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Anticipating the Future: Temporal Regimes of Meteorological Decision Making

Fri, August 22, 8:30 to 10:30am, Intercontinental Hotel, Miró

Abstract

This paper builds on a 22-month ethnography of forecasting operations at the National Weather Service to examine the temporal dimensions of meteorological decision making. As a preliminary step toward temporally embedding weather forecasting practice, I identify two principles that underlie its logic: risk and scale. The former rests on a demarcation between routine and non-routine operations, while the latter is driven by the fact that the more global the reach of a weather phenomenon the earlier its detection. The joint influence of risk and scale on weather forecasting practice yields four temporal regimes—and, I argue, four distinct styles—of decision making: emergency, extended alert, near-term, and longer-term. To flesh out and elaborate this rudimentary framework, I analyze its empirical manifestation in summer weather forecasting, winter weather forecasting, short-term forecasting, and long-term forecasting respectively. In so doing, I complicate dual-process models of cognitive processing by establishing that, in practice, deliberation and heuristics are combined across disparate temporal regimes to produce organizationally sanctioned, skilled predictions.

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