Come for lunch and to hear Phaedra Daipha (Sociology) here at Eagleton on October 23rd (Thursday) at Noon – see below*.

This is the first of our work in progress presentation over lunch meetings - designed to last no more than an hour.

(Our parking lot will be open to all comers!)

*
“Who Can Predict Mother Nature?: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth”

Based on fieldwork at a forecasting office of the National Weather Service (NWS), I discuss how NWS forecasters make sense of the present and see into the future of the weather. I establish that NWS forecasters must contend with partial, non-overlapping, and often contradictory weather information, derived from a wide variety of sources. Framing weather forecasting as a process of complexity distillation, I introduce the heuristic of the “total observation collage” to analyze how NWS forecasters negotiate between place and space; between past knowledge, present reality, and future probability; between multiple logics of telling the weather. Further, I draw from interviews with fishermen in the US North Atlantic to problematize the notion of meteorological expertise. And I conclude by arguing that the reason the NWS remains the official mouthpiece of U.S. weather has relatively little to do with the accuracy of its forecasts. It is to the information