Lake Doctor | A Lilly Center for Lakes & Streams Podcast

Weather Watch: Unpacking Climate's Impact on Aquatic Ecosystems

• Lilly Center for Lakes & Streams • Season 1 • Episode 7

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Unlock the mysteries of weather and its profound effects on local lakes with our special guest, Matt Rudkin, a meteorologist who has taken his expertise from TV to an analytical role at United Airlines. Learn how Lake Michigan’s ice cover impacts Indiana’s spring weather and the critical role of education in understanding weather patterns. Matt’s passion for demystifying weather phenomena shines as he explains the 'why' behind what we see in the skies and how it all connects to our daily lives.

Join us as we break down the complex interplay between atmospheric conditions and lake dynamics. Discover how microbursts mimic a garden hose hitting a driveway and the cascading effects of high and low-pressure systems on thunderstorms and nutrient mixing in lakes. With vivid analogies and a focus on making science accessible, we explore the stratification of lakes, the influence of wind and rain, and how these elements foster plant and algae growth, all while connecting these processes to broader atmospheric layers and weather patterns.

Finally, delve into the fascinating world of ice cover and weather predictions. Uncover the impact of ice on evaporation and aquatic life during winter, and compare historical ice harvesting with modern forecasting methods. Matt and Dr. Nate Bosch shed light on global patterns like El Niño and La Niña, leveraging historical data to predict future weather. We also touch on Matt’s inspiring journey into meteorology and discuss how changes in our climate could lead to more severe weather events. This episode is packed with insights that will transform your understanding of the intricate dance between weather, climate, and our lakes.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Lake Doctor podcast. I'm your host, Susie Light, and I get to share some stories and talk about our beautiful lakes with my friend, Dr Nate Bosch. Nate, you received your doctorate from the University of Michigan in limnology.

Speaker 2:

That's right, Susie. Limnology is the study of freshwater aquatic systems, unlike oceanography, which would be saltwater. On this podcast, we're going to dive into lake science. We're going to meet folks who are passionate about our lakes just like we are, and we're going to have some fun together.

Speaker 1:

Visit lakesgraceedu, where you can learn more about the topics in this episode and support the Lilly Center's work.

Speaker 2:

In today's episode we have Matt Rudkin. He's a meteorologist and we're going to talk about how weather influences our lakes.

Speaker 1:

We are so excited about today's episode. The doctor is in. I am thrilled today that Matt Rudkin is joining us. Matt Rudkin, local boy, made it good meteorologist and my favorite weather app from Matt Rudkin Weather. So, matt, tell us a bit about yourself.

Speaker 3:

Oversaw raised. Go, tigers, great to be with you here. I was a local TV meteorologist for over a decade. Most of that was up in South Bend at WSBT. After the pandemic decided just to change my career a little bit. I now work at United Airlines, still doing a lot of analytical work, but not weather forecasting. I forecast a lot about load demands, so where people want to go at what time of the year, and I'm part of the team that helps try to solve that puzzle on what type of airplanes we want to send to different markets at different times of the year and different days. So a whole lot of fun. But my passion is still meteorology. On top of my career at United, I still do a lot of social media and digital work. As Susie mentioned, I've got an app, still pretty involved in local weather and education, which is certainly a huge passion of mine.

Speaker 1:

So local weather. We love that you pay attention to what's happening in Warsaw, but I think sometimes you just do that for your mom and your sister. Oh, of course.

Speaker 3:

I have a contract right. I don't have a choice, so I'm going to keep everybody updated in the family.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and I would really be remiss if I did not ask you about Doppler. Tell us who Doppler is and why Doppler is Doppler.

Speaker 3:

See, this is a question I should have been prepared for and had like a bunch of pictures. Doppler is my dog. I rescued him about eight years ago. He's a hound, a beagle mix. He's a good boy, lives with me up in Niles, michigan, just north of South Bend, so luckily, compared to Warsaw, we get a lot of snow up here. I know it's only an hour or so north of you, but triple to quadruple the amount and he has learned to embrace it for what it is, so got that going for us.

Speaker 1:

You know, one of the things that I really love about how you have helped educate our community was something that you shared a long time ago, when we were having a miserable spring. It was cold, crops were delayed, it was a miserable spring and you explained to people that Lake Michigan had a lot of ice on it and that wind and that ice was impacting our weather in Indiana. So tell us about why is education and helping inform the public about these kind of weather things important to you?

