The Weekender: On social media, a stormy pattern lies ahead

I’ll tell you what, I really needed a morning like this. Rain is steadily dripping on the windowsill, and it has been a gloomy (and slow) start to the morning. The coffee seems to taste a little better when I am able to enjoy a rainy morning like this. This weather has me reflecting back on the past week of weather – one that featured Hurricane Michael’s historic landfall in Florida.

More specifically, I started thinking about social media leading up the storm system and the way that meteorologists (and non-meteorologists) conveyed information.

Weather forecasters have a communication problem. In the age of social media and technology, images and opinions are more available than ever. Thousands of model images circulate the internet each day, many of them without much context. In winter, snow maps are king. In summer, tropical threats bring out some of the most ridiculous long range model images. Having access to all of this amazing data is a great problem to have, but it is a problem, still.

From this, I have grown to appreciate folks who take the time to annotate or explain the graphics they are providing to the public. They are present in various fields; in the government forecasting agencies, on Twitter, and in the private sector of meteorology companies. There is something special about someone taking the time to explain a graphic in an understandable format (see the captioned tweet below for a great example).

Incredible how fast the satellite structure changes w/ a rapidly intensifying TC. #Hurricane #Michael now has expending outflow in all quadrants on wv.

The upper-level trough providing VWS yesterday is lifting out, but some mid-level shear will continue to undercut its outflow. pic.twitter.com/XCrelKXITf

— Philippe Papin (@pppapin) October 8, 2018

But communication goes farther than that. During the time leading up to Hurricane Michael, I was reminded of the fact that we still have plenty of work to do as a community to improve our communication during major storm threats. As the hurricane approached the Florida Panhandle, forecast model and observation images were provided without context – and opinions that were not backed with scientific evidence were posted to tens of thousands of followers. “A strong category one hurricane, maybe, in terms of impacts”, some said on Twitter, including additional opinions that the storm would be , “more like Hermine”. I even saw at one point that “A major hurricane should at least have an eye.”

As we all know, Hurricane Michael turned out to be nothing like that – and the writing was on the wall well in advance of these messages reaching social media. We know than an eye is not a determining factor as to whether or not a hurricane is significant. We knew that the storm would be much worse than Hermine. While the majority of the messages from the National Weather Service and meteorologists were sound and well-informed, some of them were not, and the above quoted messages are a great example.

The unfortunate truth is that while meteorologists and weather forecasters have done their best to improve the quality, context and detail of information being provided, there will always be opinions that are going to be incorrect. Sometimes, we get it wrong. It’s just the nature of trying to predict the future (that’s our job, after all). In some sense, it’s up to the public to follow our lead, and to use sources that are credible and trusted. In the case of Hurricane Michael, my hope is that nobody looked at the storm as if it were similar to Hermine – that would have been a very grave mistake.

As a meteorologist, weather forecaster, or weather information source, you have an obligation to ask yourself this question before you put something “out there”:

How is this message going to be received by people who could be impacted by the storm system? 

If you come up with a mixed or uncertain answer, you probably should consider re-wording your message, or restructuring it completely. Blaming it on how it was received – which I have seen plenty of over the past few days – is even worse. That’s not on the public, or the people receiving it, or the people giving you some push back for it. That’s on you as a communicator, you failed to deliver the message properly.

As we move towards winter, it will be increasingly important for meteorologists to continue improving communication with the general public. It’s up to us, as professionals, to bridge the gap in understanding technical terms, communicating uncertainty, and simplifying potential hazards (can we please work on streamlining the 252 different National Weather Service warnings and colors?).

There has been plenty of improvement over the past few years, but collectively there is still a long ways to go. It’s up to us to continue to streamline effective communication – if we don’t, we will start to lose the trust of the general public very quickly.

That’s all i’ve got for today. I hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekend!