A weather hazard may begin with a perturbation of the atmosphere and end with a quiet stillness, but throughout this lifecycle there are constant interactions between the storm and people—from forecasters to emergency personnel to individuals striving to keep themselves and their families safe from harm. All of these interactions are colored by uncertainty: meteorological uncertainty about how the storm will behave; uncertainty of political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of human activity with which the storm interacts.

In weather hazards contexts, much research exists on meteorological uncertainty in weather forecasts, how it is communicated, and how it is understood.1For example,
→Kenneth Broad et al., “Misinterpretations of the ‘Cone of Uncertainty’ in Florida during the 2004 Hurricane Season,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (May 2007).
→National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2006).
→National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), Integrating Social and Behavioral Sciences Within the Weather Enterprise (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2018).
→Rebecca E. Morss, Julie Demuth, and Jeffrey K. Lazo, “Communicating Uncertainty in Weather Forecasts: A Survey of the US Public,” Weather and Forecasting 23, no. 5 (2008): 974–991.
→Susan Joslyn and Sonia Savelli, “Communicating Forecast Uncertainty: Public Perception of Weather Forecast Uncertainty,” in “Communicating Weather Information and Impacts,” ed. Peter J. A. Burt, special issue, Meteorological Applications 17, no. 2 (2010): 180–195.
→Susan Joslyn and Jared LeClerc, “Decisions with Uncertainty: The Glass Half Full,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 4 (2013) 308–315.
→Christopher D. Karstens et al., “Evaluation of a Probabilistic Forecasting Methodology for Severe Convective Weather in the 2014 Hazardous Weather Testbed,” Weather and Forecasting 30, no. 6 (2015): 1551–1570.
Less attention has been paid to how other types of uncertainty emerge and propagate through the lifecycle of a hazardous weather event or across multiple events. People engaged at any stage of the process—from prediction to recovery—interpret, infer, and consider uncertainty in their perceptions and decision-making. However, little is known about how to identify or characterize the more entangled, nonmeteorological types of ambiguity that arise from social, cultural, political, or other variables. These ambiguities, and the social contexts from which they emerge, inflect understandings of a forecast or warning, perceptions of risk, and decision-making.

“Little work has foregrounded the concept of uncertainty itself, including how it differently circulates and mobilizes attention among disciplines, and how it is often taken for granted in risk reduction discussions and strategies.”

Social scientists have begun to chart diverse uncertainties, but efforts remain nascent and are typically isolated within disciplines. Uncertainty frequently appears in the literature as part of the discourse that accompanies controversies in studies of public health and medicine,2→Deborah Lupton, “Taming Uncertainty: Risk Discourse and Diagnostic Testing,” in The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body (New York: Sage, 1995), 77–104.
→Alexa Dietrich, The Drug Company Next Door: Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 251.
climate change3→Simon Shackley and Brian Wynne, “Representing Uncertainty in Global Climate Change Science and Policy: Boundary-Ordering Devices and Authority,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 21, no. 3 (1996): 275–302.
→Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 552.
→Thomas Morton et al., “The Future that May (or May Not) Come: How Framing Changes Responses to Uncertainty in Climate Change Communications,” Global Environmental Change 21, no. 1 (2011): 103–109.
and energy,4→Anna Willow and Sara Wylie, “Politics, Ecology, and the New Anthropology of Energy: Exploring the Emerging Frontiers of Hydraulic Fracking,” Political Ecology 21, no. 1 (2014): 222–236.
→Stephen Zehr, “Public Representations of Scientific Uncertainty about Global Climate Change,” Public Understanding of Science 9, no. 2 (2000): 85-103.
environmental problems,5→Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 488.
→Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 264.
emergent technologies,6Philip Brey, “Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies,” NanoEthics 6, no. 1 (2012): 1–13. and disasters.7Havidan Rodrıguez et al., “Communicating Risk and Uncertainty: Science, Technology, and Disasters at the Crossroads,” in The Handbook of Disaster Research, ed. Havidan Rodriguez, Enrico Quarantelli, and Russell Davis (New York: Springer, 2007), 478–488. Although ubiquitous in these studies and fields, uncertainty often is embedded in the disciplinary discourse. In other words, little work has foregrounded the concept of uncertainty itself, including how it differently circulates and mobilizes attention among disciplines, and how it is often taken for granted in risk reduction discussions and strategies. Even less work has examined what uncertainty is, how it is produced and maintained, and how it moves among different disciplines, between academics and practitioners, or between practitioners and the public. One consequence is that our collective understanding of uncertainty is attenuated; for example, the ethical dimensions of uncertainty remain unexplored, especially those that encourage questions about uncertainty decided by whom, or at what cost.

