Hi, and welcome to today's webinar, Rainfall and Hurricane Forecast, Implications to Inland Marine, hosted by Inland Marine Underwriters Association. I am Eileen Monreale, Education Training Specialist at IMUA. Thank you for joining us today. A few technical tips, you'll see your attendee control panel on your screen that may minimize by default. At any point, you can right-click the orange arrow to bring it back. Also, you can select the view on the control panel and uncheck the auto-hide option. Although due to the size of the file, we did not upload the PDF of the presentation on your handout, we will email it to you following the webinar. There is a question box in the control panel. Our presenters will address your questions at the end of the presentation, but please enter them at any time. And I think they'll be using that for different feedback throughout the webinar, so keep your eye on your questions on your control panel. To encourage your questions, IMUA will email a $25 Amazon gift card to the most slash best engaged attendee as a token of our appreciation for your engagement. So let's get started. We can move to the next slide. And I want to remind you all to be aware of the IMUA policy statement. And now, there's our statement, beautiful statement, and now I'm honored to introduce today's presenters. Barry Cai is the Richard J. Russell Louisiana Studies Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography and Anthropology. His research focuses on climate extremes, with particular focus on heavy rainfall, hurricanes, and storm surge. He is also an expert in matters concerning climatic data and its interpretation. Dr. Cai has published extensively in these areas, and he currently has 90 referred publications, two books, as well as numerous other technical reports. I will share no further, although there is much more to add. Suffice to say, Dr. Cai is extraordinarily qualified to present today. Vincent Brown is Assistant Professor of Research at Louisiana State University. He earned a BS at Salisbury University, an MS at University of Tennessee, and a PhD at Louisiana State University. His publications include recent articles in the Journal of Hydro-Meteorology and Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. Dr. Brown is interested in all things weather and climate, with a particular focus on precipitation, climatic extremes, severe weather, and climate change. I think he must have a lot to focus on these days. Dr. Brown, Barry, and Vincent have presented at IMUA annual meetings and webinars in recent years, always to excellent reviews, and we're thrilled to have them with us today to provide what is sure to be an illuminating presentation. Please take it away, gentlemen. All right. Well, thank you very much. So we were told or asked to give some presentations on this upcoming hurricane season. So that's what I'm going to primarily focus on, and then Vinny will come in behind me and talk some about the rainfall dynamics involving hurricanes and so on. And we'll hold questions until the end of each presentation, as I understand it. So with that, again, I'm in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at LSU and serve as the Principal Investigator of the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program. Our acronym is SCIP. And we are a joint venture between LSU and the University of Oklahoma, where my Oklahoma read today. They're actually flying into Louisiana this afternoon, so I wanted to represent. So anyway, so let's talk about the hurricane season. This is the NOAA hurricane season outlook, which they released in late May, just about a week or so ago. And what NOAA is projecting is that we can expect anywhere from 17 to 25 named storms this year. Now, keep in mind, to put that in perspective, 14 is considered an average season. So we're looking at something quite a bit above normal. Hurricanes, we're looking at anywhere from 8 to 13. And of those 8 to 13 hurricanes, we expect anywhere from 4 to 7 of them to become major hurricanes. So we have no idea. I mean, this is a projection. It's a prediction. And if it does live up to its prediction, we have no idea where the storms are going to go and which areas are going to be most vulnerable. So there's still a lot of uncertainty involved in what we're looking at. I will say, though, that since NOAA's been issuing these forecasts for the last couple of decades, this is the most dire forecast they've ever made, topping out the 2010 forecast that they put out, which up until this year was the most dire that they've ever had. Now, the worst season we've ever had was 2020, when we had 30 named storms. But they weren't predicting big, big numbers that particular year. So that's just a little background. But they're predicting – obviously, this is the worst season that we've ever had forecast going into it. Now, some competition for NOAA is the Colorado State Tropical Meteorology Group. This is headed up by Philip Klotzbach, who's following in the footsteps of Bill Gray. They came out with their forecast back in April. They were also forecasting a very, very busy season. And as you can see, what I've highlighted there, the total number of named storms – instead of picking a range, they actually pick a specific number. And they're projecting 23 named storms this season. And you can see to the right of that, the average for 1991 to 2020 is 14.4. Again, I put these numbers in perspective. Of those 23 named storms, they expect 11 to be hurricanes. Roughly seven is an average season. And for major hurricanes, they're predicting five for 2024, whereby three is considered an average season. So, all across the board, we're expecting some pretty big numbers. And then, AccuWeather also has a forecast. They didn't have any great graphic that I could grab to show it to you, but they're projecting anywhere from 20 to 25 named storms. So all three of these groups are predicting some pretty sizable numbers that would certainly rank in the top three, four or so of the busiest seasons that we've ever had on record if it lives up to its top billing. So, why is this season expected to be so busy? And why these – so, why these dire forecasts? Well, the first thing is, we're – we have a waning El Nino right now, rather. We were in El Nino for most of last hurricane season and through most of the winter and early spring. And that El Nino is finally starting to weaken. They expect us to go neutral very soon. And by the time we get into the real core of hurricane season, into August and September and October, we expect this La Nina to start to develop and really start to blossom. El Ninos create very unfavorable upper air and tends to minimize and mitigate the number of storms. La Nina, on the other hand, creates very favorable upper air weather systems for storms to form in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. So, La Ninas are bad news for us here in the southeastern United States or anywhere in the eastern United States, for that matter. In addition, we have record warm sea surface temperatures playing out across the entire North Atlantic and really across what we call the main development zone or main development region, the MDR. And last year was record-breaking and right now the sea surface temperatures are even higher than last year. And so, it's been pretty crazy. Another characteristic of this season is that we've had very weak trade winds and expect that to remain in place. And why that is important is because when the winds don't really blow over those waters, it only makes them get hotter. When those trade winds are blowing, it obviously causes evaporation off those water surfaces. That serves to cool the water surfaces a little bit. With weak trade winds, even more heat is building up and that feeds into those record warm sea surface temperatures. And then lastly, we expect to have a hyperactive West African monsoon. What that does is right off the west coast of Africa, we spin up these thunderstorms and that serves basically as seeds, if you will, by throwing these thunderstorms out into the Atlantic Ocean where they can then start that rotation and can eventually create an easterly wave, which can then, again, grow all the way up into a major hurricane under the wrong circumstances. So a hyperactive West African monsoon just plants more seeds out there that can ultimately turn into a big major storm. So you put all these things together and you end up with a forecast like this for, again, the worst forecast that they've ever made going into a hurricane season. I do expect this hurricane