Speaker 3:

Oh, susie, I really appreciate it. Great question. No matter who you are, no matter your educational background, I think everybody loves to learn. I was blessed to have the ability to go to college go boilers but not everybody has that, and so I think it's very important to teach people at a level they understand. Not everybody needs a calculus background, not everybody needs peer-reviewed research background, but the one thing I learned very early on when I was lucky enough to go into television, is everybody wants to know why. When I was lucky enough to go into television is everybody wants to know why.

Speaker 3:

And now, in 2024, going into the mid-2020s which is just weird to say, but going on the next few years here, you can get a weather forecast anywhere. You can get it on your phone, you can get it on your car I think there's some smart refrigerators now that will give it to you but people just want to learn why the weather is doing what it's doing, and that's something an app can't teach you. That's something a lot of digital resources can't teach you. So it's been a lot of fun to teach people like yourself, susie, why things happen, and try to educate them not just why, but also how to prepare.

Speaker 3:

The one thing I'm really proud of or one of many things in my 10 to 12 years doing this in the digital world is people seem to finally have figured out during the summer when we're talking about a severe weather risk. When they see the sun, it's not a good thing. I've worked years on really trying to educate people that when it's cloudy it's a good thing, it suppresses temperature. When it's sunny, you get all that rising motion thing. It suppresses temperature. When it's sunny, you get all that rising motion. So things like that just trying to educate people as to why the atmosphere works in the way it does.

Speaker 1:

So, nate, you also are big into education, and something you and Matt share is that the research and being able to present data in a non-sensational manner. So tell us about your philosophy on that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So there's no sense to try to take these scientific concepts and try to create a hysteria or over-hype it for fundraising or sensationalizing things. We want to help people make better decisions in their day-to-day life and so at the Lilly Center we're looking at what we call water literate citizens. That's our goal and so we work with partner organizations. We do public education to help change some behaviors for taking better care of our lakes and streams, and then also looking at K-12 students and how they can grow up to be water literate citizens. So when they're making decisions for their own families or communities here, they're making decisions that help take care of our lakes and streams well for the future. So we'd love to do hands-on things, just like Matt was talking about Want to meet people where they're at, not talk over their head or talk you know beneath what they already know about, but be able to match that educational message and do it in kind of a fun sort of a way so that it's retained by people.

Speaker 1:

So one of the things I notice when I'm driving near Winona Lake often I see white caps on the lake and that's because the wind is creating movement in the lake Matt. Why do we experience strong winds, maybe in the fall and the spring, more than we do other times?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, good question, susie. So Earth is always trying to equalize itself. It's why we have weather, it's why we have a planet that can sustain life. Everything this planet's trying to do is trying to equalize itself. It'll never get there.

Speaker 3:

So the way it does it, or the way physics allows it to do it, is by weather systems. So you've got low pressure, you've got high pressure and pressure's fluctuating all over the place. Wind comes from the change of pressure, so you get wind that's blowing from low to high pressure. So here in the Midwest, where we live, we get a lot of weather systems that come through all seasons of the year and pressure fluctuates all over the place. If you have a barometer you can watch it go all over the place. So when we go from a pretty nasty storm system to, two or three days later, a whole lot of sunshine it's a big pressure difference and between those is guaranteed wind and depending on how strong each that low and high pressure is, we'll determine how much wind we get.

Speaker 3:

Also in the Midwest we've got a bunch of great lakes. We live at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. There's no friction on that lake. Warsaw is a little removed from that. You know you're several miles away, but just to our north there's no trees, no hills, so all that wind just rolls and rolls and rolls until it gets to the shoreline and it goes for several miles thereafter. So we just live in a very wind prone area. On top of that something that everybody listening is familiar with we have a lot of cornfields, a lot of bean fields. It's pretty flat in Kosciuszko County, so when that wind rolls through it doesn't have anything to hit up against. There's not a whole lot of trees because we've got a lot of fields, so it's just naturally windier because of less friction. You combine that with, again, a lot of weather systems coming through. The atmosphere is always trying to stabilize itself and it has difficulty here in northern Indiana.

Speaker 2:

So, matt, would that be accurate, to say that we have more wind conditions in the spring and the fall, or is that just kind of how we perceive it? Is it pretty consistent across the whole year?

Speaker 3:

No, no, I think that is very accurate because you're also changing seasons, right, and so there's a lot of different variabilities going on. There we're in like the middle of winter or the middle of summer. Things are pretty quiet, there's not a whole lot of change going on, and, right, you know, in the late summer months you don't have a whole lot of wind, whereas you get to the fall think about Halloween and thereafter you start getting those first winter systems in it's windy for several days. That's that pressure difference again, as the seasons start to change.

