• Jefferson’s Thermometer: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/thermometer

• Founders Archive Records: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/02-01-02-0010

• Jefferson Weather Database: https://jefferson-weather-records.org/node/41019

• AMS Climate Records Study: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/84/1/bams-84-1-57.pdf

• John Adams & Philly Heat: https://www.amrevmuseum.org/john-adams-and-revolutionary-philadelphia-s-summer-heat

• The Hard Winter of 1779-1780: https://emergingrevolutionarywar.org/2016/01/23/the-hard-winter-of-1779-1780/

• Climate Central’s 250 Years of Climate Change: https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/250-years-of-climate-change

On July 4, 1776, as 56 men gathered to declare independence. That same day, Thomas Jefferson bought a brand-new thermometer, and started taking meticulous notes. Those very readings marked the birth of an American climate record that stretches all the way to the present day.

In this episode of Atmosphere, host Emily Gracey sits down with Kaitlyn Trudeau, an applied climate scientist at Climate Central, to unpack two and a half centuries of American weather data. Together, they explore how our climate has shifted from the brutal winters of the Little Ice Age to the rapid warming of the modern era... and what the data tells us to expect by the time the nation turns 300.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The Weather of 1776: What it was really like in that Philadelphia room (think wool coats, horseflies, and no AC), and how Jefferson became America's original "weather nerd."

• Nature’s Time Capsules: How scientists use paleoclimate proxies—like tree rings, ice cores, and coral—to unlock millions of years of climate history.

• The Rate of Change: Why the dramatic shift in global carbon emissions over the last 50 to 75 years is the real cause for concern.

• Climate Controls: Why the climate is warming differently in places like the Southwest compared to the Great Lakes.

• A Story We Are Still Writing: Why the next 50 years aren't predetermined, and how collective action today dictates our future.

Articles referenced in this episode:

https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/thermometer

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/02-01-02-0010

https://jefferson-weather-records.org/node/41019

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/84/1/bams-84-1-57.pdf

https://www.amrevmuseum.org/john-adams-and-revolutionary-philadelphia-s-summer-heat

https://emergingrevolutionarywar.org/2016/01/23/the-hard-winter-of-1779-1780/

Connect with the Show:

• Follow Emily on Facebook: Meteorologist Emily Gracey

• Follow the Show on Instagram: @AtmospherePodcast

• Deep Dive on Substack: Subscribe to the Atmosphere Substack for weekly science breakdowns.

• Listen to the Weekly Weather Brief: Catch Emily and meteorologist Kerrin Jeromin every Friday for a quick rundown of the week’s biggest science stories.

Just three years earlier, a different news director had taken a chance on me, a young meteorologist with zero on-air experience. He put me on air and told me “don’t fuck it up.” He was joking, of course, but I laughed nervously and tried not to throw up as I went live from a top-30 market and delivered a horrific weather presentation, by my own standards. Thus began my lifelong imposter syndrome.

In those three years, I didn’t learn much from my superiors. But I learned a ton from the hardworking, gritty, hilarious, and deeply cynical people I worked alongside. They were older, they were smarter, and there was no room for egos at a station so bad it was referred to internally as the “two-tanic” (Channel 2). It was a scrappy operation. And it was the most at home I had ever felt in my life. Which is why it stung when someone told me I didn’t belong there.

For the record, I don’t hate many people. But the woman who fired me? I will never wish her well. And from what I’ve heard, she hasn’t gone far. Shocker.

After about a year of freelance work, I landed back in Baltimore at a different station as a weekend meteorologist. This time felt different. I wasn’t in over my head. I was fully qualified, the people I worked with were closer to my age, and I had a tough news director who actually taught us how to do good work. I had fun. I worked hard. I learned a lot.

Meanwhile, I watched my friends back at the two-tanic complain about layoffs, low morale, and the overall misery of their station, and I found myself grateful. Grateful that first news director took a chance on me. Grateful I’d walked through the door of Channel 2 at all. I made the best friends of my adult life at that sinking ship, and I will never regret a minute of it. It was like going to college, except they paid me to learn.

Losing that first job also did something else to me. It took away the fear. The worst thing that could happen already had, and it wasn’t that bad. So why spend energy dreading the future?

As my personal life evolved…marriage, kids, moving… so did my career. I’ve moved onto other stations, new cities, new friends, and (slightly) better schedules.

In recent years I’ve been living my best work-from-home life, which is a sentence I never expected to type as a meteorologist. Creating digital content, conducting interviews with scientists, producing podcasts and hurricane specials, all from my pimped-out she-shed in the backyard. I stopped wearing Spanx and straightening my hair every day. I was in my 40s and finally, genuinely comfortable in my own skin.

It was a good life. Steady paycheck. Real work-life balance. No weekends, no holidays, no 2am alarms.

So imagine my disappointment when, this past April, my boss called our team of six into an upstairs office (why is it always upstairs?) and told us our department was being shut down. We were all laid off.

This time, I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t angry. I was disappointed, because I loved my job. But something was different from 17 years earlier. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I felt grateful. I did work I loved for four years and honestly feel like I got more out of it than it got out of me. I have skills I didn’t have before. I was given the freedom and the tools to build them. I was trusted, appreciated, and treated with real respect, and when it ended, what I felt most was: thank you.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had my dark moments: navigating disappointing severance terms, writing checks for COBRA that make me reach for a glass of wine. But sitting in bitterness doesn’t serve me. It doesn’t serve anyone.

Here’s the thing about local television news: it’s dying. The media landscape is changing in ways that are uncomfortable and inconvenient to acknowledge. Kind of like climate change. Both are real, both are disruptive, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make them less so. We can sit with the discomfort or we can figure out how to move forward.

People look at me with pity when they find out I was laid off, and it almost makes me feel guilty. Because I want to tell them - losing a job isn’t the worst thing that can happen. It’s like losing someone you love versus never knowing what love feels like at all. I know what it feels like to love what I do. I’ve been lucky enough to do it for a long time. So I’m going to keep doing it.

No one’s paying me for it right now. But they will. Things have always worked out for me, just not always the way I expected.

And honestly? That’s my favorite part.