OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS

Selling the Weather

The climate is becoming more extreme, and so is the way we watch it.

From The New Yorker
April 3, 2000

Getting up early on the morning of January 24th, I thought the city seemed oddly quiet, but it wasn’t until I looked out the window that I saw the snow. The “Surprise Storm” that hit the East Coast of the United States that morning was under way, dumping as much as twenty inches of snow in Raleigh, eight and a half in Philadelphia, and six in New York. For the previous three weeks, unseasonably balmy weather had been the topic of small talk everywhere: why was it so warm, wasn’t it weird that there was no snow–was it another sign of global warming? Now the first big winter storm of the season comes along, and the National Weather Service, the federal government’s weather agency, doesn’t put out an advisory until ten o’clock the night before. (The N.W.S. had been on the network news just a week earlier, announcing new weather supercomputers, which are supposed to make forecasts even more accurate.) Forecasters had seen a low-pressure system moving toward the southeast on the National Weather Service’s satellite pictures, but all the major computer models said the storm would head out to sea. As Elliot Abrams, the chief forecaster and senior vice-president of the State College, Pennsylvania, forecasting company AccuWeather, told me later, “Who am I to say the numerical guidance is wrong?”

I turned on the Weather Channel, as I always do for big storms. The forecast may have been inadequate, but the live coverage was superb. In New York City, the Weather Channel was out in force, filming cars driving through slushy puddles and reporters sticking rulers into the snow in Central Park. I settled in for a little “weatherporn”–the voyeuristic weather-watching experience that has become a condition of modern life.

Ever since widespread weather-data collection began, shortly after the invention of the telegraph, in the eighteen-forties, accurate forecasting has been the goal of the weather report. But in recent years TV weather has given increasing time and emphasis to live pictures of weather, usually in the viewing area, but sometimes elsewhere if the weather is atrocious and the pictures dramatic–and this is transforming the weather report. In some respects, these broadcasts seem more like news than like “weather” in the traditional sense. Weather “events” are hyped, covered, and analyzed, just like politics and sports. (The Weather Channel acknowledged this in a recent TV ad created by Chiat/Day which depicted weather enthusiasts in the guise of sports fanatics, their faces painted like weather maps, rooting for lows and highs in a fictional “weather bar” known as the Front.) At the same time, the news, which once stuck to human affairs, now includes an ever larger number of weather-related stories. From 1989 to 1995, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, weather coverage wasn’t among the top-ten topics on the nightly network news. In 1996, it was eighth, and in 1998 it was fourth–more than eleven hundred weather-related stories ran altogether. (According to the American Red Cross, 1998 was the most expensive year ever for natural-disaster relief.) Wild weather is also a standard component of reality-based programming on Fox and the Discovery Channel. And in book publishing recent best-sellers like “The Perfect Storm,” “Into Thin Air,” and “Isaac’s Storm” have helped create a hot market for weather-related disaster stories. This is not so much a new market, though, as a revival of one of the oldest genres in publishing: Increase Mather’s 1684 book “Remarkable Providences,” which includes several chapters on extreme weather around New England, was one of the early weather thrillers in the New World.

This newsier approach to weather, with its focus on weather events to help boost ratings, means certain kinds of weather get overblown while less telegenic but no less significant weather is overlooked. Take heat, for example. Eight of the ten warmest years on record occurred in the nineteen-nineties, the two others in the eighties. (If the planet continues to warm at the present rate, some climatologists predict an increase in global surface temperatures of between two and a half and six degrees by the year 2100.) But heat doesn’t do particularly well on television. You can track a blizzard on Doppler radar as it moves up a map of the East Coast, but you can’t watch heat. And drought, as Robert Henson, a writer at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the author of a book about TV weathercasting, told me recently, “is the ultimate non-event. You usually hear about the drought only when some rain event comes along to end it.”

