Hunter Williams arrives to work at the KVUE television station in Austin, Texas, at 2:30 p.m. each day with a daunting task: helping Texans understand the region’s weather in nightly forecasts that last less than three minutes each. As extreme weather intensifies in Williams’s state and across the globe, he must increasingly consider climate change’s influence on his viewers’ lives as part of his job.
Williams, KVUE’s chief meteorologist, sometimes relishes the simplicity of a 15-second window to make the link. “This is the second hottest summer ever recorded in Austin,” he might say. “All of the top five other hottest summers have happened in the past 15 years.” Sometimes, as he points out, the data is most powerful when it stands on its own.
Weather is the only topic that most U.S. adults often follow in local news, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center report. Newsrooms know its value; weather stories matter to people and draw them to their websites. But extreme weather, such as wildfires, increasingly frequent hurricanes, and scorching temperatures, also presents reporters with opportunities to provide locally relevant information on climate change.
Unfortunately, journalists don’t always take advantage. Only 44 percent of 133 breaking news stories about extreme heat and flooding in the U.S. in June 2024 mentioned climate change or global warming, an analysis by the climate outlet HEATED found. Only 11 percent referenced fossil fuels.
Historically, many outlets have given undue weight to climate change skeptics in their stories. Others have shied away from covering the climate at all, hesitating to wade through misinformation promoted by oil and gas companies, or fearing backlash from political actors or advertisers. Lacking resources is also a barrier: It’s difficult for journalists to take their stories deeper in newsrooms where staffing and funding have been slashed while output expectations remain high. Tackling the complexities of climate change within the confines of a short segment or couple-hundred-word story is its own challenge, too.
“We can’t expect reporters to be performing miracles in newsrooms,” says climate communications researcher Henri-Count Evans, who lectures at the University of Eswatini and leads data-journalism trainings in multiple countries in southern Africa. At the same time, research, including his own on global and local frameworks for climate communication, has demonstrated local media’s role in shaping people’s perspectives on climate change in the region. Another study even shows that local media in the U.S. has more power than national outlets to influence attitudes on climate change across political divides.
“There’s an emotion that you’re building” for audiences when your reporting connects relevant climate issues and possible solutions with people’s daily lives, Evans says. By interweaving climate and weather coverage, journalists can provide key context behind meteorological events, enliven exhausted coverage areas, and empower communities as our planet transforms around us.
Putting Weather in Context—Even on Deadline
It can be hard to cover climate within a weather story because the lead time is often short, especially when the weather takes a sudden turn for the worse—like a flash flood or a tornado spinning out of a thunderstorm. To get beyond the need-to-know basics in a quickly developing story, it’s important to prepare in advance. Even a small amount of pre-reporting can help you deliver the climate background behind a weather event when it hits. That could look like learning from people who’ve experienced the kinds of extreme weather you might encounter, or identifying the communities and industries most likely to be impacted to help you prioritize your reporting when those events occur.
You could also find data that fits local weather within broader trends. To shed light on the temperatures in his own forecast, Williams sometimes turns to Climate Central, a policy-neutral nonprofit run by scientists and communicators. He gleans insight into the day’s highs and lows by looking at their daily map, called the Climate Shift Index, which assesses whether the changing climate will make a given temperature more or less likely in the future. A glance at the map’s data for May 22, for example, reveals that Austin’s temperature was 7.4°F hotter than normal for this date—and that climate change has made temperatures like this at least four times more likely. Williams uses these statistics to round out his forecasts with just a sentence or two.
While reporting or researching a timely story, it also helps to store away evocative phrasing for future pieces with longer timelines to unpack data, track trends, and dig into the details.
Journalists seeking climate context for local and regional weather stories can also draw from the emerging field of attribution science, which models how our changing climate affects weather conditions around the globe. World Weather Attribution, a global collaboration begun in 2015, publishes studies quantifying climate change’s influence on a variety of weather phenomena. Their research explains that with our current state of about 1.2°C of warming, unrelenting high temperatures like those in Mexico’s heatwave in May and June 2024, for example, are expected to become a 1-in-15-years occurrence (as opposed to around once in 60 years back in 2000, when global temperatures were half a degree lower).
