There is a growing call within the atmospheric sciences community for a focus on how weather and climate forecasts, severe weather warnings, and related forecast uncertainty are communicated, as evidenced by a recent National Research Council (NRC) report. The NRC report states, “Communication is the critical link between generation of information about uncertainty and how information is used in decision-making” (p. 106).

Communication is most often defined as the transmission or exchange of ideas, and it is this simplistic transmission model that is so often taken for granted in everyday discourse. However, more sophisticated communication theory models acknowledge that meanings reside in people, not just in words. A constitutive model, one that recognizes that the practice of communication is inseparable from how we think about communication is more often the way talk happens. Communication theory is inevitably a practice as well as a theory.

To investigate how communication practices are constituted across multiple collaborative partners involved in extreme weather events, I will analyze the discourse of the agencies and organizations involved in warning assessment, dissemination and compliance. The proposed paper will address the communicative practices of key players involved in communicating warning information and attempt to show how these communicative practices embody larger theoretical and normative stances.