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Paper short abstract

Based on interviews with Canadian broadcast meteorologists, this paper examines forecasting as infrastructural care and horizon work. It shows how temporal coordination, embodied expertise, and improvisation sustain the viability of public weather communication under climate uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

This study examines broadcast meteorological labour in Canada as a form of infrastructural care and horizon work in a public sphere increasingly shaped by climate uncertainty, risk, and contested authority. Building on anthropological and STS work on temporal infrastructures and time as technique (Star 1999; Bear 2016), anticipation (Adams et al. 2009), and the politics of mediated time (Sharma 2014), it approaches forecasting as the coordination of heterogeneous and often incommensurable temporal regimes. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with broadcast meteorologists from major television and news networks across Canada, I explore how atmospheric processes, bureaucratic protocols, and media production cycles are held together in practice.

I argue that broadcast meteorology functions as a future-oriented, experimental infrastructure concerned with the ongoing viability of public orientation under conditions of runaway change. In this sense, forecasting operates as a form of ‘horizon work’ (Petryna 2022): working at the edges of knowledge to stabilize uncertainty and render volatile futures publicly actionable. These practices rely on embodied expertise (Collins and Evans 2007) and on continual work of synchronization, anticipation, and improvisation. Rather than treating these as purely technical responses to uncertainty, this study shows how forecasting operates as a form of situated mediation and care. Read through Boyer’s (2022) notion of revolutionary infrastructures, broadcast meteorology appears as a site where the limits and viability of existing infrastructures are continuously tested, repaired, and provisionally sustained by holding together temporal worlds that might otherwise pull apart.