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Inside the World of Forensic Meteorology · Atmosphere with Emily Gracey

• Emily Gracey: All I see is unfortunately you know pieces going in different directions. Then I called up NASA and said I was meteorologist and I I think I just saw the the space shuttle explode bec and and there was silence on the other fen end of the phone. I said, Do you copy that? Yes. On February first, two thousand and three, meteorologist Rob Perillo stepped outside his Louisiana home to watch the space shuttle Columbia pass overhead. Instead, he became an eyewitness. And John Bernier says, hey, check out the Shreeport. So I forwarded that to Columbia and you could see where it was going in the different scan layers. So kind of a tool designed to track rain and storms was suddenly helping tell the story of a national tragedy. And while Rob wasn't officially investigating Colombia, the instinct behind what he did that morning is something. He spent decades doing looking at the evidence left behind in the atmosphere and figuring out what happened. I call it CSI meteorology because you're given a case, you never know what the answer is going to be. Today on Atmosphere, we're investigating the world of forensic meteorology. How can radar, satellite data, and sometimes a little geometry reconstruct the weather at one exact place and moment? What happens when a meteorologist takes a witness stand? And what can the weather reveal about everything from a deadly lightning strike to a ship caught in a hurricane to a slip and fall in a grocery store parking lot? Meteorologist Emily Gracie, and this is Atmosphere, a podcast where science becomes conversation. Each week I sit down with the experts behind the forecasts, the research, and the headlines to explore not just the science, but the human stories behind it. Through natural curiosity, we're making science more understandable, more relatable, and hopefully bringing a little more comfort in how we experience the world around us. If you've spent any time around broadcast meteorology or going to conferences, there's a pretty good chance you know Rob Perillo. Rob has been forecasting weather in Lafayette, Louisiana for nearly four decades. But long before he became a familiar face on television, his career took him through research, nuclear power, offshore and marine forecasting, and even aviation weather. And somewhere along the way, he started doing something most people probably don't even realize is a job. Forensic meteorology. Instead of forecasting what the atmosphere will do, Rob reconstructs what it already did, sometimes years later. He's worked cases involving hurricanes, ship accidents, lightning strikes, extreme heat, flooding, ice insurance claims, and even law enforcement inquiries. I've known Rob for years, and I've heard bits and pieces of this side of his career at conferences. But I never really stopped to ask him what it looks like when the weather becomes evidence. How do you prove what conditions were at one place and one time? How certain can you be? And what happens when you have to defend that science in a courtroom? So today we're digging into Rob's other career, the one that requires equal parts, meteorologist, detective, and science communicator. Here's my conversation with forensic meteorologist Rob Perillo. So when people think forensics, they don't generally think weather. So can you tell me like how forensic meteorology fits into that? And if I think people instantly think like murder, but that's not always the case, right? No, it's it's just digging back and looking back at what kind of weather occurred back in the past. I love it because it's you know, we're in in broadcast television and what we do, we're applied forecasters. I always want to be an applied forecaster, but this uses the different part of the meteorological brain where you're given a date and a time and a location and what was the weather going on at that time. So you have to dig back and look at satellite imagery, radar imagery, local weather observations, maybe some model data, initialized initialization type data. So you can kind of get an idea on wind fields and that sort of thing. so it's very interesting. I call it CSI meteorology because you're you're given a case Whether it's a a defense case or for a plaintiff, you never know what the answer is going to be. And I go in without any you know, blinder with blinders on, not listening to what the attorney wants or or what this case is looking for and dig down to the basics of what happened at a specific date and time. Now I do this work, I just gotta put this out there, do this work, and this is my spare time. This is my hop. But it's so I do it on the weekends. I don't do too much on the weekdays because as you know, in the broadcast industry, a weekday is a 12-hour day, whether it's sunny or not. Well, so it's interesting because I feel like throughout my career, people have asked me to do like this sort of work, but on the sly where it's like they're not actually paying you for it. Like people I've worked with, especially when I worked with Sinclair, because there was a