 So slideshow so we'll jump right in and I'll kind of introduce myself and the work I do at this intersection of weather and meteorology and transportation. So hopefully you all can see my slides here. And so this image actually comes from my family's trip to Nebraska for Thanksgiving. Two years ago now back in November 2019. And you can see this is what the interstate looked like heavy traffic a truck in the middle of the road certainly not where it should be. So just a just a fun old trip for sure. But when we think about cars trains and weather, you know I certainly want to say at least my background in this area, sometimes called surface transportation weather, or also called road weather sometimes. Currently, I'm a project scientist in the research applications laboratory here at NCAR, but previously, I also had a brief time where I worked as a meteorology and weather operations in turn with the Colorado Department of Transportation. So in addition to the science I also kind of had a sense of the 24 seven boots on the ground life as well. So during my passion for this arena of road weather really started when I was a little kid, my dad and I we would always go out. I grew up in the New York City area, and we would always go out to one of the highways that were near our apartment in Queens, a Long Island Expressway if you're familiar with the area. And anytime there was a snow storm I would always take all kinds of pictures so this one here, you can see a van facing the wrong way in the middle of the image there. This was the famous day after Christmas Blizzard back in 2010. And that storm was really impactful in part because you had buses that were stuck in snowdrifts, you had cop cars that were just buried under mounds of snow. But really this passion for road weather, you know really goes to other hazards as well. So, when we think broadly about weather impacts, we can think about things like Hurricane Katrina that hit New Louisiana back in 2005. And, you know, all of these rows of rivers that you see here in this image well those are actually streets where you would normally have cars you would normally have people going about their daily lives. And, you know, we can think about this high impact event that turned roads in the rivers. Or we can also think about other kind of hurricane and related impacts this one is a photo of upstate New York where my family lives or at least grandparents live. And this is a really delicious hot dog place and ice cream, but you can actually see that the river, the local river in the area is flooded so parking lots underwater businesses underwater as well. And sticking with hurricane for a moment. This image shows the New York City skyline associated with Hurricane Sandy in 2012. And what you see is that large areas of lower Manhattan parts of New York City, are completely blacked out because of hurricane impacts. Now, this is not just important because no one likes to lose power, but also if you think of transit and the New York City subway system. This image on the left shows what the subway system looks like on say a normal day where you have full access to all of the different lines. But on the right here, this shows essentially the areas that had no subway service anymore, because of power outages whether it was flooded tunnels from storm surge from the hurricane, or other impacts and so you see, again those parts of lower Manhattan that were completely blacked out on this image, no subway service there. And you can definitely see that there's a lot fewer lines or less or kind of a lower density overall, and when you look at other parts of the city. But also when we think about how weather impacts the roads, you know it can be really high impact and dramatic events as well such as say twin tornadoes in Nebraska. And you know what happens if you're driving down the highway and you encounter this scene. You know, do you pull over do you take shelter in the ditch do you turn around and drive the other way. Or again when we think of winter weather, we have two storms, same location, Lakeshore Drive in Chicago Illinois, decades apart, and similar impacts where we have cars stranded on Lakeshore Drive back in 1967. And then more recently a Groundhog Day storm in 2011. We have someone skiing alongside the cars right there on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago. And perhaps maybe more locally and closer to home. We know that here in Colorado, we can have some crazy hail storms, whether it's big hail or hail that accumulates so deep that we get cars or state patrol that have to drive through roads that look like snow storms in the middle of the country just because of how much hail can fall, or even more recent when we had the wildfires, and this is the coward fire, kind of in the northern parts of Boulder here. And certainly, you know when you think about evacuating an area, you have to concern yourself with things like where's the smoke team going and are you evacuating people into safer areas or harms away so all of this you have to think about well is whether impacting the roads and impacting kind of the safe routes and so this image taken west of Longmont looking towards the foothills again the Calwood fire back in October 2020. So, you know one of the tools that we rely on, kind of in this arena certainly are traffic cameras. Now if you've ever been driving down the road, you might notice you know some of the cameras are red light cameras so don't run red lights. But other cameras might be sitting on say bridges or overpasses or tunnels, or just alongside the road and primarily they help transportation agencies get a sense of where there might be a crash or what might be occurring with the traffic. They're also really