From conference to series

Scholars from diverse backgrounds came together to contribute to the “Chancing the Storm” series, each providing their take on these “other” types of uncertainty that pervade human experiences of extreme weather and climate events. This group of scholars originally convened at the 2019 American Meteorological Society annual meeting held in Phoenix, Arizona. As social scientists, we explore not only how meteorological and climatological uncertainty percolates through decision-making, but also the historical, social, cultural, economic, and political conditions that arise from and intersect with weather and climate phenomena.

From multiple disciplinary perspectives, we came together to examine uncertainty more broadly, loosely using the following questions to guide our inquiries:

1. What are the definitional aspects of uncertainty and the larger contexts in which uncertainty is conceptualized?
2. How does uncertainty originate, emerge, coalesce, expand, interact, and shape temporal or spatial aspects, and/or other relevant factors?
3. What are the political, cultural, social, individual, and/or economic variables that shape, intersect with, or arise from uncertainty?
4. How do you identify, recognize, or measure uncertainty? What are the approaches, mechanisms, methods, observations, instruments, or accountings of uncertainty?
5. How do ethics come into play in uncertainty?

The result of this exercise has been this series, which, we hope, will inspire our colleagues in both physical and social science disciplines, including our partners in operational fields, to think more broadly about uncertainty, how it is understood, communicated, and acted upon when extreme weather and climate events threaten and occur. Reflecting on the series, we highlight each author’s key message to the research and operational communities, which may catalyze new directions of research and new ways of operationalizing our broader understanding of uncertainty in order to work toward safer and more equitable outcomes from extreme events.

What we learned

In his essay opening the series, Scott Knowles brings his nuanced understanding and treatment of history to bear on our questions, stating, “The ‘certainty’ of the historical record is an artifact of a time when women, minority groups, workers, and nonhuman life/the environment were not part of the inquiry…When only a few main narratives are allowed into the record it is far easier to develop straightforward causal explanations of historical change.” His insights push us to consider uncertainty as a social construct, and to interrogate whose record counts, who gets to acknowledge uncertainty, and who has been served—and to what end—by uncertainty. Seeing a disaster as much more than a singular event exposes who is really experiencing uncertainty.

“These different modes of uncertainty allow us to see how uncertainty is differently conceived, used, and applied.”

Following this theme of uncertainty as a construct, subject to the same social processes and pressures that shape much of our world, Robert Soden diagnoses three different modes of uncertainty in his study of the 2013 flood along the Colorado Front Range. In the first mode, uncertainty is the subject of technocratic science and can be described and managed by complex taxonomies that are easily translated to equations and maps. The second mode of uncertainty is generative and malleable and can inspire creativity in the spaces left indeterminate by uncertainty. In this way, uncertainty is more like a resource than a variable to be mapped. The third mode is similar to Knowles’ description of uncertainty as the “result of particular historical constellations of ideology and power.” These different modes of uncertainty allow us to see how uncertainty is differently conceived, used, and applied.

Touching on the techno-scientific mode of uncertainty, Melissa Bica examines how uncertainty is inscribed in visual risk communications transmitted across Twitter through diagrams and maps. These messages and images are generative of new meanings and, in doing so, actually serve some voices more than others (following Soden’s third mode of uncertainty). Bica finds that social media offers “a way for researchers to learn about human behavior and disaster response, given thoughtful collection and treatment of the data. Even an official evacuation order can thus be uncertain, despite its seemingly objective nature, as people may have conflicting reasons why they do not or cannot evacuate.”

Moving into the realm of cognitive psychology, Susan Joslyn explores the cognitive processes that help us grapple with uncertainty and render it meaningful in the context of our decision-making. By paying close attention to the disjunctures in risk communication between the communicator’s intended message and the recipients eventual understanding, we can uncover new forms of uncertainty and address them by taking into account the cognitive processes and mental models present in at-risk populations.

Wutich and Jepson deftly demonstrate how uncertainty both pervades the lived contexts that extreme events enter and becomes multiplied and changed by climatic events—in this case, drought. They discuss the techno-scientific uncertainty associated with drought due to the difficulty in predicting its onset and end, as well as how this uncertainty exacerbates and complicates consumption patterns.

