Podcast De Weerman

The Podcast De Weerman is an attractive and popular format with an impressive community of followers. It is produced by the Dutch Public Broadcasting Association.

Citation:

The combination of climate expertise, TV and journalistic expertise are a perfect mixture to communicate difficult facts. Interviews with relevant stakeholders, people involved in weather and climate are lively aspects of communication and relate to experience with all kinds of weather and climate issues reaching from the past to the future.

De Weerman is all about weather and climate, about the mechanisms behind weather phenomena, about weather forecasting and climate change. It is addressing a general audience, no background in meteorology or science is needed. Each episode of the podcast is centered around a theme and the meteorological processes are explained in layman’s words in order to inform the general public on a more detailed level than possible in regular news and weather forecast items on TV and radio. The podcast is a mix of fun facts, science, impact, and the relation between climate and weather is woven into the episodes. The podcast is hosted by TV weather forecaster Peter Kuipers Munneke, who is also a polar researcher at the Utrecht University in The Netherlands, specializing in the climate of the polar regions and ice sheets, and news anchor Fleur Wallenburg and their team.

The podcast started in October 2019 and in the meantime, 30 episodes have been produced over a period of three years. The number of productions as well as the content and variety are continuously growing.

The Weerman is very useful to all parts of the society, because themes are flexible and deliver answers to many questions relating to weather and climate with the aim to inform in a colloquial and attractive manner. The pedagogical value through “voice-communication” draws attention to just the human “listening”-capability, requires and inspires fantasy of the listeners. It is a constant offer, guarantees continuity and seems to be institutional and attractive for listeners and so far timeless.

Mixture of a well-known TV-persons, and journalists guarantee a programme not overloaded with pure science and scientific language. Accessibility is easy, everyone with a computer or a mobile phone can choose their topic of interest and can repeat the programme as often as desired in order to better understand the content. Download enables the listener to collect the different editions and archive them for further use. The audience will get used to listen to climate issues.

The podcasts are professionally produced. The 30 episodes have been accessed over >300k times so far. The entire collection of podcast episodes can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcast, any other podcast browser, or online at https://www.nporadio1.nl/podcasts/de-weerman

The Podcast De Weerman was nominated by the Dutch Meteorological Society.