This is an old complaint–that ratings-driven, storm-of-the-century-style coverage makes it harder to get accurate information about the weather–and it has been heard here in New York at least as far back as the overhyped Hurricane Gloria, in 1985. But it’s not only the broadcasters’ doing: the public’s fascination with wild weather is apparently inexhaustible. We live in peaceful, prosperous times, when the only massive external threat to home and hearth is weather. When a big storm comes along, you can almost feel the nation girding its loins as people gratefully turn their attention away from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

Could our preoccupation with storms reflect a more profound shift in the way we think about the weather? Ever since that famous day, in June, 1752, when Benjamin Franklin and his son flew a kite in a thunderstorm and proved that lightning was electricity, storm science has been the subject of reasoned deduction, free of the superstition that Puritan theologians brought to their doom-haunted accounts of terrible weather. Today’s fears about global warming may represent the end of this age of enlightenment. With growing public awareness of changes in the climate, and a readiness to link those changes to any and all weather anomalies, we appear to be moving away from Franklin’s school of meteorology and back toward an Increase Mather school, in which extreme weather is taken as a sign of cosmic displeasure for our failure as stewards of the earth.

Hurricane Floyd, the most damaging storm of 1999, was a good example of the collision of what might be called weather values and broadcast values–the need to give people an accurate forecast, on the one hand, and the desire to put on a good show, on the other. From a broadcasting point of view, Floyd was a perfect storm. Its frightful satellite image made its début on the national screens on Friday morning, September 10th, still fourteen hundred miles east of Florida, and then enjoyed several nights of analysis and commentary as it approached the United States, allowing the media time to deploy crews along the coast. By Tuesday, Floyd was the leading news story in the country. The Weather Channel set a new single-day ratings record, breaking the previous record it had set, on January 7, 1996, during “the Great Blizzard of ’96.” Weather.com, the Weather Channel’s Web site, also set a record, with twenty-three and a half million page views on Tuesday. Broadcasters in every field were trying to get those satellite pictures of Floyd on the air. (“Entertainment Tonight” led with the storm on Wednesday, under the rubric “Stars Evacuate.”)

President Clinton cut short his stay in New Zealand, where he was trying to mediate in the East Timor crisis, and came home. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush made statements about the storm; Gore, looking to solidify his appeal as the weather candidate, even did a phone-in interview on the Weather Channel.

But none of the news coverage of Floyd helped much to prepare for the actual storm, and in some ways it may have hindered preparation. The National Weather Service’s Floyd forecast provoked the largest evacuation in American history, and it turned out that very few of the people who left their homes needed to go. Almost all the expensive beach houses that you saw on television were unharmed; it was the farmers inland who were wiped out by the flooding that followed the storm, and most people weren’t prepared for that.

The N.W.S. forecast–made by government forecasters working in the much photographed National Hurricane Center, in Miami–declared that an extremely severe storm would slam into Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night. So advised, I flew to Charleston on Tuesday to join a Weather Channel crew waiting for Floyd. My flight was full of nervous property owners and media people. A man behind me said he lived in Boston and had a weekend house on Folly Beach; he was flying down to board it up. “I always wanted a place on the beach, so I figured why not,” he said. “But this is scary.”

As the plane descended toward Charleston, I looked down at Interstate 26 and saw the largest traffic jam I have ever witnessed; even from five hundred feet the cars stretched as far as
I could see to the red horizon. (The local paper later reported that it took people fifteen hours to go sixty miles.) The old motto of Charleston, “Come hell or high water,” seemed to have yielded to a new motto: “If the Weather Channel says go, go.”

Heading toward Folly, I had the eastbound side of the Interstate pretty much to myself. A religious program was on the radio; a caller was explaining that God could not be in the storm, because in the Bible Jesus condemns the storm, and he wouldn’t do that if his own Father was in it, would he? This was interrupted by a news conference in which Governor Jim Hodges was upgrading the voluntary evacuation order to a mandatory order for all residents along the Intracoastal Waterway. All the hotels and stores in Charleston were closing, and by the time I arrived at the Folly Holiday Inn, where the Weather Channel crew was filming, it had nearly shut down.

I stood on Folly Beach and looked down the beautiful curve of sand with those expensive homes built cheek by jowl along it–the stacked chips of twenty fat years in the American economy, combined with a quiet period in major Atlantic hurricanes that now seemed to be coming to an end. I wandered a couple of streets back from the beach, into a funky-looking convenience store, called Bert’s, that hadn’t yet closed, and I loaded up on supplies, buying items I hadn’t bought since I was a kid–Pop-Tarts, Nilla wafers, Hawaiian Punch. Most of the customers were surfers, who had come out for the waves. The checkout girl was looking up at the TV as she absent-mindedly bagged my purchases, and saying to no one in particular that she ought to get out to the beach to be interviewed by that dude from the Weather Channel.

