Weatherfluencers: Trust and Collective Sensemaking in Severe Weather Livestreams

Abstract

During severe weather, YouTube-native content creators interpret unfolding conditions in real time,offering radar analysis and safety guidance to large audiences. These weatherfluencers operate outside the credentials, professional affiliations, and accountability structures through which the U.S. weather enterprise has historically made its expertise publicly legible. Existing work in sensemaking, trust, crisis informatics, and weather communication has not explained how audiences organize live collective interpretation around a creator whose professional standing is actively contested. I investigate that problem through three stud- ies of severe weather livestreams. I find that broadcast meteorologists retain their institutional advantages compared to weatherfluencers, particularly on measures of trustworthiness, credibility, and legitimacy; that weatherfluencers make their interpretive reasoning continuously observable through source triangulation, uncertainty narration, and on-screen revision; and that chat participants engage with that reasoning through directed questioning, ground-truth reports, and source comparison. I develop inspectable interpretive work to name the continuous public externalization of interpretive reasoning as it unfolds, which gives audiences evaluable material to work with even where credential cues are absent or contested.