The increase of billion dollar weather disasters | Across the Sky podcast

The number of billion dollar weather disasters has jumped in recent years. Lead Scientist on the NOAA quarterly report, Adam Smith, talks about how they arrive at those figures, what types of disasters are most expensive, and what part of the country is most vulnerable.

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The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:

Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hello, everybody. I'm meteorologist Sean Sublette and welcome to Across the Sky, our National Lee Enterprises weather podcast. Lee Enterprises has print and digital news operations in 77 locations across the country, including in my home base in Richmond, Virginia. I'm joined by my colleagues from across the sky, Matt Holiner in Chicago, Joe Martucci at the Jersey Shore. Our colleague Kirsten Lang continues to take a little time off in Tulsa for a few weeks.

Gentlemen, we've got a great guest this week. We've all heard about the billion dollar disasters report. Adam Smith from NCI. That's Noah. National Centers of Environmental Information is joining us to talk all about this, because this this is fascinating stuff. I mean, some of this can get very complex and deep into the weeds. So Adam does a really good job, I think, talking about how they come up with this data and why it's relevant.

Yeah. And most of us across the country have been hit by some billion dollar disasters since they've been tracking this year, going back to, I believe it was 1980. So it's something that probably has impacted you, whether you remember it or not. So we were happy to have Adam on in the end to drop his knowledge on us here for our podcast.

And really what caused us to reach out to Adam is when they came out with their report at the beginning of May, looking at just the for the first four months of the year, we've already had $7 billion disasters and that's the second most all time if they've started keeping records in 1980. And probably what's more remarkable is if you look at the average number of billion dollar disasters for the entire year from 1980 to 2022, it's $8 billion disasters in the entire year.

And we've already had seven in the first four months. So that is not what we want to see. But that's been the recent trend because if you look at just the last five years, 2018 to 2022, we've had $18 billion disasters on average. So in the last five years the average is 18. When you go back to 1980, the average is eight.

So there is a clear uptick in the number of billion dollar disasters. So we had to get Adam on that talk about, yeah, fortunately he was telling us so much of this was driven by a very recent uptick in tropical cyclones slash hurricanes. We also talk about the droughts. You know, there's long term drought that until this past winter has been plaguing the western United States.

So we get into all those things. We'll also talk about, you know, some of the intricacies of this and why it's sometimes the data is misinterpreted. So we'll get to all of that as we begin our conversation with Adam Smith at the National Centers for Environmental Information. And we welcome Adam Smith, visible scientist at the Climate Sciences and Services Division at the Noah National Center for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina.

He is the lead researcher for the quarterly Billion dollar Disasters Report, and he has been involved in the nexus of climate and weather risk for more than a decade. Adam, welcome and thank you for taking the time with us on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So I wanted to started at the big level because a lot of this stuff is kind of esoteric or for the home listeners, home viewers.

So take us at a top down level. Our is this kind of stuff quantified in terms of this disaster? Is this amount of money? This disaster is this amount of money? You aggregate this up. So at the bigger level, how was this done? So to do this type of analysis require is a broad array of public and private sector partners.

For example, the insurance and reinsurance industry, of course, even the catastrophe modelers also federal agencies like FEMA, USDA, the National Interagency Fire Center, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Energy Information Administration, and at the state level, of course, state agencies and management authorities, they have a lot of data pre and post disaster. And so we're looking at quantify in total direct losses across about 16 different asset classes using the combination of that public and private sector data.

So this would be insured, under-insured and uninsured damages to homes, to businesses, to government buildings like schools, the contents of all of these structures. Even time element losses such as business interruption or loss of living quarters. When you're out of your home lost, being repaired or rebuilt. But there's other assets even that the private sectors that often pay attention to as comprehensively, for example, public assets, roads, bridges, levee systems, even the Department of Defense, military bases, electrical grids are also something we look at as far as damage that's also a public private partnership and damage to to vehicles, to boats, to offshore energy platforms.

