On warnings, communication, Monday morning quarterbacking, or how Ryan Hall won me over, y'all
The "Twitchification" of weather coverage is messy, but some people are doing it well and reaching millions of people in the process.
Several years ago, back when Twitter was still somewhat hospitable, someone in meteorology began a hashtag trend dubbed #howtostartametfight. How to start a met fight. In other words, you’d share a take that would almost certainly incite rabid responses. I’ll be honest, meteorologists tend to get pretty worked up over stuff. I think years of being joked with and teased about how “we can be right half the time and still keep our jobs” makes us inherently a little annoyed.
A good example of this recently was The Onion sharing the headline “Understaffed National Weather Service Still Weeks Away From Issuing Kentucky Tornado Warning.” It’s The Onion. When you get The Onion treatment, your best bet is to chuckle and move along. But a lot of meteorologists took offense to this. And to be truthful, I understand why. The office in question that issued the tornado warnings in Kentucky had announced literally days before the storms that they were ceasing 24/7 operations because of staffing shortages caused by “strongly encouraged” early retirements, layoffs, and buyouts implemented by the Trump Administration. They’re one of a handful of offices doing this, though few are as prone to extreme weather as this office’s area. And in the “fog of war” as Ian Livingston aptly put it on Monday, this translated to a lot of people believing that this office didn’t get warnings out in a timely manner Friday night. That was not the case.
Indeed, it’s important to first and foremost credit the NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky for surely saving many lives the other night due to early, timely warnings. The tornado warnings on the storm that moved into Somerset, KY and onward toward London, KY were issued well in advance. There were questions as to why the warning was not upgraded sooner to, say, a tornado emergency, as you’ll see below. But the fact of the matter is that residents had warning. And it’s not as if the forecast was a total surprise. This had been discussed for several days in advance. The office would not be left unstaffed in this situation. And people were most likely aware that it was a higher end weather day.
However…
Here’s the thing. When you have limited staffing, or, say, 10 employees doing the work of 15 to 18, this becomes a problem. Some may call that an example of extreme efficiency. Maybe that can fly in a factory that makes widgets. But in an office that is there to keep the public safe, informed, and protected, it’s a long-term recipe for disaster. There is no margin for error, or at least extremely little margin for error in NWS offices. It’s a system that has worked countless times over the years in an agency that, relative to others in government, is already operating in an incredibly efficient manner. So did it all work this time? Yes. Will it work next time? Or will employees be burned out? Will they be tired and miss things? Will they be so overworked that it begins to take a toll on their personal lives? Do we want people in those situations having to deal with monitoring and issuing warnings that will save the lives of others? Or do we want them rested, operating at peak focus, and happy in their work knowing that they make a difference and get treated with proper respect by their employer? NWS’ers sacrifice, often and a lot, to achieve the mission of protecting lives and property. They’re the truest definition of civil servants. Perhaps we should be lionizing them instead of making them fight to even have a functioning toilet.
Which leads me to my next point. In this environment, communication is critical. I am a science communicator, and after about 21 years of communicating weather forecasts in ways people can use them, I consider myself to be pretty well-versed in what makes good weather communication. I struggle to say “expert,” because I’m a meteorologist but not a formally trained communicator. Maybe I am an expert. I don’t know. Whatever the case, I’d like to think I know a good communicator when I see one. And right now, we’re operating in a world of weather communication that is becoming a heck of a lot more a la carte than “waiting for the 6 PM news.”
How to start a met fight
Harkening back to the opening statement of this post: If you want to start a met fight, start talking about YouTubers that broadcast severe weather coverage. You’ll get opinions. I’m even guilty of this. I have lovingly referred to YouTube as a “cesspool” of weather information in the past. And that’s still true. There’s a ton of content on YouTube that is just unspeakably bad garbage. And unfortunately for some of those on the platform that actually devote time to putting together quality information, they often get taken down with takes like that.
