Meteorology and atmospheric science at Penn State.

This is weather world.

Well, the tables have turned here on Weather World.

I am sitting here with our very own John.

Nice.

He's usually the one who does the interviewing.

But tonight I have the pleasure of interviewing him because he has come out with a book that we are going to talk about tonight.

It's called The Weather God's Curse The Gettysburg Campaign.

And he co-wrote this with Geoffrey Harding.

Welcome, John.

Thank you, Marissa, and congratulations.

Thank you very much.

Uh, so Geoffrey Harding is a historian.

He knows a lot about the Gettysburg Campaign.

He is a tour guide in Gettysburg.

How did you get involved with him?

Yeah.

Jeff is a licensed Gettysburg Battlefield tour guide, and it was more or less a random call.

He knew I had some interest in the link between weather and history.

I had done some actually, here on Weather World about the Battle of Gettysburg and the weather, and he saw that.

And he had a very simple question.

He said that visitors always ask him what it really felt like, and no one had been able to combine humidity with the heat.

I mean, there was an observatory in Gettysburg, a professor at, uh, Pennsylvania College who had a number 87 degrees on the third day of the battle, but no idea about how humidity played a role.

And he wanted to know if I could help.

And so this book doesn't just follow the battle.

It follows the whole campaign.

So tell us a little bit about what do you mean by campaign?

Right.

The project started just focusing on the battle, but then we published a paper about the battle itself and decided to write a book, the term Gettysburg Campaign to Historians generally refers to.

It's a six week period.

It starts on June 3rd, 1863, when the armies were clustered around Fredericksburg, Virginia, which is about 50 miles south southwest of Washington, D.C.

and then the armies moved north.

The battle occurred July 1st through three, and then Lee retreated, and generally speaking, the end of the campaign is July 14th, 1863, because on that date he was able to get his armies back across the Potomac River out of Maryland into the safety of Virginia.

Okay, so we know that Jeff is the historian involved in this, but what were your contributions and specifically new contributions toward this story?

Yeah.

Well, the the first order of business was to try to figure out how we could get an estimate of the humidity in Gettysburg, you know, the dew point, so to speak, because the observer in Gettysburg, Professor Michael Jacobs, did not observe dew point.

So we had to figure out I had to figure out what to do.

And it turns out that up the road in Harrisburg, which is only, of course, about 35 miles from Gettysburg, there were two observers who did observe not dew point in that day.

They observed something called the wet bulb temperature.

But you if you know the wet bulb temperature, you can get the dew point.

And so once we knew what the dew point was in Harrisburg, I was able to establish that the air mass that enveloped Gettysburg during the battle was pretty much the same air mass that enveloped Harrisburg.

And they're they're close.

They're at about the same elevation.

So basically all we did was extrapolate the dew points from Harrisburg to Gettysburg and make the reasonable assumption that it was almost as if, in terms of what it felt like, it felt like the battle was being fought in Harrisburg, but it was being fought in Gettysburg.

Now you don't just use data from Harrisburg, you use data from all over the area.

So how hard was it to find this data?

Yeah, the data is not that hard to find if you know where to look.

It's all in a NOAA data set NOAA database.

So we also used a lot of data from the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

And the unique thing about that data was it was available every three hours.

You also talk a lot in the book about NOAA reanalysis, being able to figure out what the weather patterns were during this time period.

Talk about that, right?

Sure.

The NOAA has come up with a it's essentially a computer model which instead of forecasting forward, which is what we like to do on weather world, it forecasts backward, it rebuilds or reanalyzes and provides sort of the best case.

This is this is our best estimate of what the weather maps looked like.

And it goes back to 1836.

And you can generate weather maps three dimensionally every three hours back to 1836.

And this was the first time that I'm aware of that this resource was brought to bear.

Uh, not just on, on, on the Gettysburg Campaign, but on the Civil War.

At the end of this, you talk about what you learned.

There were three main conclusions.

Without giving away everything, what do you do?

Take away from it?

Well, the big takeaways for me were it was well known that as the armies were coming north, there was a heat wave during the middle of June, but it was not known really.

How hot was it?

What did it feel like?

We quantified that and it was it was an historic heat wave for that part of the country.

When you look at it in in the context of, say, modern day heat waves.

Secondly, um, the second day of the battle, July 2nd, all that was really known was that the observer in Gettysburg said it was 81 degrees.

We took it a step further.

We computed heat indices, dew points.

It felt a lot worse than that, 81 suggested.

And finally, Robert E Lee had trouble getting back across the Potomac.

During the retreat, we tried to quantify how bad the flooding was on the Potomac that kept him in Williamsport, Maryland until July 14th.

Okay, well, this book is available now.

Where can people find the weather gods curse the Gettysburg Campaign?

Actually, it's available on Amazon.

It's available at the publisher, Arcadia Publishing.

It's available at the Penn State bookstore.

All right.

Well, John, nice.

You wrote this with Geoffrey Harding.

Thank you so much.

Pleasure to have you.

Thanks for having me.

And we'll be back in a moment with more.