And finally, the agriculture sector, of course, is heavily impacted by heat waves, cold waves and drought. So we look at crops, livestock being calls that increase in particular with drought damage to commercial timber, often with hurricanes in the southeast and wildfire fighting suppression costs. So those are the 16 different asset classes that we have homogeneous data over space and time.

Going back many decades. That's consistently available. But it's equally important to know what we are not able to capture. So that would be things like non-market losses to environmental damage, environmental degradation, a natural capital, those type of losses, mental and physical health care related costs, which are likely substantial in the downstream ripple effects outside of a hazard region.

There's also not quantified, so you could say this is a conservative but solid baseline estimate. Another piece of the puzzle would be one of the first key transformations we make would be the reciprocal of the insurance penetration rate, which varies by asset, by region and by hazard. Because we're looking at hurricanes, severe storm events like tornado hail and high wind events, heat waves, cold waves, winter storms, wildfire drought and urban flooding and river basin flooding.

And some of those are very discrete events. And M.S., a day to day, three days like a severe storm complex or a hail storm. But some we treat more seasonal like droughts and wildfires because they're often slow onset events that get more impactful, particularly in the fall as the West dries out, as we've seen many times in recent years.

Hey, Adam, it's Matt. So looking through April of this year, there were seven confirmed $2 billion assets. But what I noticed is underneath that, you lost three more potential billion dollar disasters. And I'm just curious, what is the difference there? Why are there three additional ones that could not be confirmed yet? You have seven confirmed billion dollars of three additional ones that cannot be confirmed yet.

So what's the what does it take to become a confirmed billion dollar disaster versus these preliminary ones? Yes, that's a great question. This is this is a new feature we just added in recent months based on user feedback and requests. So that has to do with the data latency across all these different public and private data sources. We partner with the data latency, basically a fancy word for how long it takes a data to mature and stabilize.

That varies based on the size and the impact, the intensity of an event. So we like to probe. Probably one month is about the bare minimum for the smallest billion dollar disaster event, like a hailstorm in Colorado, for example, whereas hurricanes could take many months, you know, six months or more. As we've seen in Florida, often times the claims process continues and continues.

So this provides this section you're talking about the potential billion dollar disaster events. It kind of pulls back the curtain a little bit to say what events are we looking at as far as the data maturity that may be added to the list in the coming months? And correct me if I'm wrong, but if those three were confirmed, that would put us at ten through the first four months of year, which would be a new record because the current record is $8 billion disasters in 2017 and 2020, right?

That would be correct. So these are not yet confirmed, but if they were all confirmed, we would be on a record base. That's correct. I mean, I'm going to parlayed and said more of a, let's say, 30,000 feet view of this where we've been over the past couple of decades with these billion dollar disasters. And I'll note, I know you adjust for inflation so the numbers are accurate in terms of something in 2000 is the same as now.

But also furthermore, you know, where are we seeing what types of events are giving us our biggest increases and as are anything that we've seen, decreases that over time as well, a lot of these different hazards have had frequency and cost trends that are really going in the wrong direction in terms of they're getting worse for different parts of our nation.

So if you can remember, the last three hurricane season is 2020 through 2022 were quite active. I believe we had more Category four and Category five landfalling hurricanes on record in that period than most of what the record shows and heard. That and hurricanes to the point are the most costly of these extremes we measure and it makes sense are big, powerful storms.

So we have a lot of assets, a lot of population in harm's way along the Gulf Coast, in the southeast. We've also seen a lot of inland flooding events, urban planning events, more in the 20 tens decade than we had in the 1980s, nineties and 2000s combined. It implies, of course, we have more population, more exposure, but climate change is putting its thumb on the scale for some of these extremes, like heavy rainfall in the eastern U.S. As we know, the costliest flaperon equation, everyone see increase in temperature.