Speaker 1:

So sometimes in the wintertime we'll get a heavy snowfall and often you call it a lake effect snow. Can you explain?

Speaker 3:

that Absolutely Probably don't have enough time. I could geek out on this one all day. It's literally one of the reasons I know I'm odd. I really like winter weather. It's one of the reasons I'm up in southwest Michigan. You know, an hour north of Warsaw.

Speaker 3:

Lake Michigan's a big body of water. All that water evaporates, just like your pool, just like you know a little pot of water in your backyard. It's the same thing, just on a really big scale. So as that water evaporates it eventually reaches a higher level in the atmosphere. Where it's colder, cold air physically can't hold as much water as warm air. So as it rises and rises, it condenses and the atmosphere's got to get rid of that moisture. Somehow it can't hold anymore. It does that in a couple of ways it forms clouds, it forms fog and it precipitates. Lake Michigan's enormous. So all that evaporation going up condenses real fast and it falls in the form of rain or snow, particularly in Southwest Michigan, northern Indiana and, if the winds are just right, warsaw can get hammered as well. That's why lake effect is more significant.

Speaker 3:

In the fall. The water's still really warm, right, tons of rising motion because of that, so you can get some really heavy snow, whereas later in the year, let's say February, the lake's pretty cold. It's in the mid-30s, so you don't get nearly as much evaporation from that. And if it's a really cold winter, if you think about oh boy, like 2014 or 15, somewhere in that ballpark the lake was almost completely frozen over. When there's ice on the lake, no evaporation happens, so you kind of cut off the lake effect snow machine. That's about a day's worth of rambling in like two minutes. I could keep going, susie, if you want.

Speaker 1:

No, that's great. I appreciate understanding that. So lakes evaporate, but lakes also are dependent on oxygen to help feed the fish and provide nutrients. How do lakes get re-oxygenized? Yeah, is that a word?

Speaker 2:

Oxygenated.

Speaker 1:

Oxygenated.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so oxygen comes into a lake a couple of ways. One would be with those winds that Matt was just talking about, blowing across the surface of the lake. We get diffusion of oxygen from the air above into the water itself in the lake, and so we can add more oxygen. That way. We also have in the lake. We've got aquatic macrophytes, also known as weeds, as well as phytoplankton, also known as algae, that are plants doing photosynthesis, and photosynthesis produces oxygen as well. And so in those surface waters, that warm water layer at the top of the lake, we've got lots of oxygen there because it's being produced there and it's diffusing in. And so when we have these wind events that make waves and create some turbulence in the surface water, that's going to allow more oxygen to get in the water than if it's really calm because we're sort of agitating it.

Speaker 1:

Spring often brings additional rain and wind to our area. What are the major factors in creating or influencing rainfall in our area?

Speaker 3:

That's a good question. It's a fairly complicated one. As we mentioned before, evaporation has a lot to do with this. So one of the things in the fall for example, if you have a really good, healthy crop, those corn stalks and the beans and all of the other crop out there actually breathe and when they exhale, they exhale a lot of moisture to the atmosphere. So when you get some extra moisture, that's theoretically artificial, right? If humans didn't exist, there'd be a lot of forests out there.

Speaker 3:

So this artificial crop that's around here that we rely on that's very important in Indiana evaporates a lot of extra moisture. So when weather systems come through, they have extra water to work with and you get some really significant heavy rains because of that. In addition, like we mentioned earlier, lake Michigan is in our backyard and northern Indiana has hundreds of small lakes. We've got the largest freshwater lake in our backyard, up at Wawasee. That also evaporates into the atmosphere. So you've got a lot of inputs going on here that the atmosphere can work with to grab onto and dispel when it becomes oversaturated.

Speaker 1:

So often there's like really, really heavy downpours and sometimes what are those things called when there is a microburst of water?

Speaker 3:

Yep, yep, so a microburst. The best way I can explain it it's straight-lined wind, and the easiest way and I've got a lot of reception online explaining it this way is, if you're outside, take a garden hose, point it straight down at the driveway. What happens when that water hits the driveway? It doesn't just like flow away right, it hits and spreads straight out. The atmosphere is the exact same physics All that real heavy rain.

