- Bastardi is chief forecasterfor Weatherbell Analytics

Joe, thank you so much for being with us.

You were prescient in this, you forecast

something bad was gonna happen,

how'd you know about it?

- Well this is what I was made to do

and I always tell peoplethat the foundation

you stand on today was built yesterday

to reach for tomorrow, and ifyou study weather patterns,

now look I have no life besidesthe good Lord, my family

and the weather, right,so this is all I do.

If you go back and look at the past

you can see the setupsfor these kind of things

and back on July 16,excuse me, September, well

first of all, pre-season forecasts call

for a big in close season.

In other words, very little activity

in the areas that got hit downin the Caribbean last year

but all further north

and you see where all the storms are going

they're all further north this year.

And so what happens is this.

When we get closer on September 16th

I'm on the air with peoplesaying "I'll see you

"in October, there's going to be something

"coming out of the Caribbeanin the Gulf of Mexico

"and I'll be on again."

And when we got to 10 days, 12 days away

well actually September 20th,

modeling was showing that the activity

in the tropics, in theglobal tropical activity

was shifting to thePacific and Atlantic basin,

Eastern Pacific and Atlantic.

So you can see this stuff moving across

and once we put that together,

we started warning our clients

and then we saw the bigridge build up again

over the Northeast United States.

Alberto, Gordon and Florence all came in

when that ridge went up over the Northeast

and into southeast Canada.

This is known as the Newfoundland Wheel

by the old-timers, I guessI'm getting to be one of them

63, the men that came beforeme, they taught me this

that whenever you gethigh pressure built in

the northwest Atlantic andthe northeastern United States

in the hurricane season folks,

what has to happen underneath?

Think about it, there'sgonna be a reduction

of pressure and whenthe pressure is reduced

in a large scale over that warm water

you're gonna get development.

So it was right there, so what happened,

by Sunday we were forecastinga major hurricane hit

on the Florida panhandle.

So we had a 3, perhaps a category 4

going into Florida from then

it was hardly even atropical storm at that time.

We did the same thingwith Sandy by the way,

on October 21st we hadthat, and the reason is

it's nothing magicalabout it, it has to do

with trying to discernthe long-term patterns,

understanding what happened before

what's going on now, matching them up

and then use the great toolsthat science has developed

to try to help us inseeing things like this.

So that's what we did.

It gets very frustrating, as you know

there's all sorts of distractions today.

The world is full of noise, right?

So there's noise about theSupreme Court nominations

Sunday and Monday so themedia's not paying attention.

Tuesday Nikki Haleyresigns, media is oh yeah

there's a hurricane down there.

Yesterday of course,you saw the market crash

at 800 and so by the timethe hurricane made land fall

you see the media goingto the market, right?

So what happens is Ithink that a lot of people

got caught by surprise.

What happens when there's a surprise?

You've gotta go lookfor something to blame.

Who do you blame?

Climate change.

It all just keeps movingalong in the same circle.

And so you know, maybeI'm just one of those guys

who looks at linkage

actually this is shameless advertisement

I have a book out calledThe Climate Chronicles,

it describes what's goingon today where this is,

very little about this is actually

about science and weather.

Most of it is about other things

and that's what you see with these storms.

- Joe I want to ask yousomething about the winter.

Does this have anythingto do with the fact

that we may have acolder than usual winter

or more mild or what does it say?

- Yeah and I'll tell you why,I actually put this on Twitter

people on my site, Weatherbell,they see all this stuff

that's going on but myprofessors at Penn State

when I was back there in the 70s said

"You have to explainthe why before the what

"so when it happens people know why."

You gotta tell them before.

What happens is this folks.

The same oscillations in the ocean

that you will see in September and October

cause enhanced tropical cyclone activity

what we call the maddenjulian oscillation,

it's indirectly caused by the oceans

and the state of the oceans.

If that repeats itself in the winter

the same pattern that is causing this now

repeats itself in the winter

what will happen is thewinter gets cold and stormy.

So let's go back and look

at when there were major hurricanes

from Florida into theGulf of Mexico in October

you line up those years, you look

it's got a cold winter.

The fact of the matteris that back last winter,

we saw something go on and we said,

"Look, there's going to bewhat we call modoki el nino

"for the next winter."

So this is nine months away.

Predict a big rainfallseason in California

then March and April,hence the wildfire season.

You grow a lot of stuff in California

because of a lot of rain, it dries out,

they get big wildfires.

It also meant a hot summer, right?

So we have all this, we movefrom one thing to another.

Wildfires, summer, thehurricane season all point

at this cold stormywinter because all I do

is line up past years when that happened.

So we'll see it happens,only God knows tomorrow.

- That's right (laughs).

- You know what, it's a humility thing.

The atmosphere teachesand it's a good tool.

- Joe you're terrific, thank you so much.