Jeff Morrow, one of the channel’s on-camera meteorologists, was at Folly Pier getting ready to do a live shot. (At the Weather Channel, a forecaster is called an O.C.M., although Morrow refers to himself as “the talent.”) A freelance cameraman–wearing black jeans, no shoes, and a wild-man look you sometimes see in cameramen–was framing the shot in a digital Betacam. A second cameraman was out filming people getting ready for the hurricane: loading up on plywood, for instance, at the Home Depot, a major Weather Channel advertiser. Morrow had a winning lack of cynicism about his job in the media. Because O.C.M.s cover bad weather, which is supposedly nobody’s fault, they seem to be able to maintain a youthful enthusiasm. (Every single O.C.M. I met traced an interest in the weather back to childhood.) They also get an enthusiastic reception out in the field. “These Weather Channel guys are treated like frigging royalty,” I was told by Bruce Fauzer, a satellite-truck operator who was working with Morrow on Floyd. “Usually, local people treat the media like scum–vultures preying on a disaster. But local people love these Weather Channel guys. When we were in North Carolina for Dennis”–the hurricane that had threatened the East Coast a week earlier–“people were coming to the truck with plates of ribs, cold drinks, pie, you name it. It was amazing.”

In between updates from Morrow, the Weather Channel was broadcasting the National Weather Service’s data. During storms, the Weather Channel gives much play to its tropical-storm experts–they include Dr. Steve Lyons and John Hope, the eighty-year-old Cronkite-style co-anchor of the Severe Weather Update desk. But, as far as severe-weather warnings go, the Weather Channel broadcasts only the National Weather Service’s bulletin. (In times of an emergency, such as a hurricane, the N.W.S.’s forecast is supposed to be transmitted by all weather broadcasters.) Even if a staff meteorologist disagrees with that forecast, the channel will not break rank with the N.W.S., a practice the Weather Channel’s vice-president, Ray Ban, chalks up to the importance of “being on the same page, weatherwise.”

The National Weather Service’s forecast was based in part on a computer model running on a Cray T-90 supercomputer at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in Princeton. Another computer model, which is used by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, in London, was beginning to spit out a different forecast for Floyd, showing the storm weakening and turning north, and eventually making landfall near Wilmington, North Carolina, between fifty and seventy-five miles farther east than the N.W.S.’s predicted track of the storm in the eighteen to twenty-four hours preceding its arrival. The European forecast would prove correct, and by Tuesday night AccuWeather–which for the past thirty-eight years has sold forecasts to newspapers and TV and radio stations–had started to use that forecast, which its clients passed along to local markets. Elliot Abrams said that the same computer model had worked well with Hurricane Dennis, and “when a model has a hot hand you stay with it.” But Weather Channel viewers weren’t aware of the other forecast. I had spent the whole day with the Weather Channel, and I heard the correct forecast only when I got back to the hotel that night and turned on the local news.

I grew up at the agricultural end of New Jersey, which is still remarkably open country–lots of farms, few trees, and houses spaced half a mile or so apart. My father had been a farmer for most of his life, as had his father and grandfather, and we were acutely attuned to the weather as a kind of adversary–at best benign, at worst terrible and awesome in the Old Testament sense. In the summers, I worked for a local farmer, hauling sections of metal irrigation pipe among the rows of vegetables. When you’re a mile or so from cover, carrying around thirty-foot-long conductive tubes, you become used to watching the sky for signs of bad weather: getting caught by a thunderstorm under a single lonely tree out there in the midst of all that space, and facing the real possibility that lightning will strike, fills you with a kind of terror you never quite forget.

At breakfast, my father would read out the weather report from the newspaper, and we would discuss whether it was good or bad for the crops. It was usually either too dry or too wet, or both, as happened in 1972, when Hurricane Agnes came up the East Coast and hit South Jersey. I remember the lines in one farmer’s face as he surveyed his peppers, covered in two feet of salt water. The road we lived on used to be connected to a causeway that was taken out in a 1938 hurricane (the N.W.S. didn’t start naming hurricanes until 1947), and I would ride my bike down there and look in wonder through the muddy water at the broken concrete slabs, disappearing into the muck and ooze.

