MbShea@PWP@English@UMCP

Abstract: Many meteorologists are trained to forecast and communicate weather and/or climate changes. The problem is that there are people besides the trained forecasters care about the weather and forecasting. This poses a dilemma where the veterans and amateur forecasters come in to deduce severe weather and take it more or less severely than they should, as well as to whether or not the public or audience should trust the forecaster. For example, a veteran forecaster comes in and one day, communicates the wrong weather towards the public, predicting a town to be under a winter storm watch for tomorrow. When that day comes, the weather ends up being a warning at the last minute and the town ends up getting about four feet of snow. Then, the next day, a new forecaster comes in to predict the weather; considering the previous forecaster got the weather wrong, should the audience trust the new guy or risk going back to the veteran again? Better use of risk communication and weather analysis can help in getting the audience’s trust in believing weather severity.

Reader’s Profile: This is a reader who finds forecasts unreliable and a waist of time and would rather risk being uninformed on the potential weather for the future.

Reader’s Response: Last winter’s forecasting was all right. However, meteorologists have a tendency of getting the wrong readings for snowfall. When the snowstorm had hit my area, they had predicted we would get around one-to-two feet of snow, solely because those were the readings that were recorded when the storm hit the neighboring cities before us. When it came, we got three-to-four feet of snow. The meteorologists took into account the storm’s current strength, not the possibility of the storm gaining strength before hitting us. I wonder if these forecasters actually know what they are talking about or if they actually care about the daily change in weather.

H -- not sure this title supports your planned set of documents. Revise to tone into one of improving communication and not blaming.

This abstract seems to be different from the document we discussed.

Touch base with me now about your changed audience/context/purpose.