season to start early, end late, and be very busy pretty much all in between. So to put some perspective on this, and this is some research that came out of a pretty old paper, and it looks fairly technical, but it's really not. And what we're looking at is what is the probability of U.S. hurricanes, and when I say U.S. hurricanes, hurricanes that make landfall somewhere in the United States, what is the probability under El Nino, neutral, and La Nina conditions? And if you look at the red line and where it intersects, let's just say two hurricanes affecting the United States, what is that probability? Well, during an El Nino, if you work your way up from the number two from the bottom, which is the number of U.S. hurricanes, we work our way up, and where we intersect with that red line, that'll give us the probability to the left, and that comes in around 25%. So we had about a 25, going in an El Nino year, we would have about a 25% chance of having two named storms. If we work our way up that line for two named storms, it comes out to about 45% or so for under neutral conditions to have two storms, and during a La Nina, there's about a 60% or 65% chance of having two or more storms during a La Nina year. And you can do that for any number of storms, and obviously you have more storms that on average occur during La Ninas than you do during El Ninos, and if we look over to the right, the mean number of landfalling U.S. major hurricanes are very interesting. El Ninos, we get about one every four years, okay, in terms of El Nino years. One in four will get a major hurricane. During a neutral year, about two out of three years get major hurricanes, but during La Ninas, almost every single year gets a major hurricane on average. We average about one per year. So it's about four times more major hurricanes during La Nina than during El Nino. And again, we're in a very weak El Nino now, but by the time the real heart of the hurricane season gets here, we expect to be under La Nina conditions, and that should extend later on into the season. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the sea surface temperatures. This is the sea surface temperatures between 60 degrees north and south, okay, for the entire globe, for the entire world. And I notice a lot of squiggly lines on here. All those gray lines are all the years between 1981 through 2002. The sort of yellow or beige-ish line represents where the sea surface temperatures were throughout the year for 2023. And then the black line at the top is where we currently are in the year 2024, and obviously it's incomplete because we're only in early June. But you can see we're running way above what the long-term averages would suggest and pretty far above what happened in 2023, which was absurdly record-breaking. So that just gives you some idea of just how crazy this year could potentially be once we get into the real teeth of this particular hurricane season. Now drilling down just on the North Atlantic, this is going from the equator up to 60 degrees north across the Atlantic Basin, same information here. All those gray lines at the bottom represent, you know, the temperatures, the daily temperatures for the North Atlantic averaged, you know, over the whole region. And you can see how it bottoms out in early March and peaks in the latter part of August into early September. And again, you can see all those years from 1981 in this case all the way through 2022. The yellow line is the 2023, and you can see with the black line at the very top there is what's currently going on in 2024. So again, last year was pretty crazy, you know, obscenely record-breaking, and we're even breaking those records so far this year. So buckle up your chinstraps, I guess, is kind of what the take-home message is there. This is a graphic from AccuWeather just showing what the month of May looked like. And what you're basically looking at, this is kind of that main development region in the red, and the sea surface temperatures there have been running about anywhere from 2.5 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the historical averages. And that may not sound like a lot, but let's just say when you factor in how much energy is wound up into that, it's absolutely absurd. And again, this clearly does not bode well. So this is based on the sea surface temperatures. Now this next graphic is looking at the ocean heat content. And this is looking at not just the – again, by virtue of its name, sea surface temperatures really just looks at the actual surface of the ocean, where this is looking at the amount of energy that exists through very deep layers of the ocean. And as you can see, this is again for the main development region where the storms form. The blue line is the long-term average, and the red is showing you how much energy is available up through May 20th of this year and how much above normal we're actually running. And everything is pointing toward a very, very busy year because of the amount of energy that's going to be available from the ocean surfaces combined with very conducive upper air circulation in the upper part of the atmosphere for these storms to form. Sorry, I moved my mouse. You had to click again. Oh, I got to click again. Thank you there. There we go. All right, so what year serves as an analog for 2024 going into this year? So I went and looked at this a little bit, and I would argue that 1933 gives us a reasonable analog for what's happening this year. 2020, you can make an argument for that year as well, but what's unique about 1933 is we had very warm sea surface temperatures, not quite like what we're having now, but relative to what kind of sea surface temperature we were experiencing in 1933. The sea surface temperatures were warm. We were in a hyperactive mode, if you will, for hurricane activity, much like we are now. And we were also in a La Nina. Well, in this particular year, we officially had 20 named storms that were clocked. And one thing I want you to notice is look out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean there, and we have one storm, storm number 15, that did get cataloged there. But there's a real dearth of storms out in the middle of the Atlantic. And there probably were some, excuse me, that probably just got missed that particular year. But what's really interesting about 2020, even though I say only, only had 20 named storms as opposed to, say, 30 in the year 2020. The amount of energy expended by those storms was the tops of any season that we have on record. And as a unit or a metric that we use called ACE, or accumulated cyclone energy. And this year, there was more energy expended by cyclones because the cyclones were very strong. And if you count, if you look over here in the chart to the left, I don't know if you can see my mouse. Vinny, can y'all see? Yeah, y'all can see my mouse. Notice the number of MHs here, which stands for major hurricanes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 major hurricanes that year. And given the durations of the storms, when you combine the duration and the strength, you can come up with this metric that we call ACE. And there was more ACE expended in 1933, even more so than what we had in the year 2020 with 30 named storms. Just to show you, this gives you the top 10 years of accumulated cyclone energy. You can see 1933 coming in at number one, 2005, which also had 28 named storms, ended up pretty close. There were a lot of big storms that year, including Hurricane Katrina that annihilated Louisiana. But 2020 actually comes in 13th. So it's just a few ticks off this top 10 list. And of course, this year, they're predicting ACE values around 190, I believe, which would, if it does live up to its billing, would put it as a top 10 year, but certainly nothing close to what we experienced in 2005 and 1933. And the reason I talk about 2020 as a potential analog year for what's happening this year is one of the things that happened in 2020 is we also had a developing La Nina in the middle of the season, which is kind of what we expect to happen this year. And by virtue of that, as we get deeper into the season, there's at least a possibility that this El Nino could, La Nina, excuse me, this La Nina could be growing or building in intensity, which may make the back end of the season busier than the front end. And I put this season up here. You can see all the storms here. This is, again, 30 named storms this year, but notice the number of storms we have very late in the season. I mean, October normally averages maybe two or three