Hurricane Idalia became the eighth major hurricane to make landfall on the Gulf Coast in the last seven years, leaving behind a trail of destruction in its path. On this week's episode, the Lee Weather Team looks back on the storm to discuss what stood out to them the most.
How good was the forecast? Was the forecast communicated effectively? Why did some people choose not to evacuate? What can we learn from this storm before the next hurricane strikes the United States?
Get the meteorologists' perspective in our in-depth review of Hurricane Idalia.
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About the Across the Sky podcast
The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:
Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
 
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Across the Sky, our National Lee Enterprises Weather podcast. I'm Matt Holiner in Chicago. One quarter of the lead weather team, but the whole game here today, meteorologist Joe Martucci based in Atlantic City. Sean Sublette in Richmond, Virginia and Kirsten Lang in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Together the four of us cover weather across the country.
Yes, not just across the sky, but across the country. And this national weather coverage is new. So if you're listening to this podcast on a Lee Enterprise's website or app, you're probably going to be seeing more forecast videos from us, especially when bad weather is expected. But I think it's safe to say this podcast, this is the first thing that went national and I think it's the favorite part of our jobs.
And nothing is changing here. In fact, each week we continue to see our number of listeners go up. So really, we can't thank you enough for tuning in and subscribing and this week, just like the national weather story for the last week. This episode is all about Hurricane Idalia. The damage is still being assessed, but it is clear that this was another devastating storm for parts of the southeast.
And of course, right off the bat, our thoughts and prayers are with all the people trying to recover from this storm. Now, obviously, lots to discuss here. But to start, guys, let's just go around the horn and talk about the first thing that stood out to you about Dahlia. Sean, let's start with you, because you were doing a lot of updates on this storm for our Carolina properties.
Yeah, I think for me, one of the things that I take home from Idalia is actually how well it was forecast. You know, we are we are in an environment you know, we've been talking about this for a few months now. We've got very high ocean heat content, high sea surface temperatures, basically warm water. But we've had the El Nino going on and there's this whole battle back and forth between the two.
Which one of these impacts is going to be larger? And we kind of said, well, once things get started, they can really, really go. And that's kind of what happened. I mean, the Gulf of Mexico was especially warm, and it is not common for the National Hurricane Center to to talk about rapid intensification in their discussions and their technical discussions as this environment is primed for rapid intensification.
And and by that, we mean something very specific, effectively going up two categories in 24 hours. I mean, technically, it's 35 miles per hour and 24 hours, but two categories, right? So for them to be talking about rapid intensification, which such high confidence, then it comes to fruition pretty much a