Speaker 3:

Say, you're driving down US 30, you're looking through the flat cornfields and you see the big cumulonimbus clouds and the big rain underneath it. All that water hits the ground and goes straight out. When it does, it holds wind with it, or holds air, which becomes wind and goes straight out. That's what a microburst is. And some of those clouds, I mean, they top like 60,000 feet. To put that into perspective, commercial airplanes fly between 30,000, 35,000 feet, so they got to go around them. They happen a lot in the summer and, again, crops contribute to it, at least some, but we just have an abundance of available moisture. We also have the Gulf of Mexico, which I know is over a thousand miles away, but with South and West winds we're just in that spot in the Midwest where we can tap into some of that moisture, and you can certainly relate to that. When you step outside in the middle of the summer, it's 90 degrees, but instant sweat hits you in the face. That's the Gulf of Mexico working its magic.

Speaker 1:

So you talked about when the sky is clear and the sun is shining. I always thought that was a Canadian high. I think an old weatherman not you might have called it a Canadian high and I glummed on to that. Did those help contribute to potential storms in the future, like in a couple days?

Speaker 3:

a couple weeks In an atmosphere that's conducive to thunderstorm development. It's pretty short term. So you're totally right, the big Canadian highs, high pressure, is sinking air. When you have sinking air, nothing really develops. Those are the days it's just beautiful out, Blue sky can get pretty windy, but those are the beautiful days in the summer and in the winter. Those are the remarkably cold days, you know, it's just crystal clear. At night it can get below zero Low pressure, which is the opposite.

Speaker 3:

That's rising motion. When everything rises it's got to condense. When it gets cold up there in the atmosphere, several thousand feet, and that's where you get the big thunderstorms. During the morning and midday, when the sky is clear, you heat up the surface, right, you get a lot of sunshine. It gets hot real fast. That just further escalates that rising motion which contributes to thunderstorms. And the faster the rising motion is, the higher it gets condenses faster. And then, Susie, that's where you get those real big downpours you were talking about. You get some big wind with that. Those big clouds that develop usually is because of sunshine in the morning.

Speaker 1:

So, Nate, when we get those microbursts or those really heavy downpours, how does that affect our lakes?

Speaker 2:

Well, a couple of ways I think of right off the top of my head. One when we look at the wind itself. So our lakes in the summer months are what we call stratified, and so we've got different layers. We've got the warm water layer at the top, called the epilimnion, the cold water layer at the bottom, called the hypolimnion. And even with 60, 70, 80 mile an hour winds blowing across the surface of the water 60, 70, 80 mile an hour winds blowing across the surface of the water, pushing water towards one shore there's not enough energy even in that kind of wind to make the entire lake what we would call turnover mix from top to bottom, because there's a density difference in the water, that that warmer water is lighter, that colder water at the bottom is denser. It's kind of like um, maybe as a child, the little punching bags with the weighted thing on the bottom and you hit them and they keep popping back up again, kind of like the lake.

Speaker 2:

Right, You've got this dense water at the bottom and so, blowing across the surface, it will add oxygen into the water, like we already talked about.

Speaker 2:

It might mix that surface water a little bit, but it's not going to mix from top to bottom as you move into the fall and the surface water starts to cool off and become similar to the bottom water, then you can get mixing in the fall and then again in the spring when the ice comes off the lake.

Speaker 2:

But turnover, that's going to be an important part of the wind. The other thing when you have a thunderstorm is the water itself, and we know water is always going to go downhill, and so when it washes downhill it's carrying hitchhikers with it in the form of maybe sediments like soil particles or nutrients that could be absorbed onto those sediment particles or washed in a sort of dissolved form by themselves. And as those nutrients get washed into our lakes and streams, those are going to cause plants to grow. Just like nutrients in a forest or in our lawn in the form of fertilizer or on a crop in the form of fertilizer, would make those plants grow more and be healthier, so too in our lakes the plants will grow more, which would be the weeds and the algae growing more when we wash more things in.

Speaker 1:

Cool. So, Matt, I think I remember from my eighth grade science class that the atmosphere has layers too, and you talked about those clouds raising to a high level. So okay, I'm putting you on the spot. Eighth grade science person. What were some of those layers of the atmosphere?

Speaker 3:

Oh, there's five of them the troposphere, the stratosphere, we could go all the way up. I got to say, though, what Nate was talking about. Nate could be a meteorologist, so the atmospheric physics is the same as liquid physics. When you go through college, when you're modeling, et cetera, they act exactly the same. So he was talking about the different layers, the different mixing. Susie, that's what you were talking about the layers of the atmosphere. You could treat them like a layer of a lake, and each one has different properties based on the density, and when they mix, that's when you get some storms and whatnot. And when they mix, that's when you get some storms and whatnot. So what he was saying, I thought, was really fascinating, because you could absolutely translate that to atmospheric physics as well.

