“A dubious solution that plays fast and loose with Occam’s razor. The prudent manner abides by the weather glass”
– Mark Malsick, SCDNR
Many in the Carolinas and throughout the world know Mark Malsick by his severe weather email. His email is wildly popular and gets forwarded around offices every time he sends one out.
We discover who he is and his secret to his growing email list. We also discuss some of the tools he uses for his predictions and why sometimes he does not agree with the National Weather Service. Thanks again to Mark Malsick for making severe weather special.
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Transcript
Mark Malsick:
In there, somehow she gets it. I mean, she wouldn’t fess up how she got it, but she’s getting it. Comic relief sells itself because I don’t think [inaudible 00:00:15] has the same weather that we have. Maybe it was by way of using the term Djibouti heat, which is real, but I don’t know. It is kind of humbling to get some of the comments that I do.
Robert Osborne:
Many in the Carolinas and throughout the world know Mark Malsick by one thing, his severe weather email. Yes, his email. His email is wildly popular and gets forwarded around offices every time he sends one out. I do it. So why? Dr. Ladner, Amy, and I asked ourselves the same question but then soon found ourselves really, utterly, and completely sidetracked reading some of his past emails.
Amy Anderson:
“Based on the current track, conservative rainfall amounts range from 10 to 15 inches over the PD to four to six inches over the CSRA. Your mileage may vary.”
David Ladner:
All right. I like this one. “Good morning. The tropics, they sleep. Shh. A mid-Atlantic gaggleplex of cloud, midway between Africa and Brazil in the ITCZ, drifts harmlessly west pummeled by sheer and poor choices.”
Amy Anderson:
Yes! The poor choices. “Post tropical cyclone Leslie is corralled over the Northern Atlantic. Leslie makes looping whifferdills over the open ocean for the next seven to 10 days, menacing Mariners and not much else with hurricane force winds. Curiously, according to NHC, not a hurricane. Discuss.”
Robert Osborne:
Welcome to The Outfall. I’m Robert, and today we talk to the one and only Mark Malsick. We learn a little bit more about him, his growing email list. We also discuss old school science behind some of his predictions and why sometimes he does not agree with the national weather service. Mark works for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources as a severe weather liaison. How did Mark get to be Mark? A small Navy military plane that sits on the corner of his desk offers a clue to Mark’s background.
Mark Malsick:
I went to the University of Connecticut. I got my degree in geology and geophysics and about that time, graduation rolled around, the oil companies weren’t hiring, so the Navy came around and there officer programs had one for geophysics, but really it was oceanography meteorology. And so I joined, went to OCS and they said, “You’re going to have to learn to drive a ship first.” You go through OCS and the follow on, which is surface warfare school and everything’s destroyer, cruiser, frigate, destroyer, cruiser, frigate. And so the Navy goes, “No, you’re going to go to aircraft carrier.”
Mark Malsick:
So life in a big city, little tiny me is on an aircraft carrier for three and a half years to learn how to drive. But the upside was they all have a weather office. So I did a lot of on the job training and just saw what they did and hung out with them and saw how not to breathe, how to breathe. Especially on a carrier. I mean you’re dealing with these fighter pilots and the attack pilots and the captain and the whole deal. They don’t want to hear weather excuses.
Mark Malsick:
They don’t want to hear possibly, maybe, likely showers, stuff like this. What is it going to do? Type deal. So it’s kind of a brutal way to grow up, but it helps you, at least with the science and the fact that you’re away from the United States and the national weather service and you’ve got to figure it out on your own. I mean, you’re in the Southern hemisphere. There’s no other forecast but yours. So you got to come up with it. And so you got to figure out how to do that forecast, how to brief it, how to use what limited data you have to come up with it. There are some tremendous people to teach you with a lot of experience.
Robert Osborne:
Mark first got his taste of mixing humor and weather on an aircraft carrier. He discusses how this helped him and we learned more about how his email list has grown.
Mark Malsick:
And there’s an airplane that covers the next day’s activity and it’s almost an hour by hour list of landing and launching by type of aircraft, by squadron to actual ammunition load out, the whole deal in there. And it comes out just after midnight. And so we’re sitting up on the bridge, we’re driving the ship and this thing comes out. Really there’s not a heck of a lot to do in there. So when the airplane comes out, the people that put the airplane out would always put a far side cartoon and they would change it and it would be apropos to something that was going on with the ship and the cartoon would be changed and then the name would be scratched out and it would be, the captain doesn’t let the navigator drive because the navigator’s a dog and, well anyways, so it was just that something kind of banal and serious.
Mark Malsick:
These guys thought enough to put something in there just to go, “Hey, put a cartoon in there. Make fun of somebody,” kind of deal, which I mean, it caused a big debate because the lawyer stepped in, pardon me, to all of you esteemed people in the legal profession, but they came in with the big stickers, “You can’t put copyright material on the airplane.” Well, obviously, they came back and said, “Well, the airplane is technically confidential so no one else can see it. Neener, neener, neener.” So anyways, it was just kind of this way that you can do something serious and have a little bit of fun with it in there and just make it more interesting and make it more likely someone’s going to pay a little bit more attention to it. So doing this Navy weather stuff for a lot of years and having to be very serious.
