Climate Communication is an important mandate of national weather and climate services. At MeteoSwiss, we reach a wide spectrum of audiences through different channels: from the general public and policy makers to federal, cantonal and local authorities, decision makers and more science-educated partners such as impact researchers. Visualisations play a key role in all contexts and are an excellent way to illustrate complex scientific topics in a digestible and actionable manner.
Given our wide range of users, our visualizations range from infographic-type plots and animations with a high creative ambition to more standardized graphical representations in the context of climate monitoring and climate projections. To this end it is also relevant to implement the visualisations in an operational production chain that allows to provide this information in a timely, reliable and reproducible manner.
The presentation aims to provide an overview of our activities and approaches and to comment on the experiences and learnings that we gathered over many years. These include: infographics and their use and impact examples for and the role of animations and video content storytelling with personas to make complex information tangible for users examples from the climate monitoring suite and their applications lessons from interdisciplinary projects and co-design
We hope this talk sparks an exchange about the possibilities and challenges of visual climate communication in an operational setting in weather and climate services and that we might learn from designers and communicators working beyond the boundaries of science.