Over-Hyping Weather Warnings Can Be Dangerous

Preparation is important. And when it comes to serious weather phenomena, I have always been in the “better safe than sorry” camp. Snowstorms, hurricanes, floods, heat waves, windstorms, and other events can be life-threatening in their most severe forms.

So when weather authorities, assisted by the media, report that severe weather is coming, I tend to take notice.

But lately, there have been a lot of these warnings. In my area, we’ve learned to respect the words “atmospheric river”. It’s a newer term that suggests there is a Noah’s flood-type inundation of rain on the way, a river of dark grey clouds pregnant with more moisture than a small ocean. We used to call these things wet storms, but that wasn’t dramatic enough for the media and the forecasting people.

To their credit, since that “atmospheric river” term became widespread, there have been some storms that did arrive with a lot of moisture, wind, or both. In that sense, the warnings proved helpful. They may have aided peoples’ preparation and perhaps even saved lives. That’s the way these weather service warnings and media attention are supposed to work.

But at other times, I find myself questioning the decision to issue warnings. On several occasions, I have found myself within the geographical warning areas for high winds, flash floods, and the like. The media have not wasted the opportunity to play up the dangers and what they seem to portray as near-historic levels of moisture or wind in the upcoming forecast. On several occasions, those storms have veered away or sputtered to where either the wind hasn’t arrived at all or rain showers have lasted only a couple of hours.

Even if I’m not in the National Weather Service warning area for a particular weather event, the local media have been hyping the storms anyway. They can almost invariably find some meteorologist or college professor who has looked at the storm models and suggests that this coming storm could produce more wind than we’ve seen in two decades (even though, when it finally arrives, it’s often less than an average afternoon of wind).

This media hype has gotten more common in the last couple of years. I sympathize with the media’s need to attract viewers and consumers. And I am more comfortable with “better safe than sorry”, especially in an era where weather phenomena seem to be more extreme than ever before. But even I think they are going too far with the volume of these repeated warnings.

The cautionary children’s tale of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” from Aesop’s Fables applies here. Too much alarmism may be seen as a lie, even if it’s sometimes true. Even though forecasting possible weather scenarios is meant in good faith, often because there is some element of possible risk in the outcome of the forecast models, too much alarmism will backfire.

In sensationalizing more and more storm stories, what forecasters and the media are doing is de-sensitizing people to the warnings. And in the end, though their job is to warn us, over hyping things could be far more dangerous. People who are de-sensitized to risks are more prone to dismiss potential danger.

Hopefully, those authorities are mindful of that balance, continuing to warn us when there is cause to do so, but not overselling the quantity of severity of those warnings. They don’t need to be right about the outcome all of the time because weather is unpredictable. But if they are wrong about more and more hyped forecasts, people will have a harder time believing them when it counts.

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