The monsoon onset is a critical event in the Bangladesh calendar, especially for the domestic agricultural sector. Providing information about the monsoon onset for the past, present, and future has potential benefit for a country so vulnerable to changes in climate. But, when does the monsoon start? To produce any scientific information about monsoon onsets, lengths, and withdrawals, we first need to apply a monsoon definition to our data. Choosing a scientific definition is not such a simple exercise in Bangladesh. Different definitions lead to different monsoon onsets and thereby also monsoon lengths. If a climate application aims to provide information about the monsoon onset, then we need to understand how the people who might use this information perceive the monsoon onset. We then need to understand how their perceptions compare with previous scientific work. In this study we carried out a structured questionnaire in six rural regions around Bangladesh and asked the local agriculturists how they defined the monsoon and when they thought it started. It turns out that the agriculturists and previous scientific publications do not necessarily agree. Our results do not undermine previous scientific work on the monsoon in Bangladesh, but they do carry an important message about how we should design, implement, and evaluate climate applications in Bangladesh that encompass the monsoon onset.

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Climate change adaptation has increasingly come to be conceptualized as a place-based social process, in large part mediated by the local cultural context. The specificity of adaptation has called for partnerships between scientific and local communities to “co-produce” knowledge of climate variability (weather) and longer-term climate change. However, this raises numerous methodological challenges, including how to elicit the representations, knowledge, and cultural meanings of weather that are tacit to people in a community, and represent them in an explicit form that can be shared in a process of “co-production”. Such work demands careful attention to the way tightly intertwined knowledge systems continuously rebuild representations of climate in a place, and how these knowledge systems are also intertwined with values and the exercise of power. This paper takes up this challenge and explores the potential offered by theories and methods of narrative. Looking at a research project “co-producing” knowledge of weather and impacts in northeast Bangladesh, this paper describes the experience of running narrative interviews with communities there, and how these narratives were analyzed along four themes to contribute to the co-production process. These themes included 1) the weather phenomena and impacts important to local communities, 2) how weather provides meaning and identity in that place, 3) how community actors produce and share weather knowledge, and 4) the climate-related narratives pervading the community. In sharing this experience, this paper seeks to fulfil a demand for more detailed practical accounts of narrative methods in climate adaptation research, particularly for knowledge co-production.