whole true crime unit. So they would often reach out and say, Hey, can you verify like what the winds were at this time on this day or how hot it was? so did it start with that, with people just kind of asking you for favors and then one day you were like, you know what, I should get paid for this. Yeah. Well, you know, any any, you know, we get a lot of queries. I get a lot of queries from the state police or the coroner's office. And and that's pro bono work. I'm doing work for public service, so I'm I'm not charging anything on that. But there are people that also wanna know if they had hail over their house, they have an insurance claim, and they don't have the wherewithal to hire an attorney or whatever. So I'll do I'll do some legwork for them. But if it's gonna take me more than a couple of hours, which most most situations do, then it's like, nah, it sounds like you need an attorney to kind of guide you through this process on on whether it's going to work or not for you in your particular case. But I do plenty of that, just doing the public service that we do in the TV business. And I have no problems doing that. It's just a matter of getting the time, right? Is there I've heard forensic meteorologists before say that like getting your certified consulting meteorologist from AMS, from the American Meteorological Society is helpful, but it sounds like you're not like short of business. So how do people find you? Do you need that certification to do this? Well you need some sort of certification. Really does help. I've been sitting on an AMS TV seal of approval from 1992. and the hardest thing about this well one you got to know your meteorology and you gotta you know if you're producing reports you gotta know your meteorology inside and out unfortunately I had a pretty Active career and started doing this before I even got into the television business. And once you're accepted in state or federal court, it's smooth sailing. ideally in this day and age, you want your certain your CBM, your CDM, certified broadcast meteorology will help. certified digital meteorology hurt helps a little bit more. And most should have a CCM, certified consulting meteorologist, a seal of approval, because that's gives you the bona fides of being able to testify in court. But I I've been doing it so long, I've been doing it for 40 years. I've been accepted in court. And once once you're get out there, I don't do any advertising. I get repeated calls. I get calls from people that have deposed me and try to make me look bad. And then the next thing I know, a year later they're hiring me to do some work for them. So It's it's just word of mouth type of business. And I can't take all the business that I get. I kind of shovel them up to to some of my colleagues when I'm overwhelmed and I don't like to do this type of work, especially during hurricanes. Mm-hmm. Do you ever like give them to younger people trying to get into the field? Because it seems like it would be kind of a hard field to break into unless you get like a first case. Well, usually no, it's it's usually my older contemporaries because they're more experienced. I think when I retire, I will certainly like to do a an AMS extended talk or maybe a workshop on how to go about doing this and what's the process. I'm very thorough in my reports. I see other meteorologists' reports that that's all they do is forensic meteorology, and my reports are much more thorough. and also it's harder to depose. I don't like to leave my house and go to a courtroom or to a law office and get deposed on the report. I like to leave no questions in my report. And I still get deposed and occasionally go to trial, but 95% of the times they're just trying to discredit me as a expert witness. and that does it takes about an hour, hour of my time and I don't care because I'm on the clock anyway. So whatever you want to ask, go ahead and and I'm ready to defend the work that I've done. Okay. You're throwing out some law terms here that maybe not everybody understands, including me. So, Depose, can you explain kind of the process of what happens when you get a case or when somebody first approaches you about a case? Yeah. Well, I get a case first off, before I even take a case, I kind of do a quick maybe half hour look-see. It's like, well, let me see what's going on that day. whether there is a case or not. I don't want to waste an attorney's money or time if there's not a case and charge them, you know, a retainer and there's nothing going on. So I'll do a little homework just to see if there was something going on at this time, if it's a slip and fall, if it's a severe weather case, the hurricane case are usually pretty obvious. but I will go ahead and start digging down and looking at satellite imagery, maybe pr producing some site-specific radar. It depends on the case and what they're looking for. And sometimes it's a temperature forecast and those are quick and dirty. Okay, what was the temperature in Lafayette? Okay, then I can figure out a temperature that's 20 miles away from laff yet, that type of thing. so it's it's about doing your homework and knowing how to acquire