Back then, in the seventies, the weather on TV was somewhat comic, partly because the notion that anyone could reliably predict the weather was still funny, and also because TV weathermen were more likely to be monologuists than meteorologists. David Letterman began his career as a weatherman, in Indiana, and his “Late Show” gags preserve the spirit of an era when weathermen would make hip-checking movements that, with any luck, would send an approaching low out to sea. Those days, when Willard Scott once read the forecast dressed as Carmen Miranda, are gone now, as, inspired by the Weather Channel’s example, weathercasters have generally adopted the demeanor of a scientist rather than that of an entertainer.

I moved to New York City in the eighties. This common American experience, moving from farm to town, which in most families happened a generation or two ago, affects a person on many levels, but one of the most profound is the change in the weather.

In my first New York apartment, which had a view of an alley and a fire escape, weather was no longer the Shakespearean epic of wind and sky it had been on the farm. Being weather-wise in the city means making weather inferences: seeing patches of sky between buildings and guessing what the rest might look like, or learning to measure wind speed by how violently the stop sign you can see from your office is rattling on its pole.

That’s when I started watching TV weather. The satellite and Doppler-radar pictures that now illustrated the weather report were like really good views that I didn’t have from my apartment. Images from the federal government’s polar and geostationary weather satellites, maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which hover twenty-two thousand miles above the earth, had begun to appear on television in the eighties, as had other pictures from the N.W.S.’s network of a hundred and sixty-one radar observation stations around the country. (In recent years, many broadcasters and private weather companies have invested in their own equipment; WNBC’s much publicized Doppler radar is a large white ball sitting on top of Rockefeller Center.) Doppler radar was a crucial innovation and allowed forecasters to show the weather moving–particles in clouds coming toward the radar compress sound waves, while particles in clouds moving away expand them–rather than merely diagramming fronts with a grease pencil on a clear plastic board.

I became what’s known in the weather industry as a “tracker.” To be slouched in an armchair on a hot night on Long Island, with the lights off, windows open, mosquitoes flitting around the colored lights of the satellite pictures, watching a hurricane that is still a thousand miles out in the Atlantic and bearing down on Florida is my idea of good TV. My best tracking experience was Hurricane Bob, which came up the East Coast in August of 1991. This was the same weekend that the coup took place in Russia, and I spent a good deal of Sunday night clicking back and forth between the Weather Channel, which showed Bob approaching Long Island, and CNN, where Boris Yeltsin could be seen confronting the tanks. The old world order was breaking down, and the new order would be less stable, more chaotic–more like weather. Weather was becoming a metaphor for
a kind of uncertainty that exists inside any very large system. Politics, once like war, would be like weather (“hurricane george!” screamed the headline in the Post in February, when W. won South Carolina). Media were becoming like weather, too–the way a big story crashed through the culture, submerging all other discourse in its storm surge of repetition, then disappearing quickly, leaving behind a weird deadness, like the aftermath of a big storm.

I went to the Weather Channel’s headquarters, in Atlanta, in July, 1999, a visit that coincided with the beginning of a heat wave in New York. The day before I left, the Times reported that parts of the Sunrise Highway, on Long Island, had “liquefied” in the heat. The cab I took to the airport overheated on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the cabdriver, a Haitian, peering under the hood, made the washing motions with his hands I had seen tut-tut drivers in Port-au-Prince use when their wretched machines broke down. I proceeded toward Tillary Street on foot, trying to stick to the curb on the inside of the roadway, but the hardy little bushes growing out of the concrete were sooty and began to begrime the khaki pants I was planning to wear the next day to the Weather Channel, so I moved off the curb and was now loping along on the roadway, inside the turn–a bad place to be. It occurred to me that this is how you get killed by the weather in New York City. I managed to reach the airport in time, only to find that the flight had been cancelled. Explanation? “Weather.”

