How to Predict the Weather in Our Era of Freakish Storms

On Thursday, June 19, 2025, the National Weather Service in Reno, Nev., issued a two-day forecast for the region that included Lake Tahoe, a popular and mystically blue-green body of water surrounded by mountains, some almost as high as 11,000 feet.

Friday, June 20, called for winds of up to 25 miles per hour, punctuated by 40 m.p.h. gusts in the lower altitudes, dangerous conditions for boating and severe enough to prompt a Wind Advisory. But Saturday’s weather — clear, with light winds, the high an unseasonably cool 61 degrees — seemed far more hospitable to recreational activities on the water.

On the morning of June 21, anyone looking out a window would have seen blue skies and white sheep-shaped clouds. Anyone reading the morning’s updated weather report would have noted how it validated the earlier one, with slight variations. The forecast called for increased cloudiness and even lower high temperatures, with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms, the winds strengthening to a still moderate 10 m.p.h.

People piled into boats and onto the lake.

Around 12 p.m., the weather started to sharply veer from the predictions. Boaters couldn’t see the storm clouds building to the northwest, or the snow that began to fall on the mountain pass around 1 p.m., or the lightning that forced the cancellation of a foot race at a nearby ski resort.

Shortly after 2 p.m., the conditions began to rapidly, and startlingly, deteriorate on Lake Tahoe.

Over the next hour or so, the temperature dropped to 43 degrees from 55. Data from a weather buoy near Tahoe City, reported winds increasing to over 29. m.p.h. from seven, with gusts as high as 45. The winds, traveling the length of the lake, had 22 miles of uninterrupted running room to push the water into increasingly higher, rowdier peaks. The earlier forecast called for waves of one foot. These waves reached 10.

It started to rain. Marble-size hail fell from the sky. At 2:20 p.m., a sinking boat, carrying 10 passengers, called 911. At 2:57 p.m., a 28-foot boat, also with 10 passengers aboard, capsized. At 3:24 p.m., a mutual-aid call went out to the Coast Guard and local rescue agencies for help responding to multiple boats in distress. The South Lake Tahoe Police Department alone received more than 50 calls.

By 4:25 p.m., the winds had dropped to a negligible three m.p.h., blue sky appeared between the dispersing clouds and six people — later eight — were confirmed dead.

I’ve been caught in a handful of unpredicted storms — squalls, we’ve always called them — when the formerly scrutable world, within minutes, turns lawless. Water shoots upward and sideways. The wind transforms into a solid, high-speed object. Harbors and bays I’ve navigated for years morph so violently that it’s like being trapped inside the psyche of a raging planet. Since my first squall encounter, in my early teens, I’ve been on wary alert whenever getting into a boat. The weather report. The blue sky. The safe harbor. My own judgment. Whom, or what, should I trust?

These questions were live in my mind when I first learned about what people in the media and online were calling the “freak storm” on Lake Tahoe. Versions of the refrain “No one saw it coming” seemed to expose a logical, yet apparently fallacious, notion about how meteorology works: The more ferocious the weather, the harder it should be for computer models to miss it.

An article in The New York Times succinctly corrected that assumption: “The technology meteorologists use to predict weather failed to pick up the localized conditions.”

At the time, I was 3,000 miles east of Lake Tahoe on the coast of Maine, where technology regularly fails to pick up our localized conditions, too. Given how many people work and relax on the ocean around here, nearly everyone’s got a hairy weather story; like me, no one is eager to repeat the experience. Yet our forecasts can be so head-scratchingly wrong, people in town often ask other people in town: Where do you get your weather? Responses vary and can resemble idiosyncratic, highly personalized divining systems. This wind app plus that website’s radar plus that guy on that radio station plus my barometer.

I get my weather at the nearby dock. The people who work and loiter there know the area and its weather vicissitudes well. Whenever I think a forecast might be worse than just comically wrong, I drive down to the harbor and ask around.

Because it’s not true that nobody sees the sudden storms coming. Perhaps they aren’t as freakish as portrayed. In the case of the Lake Tahoe storm, one man said that a “sixth sense” told him something unpredictable, or unpredicted, was about to happen. He noticed “the lake was laying down, the clouds were building up.” While others stayed on the water, trusting the morning forecast would hold, he returned to shore.