storms. This year, we ended up with, you know, technically five, depending on how you want to count ADA. And then we also, you know, if we count ADA in November, we have three November storms, which is, you know, where we average probably less than one in the month of November. So having a backloaded season this year, it certainly has a high probability. And I think, you know, 2020 gives us some insight as to what that might look like, because this La Nina may actually follow a similar kind of pattern that we saw in the year 2020. I wanted to sort of wrap up, if you will, looking at hurricane season climatology. And this just shows you the hurricane season, actually starting in May, going through the end of December, and looking at the total counts of hurricanes and tropical storms. Hurricanes in the yellow and the tropical storms stacked on top of it in red. And as you can see, it's very linked to the sea surface temperatures and when they peak, which is in the second week of September, around September the 10th is generally assumed as the midpoint in the season. So that would correspond to, you know, this midpoint, these two peaks that you see here. And what I wanted to do is kind of walk through the process month by month, starting in the month of May, looking at – and this just represents about a 100-year period. It doesn't have the more up-to-date storms. This certainly has all the storms in the 20th century from, you know, 1900 through the early 2000s. But it tells a story about where and how the storms form and how busy those months are. So this is looking at the month of May for over 100 years of data, and these are all the tracks forming in what I would call the shallower waters of the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and immediate East Coast. Nothing forming out over the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Then we transition into June. Now hurricane season's officially started. The sea surface temperatures are starting to ramp up a little bit, and you certainly see that uptick in the storms, but still very few forming out over the depths of the Atlantic, really forming in the Caribbean and the Gulf and relatively close to shore. And we move to July. Now you can see the storms starting to form, you know, deeper toward the African continent, you know, way out into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean as the ocean gets warm. And I also want you to notice this parabolic curve where the storms tend to move around a large atmospheric feature called the Bermuda High, which tends to get stationed right in the middle of the ocean out here. And the circulation around that high pressure is counterclockwise. And so that tends to steer the storms along in the trade winds, and then they drift northerly, and then they get caught up in the westerly circulation, and they make this curve. Now where the Bermuda High is located and how strong it is has a lot to say about whether the storms get steered up the East Coast or pushed all the way into the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. So that feature looms very large, especially in the heart of the summer when that Bermuda High is very, you know, big and stout, if you will. Then we move into the month of August. You can see a big uptick in the amount of activity. You can still see that parabolic curve, if you will. Many of what we call Cape Verde hurricanes, these storms coming right off the African continent, spinning out of that West African monsoon that we were talking about as the, you know, sort of throwing those seeds out into the Atlantic Ocean and seeing which ones take root. And we move into September. Now here, this is the busiest month of all because the sea surface temperatures are the warmest. But the steering starts to break down a little bit. And Bermuda High out here starts to weaken, and that parabolic curve doesn't become quite as pronounced as it is more in the heart of the summer season. But you can see the amount of tropical storm activity is pretty crazy in the month of September. Then the sea surface temperatures start to cool down a little bit. Bermuda High weakens even further, so you get a lot more crazy activity taking place out in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, lots of storms forming in the Atlantic and along the East Coast. And there's also a bit of a shift in the tracking from not so much in the Western Gulf, but it starts to shift more towards the Eastern Gulf as that Bermuda High pressure system weakens out in the Atlantic Ocean. Then we move into the month of November, and I want you to notice, you know, along the Gulf Coast, Louisiana, we've never had a landfall in the month of November, and the storms tend to, you know, and the patterns get very bizarre because the steering starts to really break down at Bermuda High. It really starts to weaken into the month of November. And then, you know, it continued cooling. We move into December, and just a few, you know, just a few tracks out in the middle of the depths of the ocean. So that gives you some idea what that seasonality looks like. Just a couple of other projects I wanted to mention that we've been working on is looking at the length of hurricane season and how it may be changing over time. And so every point that you see on here, for example, this point down here, all the way, you know, down here, this is the number of days that the hurricane season lasted going all the way back to 1851. Well, in this year right here, around 1917 or so, the hurricane season lasted a whole total of four days. And the way we define hurricane season, it starts on the first day of the first storm of every season, and it ends on the last day of the last named storm of every season. This hurricane season lasted four days. This hurricane season over here, which is sometime in the 1950s, lasted, you know, almost 340-something days, which is almost a whole year. This is one of these anomalous January or February storms that then, you know, starts the season because it fits the calendar year, and then it ends sometime in November or December, and you have almost a whole year's worth of days encompassing the hurricane season. Well, the question is, since climate change is occurring and sea surface temperatures are getting warmer, is the hurricane seasons becoming, you know, starting earlier and ending later? Well, we're actually finding that that is true, and especially since about 1970 or 1980 or so, that pattern has been very, very distinct. But it begs the question, is this a result of climate change and these changing sea surface temperatures, or is it just better surveillance, or are we better able to detect storms earlier and later into the year because we have better technology? This is a dilemma that we face, and to be honest with you, it's probably some combination of both of these. And then one last graphic I wanted to show you, this is one of our recent master theses that we had working on the inland penetration of hurricanes. So how far can a hurricane penetrate inland as a hurricane, at hurricane strength? So what we found in this study, so all these lines here just show you how far the storms made it inland at hurricane strength, and then we stopped it when it got downgraded to tropical storm strength. And what we found is, you know, along across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, roughly the I-20 corridor gives you some indication. About 200 miles off the coast, if you will, is about as far as hurricanes can make it at hurricane strength. And the vast majority of these storms that make it far inland usually start off as a very strong hurricane, like Category 3, 4, or 5, and that gives them more time to wind down, if you will, while they're still at hurricane strength, while penetrating further and further inland. But the bottom line here, and I think this is very important, you know, from Shreveport to Monroe to Jackson, Mississippi, over to Montgomery, Alabama, these are all these areas that are, you know, from the coast to these cities, are vulnerable to experiencing a hurricane at hurricane strength. And I think that's an important take-home message, especially for folks in the insurance business to realize that these areas can still get hit by hurricanes at full hurricane strength all the way that far inland. So with that, I'm going to go ahead. Should I take questions now, Vinny, or do I move, do we just move to you? I was going to say we have a couple of minutes if we want to address some questions. There are a couple in the chat that I can ask you real