An Apology, A Personal Plea, and A Couple Tweets: A Social Science Communique from the Meteorological Trenches

Meteorological skill, as measured by various National Weather Service performance metrics, has increased greatly over the past several decades. Has our ability to communicate that improved forecast information kept up? Has our customer's ability to leverage that improved weather forecast information also kept up? There is growing concern about what we are able to accurately convey vs. what our customers are actually hearing and then doing with that information.

This presentation will cover some of the lessons learned from Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy, the late January 2015 'apology' snowstorm, and observations from social media interaction using Twitter for these events, as well as Hurricane Joaquin, and the January 2016 East Coast Blizzard. Subjective observation shows significant gaps opening up in these events between what the weather forecast is trying to convey, and what the customer is hearing. Though some of the problem is with the listeners on the receiving end of the information, a significant portion of the problem is how we convey the message. Small changes in words or graphics/imagery that meteorologists would consider trivial provoke disproportionate responses on the part of the public and key decision-makers. Sometimes these responses are to our benefit (decisions move in the right direction) and sometimes they are not (bad decisions made using good information). Some observed patterns in these behaviors will be shared, as well as tie ins made to relevant social science work in these areas.