Mark Malsick:
I ended up, my last tour, it was a Naval Academy, and I had to put out a daily forecast for all the activities that were going on, the sports and the marching parades and all that stuff. They wanted a daily forecast. So when I got there, the head of the oceanography department said, “This is your forecast now.” I started doing that and I realized, “Look, this is my last tour, what are they going to do? send me to sea?” So I just started putting these little hooks in there and just trying to poke fun and a little bit kind of doing my own little version of the airplane cartoon and something that usually people just go, “Ugh, weather.” Hence coming here to DNR, then the state climatologist, Dr. Marcellus goes, “Well this is your job now, is to do this.” And I’m like, “Okay, guess you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Mark Malsick:
So I figured, “Well I’m just going to slip back to the same mode.” And so that’s kind of the whole evolution of this whole crazy weather alert thing. And it’s grown from a list of about a hundred state agencies and people in the building to about 21,897 or something like that. They have not gotten a negative. We’ve had one negative response to it that probably people are just don’t say anything. Just throw rocks.
Robert Osborne:
What was the negative response?
Mark Malsick:
It was actually someone, I believe it was from the governor’s office, way back when, two or three ago. And I said something about it was going to be a really severe thunderstorm day with high winds. And I said something about, bad day to own a mobile home or something like this. And they said, “Oh, you can say that,” I went “Okay, sorry for being funny.” I was just trying not to say, “high wind warning, blah blah blah.” No, just trying to make a little bit of fun of it.
Mark Malsick:
It’s quite flattering. Every time I put something out a bunch of people will come back and say, “Really like reading it, really like how you put not a comic spin, but just make it a little bit more interesting to read and put a smile on my face, blah, blah blah.” I try to just spin it in and not, make it one big, huge funny ha-ha. But just get to the point of what the weather is. Maybe throw in a couple funny hooks and let it go. I mean, don’t get it too big and all schmaltzed up with a bunch of corny jokes in there.
Mark Malsick:
There is a tendency though, when we start dealing with a real live hurricane threat that people generally found that my humor kind of gets less and less and less in there.
Robert Osborne:
As it gets more and more serious.
Mark Malsick:
It’s more serious and it’s not that it’s more banking on people picking up on that. It’s just the fact that I’m looking at so much stuff, all the different models and the data that’s out there and I know people are starting to get a little bit antsy. I just don’t really have a heck of a lot of room or time to start thinking about that. I need to get the message out as soon as I can. Especially to some of the people that like DPS, they got to put the troops on the street for these things. They need to get the information, I think soon, and they don’t need to be calling me. I need to push it to them.
Robert Osborne:
You know, I was always curious about how Mark does his job. So it was really neat just talking to him about this. Mark discusses the old school science of what he does and explains why you just never follow just one computer model.
Mark Malsick:
Give someone a decent idea of what might be the threat. There’s called a forecast cone and it literally is during a forecast process. You start at the upper levels of the atmosphere and a cone kind of translate into the amount of time that you spend on it. And so as you get down farther and farther and farther, you spend more and more time on that data at that level in there. You find tools that work, you find tools that don’t, you find model runs that you don’t need to spend a heck of a lot of time on and just say, “No, I’m waiting for the zero zero zero and there’s a 12 zero,” type deal.
Mark Malsick:
All sorts of little tricks of the trade and don’t discount some of these old timers. And some of these guys that I work with in the Navy, I mean they were like, “Put 35 knots over there in the Caribbean.” And you’re like, “Wow, there’s nothing out there.” The next data, there’s 35 knots sitting off of the coast of Columbia. How the heck did he know that type deal? So you got all this great science and equations and stuff like this. But sometimes these guys just look at, “Well the winds are like this way from the Caymans and they’re this way over here in Guadalupe, you’re going to get 35 knots over there.” Wow.
Mark Malsick:
That, to me, was some of the more mind blowing things that I was exposed to. So it really is a huge data geek Coliseum. The one thing that I found a lot of people do is they’ll look at one model run on one day and say, “Oh, it’s a storm’s going there.” “Oh dude, no, no, no, no. It’s a day to day process. It’s a run to run process. You’re comparing.” “Oh the European is the best model.” “No, there’s some times it’s wrong.” You have to evaluate all the tools in your toolbox. It’s a stupid metaphor if you ask me, but between the big models, the European, the US GFS, UK Met is nothing one there. Those big global models are your first go to.
Mark Malsick:
And then the new thing that kind of followed on to those were the ensembles and that’s when you’re taking one model, be it the European GFS or UK Met or Canadian and they run it several times, but with little different boundary conditions or different initial conditions in there. You get these in sambal type forecasts. This is 40 ways that the model sees this going with these little changes in there. That’s another thing you need to look at. What’s the mean of, where that sinks. Something else you need to look at.
Mark Malsick:
And then there’s something that you see and you see it in the spaghetti diagrams. They show on TV is they actually will take kind of like a little bit of the European, a little bit of the Canadian and they kind of smoosh them together and they get these kind of consensus models in there and those have actually proven to be some of the better track models out there. That’s another thing that you need to look at, not just a model, but you need the models matching the satellite is to look at, all right, “I can’t see a center of circulation in a storm.” Well that means the models are having a hard time too. That puts a lot of slop in that track. And that’s what you saw with Barry.