Speaker 1:

The difference is you don't have plants growing in the stratosphere.

Speaker 3:

No plants.

Speaker 1:

No plants, that's right.

Speaker 3:

Yes, we've got pollen. I feel like that's floating around all over the place.

Speaker 1:

Somebody who's allergic to pollen.

Speaker 3:

Thank you. I'm curious. You were talking about the different layers of the lake and the importance of nutrients. Is there a difference between, let's say, like Winona Lake, lake Wawasee and Lake Michigan? Or is it just scales?

Speaker 2:

No. So Wawasee and Winona would be similar in the fact they're both about 80 feet deep and so you're going to have maybe that top warm water layer is going to be 15, maybe 20 feet. It might be a little deeper in Wawasee just because it's clearer and so that epilimnion, with the sunlight going further down, it warms a little bit deeper, but then that bottom hypolimnium layer is going to be very similar then, whereas Lake Michigan is, you know you still have it's going to be a little deeper apaluminium layer because you have more of what we call fetch across the lake. The wind can work on a longer sort of path across the lake and so it's going to mix it a little bit deeper down. So the apaluminium is going to be a little deeper, both because of clarity and sunlight penetration as well as the fetch across the lake.

Speaker 2:

Lake Michigan then, because it's so much deeper than those two local lakes, is going to have a much bigger hypolimnion. While our lakes in the bottom water goes down to zero oxygen during the summer months because it goes into layers and then no longer can oxygen get in the bottom layer but bacteria are using up the oxygen down there. Lake Michigan has such a huge hypoaluminium that the oxygen doesn't get used up over the summer months like it would in our smaller inland lakes. So it does. It's scale for sure, but it has a pretty big difference in even where the fish are found in the different lakes.

Speaker 3:

Fascinating. The last question I have is ice cover. What's the importance of ice cover and what would be the challenges if ice cover becomes less in, let's say, the next five decades?

Speaker 2:

So ice cover is important for a lake as well. You have ice which seals off the lake then from the atmosphere and so, as you were talking about before, that can influence evaporation, so the actual volume of water that's in the lake. But it also influences oxygen levels and of course fish are going to need oxygen to survive in the lake. But it also influences oxygen levels and of course fish are going to need oxygen to survive in the lake. And so when you have ice on the top, if it's clear ice without snow, you can still get sunlight coming through in the winter months. And those plants in the lake, those weeds or aquatic macrophytes or phytoplankton or algae as they're known, they can still do photosynthesis under the ice even in the winter months and still produce some oxygen in the lake. Whereas if you have ice cover, then with a blanket of snow on top of it, now it's shaded and now you don't have any ability to produce oxygen within the lake. It's sealed off from the atmosphere. The only thing that's happening is oxygen's going away, as those bacteria continue to decompose things, and so the oxygen level starts to go down during the winter months.

Speaker 2:

It wouldn't be a problem on a lake as large as Lake Michigan but on a smaller inland lake or maybe someone's backyard pond, it could be a big impact and maybe even lead to a fish kill where you get too low of an oxygen level before the ice comes off in the spring and then those fish wouldn't be able to survive from that. And then if we have less ice cover than over time, if winters become milder, for example, then we would expect to have less of that sealing off. We would. Also the ice can kind of jostle around in the lakes and uproot maybe some weeds around the shoreline areas, and so that wouldn't be happening anymore and so it can influence if we have more weeds or more algae the next year, depending on how much ice or how little ice we have. So all of those things would be impacted by that change.

Speaker 1:

Good questions. So I've got a fun question for you both. Maybe you know this. In the early 1800s, warsaw was served with an east-west, north-south railroad track, like we are today. What do you think we were known for at that time?

Speaker 2:

Fish.

Speaker 1:

We just were talking about it.

Speaker 2:

Fish being brought to markets.

Speaker 1:

Not fish Ice fish being brought to markets, Not fish ice. They harvested ice from our lakes and transported it by rail east, west, north, south.

Speaker 2:

I did read about that because people had ice boxes, yeah, which literally had a chunk of ice in it, and then that was what would keep the food cool. Then that's right, that chunk of ice.

