A Newsroom Team That Sees Data in the Air

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In early November, Judson Jones was checking the weather forecast when he noticed that a low-pressure system in the Atlantic Ocean was taking on the characteristic rotation of a tropical cyclone. A hurricane in November is rare, but Mr. Jones could read the signs: A powerful storm was forming. After all, as a meteorologist at The New York Times, it’s what he was hired to do.

Mr. Jones spoke to his boss, John Keefe, the lead editor of the Weather Data team, a group formed last year that is focused on covering extreme weather events. “I think we need to write this story,” Mr. Jones recalled telling Mr. Keefe. “This is really happening.”

So the Weather Data team, in close collaboration with The Times’s Graphics desk, began working on an interactive article, with maps and rainfall forecasts, that would track the progress of the system as it raced across the Atlantic, then turned into Hurricane Nicole by the time it hit the Bahamas. On Nov. 10, Nicole became the first hurricane to come ashore on Florida’s Atlantic coast since Katrina in 2005.

Weather has always been part of The Times’s coverage. Short forecasts have appeared on the front page since 1897. In recent years, interactive features, such as The Upshot’s probability-based snow forecast and the Graphics desk’s seasonal wildfire tracker, have offered readers more immersive weather reporting.

As the planet continues to warm and wilder weather becomes more frequent, The Times is expanding its weather reporting to help readers better understand extreme weather events and the threats they pose.

“In a time when droughts are getting more intense, hurricanes are getting wetter, heat waves are getting hotter, it is important that we are able to provide analysis of these phenomena to our readers,” Mr. Keefe said.

The work of the Weather Data team is a part of The Times’s ongoing effort to broaden the scope of its data journalism. One of the roles of data journalism, according to Matthew Ericson, an assistant managing editor who oversees the area at The Times, is “to deliver a clear, reader-oriented display of quantitative information.” In a rapidly advancing digital age, more information has become available to the public, and journalists at The Times are using that data to clarify complex events through data-powered visual reports. For example, by requesting data from public health agencies, journalists behind The Times’s Covid-19 case tracker helped readers understand the spread of the coronavirus.

Bea Malsky, who previously worked on the Covid-19 tracker, joined the Weather Data team in December to build and maintain systems for managing meteorological data. According to Mr. Jones, “every parcel in the air is a data point.”

Sources like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where scientists can model advanced forecasts, are publishing more information. Members of The Times’s Weather Data and Graphics teams can present to readers just how much rain has soaked California in a series of atmospheric rivers in the last three weeks.

As a meteorologist and a reporter, Mr. Jones said his role is “to take what scientists are doing and translating it so that it makes sense for the general public.”

Growing up in Little Rock, Ark., he was fascinated by the tornadoes that threatened the region every spring. After graduating from the University of Central Arkansas with a degree in mass communications, he found a job at CNN, where his childhood fascination with the weather bloomed into a professional passion. Soon, he obtained a certificate in meteorology from Mississippi State University. Mr. Jones spent 15 years at CNN producing and reporting weather news before joining The Times in October.

Mr. Jones and other team members often collaborate with other desks around the newsroom. Mr. Keefe recalled a day in late November when he and Mr. Jones noticed a weather system moving east from the Sierra Nevada. Mr. Jones reached out to forecasters with the National Weather Service and confirmed that there was an increasing probability of a late-season tornado outbreak in several Southern states.

Mr. Keefe alerted the Express desk, a team of breaking news reporters and editors, and the National desk, about the tornado threat. At the same time, the Weather Data team began constructing a map that would display where tornadoes had been sighted in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to accompany an article with contributions from all three desks.

Mr. Ericson said the team plans to broaden its data collection efforts so that readers can view “always-on” interactive tools that capture “a full stable of the weather events most likely to be happening in their region,” similar to the way the wildfire tracker page, which gathers data from land management agencies and satellite imagery from NASA to show the spread or containment of destructive fires, does.

“We are covering the major events that might affect people’s lives,” Mr. Ericson said. “We want to be as clear as we can in explaining to our readers when a storm is coming and what may happen to them.”