The combination of these factors leads to severe water insecurity at the household level, primarily due to how water is allocated, exemplified in their field sites in Bolivia and Brazil. Their ethnographic insight shows how: “Residents stay in line for water all day, uncertain when the water will be available, while others change their daily routine to wait in line since dawn hoping to collect water. Others stay up at night to wait for the water as that is the only time when water pressure is strong enough to run the taps.” Solutions, therefore, should not only focus on technical training and infrastructure improvements, but also practices that better acknowledge and work to remedy extreme power disparities: “Public engagement with science, too, can help bolster the effectiveness of community-based efforts—but only when undertaken with a true commitment to shared knowledge production and priority-setting. Above all, any effort to decrease uncertainty in water systems must be guided by a commitment to the human right to water, an internationally-endorsed principle that has yet to be realized.”

Setting a new research agenda

“Uncertainty is and always will be pervasive in the prediction and experience of meteorological and climatological hazards.”

This is just the beginning. Uncertainty is and always will be pervasive in the prediction and experience of meteorological and climatological hazards. There remain myriad profound and entangled sources of individual, social, and cultural uncertainty that emerge, interact, operate, and propagate during these natural hazards, all of which are relevant in how people understand, respond, and make meaning. The contributions to “Chancing the Storm” raised key questions to help us better approach the role uncertainty plays in weather phenomena, and how uncertainty affects the translation of information through risk communication.

• On theoretical questions: How does uncertainty bubble up through layers of social constructs, eventually becoming meaningful and enacted by individuals and groups? How is the study of some forms of uncertainty privileged over others? How can we better determine which mode of uncertainty to apply when, for whom, and to what ends? How does uncertainty either confirm or challenge our mental models of how the world works?

• On understanding the intricacies of risk communication: How can social media allow people to creatively curate and effectively disseminate information about uncertainty associated with a weather risk? How can social media offer insight into how people render uncertainty tractable in its inclusion in everyday decision making?

We hope that conversations about “the other uncertainty” of weather and climate hazards, like the one we convened at the American Meteorological Society, will continue to be had in additional communities, with additional scholars and practitioners who represent a range of perspectives. We invite others to utilize and expand on the questions we framed above to initiate these conversations and we look forward to learning more about innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to all dimensions of uncertainty that pervade the intersections between extreme weather and society.

References:

1
For example,
→Kenneth Broad et al., “Misinterpretations of the ‘Cone of Uncertainty’ in Florida during the 2004 Hurricane Season,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (May 2007).
→National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2006).
→National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), Integrating Social and Behavioral Sciences Within the Weather Enterprise (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2018).
→Rebecca E. Morss, Julie Demuth, and Jeffrey K. Lazo, “Communicating Uncertainty in Weather Forecasts: A Survey of the US Public,” Weather and Forecasting 23, no. 5 (2008): 974–991.
→Susan Joslyn and Sonia Savelli, “Communicating Forecast Uncertainty: Public Perception of Weather Forecast Uncertainty,” in “Communicating Weather Information and Impacts,” ed. Peter J. A. Burt, special issue, Meteorological Applications 17, no. 2 (2010): 180–195.
→Susan Joslyn and Jared LeClerc, “Decisions with Uncertainty: The Glass Half Full,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 4 (2013) 308–315.
→Christopher D. Karstens et al., “Evaluation of a Probabilistic Forecasting Methodology for Severe Convective Weather in the 2014 Hazardous Weather Testbed,” Weather and Forecasting 30, no. 6 (2015): 1551–1570.
2
→Deborah Lupton, “Taming Uncertainty: Risk Discourse and Diagnostic Testing,” in The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body (New York: Sage, 1995), 77–104.
→Alexa Dietrich, The Drug Company Next Door: Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 251.
3
→Simon Shackley and Brian Wynne, “Representing Uncertainty in Global Climate Change Science and Policy: Boundary-Ordering Devices and Authority,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 21, no. 3 (1996): 275–302.
→Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 552.
→Thomas Morton et al., “The Future that May (or May Not) Come: How Framing Changes Responses to Uncertainty in Climate Change Communications,” Global Environmental Change 21, no. 1 (2011): 103–109.
4
→Anna Willow and Sara Wylie, “Politics, Ecology, and the New Anthropology of Energy: Exploring the Emerging Frontiers of Hydraulic Fracking,” Political Ecology 21, no. 1 (2014): 222–236.
→Stephen Zehr, “Public Representations of Scientific Uncertainty about Global Climate Change,” Public Understanding of Science 9, no. 2 (2000): 85-103.
5
→Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 488.
→Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 264.
6
Philip Brey, “Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies,” NanoEthics 6, no. 1 (2012): 1–13.
7
Havidan Rodrıguez et al., “Communicating Risk and Uncertainty: Science, Technology, and Disasters at the Crossroads,” in The Handbook of Disaster Research, ed. Havidan Rodriguez, Enrico Quarantelli, and Russell Davis (New York: Springer, 2007), 478–488.