quickly. So I'll go, I guess, from the bottom, from the top, and if anybody has any questions on what Dr. Cogman was just talking about, please feel free to drop them in the chat. The first one, does this apply to the Pacific Ocean too? So I guess the question is, do this dire forecast that you just went over for the North Atlantic also apply to the Pacific? The answer is, I mean, everything I just said does not necessarily apply to the Pacific. In fact, I've seen some forecasts for, like, you know, along Mexico and up toward California, that part of the Pacific Ocean is expected to have a decrease in the number of storms this year, a storm below normal, if you will. That's what some of the forecasters were saying. So it's kind of interesting that historically there is kind of this general thinking that there's like a, I don't want to say a finite number, but there's kind of like a fixed number of hurricanes that are going to form every year, and sometimes we're heavily loaded in the Pacific and we get fewer in the Atlantic, and then this year we're certainly going to have a busy Atlantic. It certainly looks that way, which probably means overall we'll see fewer in the Pacific. Now, the total numbers are going up in both basins, but that's probably more an artifact of the surveillance, and the surveillance was notoriously poor over the Pacific, given how vast it is, and we didn't have quite as much interest in, at least the U.S. in technology hasn't really focused as much on the Pacific, so our record keeping doesn't go back nearly as far, and we certainly know less about those storms than we know about the history of the Atlantic. Okay. I got another one here. Has there been any studies of the core, I'm guessing the core temperature of the Earth that is developing, potentially, I guess, contributing to the sea surface temperatures? Oh, boy. That sounds like an oceanographer kind of question. I've never actually heard anybody invoke that into the discussion about how hurricanes may be changing. I mean, sea surface temperatures are definitely going up across many parts of the globe, and in the general thinking is that's just energy from the atmosphere being removed into the oceans and heating up those ocean surfaces, but obviously, there's all kinds of things going on in the bottom of the ocean that we do not have a very good handle on or understanding of, so there could be some things happening there that we have not much of a clue about, so I certainly don't dismiss anything like that. It certainly could be important. I just don't think we really know very much about it. And there's one question about are these graphics publicly available. I think most of the ones that you shared were publicly from the National Weather Service or National Hurricane Center. Some of the graphics that we have right here are ours, and I think we're happy to share those, so when we send the PDFs out, we can do that as well. And I have one last one before we transition. Are there any weather or other events that could make the season better or worse than forecasted? Yeah, well, one thing that could help, a nice Saharan air layer would be really nice. That's where dust gets blown off of the Sahara, gets entrained into the atmosphere and moved out over the main development region in the atmosphere. And what that tends to do is stabilizes the atmosphere while that dust is there, because it intercepts some of the sun's rays, which changes the vertical profile, the temperature profile, if you will, of the atmosphere, thereby stabilizing it. And that's a good thing. That reduces the amount of tropical storm and hurricane activity that can take place. The problem with the Saharan air layer, I mean, it's a good thing all the way around, but it doesn't generally, it doesn't last a whole season. It lasts a week or a couple of weeks. And so that could cause a little pause in the season. We had that in 2020, for example, there was a kind of hurricane season kind of ramped up and then there was a little pause for about two or three weeks while that Saharan air layer did its thing. And then it worked its way through the system and then hurricane season got going on with a vengeance. So that's one thing that could make it, that could create a pause in the season. And then of course the La Nina may not develop quite the way we think it will. I mean, there's certain probabilities, they seem pretty confident that it will develop, but it's not a given. I mean, we don't really understand how it forms. And sometimes that can be blown forecast there too. So anything we can do to keep that La Nina from fully blossoming is a good thing for our hurricane season. Keep us closer toward El Nino conditions and that tends to knock the number of storms down. So there is some hope, but all the indicators right now are pointing in the wrong direction. Perfect. I'll go ahead and get started. Can everyone see my slides? Give me a thumbs up on that. Perry, can you see my slides? I can see it. Yes. Perfect. Awesome. Great. Hi, everyone. It's great to be here with you again. Some of you might've seen me in Tucson, Arizona. My name is Vincent Brown and I'm an assistant professor of research in the Department of Anthropology at LSU, and I also serve as the research director for the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program. And today I'm going to talk a little bit about changing precipitation regimes and also changing precipitation characteristics associated with tropical cyclones. So first I just want to give a quick shout out to the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program. As Barry mentioned, we're funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We're one of 12 teams across the United States. We serve the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. We're a partnership university-wise between the University of Oklahoma and LSU. And what we really do at our core is conduct stakeholder-driven research, which means every single one of our research projects needs to be applicable or useful to somebody in some way, and they're all related to weather and climate events. So if any of you guys are working in any of those states and you'd like some weather and climate information or help, or even things like this, feel free to reach out to us, because we're happy to do it. So jumping right into it, as many of you know, the climate is warming. And I want to draw your attention to this graphic here on the left and talk about why we think the climate is warming currently. And what we believe it to be is greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. So on your X-axis here, you have time with sort of the right lower portion of the graphic being present right now. Going back in time roughly 400,000 years, and what you can see, this blue line is carbon dioxide, this red line is global average surface temperatures, and the green line is methane. So what you can see going back in time is that greenhouse gases and the average temperature of the earth are highly correlated. And then moving up to present, you can see carbon dioxide and methane are going off the charts, and now temperatures are starting to follow as well. And the problem with that, and what a lot of people, you might hear some people say as well, there have been times in earth's history, the geologic history, where we've had this level of CO2 in the atmosphere, you know, it's not CO2. And that is, well, it is correct that we've had levels of CO2 in the atmosphere that have been this high before, but the problem is we've never seen this rate of rise so quickly in the record that we have. There's no natural phenomena in the climate system that can explain this much, this large increase right here in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So while the concentrations currently might not be unprecedented, the rate of rise has been. Over just the last 60 years, the rate of increase in greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has been over 100 times what we have observed in any natural observation since the last ice age. So the question is, what are these greenhouse gases doing? Well, it's not shocking to see that they raise global temperatures. So you can see CO2 concentrations since roughly 1880 is this line, and those bars represent the global average surface temperature. So yeah, as carbon dioxide greenhouse gases go up, temperatures tend to respond. How do they do this or why do they do this? Well, I showed this graphic in Tucson as well. Think of greenhouse gases just like Ralphie's little brother in Christmas