In the wake of the Kentucky tornadoes, I was drawn to a post shared by a friend and colleague of mine. It was on Instagram, but the person, who operates Connor’s Climate Corner posted a pretty exasperated take where he expressed frustration at the NWS for not issuing a particularly dangerous situation (PDS) warning for the storms in Kentucky.
I’m not going to share his take, lest I feed the beast, but I am going to share a screenshot with you from YouTube of his channel.
He made clear to state how he saw a storm that (to him) should have been warned PDS 30 minutes before the NWS tagged it as such. Someone in his chat or Discord noted that they’re understaffed, to which he replied that “well if I’m one person and I can do it, they can. We’re not doing that.”
Let me make one thing perfectly clear to anyone out there: Unless you’ve sat in that seat and had to make that call, you have absolutely no idea what it’s like. You have the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking every day of your life. They don’t. One thing that fascinates me about meteorology is how pompous and egotistical some can be in this field, a field where, yes, we do sometimes get things wrong.
Weather communication enters its Twitch era
But let’s look at his layout up there. About 1/3 of the screen is him or some element of his setup. The other 2/3 is weather. This is what I call the “Twitchification” of weather coverage. This looks more like a gamer than someone trying to communicate life-saving weather information. And before anyone says “Well, maybe he’s just offering his takes on weather and not really in the business of trying to get out critical information,” one look at his TikTok says that he wants to be seen as offering critical information to people.
Look, I know nothing about Connor or his climate corner (or what it has to do with climate vs. what it actually has to do with weather), but based on that one clip of him, quite literally ranting about the understaffed and overworked office that had issued a warning with many minutes of lead time, it was enough to stop me in my tracks and say, “No thank you.”
Ryan Hall Y’all
Let’s go a different direction. Here’s a screenshot of a snippet of Ryan Hall’s broadcast.
The little robot is an AI assistant that he uses to catch up on chat comments. The rest of the screen, while busy, is actually pretty informative. You want to start another met fight? Bring up Ryan Hall.
I’m going to say something that won’t sit well with some people in the meteorology community here. I have been thinking this for a while now, but as a meteorologist and weather communicator, I know for fact that if you want to earn your audience’s trust, you need to find a way to connect with them. Many good communicators have this ability. I do it more through words than video, but others do it through video or broadcast meteorology. Ryan Hall has a strong ability to connect with his audience. And beyond that, he’s pretty good at it too.
The forecast videos a lot of folks see are somewhat bombastic, full of quick hitting stuff, really LOUD headlines, etc. To a lot of us, me included, that’s off-putting. For some people? It works. But when rubber meets the road; whether your ability to connect with your audience pays dividends on big weather days, that’s what actually matters.
I watched a recording of Ryan’s livestream from Friday night. What it wasn’t? Bombastic, loud, over the top. What it was? Empathetic, informative, useful. For all the talk about Y’all warnings or watches that there’s been around meteorology, he was extremely deferential to NWS warnings. He did push the issue with the lack of PDS warning in Somerset, but he also noted that the NWS was understaffed. He even apologized at one point for possibly coming off too flippant about the issue. Unlike Connor he didn’t express belief that because he was one person and believed it should be a PDS warning that the NWS should do better. It should be noted that whether the understaffing was one of the reasons a PDS warning was not issued sooner is not known. Again, when you’re in that seat, it’s not as easy as we all may think. To Ryan’s credit, he channeled his frustration toward hoping that people in Somerset got warning. It was constructive frustration, not destructive.
He also juggled the other concurrent warnings elsewhere with the right amount of acknowledgement without dwelling on them and coming back to the biggest problem, which was in Somerset. One thing he does well is discuss landmarks in the path of storm, a function that broadcast meteorologists often perform well too.
Again, as a weather communicator, what I care about is whether a good, accurate message is getting through to an audience when it counts. Ryan is doing just that. Game recognizes game. And while there may be diverging opinions in the field of meteorology about his work, from my vantage point it seems it’s working, it’s working well, and I can’t find much of anything to be upset about here. And he’s reaching a metric ton of people in the process. Is that not what we want?