The water vapor increases and therefore it adds to the heavy rainfall potential, which we've seen. But of course, how we build, where we build the vulnerabilities there, the floodplains, those all go into the to the equations as well. But if we go to the West Coast, you know, we've seen four of the last six wildfire seasons have been pretty off the scale in terms of cost, really almost an order of magnitude more costly than the average wildfire season in place.

Yeah, just over the last four decades. Last year in 2022, thankfully, wasn't quite as bad in much of the West, with the exception of a few states like New Mexico and and some of the north central northwestern states. Yes. So so there's a lot of trends are going in the wrong direction. But what I like to highlight is, well, we can learn from this.

We can learn from one way wrong, what we can do better in the future because we know these extremes. We're going to continue with exposure, with vulnerability, with climate change, all in the mix. And so I think the key is to learn from them and to mitigate future damages. So looking at 2022, for example, the most costly events were a hurricane in impacted, you know, southwest Florida, but trapped across Florida.

And so it had the trifecta of impacts, a storm surge, the very high winds, but the flooding also well inland and really across Florida, many places that are not properly insured for flood insurance. And so that was in excess of 100 billion is is in the top some of the top most costly hurricanes on record. But I think that what sneaks under the radar a bit was the the drought from 2022.

It was very expansive and expensive from California to the Mississippi River. This was a $22.2 billion event, really is the most costly drought in the U.S. in a decade, dating back to 2012, which was a very impactful drought. We may still remember. So and drought also people focus on agriculture, aspects of the impacts of drought. But there's also the the the loss of hydropower in parts of the West and California in particular.

And as we know, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, they were dredging parts of the Mississippi River to help open up the flow because the low flow was reducing the commerce, the traffic up and down the river. So, yeah, all these impacts from an impact from an asset point of view and from a socioeconomic point of view are multidimensional.

And so we have to address our vulnerabilities. Yeah. Before we toss to break, I want to go back to the drought situation in the West because that is such a long evolution event. How our are you able to say, you know, well, this fits into this timeframe, You know, there's one drought or did the drought, you know, you know, we know it's a multi-year, almost multi-decade old drought or they ratification.

So how do you decide, okay, well, the drought we're going to fit into this quarter or this specific calendar year, How do you kind of get through that? For example, back in was the 2016 or 2017, there was like a flash drought that impacted North Dakota, South Dakota and maybe Montana, I believe. And it was a more bust, a smaller, isolated, but a very intense drought, you know, d3d for drought conditions, which are the most severe, but since the year 2000, what we've seen more often is just large swaths of the West with, you know, half a dozen to a dozen states that are heavily impacted throughout their growing season of their primary crops, anywhere

from D2 to D3 to D4 impacts. And a lot of the states are giving drought designations based on weather is data in the East or G-3 or higher in the West. And so we track, you know, using s and other great drought data and USDA crop insurance data. We track how the maturity of the the crop season correlates with the the drought intensity.

You know, often what we've seen is drought in Tennessee with heat in the summer and early fall will spike right when the crops are most vulnerable. And so therefore it amplifies the crop loss and the damages. Also, we see certainly for the larger area droughts and the long duration droughts, which we've seen much since year 2000. In the West, different states will struggle with wildfire cattle feed costs.

So we look at cost per ton for things like corn or hay, silage and just that the delta between that year's drought impact price increase versus the five year state cost per ton increase for those feeding commodities. So there's a lot that goes into it and drought is one of the more complex assets to to analyze for as an event.

Yeah, because everybody gets a little bit differently I'm sure. All right. So we'll take a little bit of a break. And on the other side, we'll dig a little bit deeper into the weeds about some of the pitfalls and irregularities and difficulties in quantifying this information with Adam Smith from Noah and CGI on the Across the Sky podcast.