Story. They act as a blanket, and they act as extra jackets, and they keep energy from the sun from escaping out into the space. So the more and more greenhouse gases you add to the atmosphere, the more layers you're putting on and just trapping that energy in the system, and that's what we believe is causing the increase in temperatures that we've been seeing. And so the question is, where is this extra energy that's being trapped and kept in the Earth's atmosphere? Where is it going? And this is going to play, and it's important to talk about this because this is where we find out what's going on and how precipitation is changing. So again, the first thing is we know this energy is warming the land surface, the land and the atmosphere, but this is the big one here. It's adding heat storage into the ocean. You heard Dr. Kahn talk about this. Something we call ocean heat content. Over 90% of that energy I was just talking about being trapped in the atmosphere gets eventually deposited into the world's ocean and manifests itself as ocean heat content, and that's what is driving changes in precipitation and driving changes in tropical cyclones, and we'll get into that more here shortly. It also melts land ice and sea ice and then leads to something called the water vapor feedback, which again is very crucial to what's going on with precipitation. So diving right into ocean heat content. Again, over 90% of the energy is eventually ends. It's like the piggy bank in the world's oceans, and it's one of the best metrics that we have for climate change because again it shows where that energy is sort of ending up at the end of the whole process. This bottom left graphic, since roughly the 1950s, shows global ocean heat content. It's basically the average temperature of the top 2,000 meters of water. You can see it's been steadily increasing, and also this graphic on the right shows you that again, that high historical correlation between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and ocean heat content. CO2 being that sort of blue line with the black line being ocean heat content, and unfortunately 2023 set the record for the highest ocean heat content observed, and maybe not surprisingly, it beat the record that was set in 2022. So each subsequent year we're seeing this pattern of higher ocean heat content through time. And here's where it gets important for precipitation and tropical cyclones. It actually encourages further warming by something that we like to call or something called the water vapor feedback. Now I'm going to apologize in advance for this slide. This is probably the most dense slide I'm going to go through today, but it really does a good job. I tried to simplify the easiest way I could about how CO2 to ocean heat content is changing precipitation patterns. So in the simplest sense, as the atmosphere warms, as its temperature goes up, the amount of water vapor that it can hold increases by roughly 7% per 1 degree Celsius temperature increase. So if you have a parcel of air and you warm it by 1 degree Celsius, you can pack roughly 7% more water vapor into that air. So what that tells us is that basically the water holding capacity of the atmosphere is a function of temperature. Again, that's something we call the C-C or Clausius-Clapeyron equation. So how this relates to what I was just talking about with ocean heat content, basically as ocean heat content increases, we get more heat in the ocean, energy in the ocean, it rises sea surface temperatures, it also warms the air directly above the sea surface, and it makes evaporation easier. It makes going from liquid water to water vapor easier. And what that does is it actually enhances and increases the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor, I guess fact of the day, water vapor is actually the most abundant greenhouse gas that we have in the atmosphere, and it is responsible for roughly 60% of the warming that we've already observed in the last 100 or so years. But it's very important when I say that to mention that water vapor does not control Earth's temperature. It's not what's driving the change. It's more of a response to the initial warming. And I think this graphic right here on your bottom right shows exactly what kind of happens and how it affects water vapor. So basically, as I started at this first slide, you get an initial change. You get inputs of greenhouse gases like CO2 in the atmosphere. That causes a little bit of warming. It nudges the system, keeps it a little bit warmer. Eventually, 90% of energy gets deposited in the world's oceans. What that does is raise sea surface temperatures, makes that air a little bit warmer, and it adds, makes it easier for evaporation to occur. So you get enhanced evaporation, more water vapor in the atmosphere. As I just mentioned, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. That acts as, you know, Ralphie's brother again, traps even more gases, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leads to even more warming. And then the whole system is, you know, it's a positive feedback loop where we keep getting warmer and warmer. And that's important because water vapor and its existence in the atmosphere is the fuel for extreme precipitation events. When you have more water vapor in the atmosphere, it's literally the fuel for these extreme precipitation events. And so here's some observational evidence we have of trends in extreme rainfall. Going back to the left graphic around 1900, you can see this is the annual frequency, or I think this is in decade, the decadal frequency of daily extreme precipitation events. And you can see most regions across the United States have seen an uptick. And if you look at this graphic right here, for the whole U.S., there's a pretty noticeable uptick in the annual frequency of extreme precipitation events. This graphic right here shows the average amount of rainfall per year from 2000, year 2002 to 2021 compared to a longer period average of 1901 to 1960. And what you can see is the average amount of rainfall that is accumulated in a given year in the last 20 or so years has been higher than previous years. And on here, I put the basin of the Mississippi, well, I put the Mississippi River drainage basin. And what you can see is that anywhere in this dark arena is seeing sort of upwards of 10% more rainfall in individual years. And why this is important, and this actually gave us a scare down here, I believe it was 2019 with Hurricane Barry, when you get more rainfall in the Mississippi River drainage basin, it leads to higher discharge rates in the Mississippi River, obviously, which drains right south of New Orleans. Well, in 2019 with Hurricane Barry, we had a very wet year in the spring, Mississippi River Delta, the Mississippi River discharge was running a little bit higher than average. And actually, that discharge, that higher than normal discharge extended into the start of hurricane season. Then we got Hurricane Barry, an early season storm that came and pushed some surge up into the Mississippi River. And though Mississippi River waters were already running high, it almost led to overtopping of the levees in New Orleans, which would have been disastrous. And interestingly, Hurricane Barry wasn't even that strong of a storm, it was sort of a run-of-the-mill storm. So one of the things we're watching very closely as we move forward through time is keeping an eye on these sort of compounding hazards, enhanced rainfall in the Mississippi River combined with expanding tropical cyclone or hurricane season dates. It's not crazy to imagine a high Mississippi River discharge coinciding with a storm and then overtopping levees in New Orleans. So it's definitely something that we're keeping an eye on. And then now I want to transition into one of the most sort of agreed-upon changes in precipitation that we're expecting. And it's a phenomenon that's labeled sort of more bang for your buck. And basically this graphic on your left shows sort of the, I think it's the simplest way to describe what's going to happen. So here we have Station A on the top and Station B on the bottom. On your x-axis you have days, and on your y-axis you have intensity of rainfall. So it's just days across a month, two stations. Station A and B both receive 75 millimeters of precipitation over the course of one month. So the volume of rain at both stations is the same, but what's different is the delivery mechanism. In Station B you can see the rainfall events denoted as these little bars are more frequent and sort of randomly