METEOROLOGY - Rain or shine

Climate anxiety is fuelling our interest in weather forecasts anda growing range of apps that cater forall conditions

- Hannah Marriott

One day in 2020, close to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Matt Rickett realised he was checking weather apps all the time. He immediately understood why: "Everything felt so unpredictable, so out of control," he said. "Just knowing that something was going to happen, tomorrow, that people said was gonna happen, was reassuring." The next year Rickett, who lives in Austin, Texas, decided to stop using social media: "I didn't like the control it had over my life," he said. "But I still had the energy, the need to look at my phone, for some reason. So I got even more into weather." He checks apps roughly every couple of hours. After much trial and error, he's decided he likes Weather Underground and Foreca the best.

He also uses apps' radar functions to try to track storms and precipitation. When he boards a plane, he checks the flight path using radar, too, so he has a better sense of whether to expect a bumpy landing.

The temperature in Austin has been 40C-plus for weeks; he'll keep checking the apps, even when he knows no change is likely. Or else he looks at the weather in other places, where it is less hot, and he has family, and thinks: "Oh, maybe I can go there for a little bit."

It's behaviour that Jess Green, who lives in Liverpool, England, might relate to. During last summer's unprecedented heatwave in the UK, she said: "There was a lot of talk of: 'Will we make it to 40C?' I kept checking in the hope that we wouldn't." She would watch the numbers rise on her app and would then feel relieved to see them peak, thinking: "We're on our way down; and things haven't burst into flames." She would check different locations. "I would think: so it's not a record temperature in Liverpool today. That's great. But what about London?"