the data, and then how to acquire the data that is easy for a judge to understand, a jury to understand, and then writing a lead-type report that is not too difficult for the the judge to decipher or the court to decipher. So there's a lot that goes in, there's a lot of nuance that goes into writing a report and how it's presented. So where do you find the data? Are you paying at all for data or are you utilizing the free sites out there? Well, in the olden days, we would have to order from the National Climatic Data Center and get that data certified, right? that's not necessarily a requirement anymore because we have the internet now. Since when I we didn't have the internet when I first started doing this. That's the crazy thing, right? So there is a treasure trove of data out there. Sometimes you gotta work a little harder to find what you need. If there's lightning involved, it's hard to get older lightning data and then geolocate it with perhaps where there's been an accident or whatever you're investigating. but the National Weather Service is a great source. I use Iowa State for pulling all the national weather text forecasts, area forecast discussions if they issued. Any special weather statements, severe thunderstorm warnings. And then I'll go over to the storm prediction set. It depends on the case, storm prediction center. get the what the outlooks were on that day. Were there any severe thunderstorm watches or warnings issued? And it comes down 99% of every case comes down to foreseeability. Was this a foreseeable deal where the ship captain offshore should have headed away from the storm or people inland should have prepared for a severe weather event. Okay. So what's the hardest type of weather to do a case on, to like dig up data on? Yeah, it's it's mostly offshore, because one, you're you're digging for buoys and there's thousand buoys in the Gulf or observation sites in the Gulf that were associated with platforms that are no longer there and you gotta kind of find weather data for any insight to actual data. So It doing an offshore case, you have to find the buoy data, then create a wind field, then estimate your wind and sea height, your weather, whether you're in Doppler range, which sometimes you're not if they're way, way offshore. You're using satellite imagery. and then sometimes you get some attorney applied information. You know, if there's an accident, somebody gets injured offshore. And most of my offshore cases are somebody that may be Getting off a boat and getting onto a platform or the other way around. And sometimes the water it's too rough and they're using a crane from the platform to pick them up off the boat and then bring him over to the platform. And nine times out of ten, the the seas are a little rough or whatever. Or instead of a helicopter, they may be taking a crew boat out to a platform and the weather gets gnarly there and somebody gets injured that way. So it's a it's a every case is a little bit different. And then it gets even harder where the attorney wants wind and waves for a crew boat that's gone from offshore the Texas coast to the Louisiana coast and then way out in deep water area. So you're doing a Lagrangian forecast. You're following the boat through and you gotta do wind waves hour by hour. And those things become quite laborious and take thirty or forty hours to figure out sometimes. So And write a report. So they they they can be quite cumbersome. I was gonna say, are you do you consider yourself like a detail-oriented person, like somebody who is very into like all those little tiny minute details? Cause it seems like this would be tough to do. Yeah. In this business, you have to be because I'm I'm I may be going up against another expert meteorologist that knows more or more than me sometimes, but I'm making sure I do I do my due diligence. And then also writing the report and the the structure of your sentence. you're not saying this could have happened or this may have happened. It's not even more likely than not. You have to make your statements, which I try to do with a 95% confidence level in what my statements are. And it can't be challenged. Or if it's challenged, we're just arguing, just minute arguments with maybe the other side. Have you ever run into a friend in court, like seen another meteorologist that you know? Yes, multiple times. what's that like? You know, I've had a a buddy in town, he's passed on, and he would show up on a lot of the other side of the cases. And I had a little bit of a better background. So my reports were always more thorough and and and there are a few times my report was far superior and And didn't make the other guy look good. And and I've caught errors on other meteorologists outside of town that I kind of know, whatever. And you gotta point it out in the in in the report that this report by such and such is incorrect. they missed this particular warning. That was not or whatever it might be. But in all my travels, every conversation I've had with anybody that I've been up against, we've always kept it professionally. We've never talked about it. You don't talk about it. It's it's it's a