Weather apps put more data than ever at our fingertips – and create the perfect storm for misinformation and anxiety | Canada Voices

Twelve years ago, near some farmland northwest of Toronto, Adam Skinner was in the passenger seat of a Toyota Corolla, unknowingly heading straight into a tornado.

An amateur storm chaser, Mr. Skinner was using weather radar data on his phone to track the menacing clouds unleashing sheets of rain. The wind was so strong, the nearby highway sign started to wiggle and fold. But the radar had a five-minute delay, so it didn’t show the funnel cloud forming behind the rain.

About 24 metres away, the roof of a horse stable flew off and crashed down just behind the car. Later, Mr. Skinner would learn it was an EF-1 tornado, which can reach speeds up to 177 kilometres an hour.

“There was only a severe thunderstorm watch that day. There was no tornado watch. No tornado warning,” he says. The experience made him wonder if there could be a way to better warn people in his community of potentially dangerous storms before it was too late, drawing on his tight-knit community of fellow storm chasers and weather geeks.

These were still the adolescent days of social media. Extreme weather events like the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina unfolded largely on broadcast cable news, but in 2013 Mr. Skinner thought Facebook could be a more immediate way to get information out.

Soon after the close call with the tornado, he started a Facebook page called Ontario Storm Watch to post updates about approaching storms and share Environment Canada warnings. The page – and later, a public group – quickly amassed tens of thousands of members, and Mr. Skinner launched similar groups in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

The Ontario group now has more than half a million members. Sometimes, members post photos of tornadoes more than an hour before Environment Canada will send out an official alert.

But while the groups were initially conceived to raise awareness about potential storms, they’ve also become a place for people to talk about the most granular weather data. Between snaps of massive piles of snow and golf-ball sized hail, there’s posts about the mundane, everyday weather: the high and low temperatures, the humidex or wind chill, the air quality levels and visibility.

Once the domain of professionals, climate information gathered from satellites and radar models are now easily accessible online, giving amateur forecasters an unprecedented amount of raw data. On Reddit and niche online forums, weather nerds analyze and debate the output of forecasts. On YouTube and TikTok, “storm streamers” go live for hours during extreme weather events, providing real-time updates and sharing on-the-ground photos sent in from their devoted followers.

At the same time, a plethora of new weather apps have emerged, giving access to a deluge of real-time information that can help us better plan our lives and time outdoors – from using air-quality ratings to determine when to take our kids to the playground to factoring in rain predictions for vacation planning. It’s not unusual to see people squinting at the radar on their smartphone’s weather app to figure out whether a splotch of red will be passing over them in the near future.

But the flood of data can also consume us, lead to misinformation, and heighten climate anxiety while at the same time diluting important updates about flooding and wildfire threats.

This obsession with weather isn’t new, but it’s been modernized with hyper-localized streams of information, push notifications and content creators who feed on its addictive nature – all against the backdrop of extreme weather events becoming more frequent.

The weather nerds

Matt Grauman, a self-proclaimed “weekend warrior meteorology enthusiast,” always loved watching The Weather Network as a kid, but it was when he joined an online weather forum in 2009 that his passion went into overdrive. He learned how to read the major forecasting models, such as the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) – “It’s the model that weather geeks really follow. It’s king” – and how to understand their quirks and biases.

This esoteric knowledge can come in handy in his daily life. Before a recent family trip to Calgary, Mr. Grauman obsessively checked Environment Canada’s forecast, the ECMWF, the Global Forecast System – another popular model – and what are known as “ensemble forecasts,” which run the same forecast multiple times, each time making small adjustments to the initial details to produce a range of possible weather outcomes. “For a week before, I was obsessing over the models. Are we going to be dodging showers? Are we going to be rained out?”

For Mr. Grauman, the act itself of checking models – especially when they hint at a rare weather event, even one that won’t affect him personally – can be exhilarating.

“People literally wake up in the middle of the night and check the latest model. I’ve done that myself,” said Mr. Grauman, who is based in Mission, B.C., and works in accounting. “To the average person, that sounds very dull and tedious, but to someone who’s just got that bent, that’s as exciting as watching the Stanley Cup.”

It’s a similar thrill that fuels Andrew Beardsall’s obsession with weather data.

“I check it almost all the time,” says Mr. Beardsall, who lives in Ottawa and works for the federal government. “People forward me The Weather Network forecast, and I’m looking at six different models.”

An avid skier, the 31-year-old attributes some of his obsession to the nature of the sport, since it’s so dependent on the weather. He’s downloaded and analyzed more than a 100 years of Environment and Climate Change Canada data to organize ski trips based on likely snow depth.

