Improving weather alerts in 2021 and beyond

Warning people of incoming weather hazards is one of the most important things a meteorologist can do. If we can’t reach out to people with a forecast (good or bad), then what’s the point of forecasting at all? With all the technology available to us in 2021, making people aware of the weather should be easier than ever. Yet when the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed through the Philadelphia and New York City regions on September 1 with severe impacts, many people (including some elected officials) were somehow unprepared and decided to place the blame on forecasters themselves. I want to explore why many people don’t seem to get the message, and how we can improve upon messaging in the future.

Communicating climate change – can we improve?

Last week I noticed a story from the Boston Globe written about early-season heat waves (you can read the full article linked here). The story makes a lot of great points about the health issues that extreme heat causes, as well as overnight temperatures warming significantly. However, there are some other ties that this story tries to make between climate and weather which lead to some bad conclusions in my opinion. There are some bigger questions that we need to be asking – not only about this Boston Globe article, but related news stories in general.

Naming heat waves? An idea full of hot air

This past Tuesday, a press release was published by the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance, an organization whose number one priority is to begin naming and ranking heat waves around the world. The EHRA was formed that same day, so usually I wouldn’t think much of something so new…except the press release has already commanded serious attention in the weather community, and the idea of naming heat waves has headlined several national news stories in the past few days. With an open mind, let me explain why that idea would do more harm than good.