Communicating Weather on Digital Platforms - How AccuWeather Meteorologists Help People Make Better Decisions

As our understanding of the atmosphere evolves and the computing resources to model the atmosphere become more accurate, communicating the forecast to users remains as important as ever. Since the first radio and television weather forecasts, the role of the meteorologist has required effective communication for users to make better weather-impacted decisions. Now, as consumers glean weather forecasts and information from digital sources such as weather apps, websites, and social media outlets, meteorologists are called upon to create new ways to communicate the impacts and context of the weather forecast concisely and effectively. Over its 60-year history, AccuWeather has pioneered many advances in the field of weather communication, including the industry’s first 7-day local television forecast, AccuWeather RealFeel ® Temperature, and AccuWeather RealImpact^TM Scale for Hurricanes. Meteorologists were crucial to the development of each of these innovations, and meteorologists remain at the heart of AccuWeather’s mission to save lives, protect property and help people, businesses and communities prosper – enabling better decisions. AccuWeather meteorologists are an integral part of an innovative forecast process that combines human expertise with state-of-the-science data ingestion, processing, and analysis methods. This process continuously evolves to ensure forecasts that are provided to a variety of users such as governments, businesses, and the general public are the most actionable, timely, and detailed. By providing forecasts that are the most accurate, localized, and impact-based, AccuWeather communicates weather information worldwide that helps people make decisions to improve their lives. The ways in which AccuWeather helps the public to understand the complexity of the forecast will be discussed in addition to unique role of the meteorologist at AccuWeather.