Reflections on three decades of Weather Broadcasting

In June 2004 the First (and so far only) World Conference on Broadcast Meteorology was held in Barcelona. It brought together many broadcast meteorologists from Europe and the US, as well as a good selection from the developing world who attended a pre-Conference training workshop. The FWCBM was organised by the International Association for Broadcast Meteorology (IABM) in conjunction with (and substantially financed by) Forum Barcelona 2004.

The mid-1990’s was an active time in fomenting cooperation in European meteorological circles. The EMS itself came into being during the mid-to-late 1990s. The IABM had been established in 1994 as an association of weather broadcasters, building on contacts that had been established by the Festival International de Meteo, now succeeded by the Forum International de Meteo.

One of the big questions troubling European meteorology in the 1990’s was the availability and cost of weather data, and the implications of this challenge for weather broadcasters was one of the key motivating factors behind the establishment of the IABM. As the Association developed, however, it became an outlet for weather broadcasters to discuss other challenges, such as how they should approach the question of climate change within their daily work – a challenge that remains with us.

In the developed world of the 1990’s the medium of television was still “king” when it came to communicating weather information. The FWBCM in 2004 took place on the cusp of change, as the use of the internet was becoming mainstream as a new communication medium for information, including weather information. Facebook was launched that year, and three years later the first iPhone was launched.

In this presentation Gerald Fleming, one of the Co-Chairs of the FWCBM, will reflect on the event and on how the landscape of weather broadcasting has changed utterly over the past decades.