We are officially in a rain delay.

A thunderstorm during a baseball game would dampen the mood of most summer camps.

But this is not just any camp.

Although it got canceled, I think the storm moving in was way more fun than the actual game.

For 25 years, Penn State has been uniting kids with an admiration for the atmosphere and an excitement for the extremes at weather camps.

Paul Knight and I were talking about starting a get together for kids interested in weather, since neither one of us had experienced that when we were growing up until college.

Since beginning in 2001, kids have traveled near and far for the weather camp experience.

All told, there have been roughly 1400 campers from 40 states, Puerto Rico and several countries, including the Bahamas.

Most people don't really care about the weather that much, at least in North Carolina, so it's good to meet people that have the same interests.

I've been into weather since I did live in Edmond, Oklahoma for almost all my life and I moved to Texas five years ago, and from then I started getting to weather, started forecasting.

I admire those kids.

I don't think I could have done that kind of travel and being away from home.

Um, as as they are doing.

The camps began with a couple dozen students each year, but in 2010, organizers expanded the capacity to 74, offering two different versions every summer.

The four day weather camp is more basic and geared towards younger students grades eight through ten.

Meanwhile, the five day Advanced Weather Camp is for students grades 11 and 12 who are nearing or in the college hunt.

I specifically took this camp to kind of get a better idea exactly what I want to do, and I was so thankful that now I'm confident about what I'm going to, like, major in, and then possibly have a career in 1 in 5 weather campers go on to later enroll in Penn State's Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science.

Like our very own Karl Schneider, he attended weather camp in 2014, enrolled as an undergrad just a few years later, stayed for grad school, and is now teaching faculty.

Just one example of the many weather campers who go on to find success in all areas of the weather and climate enterprise.

It's gratifying.

I mean, I can't take credit because they could have gone on to be successful without any weather camp.

But but it's fun to see just knowing how, how they were and how they've matured and still have a passion for meteorology.

I think that's great.

While the specifics on the regular and advanced weather camp itineraries may vary a bit, the collaborative learning experiences are the same.

One of the most popular activities is the Daily Forecast contest.

I think my favorite part is doing the forecast in the morning.

Um, I just like looking at all the data and stuff and predicting what I thought was going to be, uh, going to happen throughout the week.

I had previously just looked at 1 or 2 models, and I didn't know what wind shear was.

I didn't know what storm boundaries were.

There were a bunch of people here who were nice enough to teach me the basics about it, but it just shows me that I have a lot left to learn.

Uh, it doesn't at all sway me away from the idea of being a meteorologist.

In fact, it makes me want to be, like, even more because of the challenges that it brings and the sense of accomplishment when you, like, get a forecast right over the course of a week, campers benefit from interactions with experts in Penn State's renowned faculty and meteorology, geography, geoscience and electrical engineering, covering everything from chasing tornadoes to space, weather and our changing climate, all while living on a college campus.

It was relieving because sometimes I'm like, this is such a crazy thing that I stare at a storm and get all excited.

But not only that, I go research about it.

And then I realize that there's so many people who are exactly like me, but I also get along with them.

And they're not just like people who I don't even know, I guess aren't normal.

Probably being able to explore the campus with a bunch of people that I got to know and be friends with.

The campus is really nice here.

Uh, the walk wasn't too long from where we stayed, and I highly suggest coming here for a taste of weather broadcasting.

The campers not only attend tapings of Weather World here in the band Family Studios, they also get to record their own weather forecasts.

In addition to having access to Penn State's faculty and facilities, the weather camp's benefit from the sheer number of career meteorologists in State College, taking field trips to both National Weather Service and AccuWeather during the week long event.

The tours were really cool.

I really liked the National Weather Service and AccuWeather.

I thought it was really cool to see all the equipment that they use.

Definitely touring AccuWeather, because I got so many great connections and advice about exactly what I want to do.

I liked going to AccuWeather.

That was cool and I liked tracking Hurricane Eric.

No matter the year, the weather camp forecast always calls for fun.

From weather balloon launches to hikes, bowling and baseball games, there are plenty of opportunities to forge connections and create lasting friendships.

Meeting everyone.

Since everyone is super nice, it's super easy to make friends and they all have the same interests.

I came to weather camp.

I mean to meet the people that have the same interests as me.

Yeah, I made a lot of good friends.

As most meteorologists and self-proclaimed weather weenies will tell you, the bug bit them when they were young, and that's where Weather Camp has come in for the past 25 years.

No matter the changing faces, facilities, and forecasting tools, it's still cultivating a passion and fostering friendships.

Just ask Bill Syrett.

He's helped with each and every camp.

Yeah, that passion has stayed the same among the campers, I'd say.

Well, I think attending weather camp for kids interested in meteorology especially gives them an idea of what they're going to need to be proficient in, um, to make their college transition easier.

Whether they go to Penn State or not is irrelevant, but they'll have a picture of what to expect, and also an idea that there are people like them outside, um, that they'll be working with.

And they can they can follow their passion and be successful.

For Weather World.

I'm Rob