Stay with us. And we're back on the Across the Sky podcast. Our guest is Adam Smith, the Noah National Centers of Environmental Information, talking about the billion dollar disasters, reports that that come out about every quarter. And I'm I want to talk a little bit about the methodology. So, you know, even when we adjust for inflation, it seems like growing population, that coincident increase in wealth development along the coasts, more people building on property.

How do you handle all those things in the report? Historically, inflation using CPI, you A-Z as a means for doing so is what we do, and we adjust that monthly based on the end date of an event or for drought. We use the begin date. But I think a fair question has come up in recent years about adjusting for things like housing population, other assets in harm's way, because we do know that people are moving to the south and the southeast in the west, which are really hot spots for different hazards hurricanes, severe convective storms, drought, flooding, you name it.

And so we are actually embarking barking this late summer into fall and looking at some of the different assets and trying to add some additional adjustments. We do actually normalize for things like population or state level GDP. In our mapping section, you can look at any combination of years, any combination of hazards, any individual disaster. Of the 355 separate billion dollar disasters over the last 44 years, you can look at state level analysis that does normalized by population GDP.

We just haven't taken that through all of the different pools throughout the entire site. But we're going to do more work on that front. I think one of the challenges, though, is a lot of the literature does talk about using, you know, population density or housing density as ways to normalize. I think that's a start, but I don't think that's a complete answer because we are looking at 16 different asset classes that are highly variables in terms of their spatial distribution, how much the concentration and the value of those have changed where they've happened.

So we really need to come up with a more robust strategy to deal with the normalization in a in a really comprehensive way. But we have partners at Treasury, federal agencies and academia that are also looking at similar questions. So this is an active area of research. And Adam know has been keeping track of these billion dollar disasters since 1980.

But it does raise the question of why 1980? So why is that the start point and could we look back farther than 1980? Is it possible can we try and calculate, well, how many billion dollar disasters that were in the seventies or sixties, or is there something that's preventing that? Yes, in 1980 when we started doing this work, and I think the reinsurance companies like Munich Reinsurance and Sports Reinsurance have actually looked back pre 1980.

But in the United States, looking at the public and private sector data, 1980 in terms of the beginning of a decade is really where we get the first consistent snapshot of the comprehensive homogeneous data over space and time. This was a good starting point. For example, I think the FEMA National Flood Insurance Program data really doesn't really get going until the late seventies, if I'm if I'm not mistaken.

But, you know, if you look at some really extreme events like tornado outbreaks, which we had many in the 1970s, because they were so impactful, they killed so many people, they were there historical events, you could do some analysis. I think the caveat would be pre 1980, the farther you go back in time, the larger the error bars would be in terms of the uncertainty of the data in the assumptions and the impact those assumptions would make on the analysis.

And so what got you interested in getting into these EO, registering these billion dollar disasters or even working within NCI memory? Always interested and, you know, climate and this kind of information. What what was your journey that brought you here? Yes. So I've worked at NCI since really beginning Charles in five. And this this was kind of a legacy project actually predated my time, of course.

But the way it was structured, the data that went into it was it was a comprehensive it wasn't peer reviewed, it was embedded. It was it was not quite as comprehensive as it could have been. So we spent probably five years working at mini partners, developing different data relationships and understanding and writing some papers, having conferences, and then kind of made it more robust and did a reanalysis.

But I think in terms of my involvement with it, I've always been kind of a, a natural interdisciplinary thinker. I like I like thinking in that problem space, chaos and uncertainty don't really scare me as much as it might other people. And so I think it's a challenge and it's in frankly, it's just interesting. It's fun to do.

And as we've seen over the last seven years, from 2016 through 2022 and 43, these billion dollar disasters have cost over $1 trillion of damage to the United States. It took about 34, 35 years from 1980 through about 2014 to get the first trillion before we got the second trillion in the last seven years. So the point being, you know, there's a lot at stake here in terms of understanding the spatial dimensions of impact, the socioeconomic vulnerabilities and trying to bring that as just one of many different federal data tools to help people unpack and better understand the a data analysis and our tools, not the be all end all.