different realm and and you do have to keep information to yourself. You don't want to tell them how the case turned out or what we were looking at or that sort of thing. Have you ever done a plane crash? I've never done any kind of a real aviation work that I could think of. I've done a ton of visibility cases that involve visibility where there's been car accidents, train trains hitting a car, that type of thing. What about like violent crimes. I can't tell you if they've been violent or not, because I get a couple of I'll get queries from the coroner's office or the state police on what the temperatures were over the last forty eight hours because they're trying to decide on what was the time of death of some person. I don't know if it was related to a crime or it was related to a natural death or or or was any criminality involved. So but I don't know the details of that. They just want to know the weather. I'll give them the weather and kind of give them a ballpark, kind of verbal type. Well, was this at the airport over there? You can argue for maybe a little bit colder or wind chill or whatever. So that's the only real involvement with law enforcement. but I have been involved with fatalities though in weather events. Like what kind? Well, the first one that comes to mind was a a lightning event. at a park. there was a family picnicking out and it was the middle of July and they were under a covered area. So if the weather got bad you'd be shielded from the rain. the family was sitting on a metal table and dad was sitting on the bench with his feet on the ground. Lightning hit the overhead and apparently the I don't know if the unit was grounded or not, but The man was killed right in front of his family because he grounded the lightning strike. And I got to work with guy I can't remember his name. He was the foremost lightning expert in the world at the time. And he came in for the trial as well. I did the weather, he did the properties of lightning and and how much amperage and electricity went through the man or whatever. So that was one of the first cases that I worked on that involved a fatality. And then there's some cases that you would never imagine. you'd be involved with where fire ants killed somebody that was allergic to ant bites on a second floor in a hotel room. And I had to attest to the rainfall patterns leading up to this as the fire ants were on the move, they made it to the second floor of this hotel room and they bit this couple and the they were elderly. And one person died from the ant bites, so they were suing the hotel for not taking care of, I guess, pest control or whatever. But you know, and it was a wet forecast, so they certainly were probably on the move. They had an entomologist in there to talk about how the ants would move in this type of weather scenario. there were it was a little bit of an interesting case and something you'd never think you'd be attesting to in a trial about fire ants killing somebody. Had another case where somebody was out on the basin bridge in the middle of summer and stopped for traffic or whatever. And I I don't I can't discuss the details, but the person who was mad had to stand outside for a period of time and the heat index was like 120 because you're out over the Chaffalaya swamp where you have 95 degree temperatures and the water temperature of the swamp is about 90. So the heat index is off the charts. so they they passed away on the bridge and I had to attest to the heat index, that sort of thing. It's interesting because in your job as a broadcast meteorologist, you really have to take into account like people and you almost have to use your humanity, you know, to forecast weather. But it seems like it's the opposite here. Like you have to remove your humanity and just go straight science. Yeah, you're going straight into it and you you wanna you wanna be able to tell the truth. And my greatest fear is like There's another meteorologist on the other side that catches something that I missed. so that's why I'm very, very detail oriented. And you have to go in with blinders because there are times where I've been in a jury where I've been for the plaintiff and I'm helping them win a case. And then I've been at a time where I might be representing an insurance company or a corporation that is trying to pay out less in a particular trial, and the family's in the in the courtroom, but I'm just trying to attest to the weather. as truthfully and as honestly as I can and trying to separate that humanity factor and and just give this is what the weather was. I'll let you guys decide on foreseeability and who's liable, but this is what the weather was. And I I'm not making that decision. So I feel better about that. But it you know I've had some piercing eyes on me in the courtroom in the in the past. I bet. Has it ever been like a safety concern for you or your family? No, not not at all. Not at all. Has the research you've done for a case ever like thrown that case out for whoever hired you, like kind of just completely flipped what they thought was gonna happen over? There's been a case where I had a few winters ago where geometry