I wanted to develop a sixth sense like this man, and not because I distrust science or support the budget cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, though maybe those cuts will make sixth senses a compulsory skill. Sixth senses are also increasingly recommended because of climate change. As Phillip LaFrance, who runs a boat charter and is one of the people I regularly consult on the dock, told me: “I’m no longer saying, ‘Oh, it’s only a thunderstorm.’ They should be feared more.”

I was ready to fear. I was also ready to hone my weather literacy so that I could distinguish, if only in our tiny coastal notch, a day that might turn wicked from one that probably wouldn’t. I wanted a sincere response to a rhetorical question I once heard posed to a salty weather wizard: What magic are you pulling out of the air?

Natural weather forecasting, and old sailors’ aphorisms such as “rainbow to windward, rain ahead,” would seem to be of increasingly quaint irrelevance as technological advances in weather science continue to improve. Eric Sloane, author of the 1949 “Weather Book” — which looks like a children’s illustrated guide to clouds but is actually a complex meteorological primer for weather enthusiasts — drolly nodded toward the ongoing jostling for authority between science and wisdom. “Anyone who has known a sailor with ‘a weather eye’ and who has also seen the inside of a weather bureau,” Sloane wrote, “knows the difference between being weather-wise and being meteorologically accurate.”

One person who has managed to seamlessly combine traditional forecasting methods with science is Maine Public Radio’s meteorologist Lou McNally. For many, McNally has been a part of their mornings for 30 years. In addition to his jobs as a radio meteorologist and a professor at Unity Environmental University, where he teaches a course on climate change (“Some people would call it indoctrination, and I would agree”), McNally previously worked as the “folklore editor” at the National Weather Digest and wrote a weekly column called “Weather Whys” that ran in local Maine newspapers.

A proponent of the “lost art” of natural weather forecasting, his radio reports are more like informative, chatty yarns, weighed down by none of the usual bland meteorologicalities. “‘Considerable cloudiness,’” he told me. “What the heck is that? You go outside and consider it? I need to think about people who are going to be out in it and how it will affect them.”

A typical McNally report might begin: “The steam bath that was yesterday’s weather is being pushed south into the Mid-Atlantic, where our friends and neighbors will continue to cook.” He famously ends each report by reminding listeners of the limits to his predictive powers: “And that’s the way it looks from here.” Within his sign-off is a question his listeners might be asking themselves: How does it look where I am?

When we spoke, McNally was surrounded by files and books organized enough to suggest some sort of system, and scattered enough to suggest he regularly consults them all. He approaches weather — even, or especially, weather that’s already happened — as an unending mystery to probe rather than a bulletin to receive and deliver. Many meteorologists, he notes, use “canned forecasts, canned information.” These people are not, McNally said, “opening the window and taking a whiff.”

For a person hoping to acquire some natural weather forecasting basics, he advocates comparing the eventual weather against the prediction and “seeing how the forecasts played out.” He gave an example from early in his broadcast career, when, he said: “I got fried. I got burned.” He failed to predict a storm where “three-quarters of an inch of icy snow just falls out of the sky.” Afterward he studied the storm’s unusual confluence of factors to better spot one like it in the future. “The three or four times over the last 40 years that I have seen that happen [again],” he said, “I’ve forecasted it and nobody else has.”

People’s individual weather experiences — even people who’ve been dead for hundreds of years — have, for McNally, always been an inextricable facet of meteorological inquiry. When he decided, as a doctoral student, to map the path of the jet stream in 1785, he collected weather reports printed in newspapers, then filled the data gaps with descriptions of weather he found in old diaries. “I don’t know if it was just to get the mind and the hand going, or whether to get the ink flowing out of the pen,” he said of diarists’ tendency to start by noting the weather. He’d earlier tested this diary-as-data theory by comparing the weather passages in a diary from the 1940s belonging to a woman in Waterville, Maine, against the published reports. “She was saying things like, ‘Cloudy and dark, foggy, cool and damp,’ and then all of a sudden she said, ‘sunny, dry, I could put out my whites.’” The weather reports from that same period validated his meteorological interpretation of her descriptions. “Cold front! Poof! Right there.”

My conversation with McNally suggested two important mental shifts.

