Linguistic uncertainty in meteorological forecastsfor Russian speaking audiences : A comparative study between televised weather forecastsand seasonal outlooks of the Northern Eurasian ClimateOutlook Forum

Abstract: In order to make informed decisions, we need to resort to various types of information and we need to know how uncertain this information is. A commonly used source for information and subsequent action is weather forecasts. The communication of uncertainty in weather forecasts has been widely studied for English speaking audiences, resulting in a number of guidelines that practitioners can follow. For forecasts aimed at Russian speaking audiences there are very few, if no, such studies. The aim of this study is to extend previous research on the communication of uncertainties in weather forecasts to the Russian-speaking domain. The underlying hypothesis for this study is that it should be possible to distinguish texts from different types of forecasts, with different inherent uncertainty, by analysing the linguistic uncertainty markers in the text-based section of these forecasts. If this is not the case, this could in a first step be solved by applying the recommendations in the available guidelines, in a second step the guidelines themselves might need to be extended to meet the needs of the practitioners. To test the hypothesis, I analyse the expressed linguistic uncertainty in two different sources of meteorological information: weather forecasts and seasonal outlooks. The analysis shows that the original hypothesis can be confirmed: the differences between these two sources of information can be detected by analysing linguistic uncertainty markers. Further, the recommendations from the guidelines were met to a large extent, but both type of forecasts, in particular the seasonal outlooks, would benefit from a more consolidated approach. The analysis also shows that these guidelines could be improved by placing an increased emphasis on text-based forecasts, highlighting which linguistic means should be used for what purpose. The guidelines could be extended with language-specific best-practise examples. This way the guidelines would cater for a much larger user-base than they do at present.