Communicating weather information and impacts

Abstract

This Special Issue of Meteorological Applications addresses an aspect of our science which we sometimes take for granted but which plays a fundamental role in what we do as atmospheric scientists, that of communicating information and ideas in meteorology and climatology. The issue is divided into three parts. The first cluster of papers broadly address aspects of how weather information is communicated to the public. This is done through an historical overview (Keeling) followed by a consideration of how broadcast meteorology has evolved over the past 50 years (Giles, Teather, Bech et al.). The media are fond of reporting how the weather forecasters had ‘got it wrong’, hence the paper by Morss et al. identifies some of the problems inherent in communicating weather information and forecast uncertainty to the public. Communicating clear and concise information under emergency situations is even more vital, and the papers by League et al. and Silver and Conrad address components of this process, as well as looking at aspects of people's responses to weather alerts. Moreover, the increased availability of probabilistic forecasts poses the question of whether the public grasps the concept of uncertainty in forecasting, and the paper by Joslyn and Savelli discusses this issue. Away from day-to-day weather changes there are aspects of longer-term, climate, change, another subject never far from media attention. Are predictions and issues of climate change, and its impacts, addressed in the most appropriate way? This is the general theme of the paper by Manzo. The next set of papers address the broad theme of communicating weather information to specialists. Whilst this approach has the advantage that a less informal and descriptive method can often be followed, communicating, even to others within one's own specialist field, can be difficult (and even more so if the end product is to generate information disseminated to non-specialists). The case studies presented by Demeritt et al. and by Ramos et al. show how, even in a fairly narrow specialist field, the need for clear and unambiguous communication is essential. The third paper in this grouping (Persson) shows how and why communicating a clear understanding of basic atmospheric processes is essential and can be full of misconceptions and errors. In recent years there has been a move away from descriptions of ecological processes per se towards a greater discussion and understanding of the services provided by organisms in an ecological context. The final paper, by Thornes et al., adopts this approach for the atmospheric sciences, by starting to answer the question ‘why communicate’. Whilst there is a strong need to show specialists and non-specialist alike what is happening in the atmosphere (as shown by the examples of the previous papers in this issue), Thornes et al. describe the fundamental importance of the atmosphere, and atmospheric processes, in a more novel way, by trying to place a value on the services the atmosphere provides. It is known intuitively that all life needs a healthy atmosphere in order to survive. Thornes et al. put this in context and show how profound this is.