Meteorological Services Editing and Proofreading Services

Weather services communicate uncertainty for a living, to an audience that wants certainty and interprets any hedge as a lack of confidence. A forecast is a probabilistic statement dressed as a prediction, and the public has learned to read it as a promise — which is why a forecaster who says there is a forty per cent chance of a severe thunderstorm is criticised whether it happens or not. The technical skill in this field has advanced enormously; the communication of what the forecast actually means has not kept pace.

We edit what meteorological and hydrological services produce — public forecasts and forecast discussion text, severe weather watches, warnings and statements, aviation and marine forecasts and their plain-language versions, hydrometric and flood forecast products, seasonal and long-range outlooks, climate summaries and normals documentation, technical bulletins and model documentation, service standards and product definitions, briefings for emergency management and other agencies, media guidance and interview material, public education content about how forecasts work, and post-event verification and review reports. Our editors check that a product's uncertainty is expressed the same way every time it appears, and that terms with technical meanings are not used loosely in public text.

Communicating probability is the central problem, and it is largely a wording problem rather than a science one. Research has shown repeatedly that people read "chance of rain" as the proportion of the day it will rain, or the area affected, or the forecaster's confidence — three wrong answers, all reasonable. We work on these so probability is stated with its reference: what the probability is of, where, and over what period, in a form that has been shown to be understood rather than one that is technically defensible. For warnings we distinguish the likelihood of the event from the severity of its consequences, because the two get merged into a single colour and a public that experiences a low-probability warning that does not verify learns to discount the next one. And we make forecast discussion text say where the forecaster's confidence is low and why, since that is the most valuable information the service holds and the part most often reserved for the technical audience.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished products, verification data and internal reviews. We are editors rather than meteorologists and offer no view on any forecast, model or warning decision. What we can do is make products consistent and comprehensible, and we work regularly with services producing material in more than one language.