When the Weather Channel went on the air, in 1982, it seemed like a bad idea. The morning shows like “Today” and “Good Morning America” did a national weather report, but generally gave it no more than a couple of minutes. People liked to watch weather on TV–the weather forecast had long been the most popular part of the local news–but who would be desperate or idle enough to watch a twenty-four-hour weather channel, mostly featuring weather in other parts of the country or the world? Today, the Weather Channel seems like a great idea. Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, thunderstorms, blizzards–who doesn’t like to watch that stuff? Fifteen million people tune in to the Weather Channel at least once a day, and the service, which is now in more than seventy-four million homes, reportedly generated about a hundred million dollars in operating profits in 1998.
The idea came from John Coleman, a weathercaster on “Good Morning America” in the nineteen-seventies. Coleman, tired of having his weather time taken away by celebrity coverage, was convinced that people would watch a lot more weather if they could. He advocated a no-frills approach, with none of the jokiness of network weather, and a lot more science and analysis. (Coleman was himself a veteran of happy weather: residents of Chicago, where Coleman was a weatherman before going to “Good Morning America,” remember his threat to do the forecast standing on his head if it rained one more day.) He took his idea to Frank Batten, the chairman of Landmark Communications, a privately held company based in Norfolk, Virginia, which owns the Roanoke Times, among other media properties, and Landmark agreed to finance the channel.
Coleman had envisaged a purely national channel, but Landmark insisted on including regional broadcasts in order to sell the channel in local markets (which still account for a large part of the Weather Channel’s advertising revenue), and developed a technology that allowed the channel to intersperse regional forecasts–tailored to more than three hundred areas–amid national programming. Known as the star system, this is the same technology that sends local emergency warning signals crawling across your TV screen.

In its first season, though, the Weather Channel lost more than ten million dollars and generated headlines like “when it rains it bores.” The graphics were crude, Doppler radar hadn’t been invented yet, and the programming was monotonous. Coleman, who was the president of the company, departed in 1983, after disagreements with Landmark about how the business should be run. (That year he filed a lawsuit against Landmark, but the matter was settled out of court.) After Coleman’s departure, the Weather Channel began receiving significant subscriber fees from cable providers, and this helped make the business more viable.

It was its coverage of a hurricane–Elena, in 1985–that first brought the Weather Channel widespread public attention. Though the original aim was to cover weather in a sober, scientific manner, the Weather Channel noticed that there was a ratings spike whenever a big storm came along. By the time Hugo hit South Carolina, in 1989, the Weather Channel had become the source to turn to during weather emergencies. Four years later, Hurricane Andrew extended that reputation. Now you can tune in to “Hurricane Season” (it lasts almost as long as hockey season, from June 1st to November 30th), “Tornado Season,” “Nor’easter Season,” and “Winter Storm Season.”

Weather Channel meteorologists use National Weather Service satellite and radar pictures, which are made available by the N.W.S. for a relatively modest access fee, to illustrate their national weather reports. These images are often further colorized to show the density of the cloud tops in different shades–red at the core, pulsing orange around that, and beyond that a malignant-looking purple, a new color in the Weather Channel’s 1999 palette. (These colorized pictures–whether they’re of hurricanes or mere “T-cell activity,” as they say on the Weather Channel–may not always be accurate depictions of how severe a storm is on the ground. But the pictures look frightening. When they look really frightening, as was the case with Floyd, people leave their homes.)

Any hour of programming generally follows the same format. At the top of the hour is “Weather Center,” a seven-minute roundup of the nation’s weather, followed by four minutes of “Travel Wise,” aimed at business travellers, and four minutes of the “Weekly Planner,” which offers forecasts of up to seven days. There’s another “Weather Center” on the half-hour, and “Storm Watch” at fifty minutes past the hour. Much of the information is the same–it’s only the context that changes. You know this, but you watch anyway, rendered impassive by the mind-numbing repetition of it all. A research study commissioned by Chiat/Day identified the channel’s addictive potential. When regular viewers were denied access for more than a week, Jerry Gentile, Chiat/Day’s creative director, told the Washington Post, “these people just sort of broke. They couldn’t get their lives together without watching the weather. They had to know. They had to have control. They couldn’t just look out the window.”

The voices of the O.C.M.s add to the channel’s calming effect. They all strike the same tone–pleasant but not jokey, confident but never knowing. (Recently, I said to a friend of mine, “Looks like snow,” and instead of scratching his chin, squinting at the clouds, and saying, “Yep,” he said, “Actually, this clipper is going to blow through here, moving this low out to sea, and tomorrow the picture looks pretty clear,” and I could tell what he’d been watching that morning.) Lee Grenci, a meteorologist at Penn State who helps to write the weather page for the Times (which recently unveiled its new expanded format and color graphics), told me that freshmen who come to meteorology school “already sound like little minions of the Weather Channel. Same language, same descriptions, same body movements. It’s almost Orwellian. Though I have to say the Weather Channel has increased enrollment in meteorological school.”