There's been a proliferation of different tools, like FEMA's National Risk Index is a great one, but there's there's probably half a dozen in the last two years. So we're just trying to do our part. And it's a very it's an interesting and active space to research. Now, I have another question for for people who really are not overly familiar with this.

Adam, if you could kind of enlighten folks I know everybody's under everybody can understand what insurance is, but can you talk about what reinsurance is? Because that's a term that gets tossed around a lot that I don't think gets a lot of its a lot of explanation. So something like Munich Re Would you would you reference early what what is reinsurance.

So yeah, reinsurance is effectively insurance for insurance companies. It's it's when really impactful events like a hurricane Ian hits Florida and causes tens of billions of dollars of insured loss that's so impactful. And so far on the distribution potential as a rare event that insurance companies wisely back up their investments with paying for additional insurance, which are often global bodies like Munich Reinsurance.

Willis Reinsurance. But even the public sector, like FEMA's national Flood Insurance Program, has wisely recently started investing more and more in reinsurance layers to basically backstop the federal government payouts for flood insurance. Because as we've seen with hurricanes in particular, like Harvey, like Ian, like Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the costs quickly run up into the billions in terms of just the insured flood losses alone.

But the uninsured flood losses are several times often the the insured losses from these events. And Adam, of course, looking at the big picture, we're seeing the number of billion dollar disasters going up. But I wonder if we could dive in a little bit more and talk about regionally, what are these? Are we seeing a particular region that's seeing more events than in the past and also as far as that type of event?

So are we seeing a trend in the type of events that are causing billion dollar disasters compared to the eighties and nineties and what we're seeing now? So as far as types of events go in peculiar regions that are really seeing a particular uptick. So looking at the state scale, Texas, Florida and Louisiana would be the top three states In terms of the impact, yeah, Texas is close to $400 billion of total losses from these billion dollar disasters 1980 to present.

Florida is also close to 400 billion. Louisiana is above or around 300 billion. And you can dive into all this data online. But if you were to normalize that by population or state GDP, you would see Louisiana certainly has the most acute impacts because they have a much smaller population, much more GDP, economic size than either Texas or Florida.

And you can think back to 2020. We had, I think, four or five landfalling hurricanes make landfall and in Louisiana. So it lengthens and makes more costly the cleanup effort. But we saw the same thing last year in Florida with Hurricane Ian hitting. And then four or five weeks later, Hurricane Nicole hitting the other part of Florida and some similar counties had impacts.

So this is an example of compound extremes with cascading impacts. And we're seeing that in the Gulf Coast. We're seeing that in in California with wildfire seasons lengthened due to the kind of semi persistent drought. Thankfully, that a lot of that drought's been diminished early in 2022 from absolute rivers. But anyway, we go from drought to wildfire to mud flow.

Debris flows in the mountainsides from the burn scars in California. So you get this compound linkage that amplifies the impacts in the national Climate Assessment has has targeted this as a topic and really amplified and put a spotlight on it. So, yeah, certainly certain regions of the country are have been struggling in recent years in terms of high frequency events.

And in Austin, these events hit similar areas and populations and even places like Louisiana, people are actually moving out of parts of Louisiana because I think it's just it's just too much to deal with. One thing I kind of, I guess, struggle with my head is that, you know, we're having Morty's billion dollar disasters. At the same time, I feel like there's never been more importance on messaging and emergency management here.

Can you link the two? Because we would think that we're trying to be a more weather ready nation at that. That's a NOAA initiative, but we're still seeing Morty's billion dollar disaster. Yeah, I think that one challenges, as we talked about, people are moving of course, to different parts of the country, say they retired, they went to Florida or Texas and they may be from the northeast or somewhere in the Midwest.