Max Velocity
For the purposes of this, I wanted to primarily focus on Ryan, as he’s been a lightning rod since he started. I did also sample some of Max Velocity’s work. He speaks with the confidence of a veteran broadcast meteorologist, yet he’s awfully young, which is impressive.
His demeanor differs from Ryan Hall’s in significant ways. He pushed the NWS PDS warning issue a little harder than Ryan but still understood that this office was in a bit of a unique position due to staffing. But he speaks a little more authoritatively. He seems focused on the meteorology and the informational element to keep people safe is somewhat secondary. At least that’s how it comes off. Which is not at all saying anything negative. That’s just how he covers this stuff, and he also does a very good job. The notification in-stream of a new issued warning can be somewhat distracting, but overall it’s the same idea. Not a ton of chest-thumping, not much schtick. Mostly just information.
What to make of all this?
A few things stand out to me based on all this.
First, there is a ton of focus on the “tiers” of tornado warnings. Just to reiterate: Despite the staffing constraints, the Jackson, KY office did great work on Friday night, which undoubtedly saved lives. Will it work this way in the future with extreme austerity? Probably not. If this is the model for the future of NWS being instituted by this administration, eventually it will implode on itself.
Most of the noise surrounding this event came from people annoyed that the NWS didn’t issue a PDS warning or tornado emergency. First off, no matter what “flavor” of warning is issued, people will still be notified. So anyone claiming that the people in the path (that were under tornado warnings issued comfortably in advance of the storm) had no warning is incorrect. Your phone alerts will be triggered if it’s an emergency or a garden variety warning.
Secondly, while the impact-based designation probably would have been very applicable here (going from radar indicated to radar confirmed and “considerable” or even PDS), it would not have impacted whether or not people got the warning. It’s tough to say that issuing it at any given point would have saved lives, but admittedly given what was on radar, it probably wouldn’t have hurt. Time will tell what happened there and why, but I would maintain it made little difference in the grand scheme of things.
And as for a tornado emergency. It is issued in extreme cases when the storm is producing confirmed catastrophic damage. A debris ball or correlation coefficient TDS indicates damage — not a guarantee of catastrophic damage. Was there a case to be made to issue one in Somerset over the weekend? Probably. Does it mean they failed at their job? No. Did people still receive warning? Yes. Again, something that perhaps merits conversation but not something worth blasting out an Instagram video complaining about. Instead of focusing on the terminology and getting all hot and bothered over semantics, we need to focus on the problem set, which in this case was the tornado. Some did that better than others. But we all need to realize that presumably very few people really know these different nuances.
Next, we, as meteorologists cannot just brush off a couple people racking up millions of views of their live streams during high-end severe events as some kind of nuisance we’re above dealing with. I freely admit that I had preconceived notions about Ryan Hall Y’all’s work. But I watched what he did Friday, and I walked away impressed. His viewers will probably say, “Well, took you long enough.” And that’s a fair complaint. Clearly, people like Ryan and Max are doing something that works and reaches people. Instead of “get off my lawning” them, maybe we should be looking at how we can more effectively engage them, work with them, help them reach more people, make them part of the formal “weather enterprise” instead of outcasts, study why what they’re doing works so well with their audience, and so on. This is part of a broader topic I want to touch on eventually which is why we need to find unique ways of connecting the public to science in ways that makes them supportive of what we do. Instead of coming off holier than thou art, we need to check ourselves a little.
It’s a two-way street too. We need fewer bad actors and people demeaning the work of the NWS (like the first guy) and more empathy that they’re doing the best they can given the cards they were dealt. Most of us in the field know that. We need the public to recognize this and fight for them too. We need the Ryan Hall’s and Max Velocity’s of the world to make sure their audiences know that much of what they do to help amplify the NWS message is done with tools created via NOAA research or using NOAA data. All of this is at risk right now. We don’t need to be pontificating and giving science lessons all the time, but we need ways to get that out more broadly.
Above all else, it needs to be reiterated: They’re reaching millions of people. That’s exceptionally consequential for us and our work as a community. We need to recognize and respect that.