Why Do We Watch the Weather on TV While It Is Happening Just Outside?

Late in January, in Riverhead, N.Y., a local newscaster stood on a main street in falling snow. It was early morning, still dark out, the day of a much anticipated blizzard, and she gestured at how much snow had already accumulated on the street. Someone in the studio said, “It’s coming down.” She paused and affirmed, “It is coming down.” This was, in fact, already aggressively obvious: Snow was blowing all around her.

For the next few minutes, dressed in gloves and a parka branded with the logo for NBC New York Channel 4, she described the ongoing storm for the audience. She noted that she had already chased down the lone pedestrian she saw to ask why he was out in the snow so early. (He was on his way to meet a friend so they could plow their street together.) She said she had seen exactly seven plows in the previous 15 minutes. She described the texture of the snow as “light and powdery,” and kicked some around to demonstrate. “You can see the wind,” she said. “This is the part of the blizzard that makes it very interesting.”

Objectively speaking, of course, it’s not really that interesting. It’s the weather. Its existence is one of the most basic facts of life: The snow falls, the sun shines, the seasons turn, the Earth spins. And yet local news clips like this one can be, somehow, gripping in their accounts of this normalcy. I find myself watching, every time a winter storm descends, from inside my cozy living room or in the corner of a neighborhood sports bar where I have taken refuge. The news spots fuel anticipation about what might be coming; they create a certain momentum around the experience. We turn on the TV so we can watch someone else standing in the wind, or measuring snow depths with a stick, or — during one recent storm — comparing the amount of snow to a stack of bread slices.

There is something a little absurd about watching the weather on TV while it is happening just beyond our windows. Most of what we see is so obvious: Snow comes down, wind picks up, plows roll through. We watch anyway. Toward the end of the segment filmed on Long Island, the newscaster reminds us that it is still very early on, that it is going to be a very long day, that there is still much more to come. We have to stay tuned.

Weathercasting has become more and more fraught as extreme weather events become more frequent. Journalists put themselves in harm’s way to document storms and fires and tornadoes. Sometimes they stand on-camera with water rising behind them or winds blowing so fiercely that they can barely stand, prompting debate over the utility of ritualistically addressing a camera in the middle of, say, a hurricane. But it is a television tradition, stormcasting, old enough that it is hard to imagine it disappearing entirely. Major networks, including Fox, are increasingly investing in weather reporting, hiring meteorologists and data analysts, betting that as more and more disasters unfold, we will want to watch them live on TV.

But then there is reporting from the scene of regular old noncatastrophic weather — the kind the newscaster on Long Island was describing, the kind that is interesting only locally, and attended to by unglamorous local media. This weather is not, in itself, so visually dramatic; snowfall, even really destructive snowfall, consists mostly of sprinkling. There the arc of a blizzard is usually much the same. The storm descends, then lifts. It might leave fallen branches, power outages, impassable roads. People venture outside for snowball fights or sledding. Streets and sidewalks are plowed, salted, shoveled. Eventually the snow melts, leaving everything muddier than before, and we wait for the next storm.

But the newscaster turns all this into a collective event infused with drama and meaning. There is utility to the coverage, but issues like road conditions are usually taken care of quickly. After that, these broadcasts become a kind of improvised human-interest story about people dealing with snow. Pedestrians are stopped on the street and asked about their experience; often they have little to say beyond confirming that yes, it’s really coming down. Newscasters pull out rulers, describe wind speeds, offer statistics on the local history of precipitation. They might ad-lib, as Channel 4’s Brian Thompson did earlier this year, about what it might be like to be a dog seen romping through the snow — or comment on how, as mentioned in a previous segment, 7-Eleven was closed, leaving no place to get coffee. News coverage becomes more like an extended, dramatized version of small talk.

There is something poignant about this, in a world where most of us turn less and less to local television and local newspapers for daily updates — a world in which those outlets are, in fact, rapidly and disastrously vanishing. News as hyperlocal human interest, as what we are experiencing in a specific place at a given moment, as the dramatization of someone’s commute: These formats have all come to feel rarer, and therefore more special. (How incredible does it feel that after the report on that shuttered 7-Eleven, a nearby viewer emerged to offer Thompson coffee from his home?) I have a friend in my neighborhood with whom I trade excited text messages at the slightest flurry; we’ll write, “Snow!” to each other, a kind of alert, as though we were not blocks apart, watching the same thing from our windows. We turn to snowstorm news for something similar: confirmation of our highly specific experience. We want to see it shared, and turned into something miraculous, despite its being so ordinary.

Weather is the bread and butter of small talk — maligned, dismissed as banal, even used as shorthand for talking about nothing at all, despite its immense significance to everyday life. Turning on the TV and seeing the newscaster on Long Island standing outside in the falling snow affirms this shared experience: We watch her watching the weather, even as we watch it ourselves. This kind of local collectivity feels increasingly hard to find — steadily replaced, in media, by national coverage of national controversies. But on snow days, the story being told is one we will all participate in, whether from our living rooms or offices or out on the street — a very normal nuisance and a miracle we don’t want to miss, viewed both from our windows and on our screens.

Source photographs: FreshSplash/Getty Images; Gerard Garcia/EyeEm/Getty Images; Screen grab from YouTube.