played into it where it was a slip and fall outside of a local grocery store here. we had sleet and we had some cold temperatures. We had a couple of nights, it was in the teens. And then we had sleet and it was on the ground for a day. And two days later, somebody suing for ice. They slipped on the ice in front of the store. And it's like, well, wait a minute. We were in the 40s one day and we were in the 40s the next day. And they slipped on ice. That ice should have melted, but the ground temperatures were cold. And physically I went out to the building as like, and you could see it on Google. they walked out on the north side face of the building. There was an app on the phone. I could do a geometry calculation. It's like the sun never hit. That particular part of the parking lot where there was water and ice. And sure enough, more likely than not, and I was fairly certain that there was probably patchy ice still there. And it came from personal experience because I'd had ice on the side of my house for three days. And it's like, yeah, I remember that event as an eyewitness. So I could confidently say there was still ice there. And never went to trial. They never asked for a report. The attorney says, better to know before we start mediating this case. on what was going on. So you do some legwork and they pay you for that legwork, but you don't have to write a report. And those are the best cases where you do four or five hours of legwork and don't have to sit down and tap out a report that takes eight or ten hours. Is it harder to forecast the future or look at the past? I I would say they're about equal. post National Weather Service cuts without the upper air data and the models not being reliable as they have been, the certainty in the forecast has certainly gone down, and my certainty in weather recreations and forensic work is usually, you know, pretty high standard across the board. Sometimes though, you don't have the data and you're you're trying to do the best you can. You have to work off of radar, or you don't have any observational data out in the Gulf and and you're you're giving the best possible offshore reports. So it it it it's it's close to a tie right now. I think I'm more certain in my reports than I certainly am in my forecasts overall. Yeah. You said 95%. I thought that was pretty high. okay so when you talk about data and Has it are we like at the peak best available data right now or is it kind of I know some government sites have been shut down in recent years. Has it gotten a little worse in recent years or is it still great? Yeah, it's a little far harder to find the data, but it it's it's there's there's a treasure trove out there and the data is coming from sources that are that are, you know, they're governmental sources. so it's it's easier overall to get the data. Going back to the olden days before the internet, you were at the mercy of of ordering data from the National Climatic Data Center, and you had to wait on observations and you had to pay a fair a lot of that data cost, you know, you'd be out a couple of thousand dollars before you knew it, just getting the data that you needed for a particular case. So in that sense, the data costs have gone down because the information's freely available, but sometimes you're working with shape files, KMZ files. You have to do processing of the data. You have to have the right programs to process the data. And I'm no techie by any stretch of the imagination, but you you figure out ways to get the data that you need that is pertinent to the case. Is AI incorporated into this at all recently? Like is it useful at all to go to like Chat GPT and be like, what was the high on this day? And please source the information from a government site? Yeah, you can do that, but it is not accepted in court, right? they they do checks on your reports on whether it's been AI written, number one. but AI has been a great tool for I'll be I mean, I might have a complicated case and I'm writing notes as I go by the data, whether it's the area of forecast discussion, the forecast, the warnings, the advisories, what was the storm prediction center. And I'm writing all these notes down and I'll tell AI, hey, can you just give me a chronological order of of all the notes that I have, which that that does save a lot of time. And I recently had a case where I was doing that didn't come to light, but I was doing the research for it, where it was a rainfall frequency and using the rainfall frequency atlas, and determining what the hourly, three hourly, six hourly rainfall rates were in a particular subdivision. was this a five year rainfall, 10 year rainfall? And I did all my work and and I just well I for kicks and giggles, you know, I figured it was some it was it was it was a six hour rainfall rate that fell within the fifteen to twenty year return period or and and I threw it I threw Chat GPT the the data, the table, and this is what I'm finding. And ChatGPT says, well yeah, that that looks like about a once in a 17 year rainfall event. And more succinctly, if you're writing it for a legal paper, that's a six percent annual chance of