For reporters on tight deadlines, World Weather Attribution also provides a concise media guide connecting different types of extreme weather events with human-caused climate change. Covering drought? The guide, available in 12 languages, including Spanish and Hindi, describes how climate change fuels dry conditions, how scientists quantify a drought’s severity, and the factors that put some regions at greater risk. The journalist-led nonprofit Covering Climate Now also provides a guide in English and Spanish on making the climate change connection in stories about extreme weather, among a plethora of other climate-reporting resources.
Interviewing relevant experts is another way reporters can deepen weather stories—regardless of tight timelines. When environmental reporter Connor Giffin, of the Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, covered record-setting floods in July of 2022, he had just 24 hours to finish his story. When he reached out to Kentucky’s state climatologist and other researchers about how greenhouse gas emissions and aging infrastructure intensified the disaster, he leaned on the timeliness of the flooding news to land the interviews he needed. “People recognized that it was important to put that event into perspective as it was happening, and while it was in the headlines,” he recalls. In addition, Giffin takes advantage of resources like SciLine’s expert-matching service to find knowledgeable voices on new topics when he’s on deadline. Reporters can also keep running lists of researchers who study phenomena relevant to their communities; experts from climate-justice nonprofits; or community organizations working with vulnerable infrastructure like housing or health care, who can offer insight during an unfolding weather event.
While reporting or researching a timely story, it also helps to store away evocative phrasing for future pieces with longer timelines to unpack data, track trends, and dig into the details. When Giffin tuned into a livestreamed congressional hearing about extreme weather and the oil industry’s role in the climate crisis, he jotted down an environmental lawyer’s description of rain falling on a remediated mine site’s compacted soil as being “like pouring water on a tabletop.” The quote came in handy for an enterprise piece he produced with the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk later in 2022 about the conditions that made summer flooding in Kentucky and Missouri more disastrous.
Knowing your audience well can help ensure that your work to incorporate climate change into coverage actually pays off. For example, the team at the Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative with 21 partner newsrooms across the Mississippi River Basin, is working to better understand the varied communities reached by the outlets that republish their stories. In 2022, their collaborators at the Missouri School of Journalism surveyed residents of the river’s mainstem states about their relationship to the watershed and its environmental issues. More than half of those surveyed felt their communities were being affected by environmental changes—and while most believed climate change was happening, 39.2 percent thought it was natural rather than caused by human activity and industry. Audience polling like this, and collaboration across the Ag & Water Desk’s multi-newsroom team, help its journalists “see the connections between issues in this huge, disparate physical landscape that we’re covering,” says editorial director Tegan Wendland.
Refreshing Tired Weather Coverage
Part of covering weather for a local community is getting to know its patterns—sometimes, a little too well. Summer will always be hot in Austin, and every day it’s Williams’ job to say so. But as mind-numbing as writing about the same kinds of weather year after year can be, it’s also an opportunity to look at something familiar in new ways. When conceptualizing a package on flooding—a part of life in much of the Mississippi River Basin—for the Ag & Water Desk’s first big project, Wendland focused on climate adaptations and solutions for the rising water many of its residents have grown accustomed to weathering. The team worked with Climate Central to analyze rainfall patterns in the region, showing that annual rainfall had increased by up to eight inches over the past 50 years. For the story behind the numbers, they also interviewed farmers exploring new agricultural practices to adapt to a hotter, wetter climate; project managers building more flood resilient infrastructure; and communities considering how to move homes, businesses, and municipal buildings away from low-lying areas.
When writing about climate disasters, extreme weather, and even plain-old rainy days, local and regional journalists have a unique kinship with their readers because they share the same homebase.
Following the news in other places can help reporters make sense of climate conditions at home, too. Ali Raza, a senior correspondent for The News International in Lahore, Pakistan, has cultivated a habit of reading up on issues in other outlets over his more-than-25-year career at the paper. Reporting on smog in Bangladesh in the early 2010s piqued his curiosity about the autumn not-quite-fog he’d seen roll into Lahore. Raza reached out to experts and investigated the phenomenon in his own city. As a result, he was one of the first journalists to report on the now-widely-covered issue of smog in Pakistan.
Looking to watchdog publications that keep tabs on climate concerns, such as HEATED or Inside Climate News, can inspire journalists to add an accountability angle to coverage of weather events. When Emily Sanders of the Center for Climate Integrity dug deeper into the deadly 2023 wildfire on Maui for the center’s climate accountability news site ExxonKnews, she found that Maui County had sued numerous big oil companies in 2020 in an attempt to recoup some of the costs associated with extreme weather, elongating fire seasons, harm to ecosystems, and more. She has also written about similar lawsuits filed at the local level in Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Puerto Rico after flooding, high heat, and hurricanes, respectively.
