We've all heard them.

Rubber tires protect you from lightning. Heat lightning is a different kind of lightning. A hundred-year flood only happens once every hundred years. If the weather changes, a big earthquake must be coming.

But how many of these weather myths are actually true?

In this episode of Atmosphere, meteorologist Emily Gracey is joined by fellow meteorologist Anthony Yanez for a fun, fast-paced conversation separating weather fact from fiction. Drawing on decades of forecasting, television, school visits, and viewer questions, they unpack the myths they've heard countless times, and explain why so many of them continue to stick.

We cover some of the most common weather misconceptions, including:

• Lightning Safety: Can lightning strike the same place twice? Do rubber tires or shoes really protect you? And is the lightning crouch still recommended?
• Heat Lightning: Is it actually a different type of lightning, or something else entirely?
• Hundred-Year Floods: What does the term really mean, and why is it so widely misunderstood?
• Rain Chances: What meteorologists actually mean when they forecast a "30% chance of rain."
• Earthquake Myths: Can weather trigger earthquakes, and why do these rumors spread after major events?
• Why Myths Persist: The psychology behind why we believe - and pass along - weather misconceptions.

Whether you're a weather enthusiast, a science communicator, or someone who's repeated one of these myths without thinking twice, this episode will leave you looking at everyday weather in a whole new way.

Resources & Links

Anthony Yanez's Weather Lab: https://www.click2houston.com/weatherlab/

Anthony's documentary, Garden in the Gulf: A Reef Rescue Mission: https://www.click2houston.com/weather/2025/04/18/garden-in-the-gulf-a-reef-rescue-mission/

Shorely Safe: www.shorelysafe.live

Connect with us:

Facebook: Emily Gracey Meteorologist

Instagram: @AtmospherePodcast

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Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, yet they support a quarter of all marine life on Earth. So what happens when the water around them gets too hot to survive?

This year's strong El Niño is pushing already-stressed reefs past their limits. In this episode of Atmosphere, host Emily Gracey sits down with Dr. Tracy Fanara, an environmental engineer and ocean scientist, to break down what's actually happening inside a bleaching coral, why El Niño and climate change are attacking reefs from two directions at once, and a striking theory she's developed linking the 2023 bleaching event to a mysterious die-off of endangered small tooth sawfish.

Then Emily talks with Shachar Damari, co-founder of V-Corals, a Red Sea-based biotech company rethinking how reefs get rebuilt. Instead of the industry-standard method of cutting coral into genetically identical clones, his team works with a rare natural fusion event that combines multiple coral genotypes into a single, hardier colony.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• The Bleaching Process: Why a "bleached" coral isn't a dead one, and what determines whether it bounces back.
• A Two-Front Attack: How long-term climate change and short-term El Niño patterns are compounding to hit reefs from both sides at once.
• The Sawfish Mystery: Tracy's leading hypothesis connecting reef collapse to a mass die-off of a critically endangered species.
• The Restoration Problem: Why most reef restoration doesn't hold up long-term, and what "resilience" actually requires.
• A Different Approach: How V-Corals uses a rare natural phenomenon, not genetic editing, to build coral that can survive future heat waves.

Connect with the Show:

• Follow Emily on Facebook: Meteorologist Emily Gracey
• Follow the Show on Instagram: @AtmospherePodcast
• Deep Dive on Substack: Subscribe to the Atmosphere Substack for weekly science breakdowns.
• Listen to the Weekly Weather Brief: Catch Emily and meteorologist Kerrin Jeromin every Friday for a quick rundown of the week's biggest science stories.

Links:

Follow Dr. Tracy Fanara on Instagram- @InspectorPlanet

V-Corals: https://www.v-corals.com/

How different is America's weather today from the world the founding fathers knew 250 years ago?

On July 4, 1776, as 56 men gathered to declare independence. That same day, Thomas Jefferson bought a brand-new thermometer, and started taking meticulous notes. Those very readings marked the birth of an American climate record that stretches all the way to the present day.

In this episode of Atmosphere, host Emily Gracey sits down with Kaitlyn Trudeau, an applied climate scientist at Climate Central, to unpack two and a half centuries of American weather data. Together, they explore how our climate has shifted from the brutal winters of the Little Ice Age to the rapid warming of the modern era... and what the data tells us to expect by the time the nation turns 300.

• The Weather of 1776: What it was really like in that Philadelphia room (think wool coats, horseflies, and no AC), and how Jefferson became America's original "weather nerd."
• Nature’s Time Capsules: How scientists use paleoclimate proxies—like tree rings, ice cores, and coral—to unlock millions of years of climate history.
• The Rate of Change: Why the dramatic shift in global carbon emissions over the last 50 to 75 years is the real cause for concern.
• Climate Controls: Why the climate is warming differently in places like the Southwest compared to the Great Lakes.
• A Story We Are Still Writing: Why the next 50 years aren't predetermined, and how collective action today dictates our future.

Articles referenced in this episode:

https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/thermometer

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/02-01-02-0010

https://jefferson-weather-records.org/node/41019

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/84/1/bams-84-1-57.pdf

https://www.amrevmuseum.org/john-adams-and-revolutionary-philadelphia-s-summer-heat

https://emergingrevolutionarywar.org/2016/01/23/the-hard-winter-of-1779-1780/

• Follow Emily on Facebook: Meteorologist Emily Gracey
• Follow the Show on Instagram: @AtmospherePodcast
• Deep Dive on Substack: Subscribe to the Atmosphere Substack for weekly science breakdowns.
• Listen to the Weekly Weather Brief: Catch Emily and meteorologist Kerrin Jeromin every Friday for a quick rundown of the week’s biggest science stories.