exceeding. So That's a you know, okay, good. That gave me some good notes, and that's exactly what I needed to provide this attorney who was trying to challenge the city, a particular city on whether the subdivision built the subdivision to specs. And then I did use Chat GPT to find out, okay, what's the ordinances in this particular county? on rainfall retention and how and most subdivisions they just have to be able to handle five years worth of rainfall than anything over a five year rainfall well it's you you're a lot interesting that some of the stuff that you do on a daily basis kind of intertwines what you do on a forensic basis. Yeah, yeah. Has it made you a better broadcast meteorologist? absolutely because I I'm I'm keeping my feet wet in the Gulf the Gulf all the time. always monitoring that. And when I'm on air and there are memorable events, I'll save the data for a lot of times it's for doing, you know, a a a talk at the local rotary and that sort of thing where everybody wants to know about the last event. And the biggest last event we had was nobody wants to talk about hurricanes anymore. They want to talk about the blizzard of twenty twenty five. So, you know, you log all that data, and there are some cases that came out of that. none that I took, but there are cases. that do come back up in the past. So I sometimes I'm looking back at my Facebook timeline. What was I saying at the time? What was going on? And that gives me a little bit more of a heads up on on which way this case might go. And that has happened with a couple of hurricanes especially. Yeah, I've definitely dug through old Facebook posts looking for stuff too. That's it's a great record. any cases really stand out to you like memorable cases that you'll never forget. Well, yeah, there was there was one. And actually I was out out of town and at the Tropical Weather Conference when this occurred. There was an offshore incident where there was it was in April. It was a squall line that moved on through and it produced a wake low event where all of a sudden the winds came out of an easterly direction, northeasterly direction. And the sustained winds were 65 to 70, gus 85. For about 30, 45 minutes. It was an incredible event and a wake low event. And wake lows are complicated. You know, it's an elevated, low pressure system. There's an exhaust jet coming out of it, and trying to visualize it was a whole nother ball of wax, and it was very difficult to show it. but I had several cases related to that wake low event. So I already had. The data, the National Weather Service data, all the reports that were done. There were also Coast Guard did several reports and had to report on this Wake Low event because there were one barge, there were eight fatalities in the area, and there were other boats in the region. You know, they were expecting severe thunderstorms and wind gusta 40, 50, 60 knots, but it was going to be a short-lived event. And this turned into a tropical storm event and produced winds and waves that. probably have not been seen in in the specific areas near the coast that were hurricane intensity. And how can you foresee that? So it came down to foreseeable whether this was a foreseeable event, which it was not, but that was a memorable one. we had a Hurricane Ida case where there was a a very large vessel with a still a very large number of people on board that didn't get out of the way in time for the storm. that that people were the people on board were the the ship was listing 45 degrees for hours and they were standing on the wall, standing on the floor, standing on the wall, standing on the floor, standing on the wall for hours at a time. Nobody was hurt seriously, but there were a couple of broken bones here and there, but they had to ride out Ida. the ship got tossed 30 miles away from the actual location where it started and I and and it came down to the captain of the boat claimed that there were there were a couple of eighty foot waves that impacted the the the vessel. And in doing my Raleigh calculations, yeah, the the significant wave height was somewhere in the forty-five foot r range level, your highest your your what they call V max V max or H max would be close to 80 to 90 feet. And people don't realize that each and every hurricane that's cat three, four, or five, is likely producing 80 to 90 foot peak wave heights, road wave heights, and they had a couple of them while they were riding out the storm. So you can imagine what it's like to be out there and having and they were right in the eyewall the front eyewall and there was a mezzo in the front of the eyewall and then they got hit by the back end of the eye wall that had a mezzo in it as well. So they had the full force of whatever the sustained winds and the wind gusts, that ship took it on. It was a pretty big ship. It had a lot of equipment that went up high on the ship. So very interesting case that way. But you have to do the forecast, the foreseeability, whether or not they were in the cone. I can't talk any more details about that or how the case fleshed out. but it it was a very, very laborious case. It's wild hearing you talk about