Almost every meteorologist I spoke to, both inside and outside the Weather Channel, brought up the Internet and the way it is changing the weather business, by making information once available only to experts accessible to everyone. (According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, in 1998 weather was the No. 1 form of news that people looked for on line.) In spite of blunders like the Surprise Storm, forecasting has continued to improve–today’s three-day temperature forecast is as accurate as a one-day temperature forecast was thirty years ago, and the ability to pinpoint a hurricane’s location has improved by more than a day, according to Ron McPherson, the executive director of the American Meteorological Society. Computer models, though not infallible or always consistent, have become steadily more reliable as the machines they run on grow in processing power, and as more data are fed into the system. And, thanks to the Net, the average weather enthusiast can now take his pick from as many as eight computer models showing various scenarios for the same region in the United States.

There are more than a hundred private weather companies in the United States, and all have been confronted by this new world of ubiquitous weather information. One popular strategy is to offer weather forecasts tailored to the needs of a particular commercial enterprise. “Let’s say you’re a cement pourer,” Elliot Abrams, of AccuWeather, told me, “and you want to do a big pour on a particular day. So you make a contract with us, and you call us and tell us where you’re pouring the cement, and we tell you what the forecast will be.”

Long-range weather forecasting is another growing business. An on-line venture, www.weatherplanner.com, offers a free service aimed at people who are planning weddings, vacations, or other outdoor events. Type in the date and the location and you can get a whole year’s worth of predictions on your screen. Weatherplanner’s parent company, Strategic Weather Services, also uses long-range weather forecasting, along with demographic and market analysis, to make predictions up to a year in advance for corporations that need to plan ahead. Many meteorologists scoff at the idea of predicting the weather that far in advance. Strategic Weather Services will not comment on its methods, but its approach derives from theories about recurring weather patterns developed by Dr. Irving P. Krick, a colorful mid-century physicist, which have long been in favor in the military (Eisenhower employed these theories in the Second World War, and meteorologists from Strategic Weather Services advised Norman Schwarzkopf in the Gulf War). The company’s clients have included Sears (lawnmowers and house paint), Duraflame (logs), Arctic Cat (snowmobiles), and K mart (garden hoses, barbecues, and patio furniture).

Another emerging trend in the weather business is the trading of weather futures and derivatives–financial instruments offered to companies as a hedge against extreme weather (or “extreme mildness,” if you happen to be in a bad-weather business). The weather officially began to be treated like a commodity when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange opened a market in weather futures on September 22, 1999, in which the investor can bet on how far the temperature in certain cities on a given day will fall below or rise above sixty-five degrees (known, respectively, as heating-degree days or cooling-degree days). A former commodities trader who now runs a weather-derivatives business told me that many brokerage firms have established weather desks, providing a new and lucrative source of employment for the hundreds of meteorological B.A.s who graduate each year.

The Weather Channel seems well positioned in this new information-drenched weatherscape, because it has never relied as much on forecasting as most weather businesses. The Weather Channel’s real competition is less other weather companies than other cable channels, such as CNBC and CNN, with which it competes for a free-floating audience of people who spend the day with their television sets on, ready to click to the appropriate channel if some extraordinary event or disaster occurs, be it human or natural. And, as weather coverage has increased on the networks and the cable news stations, the Weather Channel has adopted a more news-driven approach. It covered the war in Kosovo, when the bombing began, because the weather was a factor (cloudy skies inhibited the air strikes). It also covered the J.F.K., Jr., tragedy–weather again–and now routinely covers airplane crashes, which it was not doing five years ago. It has begun doing live reports from some major golf tournaments, and last season started reporting the weather on Fox’s N.F.L. pre-game show. On Super Bowl Sunday, the Weather Channel brought viewers constant updates on the weather in Atlanta, which was not exactly relevant to the game–it was played inside–but which did allow it to show plenty of pictures of an O.C.M. in the parking lot of the Georgia Dome.