One: Where forecasting is concerned, I should be as curious about the past and the present as I am about the future. This echoed some advice I’d already received from Maynard Bray, another trusted dock source, and more notably an engineer, writer and foremost expert on small North American wooden boats. He recommended the lessons inferred by the diary practice of the famed naval architect and design innovator Nathanael G. Herreshoff, who recorded the weather in Bristol, R.I., three times a day, from the age of about 20 until his death, 70 years later, in 1938.

Two: Weather isn’t a set of conditions locked into place at the beginning of the day.

“The first thing I ask them is, ‘Why?’” McNally said, when people want to know the forecast. Because the fact is: “They don’t care about the weather — they want to know if they can go to the beach.” A morning report can give people permission to do what they want with their day. Yet once that initial permission is given, they tend to stop seeking it.

Deriving useful intel from other people’s weather (or weather-keeping habits) is something I had, in theory, already learned from two of the canniest mariners I know: Jane Ahlfeld and Gretchen Snyder, who teach a course called “Elements of Sailing” at the wooden boatbuilding school in our town. I’ve studied with them twice.

“The hardest part of teaching,” Ahlfeld told me, “is figuring out the weather and using it the best you can.” A 37-year veteran, Ahlfeld is a uniquely positioned observer of not just our local weather peculiarities but also its longer-span climate evolutions. The challenges of her job have changed over the decades because “there are more days when we’re getting strong winds that we can’t go out in.”

(LaFrance, one of my dock consultants, has observed similar changes. Our once-reliable southwesterly summer wind is “all over the place,” and the gusts are higher. “It used to be 10-15 with gusts to 20,” he said, citing a typical forecast, “now it’s 10-15 with gusts to 30.”)

When I was Ahlfeld and Snyder’s student, class began each morning in an old shingled boathouse, listening to the NOAA buoy report on the weather radio, Channel 02. NOAA sets weather buoys up and down the coast to record data such as air and water temperatures, wave height, wind and gust speeds. Our report covered buoys starting in Boston and painstakingly worked its way northward. If we tuned in just after our local buoys were read by the monotonous, automated voice, we had to endure the entire 10- to 15-minute loop before returning to the information that presumably mattered. This exercise in patience underscored how our weather was connected to the weather of others — how, to use a local meteorological construction, if it was “blowing stink” in Boothbay, it might eventually be blowing stink where we were, too.

Ahlfeld kindly agreed to reacquaint me with the weather basics she taught me years ago. While we sat in my hot barn, she showed me handouts from our class that I should have found more familiar than I did. Beyond the diagrams explaining, say, cold fronts, Ahlfeld’s most instantly graspable takeaway involved change.

“I don’t know what that change necessarily is going to be,” she said, if she notices the wind dying or the temperature dropping or any abrupt shift in the conditions, “but I don’t want to be on the water, because something could boil up.” She added, “That’s air saying, ‘I’m not going to behave well, because I’m transitioning.’”

Another telling change is air pressure, which can be monitored with a barometer. Barometers resemble clocks, if minutes of time were inches (or millibars) of pressure. Like clocks, barometers have two hands. One is a measuring hand, which moves on its own; the other is a marker hand, which allows the observer to mark their last reading. If the measuring arm moves counterclockwise, the pressure is changing from higher to lower — low-pressure systems produce wetter, stormier weather — and people might ominously say, “The barometer is falling.”

If a person had no access to a barometer, Ahlfeld told me, here is how they could anticipate, 24 to 48 hours in advance, the arrival of a low-pressure system: First, high cirrus clouds, wisps of white called “mares tails,” appear. Then come “mackerel skies,” clouds that are “a little chunkier, like cottage cheese,” followed by fully overcast skies. That’s when, if it’s available, Ahlfeld consults her barometer.

“How concerned should I be about this system that’s coming through?” she asked. If the barometric pressure starts to fall quickly — if the distance between the marker arm and the measuring arm rapidly widens — that’s when people need to pay attention, because the faster the change, the more powerful, and potentially dangerous, the approaching system will be.

But a storm system isn’t the same as a sudden squall, defined by McNally as a “quick onset of wind, lasting just a short while and decreasing rapidly afterward,” behavior that inspired the weather adage “The sharper the blast, the sooner it’s past.”