all this stuff because I see you at all these conferences and and now I'm curious, like, well, why are you going? It feels like you know more than everybody talking at the conferences. no, no. Well, I mean, I know what I know because I've been doing it for a long time, but there's always room for I I mean, I love going to the conferences just because it's using another part of my brain as like I'm getting to learn something new, whether it's about lightning, whether it's about climate. And you have to stay up on it because there's so much information out there and you want to hear from the experts. And then you go to the con and I like going to the conferences not so much for just only the presentations. I want to see that person at happy hour and ask them more questions that you may not get a chance to ask because the the sessions are 15 or 30 minutes long in their in their discussions. And you know, us TV guys, we always got questions and there's always a line at the mic for asking questions, but there are questions that I'm not too sure if I want to ask this in public or not. So let me get to you on the side and ask you about this or this or is there any site? And you become better ingrained with your colleagues across the multidisciplines that we have in meteorology. That's because we have forensic, we have forecasting, we have research. And for me, it it feeds the other side of my brain and it feeds the soul and it keeps me engaged. I love Something interesting I learned about you because I I've known you for many years, but when I googled you, I found out about this little Bruce Almighty moment you had back during the space shuttle Columbia. And so I was wondering if you could share that experience and then if you got into the forensics of that at all after it happened. Leading up to that time, there were a few times where the shuttle would come in right over Louisiana. I did the night before Columbia was coming in on that particular flight. It was gonna be coming in basically due west northwest. And I went out, I set up my camera. My daughter, who was probably seven or eight at the time, I'm just getting my telephoto lens on the video camera, and all I see is unfortunately you know, pieces going in different directions. And at the time I had a I had a line, I had the media line over from NASA because I would call asking about landing ground track tracks. And I called up NASA and the media line and said, I was meteorologist. I just and I I think I just saw the the space shuttle explode because and and there was silence on the other fen end of the phone. I said, Do you copy that? Yes. And then afterwards I could see you know, I watched some of the the the Columbia tragedy specials and I could see the guy who had the phone and him putting the phone down. And it was for for me as a broadcaster, it was something that made a lot of my career because after that, not only I got calls from CBS and CNN, I had Miles O'Brien on one phone, Dan Rather on the other phone, and I'm doing phoners, and John Bernier out of Richmond, Virginia, colleague at the AMS for many, many years. He got through to me and says, Hey, check out the Shreeport Doppler radar. You can see the debris on the radar. So I forwarded that to CBS News. I forwarded that to Miles O'Brien. And then we were discussing it. I was going back and forth, talking about yeah, this is the debris trail of of Columbia. And you could see where it was going in the different scan layers. So kind of enterprise the story where I didn't mean to become part of the story, but I was not only an eyewitness, but then I we tracked the plume as it reached the ground. And I had a devil of a time explaining to Mr. Rather that no, this is not satellite, this is radar, and then had to explain the basics of radar and and whatever. but it was a it was a day that I'll never forget. It was a very sad day because I got calls from all the local Orlando stations and the Houston stations, where they have family that were on board that particular ship. So it was it was a very A very trying moment, but a witness being a witness to history and that video made it to the National Geographic Channel on a bunch of different Discovery Channel type specials. and then the next Monday I was I was with Julie Chen on the CBS Morning News out in East Texas, where they had me come in and report what I saw, that type of thing. So I got I was on national news as well. didn't, you know, just being an weather n and science nerd, you find yourself sometimes in the middle of the biggest stories. And, you know, I thought I'd make my career on hurricanes, which I have, but moments where you're you're not expecting it and then you're thrown into it, and then you're just you got blinders on and I'm I'm doing as much as I can to get disseminate the information, what I saw, what I videotaped and what they're seeing and how how that went down. Yeah, you were like an expert witness of a different kind, really. But it does feel very forensic like. And it it makes me think about like just our field and how multidisciplinary it really is. And how even just having that thought to like look at the radar