2 Min Read
The Story of a Snowstorm
They were calling for snow. Maybe you heard about it?
Few things kickstart the news cycle like the potential for extreme weather.
It’s no doubt a boon for web traffic — particularly weather websites.
The Weather Channel made the most of the moment. Its CEO did an interview with Fortune last Friday. That piece reported that the Weather Channel’s sites get about 70 million visits a day.
In the leadup to a big storm, weather website traffic can surge to more than 100 million visitors a day.
The Weather Channel now names each season’s winter storms to help raise awareness of hazards. Tropical storms and hurricanes have long been given names to make them more memorable.
This past weekend’s snowstorm was dubbed “Fern.”
Before storms, these sites and other forecasting agencies are instrumental in helping communities prepare. Effective communication is essential.
Weather or Not
Like all communications, weather forecasters are tasked with conveying the most accurate and impactful information to the most people at the right time.
For forecasters, those goals are often at odds. Predicting specific weather and timing over a broad area is challenging.
Take one of the most common forecasting goals – predicting precipitation. Forecasters call it Probability of Precipitation (PoP). PoP is calculated by multiplying two factors: Forecaster certainty that precipitation will form or move into the area, and the areal coverage of precipitation that is expected.
Here’s an example from the National Weather Service:
If the forecaster was 80% certain that rain would develop but only expected to cover 50% of the forecast area, then the forecast would read “a 40% chance of rain” for any given location.
Factors like the size of the area and where people move within that area both affect the accuracy (or perceived accuracy) of an already incredibly complex prediction.
Then there’s the channel the forecast is communicated on — from a two-minute local TV weather spot to a TikTok video to a single app on your phone’s home screen.
The complexity has prompted some weather experts to consider adopting a “storyline approach.” Per the BBC:
“In this style, forecasters could say things like, ‘What we’re seeing now is similar to what we saw at a certain event a few years ago’ – something within memory.”