Speaker 1:

A question for both of you. You know I've read the Farmer's Almanac and, Matt, how do we predict weather and what the weather's going to be like in the winter?

Speaker 3:

Yes, a couple of things about the Farmer's Almanac. Joking aside, I believe they go. They use historical data that may not be verified to make their predictions. You can flip a coin too, right You're like it's either cold or warm winter. There you go.

Speaker 3:

But from an atmospheric science perspective forecasting, I like to use what's called analog data, and what I do is look at, for example I'll start this in September or October for this upcoming winter. And am I always right? Of course not, but we can usually do a pretty good job figuring out the overall trend of the season by two different ways. One, the global season, so basically El Nino or La Nina, it's different warming or cooling of the Pacific waters. That basically changes the wind flow in a high nutshell.

Speaker 3:

But what I really like from a local perspective is analog forecasting, and we have data that goes back about 130 years now locally, and so I love to find a fall or summer that was similar and look at how that winter transpired, assuming that the global pattern El Nino, la Nina is the same. It has beaten computer models more often than not, so you can really use history as a guide when forecasting just a generic season. You know, is it going to be cold? Is it going to be snowy? This winter looks like a weak La Nina and this summer was pretty pleasant. Right, I've already found like five or six years that are similar and all of those have been pretty decent winters.

Speaker 1:

Oh my husband's going to love that he won't have to get his snowblower out as much, right.

Speaker 3:

Oh, I'm sorry, I forget I'm a winter weather nerd Decent as in it may be a good weather. Season Lots a winter weather, nerd decent as in it may be a good weather. Uh season lots of snow.

Speaker 1:

Sorry, opposite of what I was thinking um you know, um matt explained that he does research based on old, on data that's been collected over time. Right, you're doing the same thing yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:

Uh, we do a lot of applied research and so it's got to have a local application here, and so we do a similar thing to what Matt was just describing. Whereas we look back in time, and so I think of 2012, big drought year, had some big changes on some of our lakes. We then call 2015 sort of our monsoon year, which was a really wet weather, summertime and just really different the algae levels in our lakes, the amounts of weeds in our lakes, and so we too can look at some early predictors for what the summer might look like in the lake. One would be looking at ice cover so we've talked about that a little bit already Ice cover.

Speaker 2:

Then, if you get that snow on the top and you get ice kind of moving around, it's going to shade out those aquatic macrophytes, those weeds that are growing, and so they're going to not have really a good head start in the spring and they're going to be kind of delayed, and so you might not have as many weeds than the next year with that sort of ice cover, with the snow that leads late into the winter time. The other thing that you can look at is you can look at snow melt or springtime rains as washing in then a lot of nutrients, and if you have less of that, less nutrients go in, you might expect to have less weeds and algae in the lake that year, whereas if you have lots of runoff in the form of snow melt as well as spring rains, you can have much more nutrients come into the lake, and so you could predict then sort of a more biologically active summer on the lake, just based on what that weather is like from the winter going into the spring.

Speaker 1:

Storm drains. Storm drains are something that communities put in to help with that flow of excess water, to keep it. Tell us about storm drains and how those work.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so sometimes people when they think of water and moving water off the landscape or from one location to another through those drainage networks, they can get a couple things kind of mixed up. So one would be storm drains or the storm sewer versus the sanitary sewer. That's one distinction we need to make Now. Years gone by, many communities had what would be called a combined sewer.

Speaker 1:

So the gutters in the street and the manhole covers that have spots in it so the water could go down into it.

Speaker 2:

Right, that could be the same as the water from the plumbing in your house, from showers and toilets and drains and such such, all combined together.

Speaker 2:

Well, over time we've separated those in a lot of our communities, and so sanitary sewer then goes to a wastewater treatment plant, where it's properly treated and then usually put into a lake or a stream in a cleaner way than when it came in. Storm sewer, on the other hand, doesn't get any treatment. It goes directly from that manhole cover or that gutter street drain, directly through some pipes into a receiving body of water like a lake or a stream, and so anything then that's on your driveway or against the curb or in the street or even on your yard right around your driveway or the street, is going to get washed directly and without being altered at all into a lake or stream. And so, like we talked about before with runoff of a thunderstorm, has hitchhikers with it. So to run off in areas that are very far from a river or lake through the storm sewer network can get to those rivers and lakes and bring those nutrients or sediments with them or even other pollutants that can cause problems.