Well, when you move to a new place, I think it's one besides, you know, picking out where your your your location, where you want to live, you need to know your hazard. You need to know your natural born abilities, what has happened in the past. And you have so many great resources at the federal level, at the state level, academics have have published a lot of great papers looking at, you know, where the extremes and hazards are.

And it's not one hazard. Often it's different, it's multifaceted. And so educating yourself in terms of what can happen, but also educating yourself and preparing in case if you are confronted with a high risk and you can actually act on it and protect yourself, your family, your business, your home, your assets. And so it does ultimately come down to the individual.

But I think there's, you know, certainly an education process and understanding and some responsibility. And it's at all levels. And we have more than enough events in recent years to learn from and better prepare and for future extremes. Yeah, for sure. We get all kinds of weather across this country for, you know, everybody gets it a little bit differently.

And before we let you go, I anything else you want to share where people can find this information online and anything else that y'all are working on that we should look forward to. One thing I did not mention is we worked in recent last few years with FEMA and Census, and we integrated as a county level in the census tract level a lot of socioeconomic vulnerability information and you can compare that with hazard risk or information and the billion dollar disaster information for your for your area, for your region.

Yeah, just type. Billion-Dollar Disasters or weather costs in Google and it will come up. But we have many different tools and we're always trying to expand and add more nuance and depth and usefulness to the tools we we're working on developing user reports, dynamic reporting, so that can be developed and you know, like a PDF, you could just take it with you and read it separate from a web page.

But there's there's just so much to do in this space. And there, you know, it's not just us, as many different research groups across the federal government, private sector and academia who are doing very valuable and important work in this area. Excellent. And again, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast and for all the work you're doing there, Noah, and give our best to you, everybody who's working there at Noah, NCI in Asheville.

A lot to take in there, guys. But I mean, Adam has been doing this for a long time and by that he admits that there's no perfect way to do this for sure. But, you know, I think it's clear that as the as the climate has warmed, we are more at risk. There are more people, there are more things at risk, there's more property risk.

And we're going to have to continue to guard against these kinds of weather. Sometimes are cold. Climate disasters are like environmental disasters. Kind of avoid avoid the political political nonsense with this stuff. But the end result, whether it's tropical cyclone, whether it's heavy rain, whether it is locally severe storms, whether it is the drought, flooding, all those things, we are more vulnerable than we have been in the past.

And Joe, you know, you brought up the weather resignation and how I do think, you know, we're getting better at communicating and keeping people safe from these extreme weather events. But what we can't do works for, you know, is when these hurricanes are making landfall or when a tornado is tracking across ground, we can get people out of the way of the hurricane.

We can get people out of the way of tornado, but we can't get their homes out of the way of these storms even there. And there can be preparations, you know, to make it. You know, we see people put a clipboard in the windows and such. But, you know, when it it's a high level event, there's going to be destruction.

And I think, you know, especially, you know, in kind of what Adam mentioned, too, there's a little bit of a concern that people are moving to these places that have more climate disasters. I mean, just historically, Texas, Florida, anywhere along the Gulf Coast, the population has really been rising in the south. And that's typically where we have more of these billion dollar disasters and they're happening more often.

So this is what happens. We end up getting more billion dollar disasters as people move to areas that experience more extreme weather. Yeah, and he kind of answered it when I was saying about, you know, emergency management and yeah, like we said, weather ready Nation. But to your point, you know, I mean I think Florida was the had been the fastest growing state since 2020.

So a lot of those are going to the coast. Real estate is expensive in Florida. I was just in Sarasota two months ago. Prices are going up over there as well. And that ultimately outstrip the the increase in these disasters, too. And with things like rising sea levels. Yeah, you talk about hurricanes, right? I mean, yeah, if you had 12 inches more of sea level rise in 100 years, well, you know, now that that hurricane that's coming through, you know, is going to be 12 inches higher, what your storm surge and that might go in an extra block and an extra block is an extra million dollars or real estate or whatever it might be.