valuable from a weather perspective because they give us ground truth. They verify or confirm for us what the weather conditions are, and they can also tell us things like well when does the weather change. So, I guess, maybe for the first question I'll throw at those of you watching from home today. You know if you were to look at this image here. This is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. What how you know how would you characterize the weather, would you say that it's wet that it's dry that it's cloudy sunny so maybe Tim could read a couple of the guesses in the chat. If some of you want to take a stab at what the weather is here. While people are guessing I think we have a question related earlier. You can see the fire from my house lucky we did not have to evacuate so I think that's a reference to the cow with fire. Oh, and regarding this one. This image right now someone says dry and cloudy. That's a description of the weather. And another. Okay, another person says I think weather is dry and cloudy on that day so it's a different person same thing mix wet dry and cloudy. There's our third response. Awesome. Yeah. Oh, and another one just after a storm someone says just after storms. Okay, maybe just after. So I want you to pay attention closely here because I think you can see the timestamp about the top so notice the time there in this image. So the next image I'm going to show you is actually about 90 minutes later. Same camera image. And so now, what do you see here in this image with the weather. Wait for it. Wet roads is one of our responses rain is another response. We have this. You might notice there's kind of this droplet on the camera here and yeah some of the cars on the other side are kind of kicking up some of that road spray. Yeah, rainstorm the road is wet and so is the cars. So the camera maybe that's the camera yes so so the roads wet and cameras so there we go. Awesome, you know, definitely great guesses so yeah we went from from cloudy and relatively dry. Maybe it was a little bit wet so yeah we kind of could have had a period of rain but now in this next image about 90 minutes later, we definitely can see that it's raining one of the things that I do in my line of work is automating algorithms or kind of programming computers to be able to look at all of these different camera images and actually spit out that hey, it is raining and kind of we can send out alerts to cars or to whoever might be interested and say, you know the roads wet now we have to be careful about how wet the roads are. We have a couple of images, and I'll go through these kind of quicker here because it's a little bit less clear, but notice here on the bridge deck, we have some snow and kind of the shoulder here, and maybe some snow in the left lane. But again about two hours later that snow is gone away so in the same way we can tell how weather, you know gets worse it goes from being dry to being wet and rainy. We can tell how it starts to get better how we go from, you know, a lot more snow cover to perhaps a lot less snow cover as well. But ultimately the question remains, you know why does all of this matter. Well, because someday you and I will not be driving our vehicles, but rather our cars are going to be driving themselves, and they're going to need real time by the minute information to be able to adapt to the weather conditions and so when we think about, you know, broadly how weather impacts drivers, we know that we have vehicle impacts, loss of control traction and friction. Basically how well does your car stick to the road and stay on the road, and also behave, if you should turn the wheel or slam on your brakes, does your car actually slow down or does it skate or slide. And we also have the human factor as well, kind of the behavior of drivers. And so maybe because there's too much precipitation like rain or snow, you might lose your situational awareness you might not know where you are or how close you are to a car that's in front of you, or maybe you're traveling too fast for the conditions and you don't have enough time to react to a car that stops in front of you or maybe an animal crosses a road in front of you or anything like that. And so when we think about self driving cars and how they could be better. Self driving cars are going to have a lot of instruments on them, but they're also going to have all kinds of computer intelligence or artificial intelligence that even if you can't see the road because it's snow covered because it's wet or whatever. The car is going to have a much better sense of where it is relative to other cars because these cars can talk to one another. So you can kind of think of them as sending out a constant signal, you know, here I am please don't hit me. And so the car is going to be able to adjust for those vehicle impacts. It's also going to be able to adjust for those driver and human factors as well. So, you know there's a lot of opportunity for these self driving cars, but there's an important caveat. High impact weather still going to be a challenge for these cars and so some of the work I do as well looks at, you know, can we make sure that a self driving car is going to know that there's maybe huge hail destructive hail that's along your route. The car is not going to be like oh well the road's fine and you have baseball size hail coming after windshield, or maybe we also want to make sure that your car knows hey there's a big tornado that's crossing a highway. I don't want to drive into that there's this weather hazard here. But from talking about cars also want to make sure I leave some time to talk about railroads as well. So, you know, very quick question I'll throw out there. Do you all think