Yet even in the summer, he’s looking at weather data five to ten times a day – including forecasts for locations all around the world. For him, checking the radar offers the same dopamine hit others get from swiping TikTok or plunging down a Reddit rabbit hole – and similar to social media, there’s new information to devour every time he refreshes the model.

An average scroll looks something like this: He’ll check the weather for Old Crow, the most northern settlement in the Yukon, then head to Baker Lake in Nunavut. Next he’ll hop over to the highest altitude town in Norway, then the Alps, then click around to see if anywhere is getting snow, or a hurricane or a big rain event.

“I love the numbers and the data and the visualizations. I mean, it’s as addictive as social media can be.” Sometimes, Mr. Beardsall admits, he won’t even know what the temperature is in Ottawa. “But I could probably tell you if it’s really hot in Yukon.”

That addictive pull mirrors another digital reflex: when storms roll in, so do the posts. Kelton Minor, a behavioural scientist and an outgoing postdoc at Columbia University, found a measurable spike in posting on social media when the weather gets worse.

“You can think of this as like a storm surge of digital activity. Heavy rains create a physical flood, and extreme weather also unleashes a digital flood, which inundates social feeds with both weather updates, but also everyday chatter,” says Dr. Minor, who co-authored the recent study published in the Association for Psychological Science.

His research has also found that extreme weather alters the emotional sentiment of our social media messages.

“Our posts become full of negative emotions, angry expressions, anxious expressions,” says Dr. Minor. “The implications of that are not just at the individual level of, say, worsened well-being during times of extreme weather, but have a social knock-on effect in our network.”

The forecast calls for misinformation

Weather is inherently suited to the sensationalism of social media, and the explosion of accessible data has helped give rise to a new kind of online personality: the weather influencer.

For these influencers, deadly hurricanes, record-breaking heat, catastrophic floods and debilitating snowstorms become raw material for viral content.

Ryan Hall, 31, is a “storm streamer” with more than two million followers on his YouTube channel – called Ryan Hall, Y’all – whose polished videos rival network TV stations. The self-proclaimed “Internet’s weatherman” hosts hours-long livestreams from his Kentucky home studio, pulling radar and satellite data, storm-chaser livestreams and other on-the-ground footage sent in from his fans.

Mr. Hall doesn’t have a degree in meteorology, but he has a team that includes professional meteorologist Andy Hill and other forecasters. During streams, Mr. Hall answers questions from the chat and refers to YallBot, his personalized AI chatbot that has its own channel that runs 24/7 and monitors weather warnings. It has more than 800,000 subscribers.

Mr. Skinner, the former storm chaser that started the Facebook groups, also livestreams on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Twitch during severe weather events. On July 26, he jumped online when the radar showed a potential tornado forming near Goderich, Ont. For six hours, he tracked how the storm was progressing via the radar from Instant Weather, the website and app he and his team created, as well as photos and reports from viewers.

“If you’re in these areas, you need to take shelter,” says Mr. Skinner, pointing to multiple towns on the radar map. “I wouldn’t be waiting around to see what happens when it hits your land.”

Talking about the weather used to be a safe, even banal conversation topic. But as extreme weather events increase, even weather has become polarizing.

During his livestreams and in the Facebook groups, Mr. Skinner says he doesn’t typically reference climate change directly as the topic would turn off about half his audience. “There’s overwhelming evidence, but is it something we discuss all the time on the pages? Not really. We just stay in our lane.”

Similarly, Mr. Hill and Mr. Hall don’t explicitly mention climate change because it alienates a large portion of the audience in deep red states. Instead they address the weather event at hand with the hopes that changing patterns speak for themselves, an approach Mr. Hill has argued is more likely to convert climate skeptics.

As more people get their forecasts from social media and apps, though, there’s a risk of climate change dropping out of public conversation – and misinformation spreading more quickly.

“I have noticed that there has been a market shift in how people are consuming weather content in the last couple of years. There’s a big shift from traditional media to social media,” says Eddie Sheerr, a Newfoundland-based meteorologist formerly with NTV. In June, he left the network, launched his own app, Sheerr Weather, and continues posting near daily forecasts on TikTok.

“Weather is a great content generator because it’s always changing and there’s always some big storm on the horizon,” says Mr. Sheerr. “I think a lot of creators understand that weather can get a lot of clicks, likes and shares, which in turn can lead to attention and lead to increased value, potentially, if their page is monetized. So there is an incentive really to post weather data that may be a little bit fictitious.”

He also worries that self-taught hobbyists without as much knowledge as creators like Mr. Hall or Mr. Skinner may inadvertently share misinformation, which can sow distrust in the meteorology industry as a whole.

“What happens is these posts go viral very quickly and they can get shared, hundreds if not thousands of times,” says Mr. Sheerr.

