KC: Welcome to The Sound of Science of WNIJ. I'm K.C. from and today we're joined by Dr. Victor Gensini for today's episode. Thanks for joining us.
Dr. Gensini: Great to be here, K.C.
KC: One thing we love to do on The Sound of Science is bring some research being done at NIU to more people. Dr. Gensini, would you please explain your current research?
Dr. Gensini: Yeah, we were just funded by the National Science Foundation to look ahead to try to understand when and where severe weather will strike and to try to give people advanced lead time. So the National Science Foundation is funding NIU and our research group to really look ahead to say, do we know or can we study or research, these patterns that are perhaps more favorable or less favorable for severe weather across the United States. We're really excited to start working on that grant, it just started in April 1st of this year.
KC: That's exciting to think we may be able to predict severe weather so far in advance. That's going to save a lot of lives. What are some long-term benefits we could see because of your research?
Dr. Gensini: We're really hopeful that folks like emergency managers, FEMA, insurance companies can begin to look ahead in the next two to three weeks and really understand, are we going to be active or perhaps, good news, are we not going to be active for severe storms? They can create mitigation strategies and resiliency strategies that I think will benefit everybody. Most people are not going to change the way they behave if I give you a forecast two weeks in advance, but there are certainly sectors out there that are very sensitive to weather information that we think are going to be greatly benefitted by this research.
KC: This has been The Sound of Science on WNIJ.
Dr. Gensini: Where you learn something new every day.
