 How's it going? It's going well. Thanks for coming. Thanks for inviting me to this picnic. It's a good idea. Yeah, I thought it was going to be more sunny though. I saw the weather app on my phone two weeks ago and it didn't say I was going to rain, but here come the clouds. Two weeks, yeah. It's really hard to have any confidence in the forecast two weeks in advance. Not to mention how complicated it is to forecast near the mountains. Are you saying that the mountains impact the weather forecast? Yeah, the mountains are really important. They have a great impact on where, how much, and what kind of precipitation is going to fall out. Wait, you're a scientist. I thought the models to forecast the weather already included the mountains. They do include the mountains and the models, but the system we need to understand is really big and really complicated. First, you need to know if you have the right ingredients to form a cloud. What do you mean by ingredients? Like temperature, humidity, wind speed, and then once you have a cloud, well, you need to know what's happening inside of the cloud. Or do we have little drops of water that are growing or maybe they're freezing and forming ice? Oh, that's probably why we have sometimes snow or rain or hail. But sometimes I notice that it looks like it's going to rain, but it evaporates before it even hits the ground. Yeah, exactly. Evaporation is something that can happen to the rain drop once it leaves the cloud and falls down to the ground. And the rain could also be blown over to some other location. Wow, it seems pretty complicated. So next time I want to plan a picnic, what should I be doing? Well, you can look at different sources of information, like the weather app on your phone, but also the forecast in the local news or check what the National Weather Service is forecasting. That way you have a better sense of what the meteorologists think is going to happen. And the closer you are to your date for the picnic, the better the forecast will be. But living near the mountains, the weather can change really fast. So it's better to be safe than sorry. Yep, I have my hat and I have my envelope. Should we eat? Yeah, we should. Get to it.