Mental health is a topic of increasing interest and concern across the weather enterprise amidst a backdrop of funding cuts, extreme storms, and longer, more involved work hours. The present study therefore investigated wellbeing in the meteorological workplace. Participants (N= 389), professional meteorologists (n = 360) and professionally-employed meteorology students (n = 29), voluntarily participated in a Qualtrics-hosted online survey and responded to a number of measures representing a broad range of mental health variables. These individuals fell into three employment sectors: U.S. National Weather Service (NWS), Broadcast (television weather), and Other (a combination of academic, private sector, military, and non-NWS operational meteorologists). Individual differences emerged between meteorological sectors in personality and the subjective wellbeing domains of burnout, job satisfaction, and anxiety. Broadcasters were significantly more burnt-out at work and personally, were higher in extraversion, and were highest in anxiety. NWS meteorologists were most burnt-out in working with partners. The Other category of meteorologists showed more agreeableness and greater job satisfaction than broadcasters and those in the NWS. There was no cross-sector difference, however, in traits that might be relatively uniform among meteorologists: Grit, life satisfaction, self-concept clarity, subjective happiness, stress, and depression. Results are discussed in terms of consequences for meteorologists' mental health and emotional wellbeing as well as the future of the field.

: Exploring the human side of meteorology: a brief report on the psychology of meteorologists. J. Operational Meteor., 6 (3), 23-32, doi: https://doi.org/10.15191/nwajom.2018 Links between autism spectrum conditions and scientific aptitude were first investigated twenty years ago. Since then, associations between autism and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) aptitude have been established and discussed via the empathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory. E-S theory hypothesizes that autistic individuals are naturally driven to create and analyze sets of logical rules, or "systems," related to and constructed around things in the world. This is at the expense of cognitive, but not affective, empathy. Here, we not only extend previous work in testing the similarity of meteorologists, engineers, and physicists with respect to empathizing, systemizing, and autistic traits; we also report the first examination of meteorologists' personality and mental health relative to other representative physical scientists. Meteorologists in this sample were higher in empathizing and systemizing, extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, and less stressed, depressed, and anxious, than were engineers and physicists. Implications for the meteorological workplace are discussed. ABSTRACT (Manuscript

Meteorologists have been interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education endeavors for many years. The present study’s authors recently observed an apparent trend in United States public schools away from weather content in physical science classes, especially at higher grade levels. Through the blending of multiple psychological theories, this study sought to examine when people in the United States are presented with educational weather content at the Kindergarten to Grade 12 (K-12) levels and also investigated links between two psychological constructs: Weather salience and systemizing. Recent evidence among people on the autism spectrum suggests that weather salience—psychological attention to weather—is linked to systemizing, a psychological process that involves attention-to-detail and pattern recognition, thus prompting an investigation of this relationship in the general population. Results preliminarily suggest that K-12 weather education in the United States occurs most often in the elementary and middle school years, but that people receiving weather education only in high school, and intriguingly a combination of elementary and high school, but not middle school, have the highest weather salience levels. There was also a positive relationship between weather salience and systemizing. Results are discussed in light of the weather salience, systemizing, and social cognitive career theories.

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