spread throughout the month. And their intensity is not all that crazy. And look at Station A. There's a lot of time between rainfall events, but when it does rain it's short duration and high intensity. And the thought is that as we continue to warm, we're going to transition from looking, you know, precipitation characteristics are going to transition from that of Station B to more like Station A. Again, where there's not that big of a change in total accumulation, but the delivery mechanism of that rainfall is much different, where the events are of a shorter duration and have a higher magnitude. And this graphic here on the right sort of shows the same thing, but on the daily level. This is a projection going on, I believe, to I think it's 2050. Don't quote me on that. I have to go back and look. But what we're anticipating is, again, a slight decrease in the number of days without rain. And then sort of your average rainfall events are decreasing. And then you get a large increase in those sort of 90th, 95th, and 99th percentile extreme rainfall events. And again, this graphic here sort of shows the same sort of thing. Present day climate in your blue graphic. And then as we continue to warm, the precipitation distribution might look more like this red graphic, where there's a higher probability of those high-end extreme rainfall events. Additionally, we're anticipating a larger proportion of the annual rainfall that occurs to come in those higher-end extreme events. So in general, even if, let's just say wherever you are, the annual amount of rainfall doesn't change, we're anticipating that the delivery mechanism will change and you'll get more rainfall in those sort of higher-end events compared to sort of your average events. Think of extreme events. I always like to, whenever I give this talk, talk about Hurricane Harvey, because it was, honestly, it flirted with some of the world record rainfall totals at certain area sizes and durations. Everything in this oval during Hurricane Harvey, which obviously hit Houston, Texas, over 30 inches. We estimated one location. We have a unique algorithm that we run that uses radar and stations. We estimated one location right about in here received just over 61% inches of rainfall. And we use something called a depth area duration analysis, which is just a way that we can look at the amount of rainfall through time over certain area sizes. And if Hurricane Harvey happened over the whole state of Alabama, the whole state of Alabama would receive 19.5 inches of rain in roughly five days. So imagine covering the whole state of Alabama with roughly 19.5 inches in five days. South Carolina, again, Harvey produced enough rainfall to cover the entire state of South Carolina in 23 inches of rain. I know, I think it was Eileen is from New York City, so I went and I looked at the square mileage in New York City, and I said, okay, what would happen if Harvey was centered over New York? Well, imagine 47 inches of rain in just five days. We also did some research on what would happen if Harvey transpositioned and happened in southern Louisiana. And preliminary research shows there's no reason why a storm like Harvey could not happen in southern Louisiana, but it was very similar to what happened in New York City. New Orleans would have gotten just under 48 inches of rain in five days if Harvey was centered over it. But sort of the big takeaway for just precipitation in general is that as the earth warms, the ingredients available for big storms are going to increase, and we're expecting a general upward tick in the number of extreme rainfall events. Oh yeah, I always like to show this as well. This shows Hurricane Harvey's track. As Barry mentioned, with sea surface temperatures and ocean heat content, how important they are to storm formation. Here's the Gulf of Mexico's sea surface temperature anomalies right before Harvey. You can see a large portion of the Gulf of Mexico was running one to two degrees above normal for that time of year right before Hurricane Harvey. Harvey comes through, and you can see the temperatures drop to being one to two degrees Celsius below what was typical for that time of year. There's a couple reasons for that. I stole this quote from someone at NASA Goddard. They said that hurricanes feed off warm ocean temperatures just like a fire relies on a steady supply of oxygen to keep burning. So whenever you see sea surface temperatures and ocean heat content running high, you know that the fuel for tropical cyclones is out there. And also part of the reason why this cooled, not just due to Harvey sucking all that energy out, is also mixed up the ocean and brought some upwelling and things like that. Now shifting gears a little bit to just sort of precipitation annually and tropical cyclone precipitation. I always like to start by showing this graphic because it shows how much rainfall happens on average every year for all locations across the lower 48. It's a great graphic as you can see. Louisiana, I think it is the wettest state in the lower 48. We average about 60, 60 and a half, I'm sorry, 65 inches of precipitation per year. And the question is how much of this rainfall that we know occurs on average is directly attributed to tropical cyclones or hurricanes. And these graphics show that. And you can ignore this bottom right graphic. I really just want to focus in on these five right here. These are estimates from a paper that recently came out by Mazza and Chen in 2023. And these colors are representing this bar right here, this left scale bar. And what they show is basically how much precipitation occurs annually that is directly attributed to tropical cyclones. So you can see sort of the epicenter for tropical cyclone induced rainfall. And again, this analysis was done from 2002 to 2019. Sort of the ground zero for this is northern Florida and sort of southern Georgia, where they can anticipate around 10 to up to 16%, maybe even 20% of their annual rainfall attributed to tropical cyclones. And then sort of this whole southeast region as a whole, at least 8 to 10% of the rainfall that occurs annually is directly from hurricanes, tropical storms. And the question is, is this deceiving? And I actually think it is because you can get storms like Hurricane Harvey that can dump all of an annual rainfall total in just a couple of days, as you saw with those previous totals. And again, in some of these years, you get no rainfall attributed to tropical cyclones. So while this may represent the average, it is a little bit deceiving. So now I have a question for you guys. I'm going to show this graphic here on the next slide. But I want to know, I want you guys to guess in your home state or whatever state you're in right now, what do you think the single greatest precipitation total is that was attributed to a tropical cyclone? I'll give you guys a couple, maybe like 10 or 15 seconds to drop in the chat, maybe your state and then the total you think. So for example, if you're in New York, maybe you'll say, I don't know, 15 inches or something. Or if you're in Oregon, see if we get any guesses. Got Georgia, 18. Arizona, 3. I don't know what 25, I guess 25% means 25. New York, 24. Illinois, 5. California, 2. Texas, 18. Missouri, 3. Get some good guesses, some good guesses. Got a zero out of Washington, okay. Washington, 5. Here we go. Here you go. So this is for every state, the highest amount of individual rainfall, point rainfall for the state. So you can see Hurricane Harvey was over 16 and a half inches in this area right here. So let's see, Washington, 5. That was pretty good. Vermont, up in the nines. But you can see, sort of in the southeast region, Florida has a 45. We've had some really big events that were at least 30%, or I'm sorry, at least half of the annual total for those states. The same graphic here depicted at the county level showing the greatest amount of rainfall associated with tropical cyclones. And if you look at these really sort of standing out counties with high totals, kind of highlight them there with arrows, I looked at the storms that created those rainfall totals. There's one characteristic that stands out that is very, you know, unique, and it's the slow movement or stalling of these storms which led to great rainfall totals. And that's what I want to transition in talking now with my last couple minutes, is stalling tropical cyclones with a very slow movement of storms. This is some work that started with Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon. He actually used this photo, and I