This week, our question comes from Marie Bardi-Salinas of the Blank Check podcast. Instead of asking her own question, she pointed us in the direction of a lively discussion on the r/Brooklyn subreddit. The original poster asked, "Both my wife and I felt a little dizzy / lightheaded for a min at the same time (maybe 30 mins ago) and I just saw there was a big drop in barometric pressure in NYC - maybe that was it? Any one else feel that? Hurricane stuff or am I crazy?" Dozens of commenters were chiming in to agree. Marie wondered if this was possible. Did Hurricane Erin cause a change in pressure that made dozens of people dizzy in Brooklyn? Meteorologist Sara Tonks agreed to look into it.

Meteorologist Sara Tonks: I'm not going to say crazy. That's a diagnosis.

But I do have some receipts and this isn’t adding up.

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On Thursday, Aug. 21 at around 12:05 p.m., 40 minutes before this question was posted, a weather station in Brooklyn measured 1018.27 millibars. And then 10 minutes later, it dropped by about 0.3 mb.

To put that into perspective, the pressure constantly changes, and it usually fluctuates on an order of like 5 to 10 mb over the course of a day in any direction. It goes up, it goes down, it fluctuates. Here’s a chart that covers the entire day for context:

This is a very small pressure change. Now, pressure changes can influence your body in a couple of different ways.

First of all, you, cause your body is constantly figuring out what's going on around it and there are a lot of different external things that your body registers: heat, cold and air pressure. Your body does register air pressure when there is a significant drop, whether it's over a short or a long period of time.

Things in your body have less pressure pushing on them, so they can expand. Scuba divers are very familiar with this. When divers go down, the pressure increases, and when you come back up, that's when it decreases, but it's kind of like the extreme example. When you go from underwater several meters and back to the surface, the pressure drops, which causes air inside your body to expand.

Even on the surface, when the pressure drops, your sinuses and your eardrums, the spaces in your ears where there is air, will expand slightly, and that's part of why people can get migraines following big pressure changes.

Similarly, you can also have people whose joints hurt from pressure changes. That's something that I very much so get because I have less-than-stellar joints. Some of your body tissues can expand, which causes swelling and pain in your joints.

And you can actually get dizziness from pressure changes, because it changes the amount of blood that's going to your brain, slightly.

But in this particular situation, I couldn't find any significant pressure drops in the area. I even checked the weather station in Central Park, and that one from 11:51 a.m. to 12:51 p.m. dropped, again, less than a millibar.

A storm can cause a localized change in pressure, but anything that causes a pressure change big enough for a human to notice will produce an overall change in the area. If you think about the atmosphere as an ocean, take a spot in the middle and suddenly say a little spot in the ocean has no water. The rest of the ocean will respond, flow in, and change the surrounding area, as well.

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