Making Sense of the Weather, Together: Collaborative Sensemaking in Severe Weather Livestreams
For crisis informatics and platform studies researchers, this work provides a qualitative analysis of informal emergency communication on livestreaming platforms, though it is incremental in extending existing sensemaking theory to a new context.
This paper analyzes how weatherfluencers on YouTube collaboratively interpret severe weather in real time with audiences, identifying three key practices that transform entertainment platforms into safety-critical communication channels. The study shows how these practices challenge existing crisis communication models by integrating distributed expertise and reconfiguring platform affordances.
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.