Scientists communicate to non-peer audiences through numerous pathways including websites, blogs, public lectures, media interviews, and educational collaborations. A considerable amount of time and money is invested in this public engagement and these efforts are to a large extent responsible for the public perception of science. However, few incentives exist for researchers to optimize their communication practices to ensure effective outreach. This session encourages critical reflection on science communication practices and provides an opportunity for science communicators to share best practice and experiences with evaluation and research in this field.

DEALING with UNCERTAINTIES
This session will also include examples of how science can and should support decision-making. In this context a special section this year will be dedicated to the highly important issue of Dealing with Uncertainties:

Weather forecasts have matured substantially in providing reliable probabilistic predictions, with a useful quantification of forecast uncertainties. Including this information in the communication of forecasts and warnings, and integrating it into downstream models and decision-making processes has become increasingly common practice.

Including uncertainties not only implies the interpretation of ‘raw’ uncertainty information in ensemble forecasts, their post-processing, and visualization, but also the integration of a wide range of non-meteorological aspects such as vulnerability and exposure data to estimate risk and the social, psychological and economic aspects which affect human decision-making.

In this session, we aim to support a holistic perspective on issues that arise when making use of uncertainty information of weather forecasts in decision processes and applications.