Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question at jh.edu.

That's Public Health Question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

It's Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

Today, meteorologist Brian McNoldy joins us on the podcast again for a look ahead at the 2025 hurricane season. We also talk about how last year's unprecedented heat played out in an extremely active season and about how climate change is less about individual events and year over year comparisons and more about

the overall picture of how things are evolving over time. Let's listen. Brian McNoley,

welcome back to Public Health on Call. How are you?

Thank you, Lindsay. I'm doing great. So we had you on a year ago. It was July

2024. And at that time, we talked about how your field was really having to evolve because to some degree your work depends on weather patterns and understanding past data. And we're kind of in this era of shattering a lot of these records. And a lot of our conversation boiled down to expect the unpredictable, expect the unexpected.

I think we've really seen that in the last year.

So walk us through how that's played out since we last spoke.

Certainly, yeah.

Going into last hurricane season, we had this unprecedented, two-pronged look at what was coming up.

And one, we had expectations of La Nina to develop, and La Nina generally acts to enhance Atlantic hurricane activity.

And we also had pretty ridiculous ocean temperatures across the tropical Atlantic.

Say record breaking would be an understatement.

So extremely warm water.

So the two of those factors really had never been observed before together.

And so just to fast forward a little bit, the expected La Nina didn't quite come in quite as

forecast.

It was pretty weak.

...