I wanted to know how to foresee those.

Again, clouds. “Funky” clouds, Ahlfeld said, that are not “happy and floating along, these little puffs of wool,” but ones that start to pile up high and resemble curdled explosions (what I’ve known as “thunderheads”) or tall anvils, the tops flattened by the strong, upper-altitude wind.

“That is a bad sign,” she said, then added, circumspectly, “or whatever. It’s just a sign.”

(LaFrance also cited such clouds as a mandatory call to attention. “Vertical development,” he says, “or V.D. Which is not a medical problem.”)

But they still might be a problem. To know how much of a problem requires a person to know from which direction their weather comes. On this part of the Maine coast, ours comes from the direction of Waldo County, which Ahlfeld refers to as “a weather maker.” This is where our thunderstorms are forged. If I see an ominous cloud building between the distant uprights of a suspension bridge, it’s something to keep an eye on, because whatever that cloud contains is possibly headed toward me.

Finally, Ahlfeld shared one of her local rules of thumb.

“Never trust a west,” she said. During the summer, a wind blowing from the west means that a cold front is moving through our area, and a dry, cool, higher-pressure system is behind it. Here on land, the west wind is good news. It hearkens azure skies and sheep clouds. On the water, it arrives with an asterisk. The winds forcing the change can result in conditions that are, as Ahlfeld says, “strong and puffy, punchy.” Whatever winds and gusts are forecast, she said, they can build over the day and exceed — possibly far exceed — the predictions.

In the 1970s, the National Weather Service initiated a program called SKYWARN, which still solicits local volunteers as observers and reporters of “ground truth,” because they “can see things that radar and other technological tools cannot,” a handy rebuttal to anyone believing technology has eliminated the need for civilian input.

The concept of a person knowing the ground truth or their ground truth, besides being one of the most marvelous discoveries of my middle life, intersected with two words I heard when interrogating people around town about the source of their natural weather forecasting savvy.

Those two words were “intuition” and “gut.”

McNally also emphasized that you should “trust your gut first,” and “you need to pay attention to your gut,” because, he said, the forecast “is never 100 percent.”

“Gut,” in this case, isn’t only a synonym for a sixth sense. McNally is basically advocating a bodily approach to diary keeping. All of us contain whole lifetimes of weather data in the form of physical experiences. The more you pay attention to details around you, he said, and connect cause and effect, then the more you know to perk up “when you get a little gurgle in your stomach.”

A body, and other nearby bodies, can act as barometers, based on scientifically explicable causes. There’s a dozen or so colleges, McNally said, “where you can find a major, or at least a minor, in biometeorology,” which is the study of weather’s impact on plants, animals and humans.

“You heard the one about cows lying down means there’s going to be a storm?” McNally asked.

I had not.

Cows, he clarified, lie down because they’re tired. But, if you pass a field of cows lying in all different directions, and then a few hours later the cows are all pointed in the same direction, this indicates that the wind has shifted from light and variable to stronger and prevailing, meaning a new weather system is possibly on the way. Cows are considered prey, he explained, and “prey is going to put their tails into the wind.” A predator, catching the cows’ scent, will approach from downwind. The cows, thus, need to face in the direction of whatever predators might be coming to kill them so that they can run away.

Dogs are barometers, too. If you let your dog into the backyard during a high-pressure system, McNally said, it “goes to the corner, does what it does and then comes back.” But if the dog runs “this way and that way and this way and that way,” its zig-zaggy behavior indicates the pressure is dropping and a low is on the way. Why? Smells are held down by high pressure, released by low. The dog, he said, “is chasing yesterday’s squirrel, last Thursday’s rabbit.”

(By this same rough principle, swamps are “another natural weather indicator.” Swamps contain decomposing matter that releases methane gas bubbles. These bubbles rupture when the pressure drops. If the swamp “doesn’t stink when you drive by in the morning but it does in the afternoon,” then you know a low is approaching.)

Ahlfeld also mentioned how bodies function as atmospheric instruments. On low-pressure days, people take more naps. So do pets. The reason isn’t heaviness, as I had assumed, but its opposite. High pressure presses on the body, buttressing it. The body doesn’t need to reinforce its own boundaries because it gets an assist from the air around it. For this reason, dry days make a person feel lifted, spiritually but also physically. On low-pressure days, the interior is out of harmony with the exterior, which can be both physically and emotionally disorienting. Why am I so down when the world isn’t against me?

