Making Sense of the Weather, Together: Collaborative Sensemaking in Severe Weather Livestreams

TL;DR

This study explores how weather influencers livestream severe weather, using innovative practices to enhance safety communication and challenge traditional crisis models.

Contribution

It introduces new collaborative sensemaking practices by weatherfluencers that integrate distributed expertise and reconfigure platform features during severe weather events.

Findings

Weatherfluencers use multi-source triangulation and platform adaptations.

They transform entertainment interfaces into safety-critical communication channels.

Their practices challenge traditional crisis communication models.

Abstract

This paper examines collaborative sensemaking during severe weather events through the emerging phenomenon of "weatherfluencers" or content creators who livestream meteorological interpretation on platforms like YouTube. Drawing from sensemaking theory, crisis informatics, and platform studies, we analyze how these creators navigate the sociotechnical dynamics of interpreting severe weather in real time with distributed audiences. Through critical incident analysis of 13 Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) storm warnings across three prominent weatherfluencers, we identify three key practices: multi-source information triangulation, temporal bridging techniques, and platform-specific adaptations that transform entertainment interfaces into safety-critical communication channels. Our analysis shows how these practices challenge existing models of crisis communication by integrating distributed expertise, collapsing temporal frames, and reconfiguring platform affordances. This research contributes to understanding how informal emergency communicators mediate between institutional alerting systems and public needs, and how visual, multimodal crisis communication differs from text-centered approaches.