Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how meteorologists in Bangladesh imagine multiple futures including the daily production of weather and those of the longer term in which weather turns catastrophic. It will examine strategies by which weather is rendered predictable and moments in which it becomes uncertain.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the atmospheric futures of Bangladesh, a country heralded in contemporary debates as the epicenter of climate change but also viewed as historically plagued by cyclones, monsoon rains, and riverine flooding. Uncertain ecologies have long been a problem of environmental governance in Bengal as successive regimes developed stabilizing infrastructures and predictive mechanisms to secure the deltaic landscape. In a place where disaster is tied to seasonal weather and is always already part of the everyday, the Bangladesh Meteorological Department is an institution tasked with making sense of atmospheric uncertainty. It is the only bureaucratic arm of the state that never sleeps: data coming in from regional weather stations is analyzed around the clock, forecasts must be communicated to the public, and scientific expertise is constantly sought by other branches of government, farmers, insurance companies, and NGOs, among others. Based on ethnographic work at the Bangladesh Meteorological Department, this paper seeks to analyze the predicament that state meteorologists find themselves in as they negotiate the temporalities of the near-future, which involve the daily production and prediction of weather, and those of longer-term possible futures in which weather turns catastrophic. This paper examines strategies by which weather is domesticated, how it is rendered as a techno-scientific object, how it becomes a political concern, and the modes by which it exceeds meteorological knowing. In doing so, it argues that different attempts to harness weather through data and forecasting imagine potential futures and associated risks in competing and sometimes contradictory ways.