that railroads are weatherproof does does weather impact trains, maybe a quick in the chat kind of yes or no. I think everyone's typing, maybe thinking about it. No responses yet. We have a no. Oh, and no because the railroad at my house has rust on it. Another no. And a yes because the rails can get icy. Okay, I'd like those guesses. And so rock. One more. A rock can fall in the tracks due to ice wedging. That's a very, that's a very good one. So, you know, I think both answers are really correct in some ways, railroads have done a lot to try to lower their risks to weather. They've done things like burying cables, or here in Colorado they use these snow sheds basically they create a tunnel, so that the snow doesn't fall on the track but kind of falls on the tunnel around it. And then the train can safely go through whether it's, you know one foot of snow or 10 feet of snow. They can also do things like heat the tracks and rails, if they need to as well so in some ways, railroads have made themselves kind of weatherproof. But in other ways, weather absolutely still impacts trains to. And so this image shows a commuter train train that carries people in the Toronto care, Canada area a few summers ago. And this was from a thunderstorm that dumped really heavy rain. And ultimately, the rain came up quickly, and unfortunately the train got stranded, and people had to be rescued by the fire department and kind of boats. But we can look closer to home. And this is an image from the March 2019 bomb cyclone. And it actually shows a train that was blown off a bridge down in New Mexico just south of us here in Colorado. This train could be carrying things like computers and laptops, all kinds of goodies and fun things and unfortunately did not make it to its destination. So really strong winds can definitely blow these trains over. As you saw before as well with that same storm system, you can also have issues of flooding. And if water gets over the tracks, the trains can't pass through and can sometimes derail and come off the tracks as well. And this particular storm was really impactful, because it flooded a lot of the train tracks in the Midwest, kind of Nebraska, South Dakota area. And the reason that these train lines are so important is because they actually carry coal to a lot of the power plants that still burn coal to generate electricity. And so while we increasingly rely on renewable energy from wind or solar energy, we still also need coal to heat our homes and turn on our power as well. And so when you have a big event like this, it can impact that power generation. And then again, this was back in August, a line of strong thunderstorms that you see here in the radar image came through this town in Kansas. And again, kind of the winds blew over a train this one was actually carrying. Fortunately, it was empty but it could have been carrying gasoline and so if that knocks over it could certainly start a fire. But really to summarize, you know what we do accurate weather information is ultimately the key to safety. And so I think my colleague Brittany Welch for for letting me share this slide, but it basically shows how whether we're talking about cars or trains. We can get weather information to and from the vehicles themselves, or from those fixed sensors whether it's weather stations or those traffic cameras you saw earlier. When we get information about what's happening in real time, we can then alert drivers, we can alert them to hazards like high winds or we can alert them to things like snow and ice conditions. And we can also kind of tailor or modify that alert, whether we're talking about someone that's just driving their passenger car, or maybe someone that's driving a much bigger vehicle like say a large truck or semi. Kind of the same principle holds with the railroad as well, where we can get weather information kind of to and from the trains that are out there, but also from those weather stations. And again, kind of give them information so that they can make ultimately safer decisions. So that's, you know that's definitely kind of a quick overview of what I do here at NCAR. Definitely thanks for joining us this morning and if you have any questions, definitely happy to answer them here today, but I also want to make sure that you all have my email too. If you were ever curious to chat offline it's walker at ucar.edu. So with that, I'll turn it over to Tim for Q&A here. Excellent. Thank you Curtis. And for everyone who's online, please do feel free to enter your questions in the chat. And I think we, I think we have a good size participant list here that will allow us to also if you'd like you can unmute and ask your question. You can speak to your question if you'd like so feel free to either enter in the chat or turn on your microphone. We'll wait for everyone to formulate their questions. And I was going to say if no one has questions I certainly have more questions I can, I can ask everyone as well. It looks like it looks like we do have a question. What is the most, we have two. Okay, let's see here we go. Let's start with what is the most severe form of weather you have seen. So, it's a great question. Probably the most severe form, I'll say that I've personally seen. Probably two stories, you know, one was driving one was not so driving, I would say, definitely driving through heavy snow is very scary and severe and you know, not knowing like, are you going to, you know, all of a sudden like there's stopped cars in front of you and you can't stop and that's always a that's a scary one. And then, you know, probably most severe that I've seen just kind of standing has been has been a tornado kind of crossing in a field and fortunately not hitting anything