Paleo
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Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow for the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. The science of meteorology and one of its obscure scientific subsets was the topic of our most recent Brainstorm question. I asked what kind of work does a "paleotempestologist" do. Jim Rizzo, from Amherst, New Hampshire, phoned in this response:

"A paleotempestologist is a meteorologist who looks for evidence of hurricanes or typhoons or other severe weather, over vast amounts of time by looking at sediments from lakes and other bodies of water, and doing core sampling, and ice and things like that".

That's right. Paleo means ancient. Tempest means storm. You know like Shakespeare's play? Ology is "the study of". Paleotempestology: the study of ancient storms.

Wayne Night, from Lynn, Massachusetts sounds like he's a paleotempestologist. He said: "It's a study of past histories of catastrophic storms, landfalls, using environmental effect information rather than historical accounts. The data used in such studies includes pollen analysis, water isotope fractions, and sediment cores".

Paleotempestologists also try to determine the probability of catastrophic hurricanes striking in the future. This information is vital to coastal-development planners, insurance-risk assessors, and the millions of people who live in coastal zones. This cutting-edge field of research is still relatively new, and dating prehistoric hurricanes is not an exact science. Scientists say they can be off by anywhere from 20 to 100 years. The further back they go, the more they can predict what could be in store for us in the future.

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