Pressure imbalances are the reason that more babies are born during storms — babies are suspended in a hermetically sealed “bag of water,” McNally says, and “you have to have the same air pressure outside as in or it will pop” — and also why some people’s joints hurt before it rains. Gasses in the blood expand when the pressure beyond the body starts to drop. Generally, “we’re porous enough to balance out that pressure,” he said. But knuckles and old knee injuries, i.e. places in the body with worn cartilage and scar tissue, can’t expand as quickly, and hurt.

I assembled some barometric facts about my own body. I get migraines before big blizzards — very low-pressure systems — arrive. I also thought more about those uneasy days, the ones when I’m venturing farther into the world, specifically the more tenuous watery part of it, and I’m inexplicably in a more heightened state and worried that the wind will get stronger, and the creased foil ocean will rip into whitecaps, and that the whole situation will become quite a bit sketchier than the forecast suggests.

I mentally walked myself through one of these days. What I first register as I approach the dock is the wind hitting my cheek from a certain direction. Given what I’ve most likely, unwittingly, associated with that angle of impact on my skin — weather that may eventually turn gnarly — it probably prompts me to scrutinize the harbor more closely and notice anomalies. The dark navy blue of the water, the individual boats, pointed toward the harbor’s mouth rather than the island, suddenly caught in what resembles a slow-motion shark attack, invisible jaws whipping them back and forth.

Finally I pieced it together. The wind on these days blew from the west.

When Ahlfeld and I first spoke in my barn about all-of-a-sudden storms, she remarked, “We haven’t had one this summer, which is sort of shocking to me.”

Then we got one.

On Aug. 27, my basic weather app showed sun, no rain and decent winds. Based on this forecast, my husband I decided to sail into a nearby bay.

Around noon, right before we left the harbor, he received a notification on his phone.

“It might rain around 5,” he said, and we rolled our eyes. A few days earlier, the first notable storm clouds in many weeks appeared. The sum result? A shallow palmful of drops scattered over the entire harbor.

Also, a rain warning wasn’t a storm warning. Rain was just wet; and recently, not even.

We sailed into the bay, rounded a navigational buoy and started the four-mile trip home. In the far distance, between the uprights of the bridge, we saw a dark mood gathering. Around 3:15 p.m., back in the harbor, the wind picking up, I noticed a clutch of small boats from the school where Ahlfeld teaches, one of which carried a friend of mine, heading back toward their harbor in the stiffening breeze. My son and I gaped at the cartoonishly looming clouds while we drove up the peninsula to the supermarket.

At 4:42 p.m., as we were going home, my husband texted: “Thunderrrr.” When we crossed the small causeway that spans a usually protected stretch of river, the river’s surface was white-capping. I had never seen this before. Then around the next bend we caught sight of the open water, its surface stoked into a half-white, half-black fury.

Once it was over, about 30 minutes later, I started texting. First to make sure people were OK; then to find out if anyone knew in advance that the squall was coming.

One friend, known for his abundant, triple-back-up caution, wrote: “No warning! We were in a boat, too, and had some rather hair-raising moments!” My friend in one of the school boats reported that the second-in-command radioed an alert, and that her instructor, for a moment, wasn’t too concerned — in front of them, the sky was clear — then turned around and clocked the darkness bearing down. They made it safely to their moorings before the wind hit.

The next day I went down to the dock to conduct a squall post-mortem. I spoke to Bray, who had also been on the water — “Came out of nowhere,” he said — and then to LaFrance, who said, “V.D., V.D.” He had rechecked the radar around 2 p.m. because he, too, noticed the clouds starting to build in the distance. The radar then had predicted the squall to hit precisely when it did, between 4:30 and 5 p.m.

Yet I hadn’t bothered to revisit the forecast since the morning, when my app suggested it was safe to go out. Ahlfeld succinctly and calmly repeated in a text what she’d been saying all along. “Watching those clouds approach [should] have you running to get back on land.”