Speaker 1:

That's why it's important not to blow your grass clippings into the street and clog the storm sewer.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that yard waste. A lot of times people will think, like well, grass clippings, that's just natural right. Or leaves, those are natural or small sticks or those sorts of things. But those things can clog up that network. They also, as those things make their way to a lake or stream, they settle out usually in a low part of a lake or stream and they start to decompose with bacteria there and what's given off is nutrients which makes the weeds and algae grow, and we've already got too many of those in our lakes throughout the Midwest, so we don't need any more.

Speaker 1:

So, matt, we've been through this podcast trying to educate people about things they can do to impact our water quality. Are there things that people can do to help impact in a positive way our weather?

Speaker 3:

Sure, I think you got to take a step back and just talk about being the best advocate you can be for keeping the atmosphere clean, whether that's reducing your carbon outputs, the carbon emissions, carpool, carbon emissions, carpool. When it's really really hot, say like 90s, the atmosphere is kind of trapped. You're kind of just stuck with this air mass that can't really go anywhere. So if you've got a gas mower, if you mow early or late in the day, that helps a lot. Little things like that really do make a difference. Like me, I still live in Indiana, michigan, but I'm over here in Chicago for work a lot. I think of the three years I've worked at United. I've driven twice, I've taken trains every other time. So little things like that really do make a difference when a large scale contributes to it.

Speaker 1:

So, matt, what led you into your love for meteorology and sciences?

Speaker 3:

Oh, I think anybody who goes into meteorology can relate to this. I was the five-year-old, six-year-old during big storms in the garage, always just fascinated by weather and the challenges it creates from a forecasting perspective. But just as a little kid, I just remember being fascinated by thunderstorms. I thought snow was the coolest thing ever and always wanted to learn why it's doing what it's doing, which is just a never ending puzzle that is a lot of fun to be a part of.

Speaker 2:

I've got a couple of things I was thinking about, matt, as you were talking. One is we often hear in our area here of Kosciuszko County we've got over a hundred lakes as people watch radar and see storms moving across the area, coming towards our county. It almost seems like often the clouds kind of part right around our county and rain or snow seems to go just north or south of us. Is that just perception of some of us who are interested in those things, or is there actually any scientific basis for wet weather events and them kind of avoiding certain parts of the landscape?

Speaker 3:

Man, if I had a dollar for every time this was asked, I wouldn't have to work, I could be at home. I don't have an answer and I've escalated this question because I get asked all the time, which means it's not just perception. I think a lot of people notice it. But my friends at the National Weather Service up the road in Syracuse, two doctoral-degreed researchers the best conclusion at least I can come up with, which has some peer-reviewed research merit to it, is Lake Michigan, which just has such an enormous impact on our region.

Speaker 3:

Warsaw is south and east of the lake, so anytime you get northerly flow, especially early in the year, so the first half of the year when the lake water's cooler, the air above it's cooler and again cooler, air sinks, warm air rises. So when storms come from Illinois and they kind of interact with that, you can get them to effectively split around that lake breeze if you will. But I've seen the same thing happen in the middle of July or August and really I feel like you could say the same thing for other areas as well. If there's a line coming, it seems to split or some areas seem to get more rain or not. But I don't disagree. I feel like the Warsaw area you know a big one's coming at you and it just goes away ends up in El Carter, down by Wabash. It feels like that happens often. I wish I had a better answer.

Speaker 1:

Often we hear too that US-30 is the dividing line between a lot of snow and not so much snow. Is there any correlation? Like US-30 used to be a wagon train at one time, is there any yeah yeah science behind that?

Speaker 3:

Take a guess. What do you think? The answer is Wind.

Speaker 2:

Maybe that big lake.

Speaker 3:

The big lake, yep, yep, and the wind over the big lake. I think you're both right there. Us 30, I think, is identifiable just because from a broadcast perspective it's a big highway. I use US 6, us 20, 31. People just can visualize where that's at. But US 30, there is a big cutoff, lake Michigan. Once you get south of there it just has an exponentially less significant impact because you're farther away, whereas you get north of there you're closer to it. So if a band develops wherever it wobbles, you're naturally just going to be under it more when, if you're far away, you've got to really get that wind right in the correct direction. Also, the farther south you get think Kokomo, indy point southward they're just naturally warmer and you just get a lot more ice. You get a lot more sleet and cold rain versus farther north, you just get a lot more snow.

