Watershed education for TV weather forecasters
Recently, a project I helped design and develop was published. It’s a series of multimedia educational units on watersheds and related issues (water quantity, quality, storms & floods, drought). It’s called Watersheds: Connection Weather to the Environment and freely available via http://meted.ucar.edu/broadcastmet/watershed/.
The intended audience is broadcast meteorologists in the U.S. I learned that these broadcasters are the main (and often sole) source of scientific information for many people in the U.S. Recognizing this fact, there is a shift occuring in many U.S. TV stations, trying to help their weathercasters transition into “station scientists.”
Our goal with this project was to get TV weathercasters to start talking about watersheds on the air. To support this goal, this series has been incorporated into the new list of professional development topics recommended by the American Meteorological Society. We hope broadcasters will start using these materials and that some of the messages will begin filtering into their broadcast segments. (There’s going to be a follow-up study conducted to evaluate the use and adoption.)
As a recent immigrant to Canada (3 years), I’m wondering about the viability of this approach here. Are TV weathercasters seen as key disseminators of environmental information? And are educational projects like this viable in the much-smaller Canadian TV market?