Mark Malsick:
I mean they all locked on, “Oh, it’s going to Texas.” No, it ended up coming back into Louisiana. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the models. Sometimes they’re all on top of each other and that’s what you’re kind of striving to see is all the models, be it the consensus or the ensembles or the daily operationals. Are they all coming up on one big narrow line? When you get that, you’re pretty much sure that that’s where it’s going to go and we kind of saw that with Florence in there. They were doing a pretty good job of keeping it bore sighted on Wilmington for as long as it did it. The rainfall amounts were kind of all over the place. That said, other thing where you can really get toasted is the intensity and that’s where the models aren’t that good.
Mark Malsick:
They have a very hard time, and imagine it. What you’re trying to do is model a cloud in the convection within a cloud times how many thousands of kilometers wide from the surface. What did all the different convective physics are going on in the phase changes, the thermodynamic, the kinematic, all that stuff’s involved in a cloud. That’s a pretty varsity math in there and we’re not there with the math and we’re not there with the computing power yet. European’s sort of good, but even the hurricane center, they’ll go say, “We kind of still suck at intensity forecasting.”
Robert Osborne:
Did you say when do you think data will start getting better? Is that a five to 10 year kind of window or?
Mark Malsick:
I don’t think we’ll ever get it right. I mean, it’s just so complicated what’s going on inside, in a full blown hurricane in there. Getting more and more data with all the airplanes that are flying in and out. It helps the models a lot, but still being able to tell exactly what the wind speeds are going to be when it makes landfall is really a crapshoot. It really is. It can get you in the ballpark, but not quite as good as nailing down a track and where that track is going to make landfall.
Robert Osborne:
Before we wrapped up our interview, we talked a little bit more about why his email has become more and more popular.
Mark Malsick:
I mean from the feedback that I get from some of the responses to this stuff, people are just sick of this doom and gloom from all this stuff. I mean, they know enough to get out of the rain. They know enough to put their windshield wipers on when they’re driving the car in the rain. They know hurricanes are bad, but when you look at the track record as far as… I mean it’s become any storm that gets near the coast, we evacuate. We didn’t have to for the last couple of storms at all. Yeah, it was pretty varsity weather there for a while, we moved a lot of sand around and people got a lot of… There was some flooding and cars got stuck in big ponds and whatever.
Mark Malsick:
But it wasn’t like Michael going into Florida when it basically just… The national hurricane center used to be very, very conservative about the message that they put in and they wouldn’t put all this thing terms of deadly storm surge. And it just got to the point where people go, “It’s not that bad.” I mean we’ve lived through this stuff before and I think that’s what’s going to set up people for fall because we get a real live Hugo or something that’s worse than Hugo rolling into the coast, people will go, “We had Florence, it wasn’t that bad.”
Mark Malsick:
And, “We didn’t have to evacuate. that was a nuisance. We don’t need to do that. We’ll just stay at home.” “Okay.” You can only yell fire at a theater so many times before people start to just totally ignoring it. And I think that’s setting them up for a fall. So yeah, a lot of times I will poke fun at kind of what the official word is out there and sorry, I’m going against the national weather service, but I don’t think it’s right. I think you can use the science and make better decisions.
Mark Malsick:
I mean, if you’re continuing having government agencies that have to compete for funding, and if you have media outlets that compete for viewership and advertising dollars or clicks per whatever in it, that’s just a sign of our times now. Someone’s got to be the voice of reason. So, that’s just what I’m trying to do.
David Ladner:
The local NWS folks are insisting on dropping an isolated tornado or two, if only for the drama that is in it. My two cents is, most of the more intense, severe activity will occur over the other Carolina to the North. However, we’ll still have our share of arboreal integrity checks this afternoon. Headlights on wealth striving in the rain, please.
Amy Anderson:
I forgot, the arboreal integrity checks. Yes.
Robert Osborne:
Thanks for joining us today. If you’ve not subscribed to Mark’s email list, the link is included in the show notes, go hit it, click on it, subscribe. One thing which I think is really funny we discovered in working on this episode is that Amy, our own Amy, keeps most of Mark’s emails. Anyway, she shared one of her favorites with us and we read it to Mark and his response is classic.
Amy Anderson:
However, a few model runs continue to hint at this no-name feature heads North over Cuba and The Bahamas to possibly threaten the US East coast late next week. A dubious solution that plays fast and loose with Occam’s razor. The prudent Mariner abides by the weather glass.
Robert Osborne:
Love it.
Mark Malsick:
I have to give props to the structural geology professor I had at Yukon and he was big into Occam’s razor. To which all us undergrads are going, “What the hell is that?” Generally when you start and explain things and there’s all sorts of twists and turns and “How are you going to get from point A to point C?” Generally that ain’t the solution. And then a little bit of it is just showing off. I know what Occam’s razor is, and you probably don’t.
Amy Anderson:
Head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. We appreciate it.
