What’s Up with the Weather? Jon Martin Joins The UW Now Livestream to Discuss

Jon Martin is a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the UW and makes up one half of a two-front force of nature: the Weather Guys. He and his counterpart Steve Ackerman, retired vice chancellor of research and graduate education, host a regular radio segment on Wisconsin Public Radio’s The Larry Meiller Show and answer weather-related questions in their weekly “Ask the Weather Guys” column in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Both Ackerman and Martin will join the July 16 episode of The UW Now Livestream to discuss recent extreme weather events, the rising frequency of such events, and how a changing climate is affecting day-to-day weather.

The study of large-scale weather systems in the mid-latitudes, with particular emphasis on the wintertime, the cold-season storms, and their connection to and interaction with the climate system. That’s my secondary thing that I’ve kind of grown into in my career. I started out being very interested in and remain interested in winter storms.

In this case, we’re going to be talking about the recent spring and summer and how they’re manifesting some of the strange things that are going around — climate change in the warm season. It’s been an incredibly rainy spring and summer, and it’s been hot in most of the country. So, these things are becoming newsworthy.

[Hurricane Beryl was the] earliest Category 4 and then Category 5 — it ended up at Category 5 at some point over the ocean. It was the earliest one ever in history. This doesn’t happen on accident. There’s something going on that’s unusual, and the unusual thing is well-known. We understand what it is. It doesn’t mean that we can predict the next storm, but it does mean that we understand what’s changing the physical climate system.

If they’ve been skeptical about whether or not the climate is changing and whether or not those changes mean anything to them, they can’t divorce those questions and that skepticism. It’s healthy to have skepticism about anything when it comes to the natural world and our understanding of it. But it’s also healthy to marry that skepticism to your own senses. Now, everyone can begin to see that the weather is changing. The weather is not the climate, and yet the climate system is changing so dramatically — not quickly, but dramatically — that it actually starts to influence what we notice about our day-to-day weather in ways that are quite unprecedented. When I came here 30 years ago, this was not the case. It is now. We haven’t gotten smarter; it’s just that the weather has gotten stranger. 

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