"The Worst Weather In America": Augmenting the Information Design of Extreme Cold Weather Forecasts
For weather forecast users and designers, this work explores improving hazard communication but remains incremental with limited generalizability.
The study tested color-coded hazard icons as visual summaries for text-heavy extreme cold weather forecasts on Mount Washington, finding that icons increased perceived risk of visiting the mountain.
Mount Washington is home to extreme, and extremely volatile, weather conditions. Consulting a weather forecast of conditions at the summit is vital for making one's visit as safe as possible. Using the discussion and suggestions arising from a participatory workshop as input, we test a design intervention employing color-coded hazard icons to function as visual summaries of Mount Washington Observatory's current text-heavy forecast through a crowd-sourced study. We find that the use of icons increases the perceived risk of activities involving visiting the mountain. However, we highlight remaining questions around visualization design and design ethics that warrant further study in the domain of how best to communicate cold weather hazards in ways that are mindful of the diversity of literacies and experiences of visitors.