When I was in Atlanta, I spoke with the executive vice-president of marketing for the Weather Channel, Steven Schiffman. We met in his office, which is filled with mementos that he brought along from his previous job, at Kraft. There was a miniature Kraft Singles tractor-trailer, some plastic cheese slices, and other cheese-related knickknacks. Schiffman made it clear that his approach to selling weather was pretty much the same as his approach to selling cheese. He told me that on taking over his job, in 1998, he’d commissioned a new “segmentation study” into the “need states” of the audience, and the study came up with three basic types of Weather Channel user. (At the Weather Channel, market research is cited at every opportunity.) The first group, the weather-engaged, who make up forty-one per cent of the audience, “know the weather statistics like sports fans know a star’s batting average,” Schiffman told me. The second group, the weather planners, who form twenty-eight per cent of the audience, “are scheduling flights, or golf games with clients on a Saturday, and want to plan ahead.” The remaining thirty-one per cent, the commodity users, “just want their forecast, as quickly as possible. They don’t care if it’s raining in California.” Schiffman foresaw potential for growth among the commodity users, whom he compared to the “cheese rejecters” he had to contend with when he was at Kraft.

Down the hall from Schiffman’s office, CNN and the Weather Channel were playing on separate TVs, but both were showing a picture of a burning apartment building, right there in Atlanta. It had been struck by lightning the previous night–part of the same line of unsettled weather I had flown through. The Weather Channel is keen to find ways in which to increase its use of news footage, in part to get away from showing nothing but meteorologists standing in front of maps. As Patrick Scott, an executive vice-president, explained to me, “If there’s a flood in Georgia and someone drowns, CNN will say, ‘Man dies in flood,’ while we’ll say, ‘There’s been flooding and it’s so bad one man has died.’ But we can use the same picture CNN is using.”

The Weather Channel has to be careful here, however, because, as it widens the context of weather to include more news, it risks compromising what makes viewers loyal to the channel: the belief that they’re getting just the facts, delivered not to help ratings but for the good of the community. “People trust us,” Schiffman said, “because we’re doing the weather, not the disaster.” Weather in this case means something reassuringly straightforward, helpful, and civic-minded. It is not like news, which traffics in disaster and misery for its own sake. Traditionally, where the Weather Channel has drawn the line between weather and news is in covering the aftermath of a storm. “We haven’t done much aftermath, because then it’s news,” Schiffman told me. He nodded toward the burning apartment building. “We’re trying to figure out a way of doing more of it.”

In January, the channel introduced “Your Weather Today,” a two-hour morning show that’s closer to the network breakfast shows than the Weather Channel’s usual programming. (After ten weeks on the air the show is the highest-rated cable news program on TV.) Instead of a rotating cast of on-camera meteorologists, there are the same two every day, with their coffee cups, doing the weather. The Weather Channel’s founder, John Coleman, fled “Good Morning America” because ratings-grabbing fluff kept taking time away from the weather. With “Your Weather Today,” it is as if the idea has come full circle: a morning show in which the weather itself is the fluff.

There’s a paradox at the heart of the weather report today: people watch weather on TV because it seems real, in a way that political scandals and stock-market gyrations sometimes do not. But the more weather we watch on TV the less time we spend in it. One becomes attuned to the movement of energy around the globe–the jet stream, the flow of high pressure down from the North Pole, the path of the storm–while at the same time becoming detached from the weather outside.

I remember standing on the battery in Charleston, South Carolina, waiting for Floyd: Wednesday, September 15, 1999. The old town was eerily deserted, the windows of the great Georgian houses protected by plywood cut into neoclassical shapes. TV crews were lined up all along the stone promenade: weather paparazzi straining before the velvet rope of the ocean, waiting for the celebrity to arrive. A Weather Channel producer, Dwight Woods, tried the shot: Charleston Bay, with Fort Sumter in the background. He didn’t like it, and decided to see whether a marina that Bruce Fauzer, the satellite-truck operator, had scouted out earlier offered better pictures. As Jeff Morrow, the meteorologist, was climbing into the truck, he pointed at the sky and said, “By the way, there’s the hurricane.”

I looked up, and there it was. You could see the cloud, a huge dark plume that went up at least fifty thousand feet into the atmosphere. It was astounding, almost Biblical in size, especially in contrast to the televised satellite picture I had been seeing for so long. Television simply can’t convey the immensity of weather–that feeling you get just from looking up at the sky.

