Climate and Societal Interactions (CSI)

William Howe, Climate Assessment Specialist for the CPO RISA Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program (SCIPP) team, released three new studies on the challenges of communicating weather and climate information. He compared tweets of severe weather events between the National Weather Service and local television stations, examined the relationships between SCIPP’s primary stakeholders and sources of climate information, and conducted an experiment in which messages were framed differently to see how residents of Texas responded.

In her lead contribution, she uses the island of Maui as a case study to investigate drivers of land use change as it describes the transitions that the island has experienced. Brewington used satellite imagery to visualize the changes, noting that agricultural land cover has decreased while built-up land cover has increased.

The collaboratively built tool helps answer the common question asked of Alaskan climatologists: has it been particularly hot/cold lately?