After extreme weather events, municipalities and governments are left figuring out how to pick up the pieces—and how to fund those recovery efforts. “Litigation against the fossil fuel industry for its deception and for delaying climate action is one way that communities are thinking about addressing that,” Sanders says. “So that could be a hook for local journalists too.”
Embracing Community in Climate Reporting
When writing about climate disasters, extreme weather, and even plain-old rainy days, local and regional journalists have a unique kinship with their readers because they share the same homebase. This connection allows journalists to focus more deeply on what matters to a community, earning trust through both the grind of daily reporting and reliable coverage when weather turns severe. Reporters can build upon this trust to incorporate more climate coverage into their work and better inform their audiences.
When Katie Myers, a regional reporter at Grist and Blue Ridge Public Radio, worked for the local journalism collaborative Ohio Valley ReSource and WMMT in Whitesburg, Kentucky, reporting on catastrophic rainstorms in 2022 changed how she saw her role as a journalist. As floodwaters and national media receded from rural parts of the state, the disaster remained personal for Myers. Even the station where she worked had been destroyed.
That’s the beauty of reporting from a community: Local and regional journalists are there to hold people’s stories of what’s happening in their home in the context of what’s happening on our planet.
Rather than remaining at a journalistic distance, she volunteered folding clothes at a recovery center—in part to help her wrap her mind around the disaster. As Myers covered the impact on her community, she tried to approach sources with helpful information—like pamphlets her colleague put together about aid applications—not just questions. Myers also created a guide called “Reporting a Disaster When It’s Where You Live” with a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network. Her document marries practical disaster preparation advice with guidance on covering both an event’s aftermath and the potential for extreme weather in the future. She counsels journalists to ask long-term questions in their reporting over the coming months and years: Do experts think this will happen again? What will the rebuild look like? How are officials thinking about hazard mitigation?
Even in day-to-day coverage, community relationships are an asset. As Williams points out, he walks out his door to the same 110°F weather that his Austin-area viewers do. His reporting holds “the weight of this [being] not just a numbers game”—the extremes in his forecast have very real consequences, and Williams has the responsibility to understand and cover these downstream effects in his region. Meeting with a local master gardener’s association, for example, gave him insight into how growers cope with drought conditions.
Qusien values local media’s capacity to share stories from the ground-up. She has seen in her research that it’s easy for large, well-resourced media outlets based in the U.S. or Europe to set the tone on which big climate stories are notable. Qusien encourages local and regional reporters to look first to the people and organizations around them to shape their coverage. “What are the challenges of the local people?” she asks. Looking at “how they are making sense of their surroundings and what kind of changes they are experiencing” can ensure reporting is both informed by and useful to local communities.
When national reporters do step in during extreme weather, Myers feels that it’s vital for them to get in touch with local journalists, and credit them for their efforts. “Recognize the work that’s been done,” she says. After a BBC reporter reached out, Myers ended up collaborating with him an audio documentary on the Kentucky flooding, guiding the story’s direction and interviewing displaced residents. Other radio stations also sent WMMT money and equipment.
In the landscape of more-frequent and worsening weather disasters, reporting on climate change and the weather with care and humanity is “a long-haul thing,” Myers reflects. “A disaster is not … a thing that happens, and then it’s over,” she says. “The ramifications last for years.” Closely covering even incremental changes—small steps that help communities recover from and prepare for future storms—helps journalists stay the course.
That’s the beauty of reporting from a community. Local and regional journalists are there for daily forecasts and breaking stories, through rebuilds and adaptation, to hold people’s stories of what’s happening in their home in the context of what’s happening on our planet. Sometimes, a journalist’s best insight into how a place is changing comes from listening to the people who’ve weathered its storms for years, Giffin reflects. “Living somewhere your whole life is a form of climate knowledge.”
Kate Fishman is a freelance journalist based in San Diego, California, and an early-career reporting fellow with The Open Notebook. She has covered local news in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and California’s Mendocino County, where she was a Report for America corps member and cultivated a love for writing about ecology. Her reporting has appeared in Sierra, Reuters, High Country News, and Atmos, among other publications. Find her on X @katefishreports.