So it's all these incremental things. And that's you know, we talk about climate change. A lot of this is coming in incremental steps. It's not the day after tomorrow where, you know, the Statue of Liberty is frozen in time. That that's how it is shown, right? Is that what happened? The Statue of Liberty? Oh, my God. They can't see me.

But I have the little torch in my head now. But what it is, you know, it's these incremental steps. It's, you know, hey, the water's now half a block up the street. This storm now it's a full block up the street. The next storm, you know, and those kind of things add up dollar wise and help create some of these billion dollar disasters as well.

You know, and there's a lot of focus on the, you know, tornado outbreaks and the hurricanes that are often the cause of billion dollar disasters. But you know what's interesting, I mean, so far this year, it's mainly just been some regular severe thunderstorm outbreaks, you know, that have been hail. People often forget about how costly ALA is. A lot of times people can get inside and you don't frequently die from hail.

You go inside, you're fine. But the damage the hail caused that's been real costly this year and just straight line wind damage, it doesn't take a tornado. You get 60, 70, 80 mile per hour straight line winds and that does a lot of damage. So you don't need tornadoes. You don't need hurricanes at billion dollar disasters. That's really been the biggest problem so far this year.

Yeah. Once that wind gets past 55 or 60 miles an hour, that's when we really start to see more physical damage to structures and the like. Gentlemen, I think that's going to be it for this week. But as as you know, and we'll let the folks at home know we've been working on another podcast next week. We're very excited to have the new director of the National Hurricane Center joining us next week, Michael Brennan.

I will be here to talk about some of the new products that they've got working for the for the new hurricane season starts June 1st. I talk a little bit about about his role moving from my home state of Virginia through the ranks. NC State and on the way to the as director of the National Hurricane Center So very excited to have Director Brennan join us next week.

Joe, I know you've been working on a couple other things that you want to kind of ease the audiences to some things I know you've been working on. Yeah. So we'll start off with we did a collab with Front page Betts on our Lee Enterprises family, so I had my said, Son, we're talking about sports betting and the weather and then we said it last week.

It's something of a personal hero of mine, George Shea, Major League eating Commissioner, coming out to talk about the Nathan's hot dog eating contest. That's going to be our July 3rd episode. Talk about SEO Shawn. What better SEO do we have than is putting out on July 3rd a podcast about hot dog eating contest and the weather. And I'll tell you what, I've been to the hot dog eating contest before.

It is definitely weather definitely makes a difference because I love having been there and seeing it on TV all these years. Those hot and humid days, just kind of hazy, different than those nice day for it's 82 degrees on the corner surf and still well in Coney Island, New York. Thanks. Thanks for that visual. I'll try not to have nightmares about it.

I appreciate it. While I think about it, I would just do it this way. I think we're gonna take the reins on this day by. But yeah, we got a lot coming up and you know, we appreciate everyone listening and subscribing. You know, over the past year we've only been doing this for like 13 months. It feels like we've been doing it forever, but I bet we've been doing for 13 months.

So really appreciate all of you tuning in. If you know someone who likes weather, if you know someone you interesting climate, tell them about it too. You know, we'd really appreciate it. That's a labor of love, to be sure. Go ahead. Go ahead, Matt. No. Yeah, we just started last April. I can't believe it's been over a year, but we are past the year mark.

We have over 52 episodes now. So with APA, if you are, you have plenty of material to go back and listen to. If you're new to the podcast, we have plenty of episodes of scroll back in our history and I'm imagine there'll be a topic at some point. You'll scroll past. You want to click on and we'll have more and more in the weeks ahead.

So again, thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening, Thank you for subscribing and don't miss our conversation next week with National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan on the Across the Sky podcast. But for now, I'm Sean Sublette, the Matt Holiner in Chicago and at the Jersey Shore, our buddy Joe Martucci, and this hot dog eating contest that will see you next time for the Across the Sky podcast.