always like to show because I think that's a great idea. John Nielsen-Gammon at Texas A&M, Dr. Joel Trepanier, who's at LSU, and then myself and Dr. Khyme are all working on this project. And what we really sought out to do was to come up with a quantitative or a way to define what a stalling or slow-moving tropical cyclone is. So the way that we did that is we plotted the tracks of every single hurricane or tropical storm in the database, in a HRDAP database, and then we draw a circle around 72 hours or three days of points. So this track is actually Hurricane Harvey's, and every single distance between these points is six hours. So we draw a circle that encapsulates 72 hours or three days of the life of every single tropical cyclone, and then we take the radius of that circle. And what we find is that storms that live within a circle whose radius is roughly 200 kilometers or less tend to be storms that stall or move very slowly. So that definition, this circle right here, this dotted circle is actually a circle with a radius of 200 kilometers. And this inner circle is the stall for Hurricane Harvey, which had its 72 hours of its life, it lived in a circle with a radius of only 123 kilometers. So what we did is for every storm in the database, we looked at the radii of these circles, which again, encompass 72 hours of the storm. And this is what we come up with. So this top left graphic shows the location of all stalling tropical cyclones according to our definition by month. And I wanna draw your attention to this top right graphic, you can see this is the early season. So from May to June, where do tropical cyclones tend to stall? And you can see right along the Gulf Coast, Florida and off the coast of the Carolinas, early season storms tend to stall sort of in an area that we're not comfortable with close to the United States. September, same sort of pattern. But luckily, once you get to the later half of the season, later hurricane season, it's kind of rare for storms to stall in an area that affects us. They tend to stall in the Caribbean, which is quite interesting. They tend to stall, we found in five general locations at all sort of varying times within hurricane season. Storms like to stall off the Carolina Coast to the West of Florida, sort of in the left Western extent of the Gulf of Mexico, on the Bay of Compeche, and then also here in the Western extent of the Caribbean. But this graphic is only looking at that one point. If we look at those individual radii of all the tropical cyclones that stalled, we find that sort of the hotspot is there right off the Carolinas. And if any of you were at Dr. Kimes talk in San Antonio, he showed the hurricane strike frequency. This part of the coast is one of the most active for tropical cyclone strikes. So it's not that surprising that storms tend to stall right in here. So interestingly, stalling tropical cyclones tend to occur right off the coast of the Carolinas more than they do along the Gulf Coast. And this graphic is very, very interesting. I really want to focus in on this bottom graphic from 19, because this is one of the big takeaway message of our research. From 1850 to present, this blue line shows the cumulative number of all storms in the hurricane database. What this orange line shows is the cumulative number of stalling tropical cyclones. So what you can see is early in the record, I'll just go back, early in the record, there was a higher proportion of storms that stalled compared to all storms in the database. Well, we know, as Dr. Kimes was mentioning, that was likely due to inhomogeneities in the data. We weren't observing that many storms. And the one that we were, were the ones that were hanging around a lot, right? So that's why we get this higher tick early in the record. But more recently, we are seeing a higher proportion of stalling storms compared to the number of overall storms. And one of the conclusions of our research is that tropical storms are tending to stall more frequently through time than they have in the past, especially in the last, since roughly the 1950s, the occurrence of stalling storms is increasing, which obviously is worrisome because these things bring massive rainfall totals. And just on wrapping up on the last couple of slides here, I talked a lot about how slow tropical cyclones are very important for rainfall, but I don't want you to think that fast-moving cyclones can't cause a lot of damage as well. This graphic, this is some work by Tu et al, 2022, and they looked at basically the speed a tropical cyclone moves and then the rainfall rates. And what they found, and a lot of other people have found, is that the speed of a cyclone is actually highly correlated with hourly rainfall rates. So basically a storm that's moving very, very fast will have higher rainfall rates than a storm that tends to move slower. So while you might think, oh, the storm's moving fast, it's not going to be that big of a rain issue for us, it can produce, fast-moving storms produce high rainfall rates. So it might not hang around for a long time, but don't fall asleep because other things can produce some hellacious short-duration accumulations. And I believe this is my last slide here. I just want to touch on some projections as we move forward. Again, I shared this in Tucson, but this is one scenario going out to about 30 years, 2055. Overall tropical cyclone frequency in the North Atlantic Basin. This is us right here. And what we're generally anticipating is that the overall number of tropical cyclones is going to decrease in the next 30 years. We're going to expect slightly fewer storms. That's due to a lot of different things, predominantly wind shear, which can tear apart tropical cyclones. But the storms that do form, as you've heard from Dr. Kahn, storms feed off energy. If there's less storms, there's going to be more energy for these things to feed on. So the storms that do form we're expecting to be slightly more intense than they are now. And then also one of the biggest signals is the amount of rain attributed to these storms we expect to increase. So sort of the big takeaway is potentially fewer storms. The ones that do form are going to be more intense because again, the job of a tropical cyclone is just to redistribute energy. So if you have less storms, the energy that will be set in motion by storms you expect to be more, more intense. And finally, again, higher rainfall attributed to these events as we move forward. And then with that, I will take any questions. Let's see. Can this example from Harvey be translated to what recently happened in Southern Brazil? Unfortunately, I'm not entirely sure what happened in Southern Brazil, but I will definitely take a note of that. Dr. Kahn, you know what happened in Southern Brazil? No, I mean, there's not a lot of, they don't get a lot of tropical stuff in Brazil. Maybe like one landfall in over a hundred years. So I would imagine the parallels are very limited. So whatever, in other words, whatever produced the rainfall in Brazil, I'm sure had little to do with what produced Harvey's rainfall, which is clearly a tropical system. Is the deforestation for increasing population causing increase of hurricanes? Is the deforestation for increasing population increasing hurricanes? Kind of confused by the question. I think that as well- Well, I think this question is going, Vinny, is, I mean, the deforestation is contributing to the increases in CO2. And the reason being is that, I mean, the rainforest serves as a sink for carbon dioxide. All that vegetation takes CO2 out of the atmosphere, but then when you go out there and you slash and burn all those trees, it releases a lot of that carbon back into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. So all this deforestation removes a sink and adds a source, which only makes more, it makes CO2 increase even more rapidly. So that is absolutely a problem. Now, again, there's a big debate about what does all those greenhouse gases do to hurricanes? And that's what Vinny was just talking about, ultimately leading to fewer hurricanes, but stronger and wetter hurricanes. So that's probably the end result. So I think that's where that question was going. Okay, so our next question is, oh, this isn't easy. What is the difference between a hurricane and tropical cyclone? Yeah, so I say that a bunch and I should have clarified. A tropical cyclone is just any sort of rotating tropical system embedded in tropical moisture. It's got some, any little bit of wind. They range from a tropical wave all the way up to a cat five hurricane. So whenever I said a tropical cyclone, it's just an all encompassing term for anything tropical. And then a hurricane is a certain wind threshold, which I believe is 74 miles per hour, correct? So once a tropical cyclone gets wind speeds at or above 74 miles per hour, it becomes a hurricane. And then subsequently cat one, cat two, cat three, those are all just different. It's the same, it's a hurricane, but just with different wind speeds. And they're all tropical cyclones from all the way through hurricanes, right? And by the way, typhoons are tropical cyclones as well. Yeah, I mean, some, I think in Australia, they call them willy willies, typhoons. They're all tropical cyclones. That's just a broad encompassing term. Okay, let's see, the next question we have, will the Carolinas still be the hotspot this year? Well, if you ask me, and I was a gambling man on where I would bet that the most storms will probably traverse, I would probably say the Carolinas just because climatologically, we know that they get struck quite frequently. And we also know that storms like to stall out there, especially sort of late in the season once the Bermuda High breaks down. That area is a real hotbed or a hotspot in general. So I haven't really gotten deep into the weeds of the models yet, which start sort of throwing storms out. They don't really mean much this early in the year anyway. But again, if I was a betting man, I would say the Carolinas will probably be a hotspot. I don't know, Dr. Kahn, if you have any input on that. Well, you know, I mean, some years or East Coast years and others are more gulf years and you just really never know. I mean, I've seen some of the prognosticators saying, you know, the Texas coast is gonna be more vulnerable this year. But I'm not gonna lie, I don't see how we, I don't really think we're in a position to know that this early in the season. And I don't put much stock in those kinds of forecasts. Yeah, I just wanna be clear, what I was saying was based purely off climatology. Right, right. What is the observed, yeah. Yeah, the outer banks of North Carolina get visited by more tropical systems than any other part of the coastline. So that's what Vinny is saying, it's definitely a safe bet. Are hurricanes hitting California and West US a possibility now or in the future? Well, again, go ahead, Barry. Well, we had that big storm last year, although the name of it escapes me right now, but it dumped torrential rain across Southern California and on into Arizona. And I mean, there was sort of similar to Harvey, it produced like the annual rainfall totals in a couple of days. Now keep in mind, Southern California doesn't get nearly the rain that Southeastern Texas does, but to drop 15 or 20 inches of rain on Southern California is a big deal and it has big, big implications and impacts too, of course, both positive and negative. So it's a big deal. And so, I mean, there's a lot of unusual things going on in hurricane climatology right now. And that was certainly one of them, but is it a harbinger for the future? I mean, I shrug my shoulders and say, I have no idea. Yeah, I mean, I think things like what happened last year, it was quite anomalous. It was quite out of right field. But I mean, generally, if you just kind of assume that sea surface temperatures are going to go up, ocean heat content are going to come up, the ingredients for that to happen might be there more frequently in the future if we generally, if we see this continual general warming, because like I said, tropical cyclones, the fuel is warm sea surface temperatures, low level, high levels of low level water vapor. And those things all sort of coincide. So if we see this general warming, it's quite possible that this, instead of it happening once every 100 years, you might get it two or three times every 100 years or something. Yeah, so let's see, I got another question here. This is also about sort of the Pacific. Is the inland impact of a hurricane the same for storms on the Atlantic and in the Pacific? What's the inland impact? Well, I mean, how far inland are we talking about, I guess is the question. I mean, storms, I mean, good grief, like Camille, there were more deaths in Hurricane Camille in the state of Virginia than there were along the Gulf Coast where they had a 25 foot storm surge. And that was because the storm propagated inland and just dropped copious amounts of rain up in the Blue Ridge Mountains off of Blue Ridge Parkway. And I said, there were more deaths up there from the flooding than along the Gulf Coast. And things like that happen on the West Coast as well. Some of these tropical systems actually penetrate inland pretty far as remnants and transport a lot of moisture inland, which then gets impacted by the orographics by having to move up those mountains. And you can get some pretty hellacious rainfalls associated with some of those events, even though they may not be called tropical, but it's really tropical moisture that was brought in by these remnant systems. And I'll just mention that the environments are so different between sort of the desert Southwest, California, Pacific, than they are down here. For example, we were just talking about levees in California, they want vegetation on their levees to hold them from blowing away. They want certain things because it's so dry out there. And down here, we don't want vegetation on our levees. We want, you know, so it's a very different environment and the way the rain reacts, like obviously, we don't have to worry about landslides, they do. So I think the impacts would be vastly different, but, and we're used to them down here, like I said, we get them quite frequently. But so I think we have one, probably have time for one last question, let's see what we got. Okay, from Michelle, how about hurricanes in Hawaii? As the guy that just went to Hawaii, I'll hand that to you, because you were lucky enough to go and I was not. Yeah, I mean, Hawaii doesn't, I mean, it's not a hotbed for hurricane and typhoon activity, but they do get hit. And, you know, there's some famous ones, Hurricane Iniki, sort of took that place out probably over 20 plus years ago now. And, you know, and I believe there was a tropical system actually hit the island a few days before I got there. So, I mean, it's not like South Florida or Louisiana or the Outer Banks of North Carolina in terms of the total activity, but they are vulnerable, the tropical systems out there. And, you know, they need to be on their A game and worried about those systems as they can wreak havoc over that part of the world. And Hawaii has gotten some really crazy rainfall totals. So they're used to sort of the rainfall side of things, especially with some of the topography, some of the orographic rainfall, you get a system coming across, forcing that air upslope and it just condense, you'll get really crazy rainfall totals, but the wind is what is sort of new to them, but I haven't directly seen any, you know, future climate projections on hurricanes in Hawaii, but in the future is, again, as the climate continues to warm, it's definitely something to take a look at. Let's see. I thank you both for sharing your broad expertise with us today, Dr. Keim and Dr. Bram. As you noted in your presentation, it's time to buckle up and be conscious of all of these predictions that have wide implications for the inland marine industry. So there's a survey link posted in the chat for attendees. Please do share your feedback. We will be sending the PDF of the slides out later, which are a great reference. Are you both ready to announce the winner of the most engaged? Yes, sure. Mary, you got any thoughts? No, I don't. You saw the names as they came in, and again, it's just the show attendee appreciation. Any good questions stand out? Okay, let's see. Let's go with, I guess it was Maria Alonso. I see that name a couple of times. Maria Alonso. I see that name a couple of times. Maria Alonso, you are the big winner today of the $25 Amazon gift card. So be on the lookout for it in your email. Congratulations. Congratulations, Maria. And good luck with your seminar that you have all these people flying in for. And we appreciate you taking the time out, Barry and Vince and Teddy. You're very busy day today. We want to thank our attendees too for their participation and questions. Hope to see you all soon. And everybody, please enjoy a great rest of the day. Thanks. Hit us up if you need some weather and climate data. Bye.

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