Meghan Collins will be the first to tell you that there is a bit of a disconnect between the scientific community and the general public. She’ll also tell you that she’s working hard to change that.
Collins will be speaking at 9:15 a.m. today in the Hurlbut Church Sanctuary for the Chautauqua Science Group and the Chautauqua Climate Change Initiative. Her lecture will explore the work she is doing to use social science to more clearly communicate weather forecasts with the public — and how that work can be applied to the rest of the scientific community.
“When you notice a forecast that’s just off, … we often assume that it’s a problem of the complex physics models behind the forecast,” she said. “It might be, but it’s also a communication problem.”
Weather forecasts present a range of all possible weather outcomes using the probability that each will occur, Collins explained. That usually means that forecasters need to choose which weather outcome is the most likely to occur, and then communicate that through their forecast.
This approach, however, tends to leave out other crucial information. For example, a forecast may indicate that a certain area is going to receive one inch of snow, but there is also a 10% chance that the area may receive 10 inches of snow; that 10% chance is rarely, if ever, communicated to the public, but it could be greatly helpful to know that the possibility is still on the table, Collins said.
“Our work is focused on using tools from humanities and social sciences to understand what people want from their forecasts so that we can meet them there,” she said.
That means that Collins and the researchers she works with at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada are focused on finding out what information actually matters to individual communities. The goal of this kind of research, she said, is to create weather forecasts that are specifically tailored to each of those individual communities, rather than forecasts that fit the standard, cookie-cutter approach that has become the norm in weather forecasting.
But the issues that Collins and her fellow researchers are attempting to address extend beyond weather forecasting. Broadly, lines of communication between scientists and the public have become very clouded, she explained, and the scientific community often has trouble explaining complicated concepts to the public in ways that are digestible and easy to understand. Collins believes that is because many scientists don’t actually know what information the public really needs.
“One of the things that I have taken up when I work with colleagues is to try to dispel the assumption that people just need more information to be able to make better decisions,” she said. “People make decisions on the basis of their values, their beliefs and a whole suite of factors, … not whether they know how many parts per million or what the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is.”
By working in specific communities and talking with people individually, Collins believes that researchers will be able to pinpoint the exact things that those communities care about, and then work with scientists to ensure that information is being presented the most clearly. Understanding that a snow forecast means a very different thing in Buffalo than it does in Texas or California, she said, means that forecasters can make sure the most important information always makes its way to communities first.
Today, Collins will invite to Chautauquans to take part in her research — in a way. She will be showing some of the interactive models that researchers have come up with to more clearly communicate weather forecasts, and she hopes that Chautauquans will leave the lecture with an understanding that scientists and researchers are working hard to make the weather more understandable.
“I hope that (Chautauquans) will be pleasantly surprised to know how hard meteorologists and social scientists are working to make their weather forecasts better,” she said. “We’re actually working really hard behind the scenes to make this better, but we understand how frustrating it is when the weather forecast isn’t right.”
