In the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Penn State.

This is weather world.

One of the things we really enjoy doing here on Weather World is talking to authors about weather books.

And tonight I am so excited to once again bring on board doctor Barbara Boustead.

She is the author of the new book called Wilder Weather, and I'm so excited that you're joining us here.

Barb, we first spoke to you back in 2021.

You had done research about Laura Ingalls Wilder's book The Long Winter, and you told us about, you know, what weather took place back then and you verified what took place and what didn't.

Was the research that you did for that project basically the backbone of this book?

It absolutely was.

I have been doing that research since 2009.

So we are looking at 16 years of ongoing research.

Uh, that research was a part of my doctoral dissertation at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and continued after I got done with the dissertation.

I just continued to have an interest in a passion in looking up this weather of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books in life and what story we can tell with it.

So yes, it's all connected all the way through.

So this is not your full time job.

This was a side project that you've been doing for more well over a decade.

I love the title of this book.

It's Wilder Weather, but the subtitle, What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us about the weather, climate, and protecting what We cherish.

I really feel like after reading this, that that subtitle really sums up what is between the pages of this book.

You cover a variety of topics, and I'm just curious, how hard was it to organize this?

It was a process that required some professional help.

Honestly, there are wonderful book coaches in the world who will help you take your thoughts and organize them into something that's not just a list of facts, but actually does tell a story and has a theme that comes through.

So credit to my book coaches.

They've been wonderful to me.

Um, because this really started as an academic study.

And so that's a lot of work actually, to take what you're doing academically and translate it into something that's interesting to read for somebody other than a hard core scientist.

Um, I want to talk about Laura Ingalls Wilder for a moment.

If you watch the TV show, you hear about Walnut Grove.

But in real life, she and her family lived in many different places.

So you had to look up weather information from many different areas over periods of time.

How difficult was that to do?

It's always interesting to try to dig up weather, uh, observations and documented information.

Really anything prior to about 1900.

And so we were looking at Laura's childhood, which is, you know, she was born in 1867, lived in Wisconsin, uh, moved to Kansas, Minnesota, and then the Dakota Territory, which became South Dakota.

So all of these places between about 1867 and the 18 mid 1880s were really just becoming a part of the historical records that we keep in writing.

Now, as European descended settlers reached those places.

So finding the weather data was more than just going online and, you know, looking up the stuff that we can grab pretty easily off of a number of websites, um, I had to dig into things like weather records from frontier forts that had been digitized with a project about a decade ago.

Um, looking into other accounts besides Laura's of similar times and places, things like newspapers or letters or journals that also told the story of what was happening, really, anything we could dig up that would give some information, um, and sort of broaden our sources of information for what we had in those days when data really were sparse.

Yeah.

And I think one thing that I found interesting is I've always taken that what she had said really did occur.

Um, but there is a point in this where you say, well, a lot of this was or some of this was fiction, and you did talk about a story at Christmas where, you know, that really most likely didn't happen.

You know, us folks who grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder took those stories to heart.

And I'm not the only person who was a little bit crushed to learn that they were historical fiction works.

Now, they were based very strongly in Laura's life and experiences, but she took creative liberties like any author does when they're making a fiction.

Um, she exaggerated stories, combined characters, relocated things in place and time.

So part of the challenge of digging up the history of what had happened was figuring out which parts are fact and which parts are fiction.

Um, and yes, one of the the fictions that I dug out was from little House on the Prairie when they were living in Kansas.

Laura tells this beautiful, touching story about their neighbor, Mr.

Edwards, who goes across a flooding creek to retrieve gifts for the family for Christmas and in the weather records I dug up for the years that Laura was there in, uh, Indian Territory.

At the time, it just didn't happen.

Um, those winters were pretty cold and had not been very wet in the month or so leading up to Christmas, so it was a great story.

It maybe demonstrated neighborly support and care, but, um, weather wise, it was a fiction.

Now that you've written this book, are you done with this project?

I don't think I'll ever be done with the Wilder Weather Project.

Um, I have told, you know, through the book, I have told most of the stories that emerge as the most striking or the most, um, the most tied to Laura's tale.

But I continue to pull threads of information out of her books, or out of events happening around her, things that shaped her life, or the life of characters or people in her books in life.

So I really think this is something that I'll be able to continue to communicate about for, for many years to come.

There are more stories to tell.

We only have a second here.

Um, how would someone go about purchasing this book?

The book is published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press, and you can go directly to the press's website to order it.

It is also available through your favorite booksellers, uh, whether you find them online or request them at your favorite independent bookstore.

Excellent.

Well, thank you so much, and congratulations on publishing all this work that you took so long to procure here.

So thank you so much.

Doctor Barbara Boustead, author of Wilder Weather, and we'll be back in a moment with more.

It's not a game.

Whoa whoa whoa whoa.

I'm going.

It's social science research focused on a Pennsylvania weather hazard.