The crew set up near the marina, under the covered courtyard of a deserted Hampton Inn, just outside Charleston. Fauzer had parked the truck between the hotel and a boat warehouse. At around 3 p.m., the skyline of downtown Charleston went dark: the power had gone out. Even though the hurricane’s eye was going to miss us, gusts of wind from the squall band were already too strong to stand up straight in, and the rain stung like ice crystals. The light was very dim, and the air was beginning to fill with debris. Suddenly an especially strong blast blew the ceiling tiles out of the Hampton Inn canopy and knocked over a bank of lights, which knocked over the camera. On the Weather Channel, this looked splendid–very “Blair Witch”–but, unfortunately, it broke the camera.

By nine that night, the storm in Charleston was at its peak. The boat warehouse next to the Hampton Inn was beginning to blow apart. The skyline was dark, but once in a while there was a bright-green flash–another transformer, the metal box toward the top of certain telephone poles, had exploded as the lines blew together and opposite charges arced between them. Everyone was packed into the truck, which was now thoroughly damp, and cold from the air-conditioning. Outside, the wind roared like a train.

“Let’s make live TV!” Fauzer cried, firing up the troops. He flung on his foul-weather gear and bounded out into the storm.

Morrow and the cameraman followed him into the full force of the wind to do the shot. As they were shooting, there was a tremendous crash in the darkness nearby. A forty-foot gooseneck street light had blown over.

“What was that?” Morrow shouted, flinching from the deadly wind.

“Show it!” shouted Fauzer, who had returned to the truck. “Let’s see it!”

“These things can become missiles,” Morrow said to the viewers, glancing around. It was great live TV, but not great weather. The next day, Bryan Norcross, a Miami-based weatherman who made headlines for broadcasting in Hurricane Andrew, said in USA Today that he thought it was only a matter of time before the nation saw a weatherman decapitated on live TV. Would that be news or weather?

I was in Washington, D.C., on March 8th, when the temperature hit a high of eighty-five degrees. As I watched the weathercaster on NewsChannel 8 crowing over the shattered records and telling us how lucky we were, I was struck by the extent to which coverage of the weather, in spite of all the newsier innovations, is still rooted in the happy weather of the sixties and seventies, when storms, heat waves, and blizzards were a cheerful alternative to the body count in Vietnam, racial unrest in the cities, and soaring crime rates.

Global warming–without doubt the biggest weather story of our time–is almost never discussed on the weather report. “They don’t really want us to talk about the causes of global warming,” Buzz Bernard, one of the Weather Channel’s meteorologists, told me. The position of the Weather Channel is that if you look at the last thirty years the evidence that the planet has grown warmer has nearly reached scientific consensus, and we may be at the warmest point in the last hundred years. But whether this warming is a result of environmental or human influences is still not known, nor is it clear how long the warming cycle we are now in will last. Stu Ostro, a senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel, told me, “Once you say global warming is caused by human means, you have to say whose fault is it, and what do you do about it, and then you’re in a very difficult political situation.”

Opinions concerning the causes of global warming remain highly contentious. But many climatologists now believe that rising temperatures produce more extreme weather–not only more frequent heat waves and droughts but also more storms and floods. Thomas Karl, the director of the National Climatic Data Center, a branch of noaa, recently completed a study of extreme weather in the United States since 1910. Karl, who was for a long time the darling of global-warming skeptics, concluded in the study that there has been “a persistent increase in extreme events” since the nineteen-seventies–an anomaly he attributes to global warming.

On television, however, when it comes to the subject of global warming, Ben Franklin’s cheerful optimism–the dominant tone of his Poor Richard’s Almanac–still rules over the dour spirit of Increase Mather’s “Remarkable Providences.” Perhaps that’s good science–the time frame of climate change is far beyond that of a daily forecast–but it nonetheless works to intensify our superstitions concerning weird weather, because we get only spectacle without any scientific explanation whatsoever. And an ever-growing focus on short-term dramas further dulls our capacity to follow long-term changes.

The news about the weather–that it’s hot and getting hotter, and that our species may be contributing to the problem–is not the kind of bad news people want to hear in a weather forecast, and so they don’t hear it. And that is why, when the weatherman mentions the oddly balmy temperatures, he usually tells us to “get out there and enjoy it.”

Copyright © John Seabrook 2003. All rights reserved