Special issue  

The news media has been identified as one of the ways weather hazard risk can be communicated. However, hazards become subject to newsworthiness. Here, it is presented that the media focus of Northern Hemisphere Summer 2021 was storms and flooding. This is despite the fact there were also a number of high profile extremes for heat waves, droughts and wildfires.

Current science communication initiatives in universities draws from media and journalism to encourage scientists to be competent communicators of their research in order to show the relevance of scientific knwowledge to societal concerns. An alternative but less popular source of inspiration is from marketing and public relations. Here, science communication is reappraised through the lens of three leading marketing paradigms: 'make and sell', 'sense and respind' and 'guide and co-create'.

It is an aspiration to infer flow conditions from bedform morphology (e.g. riverbed ripples) where sedimentary structures preserve the geological past, or in inaccessible environments (e.g. Mars). This study was motivated by the idea of better designing an 'AI' algorithm by using lessons from non-AI (i.e. human) abilities. Survey participants demonstrate that the task is visually possible, but geoscience expertise does not help, so an algorithm might be trained well from the data alone.