And this is not the first foray into virtual reality by Doctor Jace Bernat.

So soon after starting as a faculty member at Hofstra University several years ago now, I came across a little VR lab they had on campus, and I tried it out and I thought, wow, this would be an excellent way to convey the dangers of severe weather to the public by making VR simulations of different hazards.

Unfortunate enough to work on several projects.

We first started with VR hurricane simulation.

We've done a VR rip current simulation, and now we have our VR Snow Squall simulation.

This latest focus on snow squalls represents a partnership with state agencies in New York, Pennsylvania and the National Weather Service.

And now we're in the testing phase here early in 2025, where we go out in the public and have the headset with us and have folks try out the VR simulation and then take a survey to provide us some feedback.

Jace and partners from the National Weather Service recently made stops at Penn State and in the State College community to put their technology to the test.

Really looking for a range of ages because we're looking for any drivers to teach them about the dangers of snow squalls.

And of course, drivers come in all ages.

So certainly we've noticed that younger people might be a little bit more vulnerable to snow squalls because they're less experienced as drivers.

So we're glad we can survey at, say, Penn State, of course, and reach the younger population that might not have much experience yet with winter driving and snow squalls, the feedback the team collects will help them fine tune their simulation and determine if the message is coming across more.

So, just kind of reinforce what I kind of already knew, which is if you can't see in front of you while you're driving, you should probably not be driving.

Certainly at the end of the simulation, it's possible to end up in a big pile up a big collision with lots of other vehicles.

That certainly can be frightening for some people, because it comes very suddenly.

And part of the reason why is because in a snow squall, the visibility is very low.

So all of a sudden you might come upon a disabled vehicle or worse, a huge collision all across the highway and there's not much reaction time.

So that's why the key takeaway for snow squalls is get off the road.

There's no safe place on a road during a snow squall.

You don't want to pull over because someone could hit you, and you don't want to continue on because you could end up in a big collision.

A new and niche method of communicating weather hazards in a memorable and engaging way.

Putting myself in the simulation allowed me to, like, get like a better, like more hands on, like learning experience, like about snow squalls.

And I feel like I'm gonna be more prepared for one.

Like if I do actually drive into one for Weather World, I'm Rob Lydick.

Good.

From water to ice, snow making has become a staple for many skiers and snowboarders across Pennsylvania.

Without it, many skiers across the Commonwealth would not have the ability to stay open for more than just a few weeks or even days.

Pristine white piece would instead be filled with dirt, patches and brown bare ground.

And with a warming climate, windows of snow may are becoming harder to find.

But new strategies have started to rise even here in the middle of Pennsylvania at Tussey Mountain, to combat the curveballs climate change has started to throw at snow making.

Snow making is a complex, multi-step process to turn water into fine snow crystals.

First, a water source is required to shoot the millions of gallons of water into the air.

Second, an air source is needed to help freeze the water.

Sometimes water droplets don't freeze until they reach -40°F because they need something to freeze onto, so special nozzles on the snow makers will shoot both tiny water droplets and ice particles with pressurized air by shooting highly pressurized air, a small pocket of air cools itself through atmospheric processes, allowing for the water droplet to start freezing on the ice particle.

The air must meet a certain criteria to allow the rest of the droplet to freeze.

As it falls towards the ground, temperature has to be under 28 and low humidity.

Um, obviously, as it gets colder and colder and drier and drier, it's way more cost effective to make snow.

With a warming climate, colder and drier conditions are becoming less common, and it has started to affect the snowmaking operations of some mountains.

So when you have those sort of short for our windows, where to kick on everything and be an hour and a kick off everything, it'd be an hour, um, when it hits at 28, the cost per yard square yard of snow is sometimes so expensive that it doesn't make sense to me.

Um, but we try to really maximize our small windows because that's what we're seeing more and more lately.

Even with dwindling snow making windows, some ski areas have started to adapt their strategies to mitigate these effects of climate change.

Some mountains combine precise timing with using different types of snow guns to make the snowmaking process more efficient.

Uh.

Fagundes.

Use more wind, more air nozzle guns are sort of more precise and where you want to put stuff and how well you can put stuff down.

I think we'll really choosy with when we make snow so that our snow quality is is of the standard that we set.

Um, I think that there's other places that have the ability to just sort of flick on and off a switch and sort of blow whenever they hit any amount of temperature, humidity mix that they see fit, even with precise timing to turn on the snow guns, it has still been difficult to manage costs and upgrades to better fight against the effects of climate change and loss of revenue.

We're kind of hitting a capacity with where we're at.

We we need more electric, we need more water, we need more air.

Um, but we make do with what we have.

It's just a long process to upgrade everything.

Snowmaking is slowly becoming more expensive, and it won't be getting any easier for resorts and ski areas to manage with the warming climate, but they are putting in maximum efforts to keep those tiny water droplets flying for skiers and snowboarders across