Which, to be fair, we did do. Ahlfeld’s response seemed to indicate not that I hadn’t been properly vigilant, rechecking the radar throughout the day, but that I’d done exactly as she’d taught me. I also didn’t think, as I might have in the past, that meteorology had failed to adequately warn us about the squall. Instead I marveled at how well the system here worked. Even the people who claimed the storm “came out of nowhere” saw it with enough time to get to safety.

Which means — if people have honed their weather eyes, if they’re in touch with the ground truth — that the difference between a “freak storm” and a forecasted one is measurable in minutes. Possibly meteorology’s most trust-inspiring feature is that an informed, engaged citizenry must work with computer-model-generated forecasts rather than submit to their authority completely. Rightness and wrongness maybe aren’t related to whether earlier predictions come to pass; they’re instead determined by an ongoing set of decisions I’m making, based on the forecasts I’m perpetually receiving. The most up-to-date weather is at my fingertips — if my fingertips, and the body attached to them, touch not a screen but the ground, the water, the air.

In the past, when I’ve returned to New York City, where I work as a professor, I still check the daily forecast in Maine. But this tracking habit quickly dies, and I eventually return to my weatherless city life, where the most pressing concern is whether to pack an umbrella.

Increasingly, however, the weather does matter in the city; or as Sloane put it in “Weather Book,” “the weather is with us wherever we are.” People drown in basement apartments during flash floods caused by torrential rains. The wind gusts are regularly strong enough that the local meteorologists warn about “unsecured objects” on fire escapes or construction sites.

That same June morning I learned about the Tahoe storm, our daughter, 450 miles south of us, was slow-poaching in a New York City heat wave that broke numerous longstanding records. Then on July 14 came a rainstorm so dramatic it made international news. (“Watch: Flash flooding sweeps through New York City subways.”) Phone videos on social media, shot by alternately panicked or enthralled subway passengers at Manhattan’s West 28th Street station, showed water rushing down the stairs, onto the platform and into the train. The videos resembled outtakes from a submarine disaster movie where not all the extras received the same script. Some people stood on the seats as water seeped into the car, while others didn’t really seem to notice anything unusual happening at all.

Reports after the July storm referred to “localized” flooding around the city. (I’ve since identified which subway stations are most likely to flood when heavy rain is predicted, so that I can avoid them.) The city’s weather, and the specific alertness it requires, can vary greatly from one neighborhood, or even one block, to the next. “That’s the way it looks from here” is as applicable an adage to an urban location as it is to a rural one.

These days — actually all days, every day — I’m talking about the weather with the people in and around my apartment building. The lobby and the sidewalk are my urban docks. Local, “it happened to me” (or my neighbor or my friend or my friend’s neighbor’s friend) stories transmit not just specific conditions and their outcomes; through them I can learn to make better future decisions based on other people’s less fortunate ones.

Leave the basement, the train, the station. Take the plants off the fire escape. Stay clear of construction sites and big trees.

And while weather talk is sometimes derided as small talk, deployed to ward off more personal interactions, it’s also how to know an individual intimately. The sole experience I might share, in any given moment, with any given person in my immediate vicinity, is the weather around us. Even so, a person’s body is the ultimate microclimate, as local as local gets. The same weather impacts each of us differently, given how old we are, how many scars we have, how many air-conditioners we have in our windows, if we have a house at all. Telling others about our local conditions — and expanding what counts as weather literacy, as our local new normals tilt ever more extreme — that’s part of talking about the weather, too. When the wind reaches 35 m.p.h., it’s difficult to hear what people are saying. During the first five months of 2026, the wind gusts in New York City registered between 35 and 70 m.p.h. on 26 percent of the days.

But other connections — equally vital survival skills — might be blunted, as well, if the weather remains inscrutable and unknowable, and understood, or misunderstood, as a whimsically destructive force that no one can predict. What we risk missing is an opportunity for collective curiosity about, and appreciation of, our shared conditions. On Aug. 27, after Ahlfeld texted about the storm clouds, she wrote: “Sun and rain have me looking for rainbows . Nothing yet.” And then: “Rainbow! To the east.” I walked outside and faced east. The setting sun flared orange against the trees, as if to remind me that fall, my favorite Maine season, was on the way. A full rainbow arched above them, earth to sky to earth.

Heidi Julavits is a writer who grew up in Portland, Maine. Her most recent book is “Directions to Myself.”