That’s why the Facebook group moderators of the Ontario Storm Reports and Mr. Skinner’s other provincial groups approve every post before it’s published, to catch conspiracy theories or misinformation. Recently, they came across their first AI-generated photo of a tornado, which was also submitted to Environment Canada. The agency mistakenly confirmed the photo was authentic, and later issued a retraction.

During extreme weather events, disinformation from high-profile conspiracy theorists is drowning out emergency response efforts. According to a recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Alex Jones’s false claims during the L.A. wildfires, including conspiracies about “globalist” plots causing them, amassed more views on X than the combined reach of FEMA, major news outlets and emergency agencies.

Mr. Sheerr sees the role of the meteorologist expanding from simply providing the forecast to also offering more context about weather events and debunking false narratives, which will be important in this era of information overload – and could save lives.

“The meteorologist is there to get you through the weather when it turns, and to communicate all the potential impacts that you could have in your daily life: storm surge, flooding hail, thunderstorms, tornadoes,” says Mr. Sheerr. “It’s our job to cover them as they happen and get people through the event safely.”

Anxiety in the air

For the past few summers, Aspen Murray has started to check a new data point every day on her weather app: air quality. From coast to coast, large swaths of Canada have been blanketed in wildfire smoke in recent years, a hazy curtain of pollutants that can lead to itchy eyes, sore throats, difficulty breathing and asthma attacks.

Most weather apps now include the Air Quality Health Index, the Canadian scale that rates the health risks associated with local air pollution. More niche apps, such as IQAir’s AirVisual, provide detailed breakdowns of specific pollutants from data captured from official government ministries and crowdsourced from monitoring devices that regular people have installed in their own backyards.

“Getting accustomed to checking the air quality has been something that’s really made me think more about my climate anxiety,” says Ms. Murray, 25. “Growing up, that’s something that I never would have thought of or worried about.”

Ms. Murray, who is based in Montreal and runs the Eco-Anxiety Peer Support Group at Concordia University, says weather reports these days can highlight that we’re already living through alarming impacts of climate change.

“When I know that we have extreme heat, I can plan my day accordingly. But then there’s the grief associated with that. The summer is so short and to not be able to go outside in a safe way in July is sad.”

Aliénor Rougeot, a 26-year-old climate activist in Toronto, has seen her life change in subtle, but worrying ways. Recently while visiting Montreal, she was concerned about sitting outside on a patio after seeing the air quality index and persuaded her friends to move inside. “I was so stressed because I had seen the purple ranking and was thinking, ‘I’m putting so much stuff in my lungs right now.’”

During that same trip, she received a push notification for a tornado warning. It caused a moment of panic, but she didn’t know how concerned she should be. Sure, it was windy where she was, but it didn’t feel tornado level windy.

“Sometimes we have a lot of information, but we don’t know how to interpret it,” she said. She eventually moved inside, but mostly because it was going to start raining.

Experts warn that the overexposure to weather warnings, especially if they’re not local or poorly worded, can lead to “alert fatigue” and may result in tuning out crucial information. During the catastrophic floods in Texas, the National Weather Service issued 22 alerts, and some people said they ignored the first ones because they are so common.

“The idea is that with the overwhelming amount of information, whether it is from the media or apps that we have on our phone that tell us what’s happening with the hourly weather, that there’s something that everybody can do with that information,” says Anabela Bonada, the managing director of climate science at the Intact Centre of Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo. “However, it’s not being taken up to the degree that we wish it were.”

Experts say that targeted alerts with clear instructions that are sent to only those in the affected areas could be used to persuade more action.

For some, though, the abundance of weather information is never enough – and obsessive weather checking helps them cope with climate change fears.

Maighdlyn Hadley, who lives in Toronto, has over the last few years been increasingly more dialled into the air quality reports to decide how to commute, and whether to pack a KN-95 if she’ll be outside for long periods of time. “I have long been anxious about climate change and using my weather app daily, at minimum, helps me feel more prepared for whatever weather system is coming at us.”

Mr. Skinner says that the vast majority of people who follow the livestreams have weather anxiety that stems from experiencing a specific extreme event.

“They want to be prepared,” he says. “There’s something comforting when I’m in front of them watching the radar, analyzing every frame, and saying ‘it’s getting stronger’ or ‘it’s getting weaker.’ It eases the anxiety.”

All this data offers Mr. Skinner reassurance, too.

“The unknown is much more scary. I’d rather know that storms are going to be here between two and five o’clock. I can prepare for it. I can get my batteries charged, all that stuff,” he says. “Is there more anxiety if you’re looking at more data? I actually think it’s the opposite.”