Weather Reporting

The comic strip begins with a caveman drawing extensive hieroglyphics on a wall with a crowd of bystanders carefully observing. He's explaining in worried tones that days continue to grow longer, Earth is warming up dangerously, and the climate is changing. Then a member of the audience shouts at him: “It's called summer, you moron.”

So goes the first weather report—and public reaction to it.

Flash forward several thousand years to 1941—one of the first U.S. television weathercasters was an animated cartoon character, Woolly the lamb, who sang the weather report: “It's hot, it's cold. It's rain, it's fair. It's all mixed up together. But I, as Botany's Woolly Lamb, predict tomorrow's weather.” Botany's “wrinkle-proof ties” sponsored the broadcast. One can only imagine audience reaction in that day before every broadcast became the subject of focus groups and statistical analyses.

After that, in the 1950s and 1960s, attractive—even “sexy”—women with little scientific training became the norm for on-air TV weather reporters. Now women comprise only 15% of the roughly 1,500 members of this exclusive club. In the early 21st century, there is a concerted push on many fronts to increase the scientific competency of on-air weathercasters, even while critics accuse many of them of misdiagnosing the climate crisis once again—this time by remaining one of the few scientifically trained groups who remain skeptics of global warming and who can communicate that skepticism to large audiences.

While TV weather reporting has often vacillated from scientific to silly, no one today questions its potential impact on society or its importance to the public. When 65 twisters ravaged central Oklahoma in a 6-hour period in May 1999, destroying more than 8,000 buildings, the number of deaths was actually surprisingly low. Scholars credit warnings from the National Weather Service, which gave an average lead time of 32 minutes, and local TV and radio stations that went into saturation coverage. Four years later, when another tornado outbreak occurred in Kansas City, again TV weather reporting was credited with saving lives. The same is true with weather reports during the active 2005 hurricane season—while more than 1,800 people lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina, it's also widely acknowledged that timely forecasts saved thousands of other people.

The convergence of TV's influence and the watch/warning system has helped lead to a dramatic drop in deaths from all weather-related events, except flash flooding. This is not true in other regions of the world where even a moderate cyclone, such as Nargis in May 2008, can still claim tens of thousands of lives in places like Myanmar, where access to accurate weather reports are not as available. While detractors decry the often unnecessary positioning of reporters in the eye of a storm, so far with only the occasional damage to a news vehicle but no loss of life (yet), the audience now expects this kind of reporting with each and every weather event.

During extreme events, the Weather Channel regularly sets cable viewing records. We're talking audiences of 80 million or more for many of these frequent weather emergencies—from historic tornado outbreaks and the record winter snows of early 2008, to the preceding drought and wind-driven fires in southern California in 2007, there's almost always one extreme weather event or another to focus a hungry audience's attention.

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