Greg Carbin: The Forecaster’s Forecaster

As the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., Greg Carbin keeps track of severe weather in the form of thunderstorms, tornados, hail, blizzards and high winds in the lower 48 states and sounds the alarm when such weather threatens people and property. (His duties do not include hurricanes. That’s the job of the NWS’s National Hurricane Center in Miami.)

Carbin works with everyone from broadcasters and first responders to regional NWS branches in forecasting and alerting the public to the storms. He also serves as a resource to the news media.

Last week the job included clarifying that the tornado in upstate New York was the state’s second deadliest, not the most viscous. He also weighed in on whether the Mid-Atlantic storm qualified as a tornado or a different kind of windstorm, a derecho.

Carbin talked to TVNewsCheck’s Diana Marszalek about the processes and difficulties of keeping people safe, broadcasters role in doing so and separating real hazards from the hype.

An edited transcript:

How would you describe your relationship with broadcasters?

I am kind of a resource to the broadcast community in terms of severe weather forecasting, climatology, historic perspective and interpretation of our forecast product. I am here to provide assistance in whatever area of severe weather you would like in regard to the official government position and the official government forecast. I am the U.S. government mouthpiece on tornado history.

Broadcasters want to get it right. They want to be able to provide a correct and informed presentation. They can rely on me or they can go at it alone, but I think they are better off if they get the official interpretation.

What are the limitations of the National Weather Service in alerting the public to severe weather?

Everybody’s assessment of his or her risk is going to be different. One of the biggest challenges of anyone in any business that tries to convey risk — it could be terrorism or personal health — is that people have different interpretations of vulnerability. For example, the younger you are the less likely you are to think you’re in danger. And then there is confirmation bias. You tell someone that they are in danger, but they still are going to take the time to confirm it. There’s not much we can do to stop that.

But it’s one of the huge challenges we face because these storms are going to come pretty quick and you are not going to have a lot of time to take actions that are going to save your life. A confirmation could come in the form of a violent tornado.

In addition to human variability in terms of interpreting risks, you also have uncertainly in the events themselves. Radar can give us the potential to have a tornado, but verifying that there actually is one is another thing. We can’t be 100% certain that a tornado will strike at this time in this place with any significant lead-time. A tornado warning lead-time is only 15 minutes.

But three out of four times these warnings are predicting tornados that don’t exist. If you have a population that understands the inherent uncertainly of predicting tornados, they would understand that we are trying our best and they better take this seriously. But there are others who vehemently would argue that the false alarm rate is a dangerous thing and we’re crying wolf.

What should the role of broadcasters be in severe weather situations?

They have an incredibly important role. They are on the front lines.

We have documentation and strong evidence to report that the public gets their information about dangerous weather and warnings from broadcasters. And we’ve learned some other interesting things like that the public actually takes their cues from their broadcasters. If the situation is really bad, they can pick up on the emotion from the body language of a broadcaster on TV. During the April 2011 event in the Deep South, people watching noticed that the broadcasters were indeed very nervous and conveyed that. People said they knew something was different that day because their meteorologist was acting differently.

Are they doing that job well?

I’m sure in the overwhelming number of cases they are. The challenge comes when the forces working to make money for the TV stations run counter to public safety. All you have to do is watch TV to see there is a tendency for sensationalism, and that’s to bring the viewer in. It’s a business. But it’s a danger in that sensationalism works the same way false alarms do in that it can numb people to the risk. And so when a bad day comes it may be difficult to separate the real dangers from the ones that are not. I often kid around with the media by telling them there is no need to sensationalize the weather. Isn’t it interesting enough?

How often does the information you are putting out differ from that that the stations are putting out?

Not often. It happens, and probably more than we would like it to. One of the more important aspects of our work is having a consistent message. And there is a tendency for TV stations to try to present it in different ways just to be different. But we are in this together and we want to work as a team because it’s the only way we can strive to convey messages that are consistent.

Many TV stations have invested big bucks in buying their own weather modeling systems and radars. How important are these local systems?

Some stations do have their own systems and they are getting more sophisticated all the time. On an individual station-to-station basis, there is probably very little they have that can compete with Weather Service capabilities. But if you look at The Weather Channel, for example, they have a very impressive operation.

So are TV stations investing in forecasting or hype?

A lot of TV stations, especially here in the middle of the country, have their own radar systems that can be quite powerful within a local range. They also have personnel on staff to go out and storm chase and helicopter capability. Here we are looking nationally and we are not going to focus on one locality. So they are not going to be able to compete with us at that level. But we are not going to be able to drill down to the compete at the their level. They are operating on a different scale most of the time.

Is there such a thing as overdoing — or over-hyping — weather on TV?

Oh, yeah. Here’s the problem. Hype usually isn’t evident until after the event and sometimes the event can turn out to be the truth. If an event has substantial impacts, then hype was probably the right approach.

What should the larger role of TV weathercasters be? Should they go beyond forecasting to address issues like climate change?

Reporting on climate change, and accurately conveying the latest findings of the sciences, would be closest to their capabilities as meteorologists. But in recent years they have been increasingly put upon to provide scientific information in other areas. I look at that a little more warily because they are not geographers or geologists or astronomers.

How important is it that a TV station has a trained meteorologist versus a weathercaster? Is that changing in importance with the growing instances of severe weather?

It certainly has trended to being more important than it used to be. It used to be a toss up if you have a degree or not. Now most stations require at least an undergraduate degree in atmospheric science.

Part of your job includes establishing protocol and processes with first responders. Should broadcasters be included in that group?

They are going to be on the front lines, there’s no doubt about that. Quite often in these types of fast changing events there is a tendency to jump on unsubstantiated information, which is often wrong. So broadcasters should have a role in tempering the tendency to jump to conclusions.

A real sign of the times is that weather-related stories are now commonplace on the network evening newscasts. Does that reflect the state of the climate, the state of the news media or both?

I have a theory about this because it seems like never before has attention to weather been greater than it is today, and it seems to have grown pretty dramatically. Some of that is probably due to the news about climate change and that we’ve seen some incredible weather events in a short time.  But what’s happened at the same time in couple of decades is that our ability to predict these events has advanced beyond anyone’s dreams.

A five-day forecast now is about as accurate as a two-day forecast was 20 years ago. The public seems to like that for the first time we can provide almost daily predictions that are accurate. There are not many areas of life where things are certain. But at least I can know that in addition to the sun rising tomorrow, the temperature will be 75 degrees.

This is the second part of TVN’s Severe Weather special report. You can read the other parts here.