Speaker 2:

So we've talked about the difference in proximity to a big water body like Lake Michigan. Even outside of Lake Michigan, though it seems across the county and we're not that close to Lake Michigan you'll get a thunderstorm event that's moving through and you'll have certain lakes where you'll get four or five inches of rain and a really intense thunderstorm, and maybe just two miles away you got a tenth of an inch of rain. How can you have such a big discrepancy in a relatively small area?

Speaker 3:

That's a great question. So these thunderstorms particularly, they're just cells, right? So if you're on the outer edge of it you're just not going to get as much, but they also don't last forever. So at their strongest, all that moisture and rising motion is going up and then it's got to go somewhere. It rains it out, but it effectively collapses on itself often. So when it collapses it's just dumping everything it's got. So when it collapses, it's just dumping everything it's got. But by the time it starts to get rid of that especially way up there, 50,000, 60,000 feet, all that moisture, it just doesn't rain as hard. But an individual storm cell, if you're not directly underneath it, you're just not going to get as much. Also, on that we call what we often refer to as training, and if you think of a train, car, car, car, car, car, sometimes storms will follow their own path or the same path, and that can obviously lead to substantial differences in a relatively short distance as well.

Speaker 2:

You were talking a little bit ago, matt, about changing climate, and one of the things we hear a lot about is changing climate. People will think about average rainfall or average temperatures, but there's also increasing research that's showing increased severity of weather events. How does that happen? How does a generally warmer climate influence more severe thunderstorms, for example?

Speaker 3:

Climate change, global warming, however you want to define it, has become political to the point where it's hard to discuss. But just focus basic on the research, the data. There's a couple of things. I'll start off with the good, because not a lot of people focus on the good when it comes to climate change. Locally it extends our growing seasons. We have a little bit earlier of a spring, a little bit later of a fall, when the weather is not real cooperative. The farmers can really capitalize on that and it can really help with their crops. Negative, there are a lot of them. Right, especially from a global perspective. But locally, a warming climate, even if it's just a degree or two, means that the atmosphere can physically hold on to more moisture. Again, warm air holds on to more water. Cold air holds on to less. When you get an overall warmer climate, it can just hold more water. So that means the storms that develop can produce more rainfall. Obviously it creates flooding if it's too much of a good thing. The other thing that's important to mention is climate change. Just global temperature. Average temperature rises means more extremes and that's really the takeaway that I try to teach people. With climate change it doesn't mean that everything's going to light up on fire, but it means that extreme weather is going to be more common.

Speaker 3:

We don't deal with tropical systems here in Indiana, but if you watch the news you know that a lot of the hurricanes that develop are now major hurricanes. It seems like a rarity that a tropical storm or Category 1 hits Florida or the Gulf Coast. It seems to be a three or four often, and if you look at the Gulf of Mexico temperatures they're at all-time highs. So if any storm gets in there it just explodes with all of that rising motion. Like we talked about Same physics as Lake Michigan. It just is a lot more rising motion because it's bathwater down there.

Speaker 2:

No, that's helpful, and we hear from a lot of our agricultural partners at the Lilly Center too, that with those more intense rainfall events it's more challenging as a producer. It's harder to hold on to those nutrients that were placed there, maybe with some fertilizer, or even their topsoil on the top layer of the soil profile there in their fields, because those more extreme events tend to wash more things off, and of course then from an aquatic perspective, we don't want to see those things get into our lakes and streams, and so those more extreme events can make it more difficult for those systems too.

Speaker 1:

You know, one of the things that you both have in common are early alert systems. So when there is a toxic algae bloom in the lakes, the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams can send out a notice to its followers. Just stay out of the water, keep Doppler out of the water. If there's a toxic bloom, keep your pets out. And, matt, you have a great system for alerting us when there's a severe weather coming our way, and I just want to say thank you very much. I do appreciate getting those alerts, even at two in the morning when there's severe weather coming our way. So it is amazing how lakes have layers, atmosphere has layers. You both have early warning systems. Thank you very much for one being here today and sharing this information with us, and thanks for the good work you do. We are, as a community, so community, so proud of Matt Rudkin, our weather guy.

Speaker 2:

Oh, thank you.

Speaker 1:

And we're proud of you too, nate, our lake guy. So thank you very much for being here today. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Lake Doctor podcast. Please like, share and subscribe. Make sure to join us next time. It's bound to be fun.

Speaker 2:

Listening to this podcast is the first step to making your lake cleaner and healthier. Visit lakesgraceedu for more information about our applied research and discover some tangible ways that you can make a difference on your lake.

Speaker 1:

We'll see you next time. The doctor is in.