Using Respectful Humor for Outreach of Meteorological Research

In 2024, the American Meteorological Society’s Education department launched Weather with a Twist —a weekly newsletter published on the Substack platform. The goal is to educate the public about the latest in meteorological research using a humorous, light-hearted tone, while still respecting the intelligence of the reader. We believe this combination of fun and seriousness can be the secret sauce to reaching those who are innately interested in meteorology but may not have the time to study it in depth.

In this presentation, we will share our subscriber growth patterns and describe our lean editorial and production process, which takes about four hours per newsletter. Additionally, we will address the subjective nature of humor and discuss how to be sensitive when covering topics with serious implications (e.g., severe weather hazards). We will also present readership demographics and evaluation survey responses, explain how we utilize Artificial Intelligence, and outline how we ensure scientific accuracy while sometimes being a bit silly.

The Substack platform supports an ecosystem of like-minded scientific publications that often collaborate and support each other (though we have not yet found any that emphasize humor in the way we do). Finally, we will describe how this platform functions, what has worked (and not worked) for us in terms of marketing, and best practices for publishing via Substack.