or anyone, but still a very severe form of weather. I think you're muted Tim still. Did you have a second one. We do have another question or we have two more. Are you ready for those. Yeah, sure. Okay, do you see a way for that we go how our cars able to connect with the program you are working on. So, they connected a few ways. One of the ways that the cars kind of connect and talk to each other is ultimately through kind of Wi Fi and Bluetooth technology. So kind of just like having an earpiece, or even kind of 5G like the cellular signal. Cars are able to kind of communicate through those different channels. Other ways that cars can communicate then is also with kind of with ultimately dedicated servers that as a car say drives through a city or an area, kind of like your cell phone being in touch with a cell tower. Your car can also be in touch with with something on the ground. Okay, sorry, just can't work this mute button today. Next question is, do you see this being tied into weather height detecting systems for rivers and roads. Um, if I understand the question correctly, you know definitely I think when we think about rivers and roads and kind of flooding. Because yeah we, you know we have these great slogans like turn around don't drown to try to encourage people to never drive their car through say a flood water that's way too high. I definitely think that we can tie these systems together to try to make sure that drivers don't go into water that's too high that have sense of you know how high the water is, because there is certainly, you know you never know if it's just, is it a very small puddle, or you know the roads completely washed out beneath you and you'll have those rock slides or rockfalls. And we see that all the time here in Colorado on interstate 70, especially where you can get those rock slides with, you know we're just having too much rain in the wrong spot. Excellent, and then we have someone wants to know, do you have a favorite type of weather you like to study. Um, my favorite type of weather I, you know I would probably say snow, definitely snow storms. I think, you know, snow storms as I kind of mentioned at the beginning was the part of the weather bug that kind of bit me from the beginning and growing up on the East Coast, you know we had a lot of blizzards every single year. So I definitely would say winter weather snow storms are definitely probably my passion and love, but I will say, I also enjoy tornadoes and storm chasing and all that stuff too. Excellent. And then we have a question that, how do you communicate bad weather conditions to vehicles that are driving on the road. Absolutely a great question. So there's a few ways that you can communicate with drivers once they're out there. More and more as we look at cars, you know getting smarter electrified self driving think of like your Tesla is out there. A lot of those vehicles the same way we talked about that question of Bluetooth connectivity and how cars talk to each other. Um, we can leverage those same channels to push weather information out to the car. So the same way that you know right now, if you are say probably back when COVID started everyone's phones at some point, got like a text message that was like text mandates or, you know, COVID alert or something like that. We can do that same thing for cars and we can either ping people cell phones although we certainly don't want people to be using their phones while driving, but also as cars get more and more technology in them. We can also kind of directly send messages to cars as well, just like we might to people cell phones. And I think if anyone could sneak in their last question we might have time for just one more. And here we go. Nice job. The rural students wonder if it could be useful for harvesting and growing. Another great question for sure. And I do think that when we think about farming and kind of agriculture. You know, that there's been a lot of talk about yeah farm equipment and automation there out in the fields is probably going to come a lot faster because there's less issues of say, a car driving in a city and you have to worry about park cars and lots more traffic and congestion, whereas say a tractor or a plow out on a field, or less doesn't have to worry as much about people running out in front of you or, or anything like that. I definitely think a lot of this is going to be very important. And from the crop side to, you know, certainly those thunderstorms we talked about with high winds and hail. Those can blow over a lot of crops like your corn and wheat, unfortunately, and lead to a lot of crop loss so yeah this information is, you know, it's not just good for transportation to it can be good for a lot of other folks out there. All right, well, it's been really fun to explore your work to make her just thank you, or Dr Walker, thank you so much for telling us about your work and thanks to everyone for joining us. And in the chat I see a thank you I love this meet the experts meeting every other two weeks. And thank you Mr Curtis. I love learning about your job and another thank you for Dr Walker. And everyone just so you know the next meet the expert session, which was mentioned happens every Thursday that will be March 18. And please check our website I put it into the chat if you saw that in there. And obviously you found it before so check the website, and for the more details later there's to be determined to be announced. Exactly what that will be like. And again, let's everyone say thank you. Everyone has already said thank you to Dr Walker and I'll say the same thank you so much. And we'll see everybody next time. All right, thank you so much everyone have a great week and weekend ahead to