and to use all of these curiosity skills that you have to apply them to this event that many people might not connect with weather at all. I'm sure they tracked they use that the reflectivity data out of Fort Pokeen. And Shreeport and Lake Charles to track that debris trail because they found debris well into central Louisiana on that particular circle from eastern Texas all the way through central Louisiana. Has doing this career changed you as a person? Has it has it changed how you think about weather? Has it changed how you live your life at all? yeah. the forensics it to me is is really fun. I love doing it. I just hate the time that it takes and it takes my weekends. It takes I take vacation time sometimes just to do this, because it it it pays better than TV, honestly. but I love digging down and just playing detective and then love being able to present the data in a way that none of my contemporaries do. so And my TD background has trained me to, hey, let's make some eye-popping graphics that are easy to understand. Whereas I may be going up against somebody that is citing multiple scientific reports that have differential equations and pictures with differential equations. And it's like the judge and the jury is not even going to get that. And they're they're not gonna even come close to understanding that. So putting things more simplistically and creating graphics that tell the story. That are annotated properly. and and to me it's it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. And it'll be something I do beyond my day-to-day forecasting. at some point I'm gonna retire. I'm not retiring anytime soon. I'm pushing 66. but in retirement, this is something I'd like to do a couple of days out of the week, just for a little extra cheddar on the side and keep me involved. And I think you asked me at the AMS conference, when you retire, are you gonna still go to AMS conferences? And the answer is 100% yes. Absolutely. Because I I think once you're a weather nerd, I knew I was a weather nerd in third grade. It's it's never gonna go. It must be so satisfying to like close that binder and finish a report or send an email off with a PDF. Is do you feel like you've like finished an episode of CSI at that point and you can just put a stamp in it? It is very relieving. It is very relieving. And it can get a little anxiety when you have two or three calls going at the same time. And I I I I give referrals over to my colleagues when I can't take the cases. And this is I'm at the time of the year where usually in in September I don't take any cases in midsummer through at least November, December, because I just don't have the time. We have holidays. Talk to me in January. And and a lot of times the attorneys, if they want you bad enough, they'll push back the dates on when they need an expert report and they'll actually work with you. but I don't take many cases. Most I take probably in any given year less than 10 and it's maybe closer to five or six right now. I I just don't have the time. And especially in this day and age where in broadcast more and more and more and more is being asked of you. I have less and less free time because that free time is working on the day job. Well Rob, thank you for your time today. Thank you for not billing me for this hour. I appreciate it. No, it's a free VN and yeah I wanna I wanna help other meteorologists Do this type of work because it is meaningful work and it is, it's, and as you can tell, I enjoy doing it. So my advice to anybody that's doing this or getting into it, make sure you do your homework. Make sure you're the master of your information because you don't want to see Rob Perillo on the other side of the case because you're gonna have to do your homework. Thank you to Rob Parello for joining me on this episode of Atmosphere to talk about forensic meteorology. If today's episode sparked any questions, or if you just want to talk weather, you can connect with me on Facebook. I'm Meteorologist Emily Gracie, or follow along on Instagram at AtmospherePodcast. For those who like to go beyond the audio, I'm also publishing deeper dives, episode recaps, and extra content every week over on Substack. If that sounds like your sort of thing, I'd love for you to subscribe and join my community there. If you enjoyed this conversation, take a second to follow Atmosphere on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. It ensures that you won't miss the next episode. You can also leave a rating or review. That'll help the show a whole lot. Atmosphere is a production of Mike Burst. It's produced, edited, and hosted by me, Emily Gracie. And if you're looking for a quick roundup of the week's biggest weather talkers, check out Weekly Weather Brief. It's a 10-minute video podcast where I'm joined by fellow meteorologist Karen Jerriman. We give you a rapid fire rundown of what you may have missed for the week. It comes out every Friday morning, so subscribe to Weekly Weather Brief on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcast. I'm Meteorologist Emily Gracie. Thanks for taking the time to slow down, stay curious, and explore the atmosphere.