10
BAMOS
Sep 2018
Article
Should we talk about the weather?
Teaching climate scientists to understand their users
Vicki Lane 1 , Dr Patrick Mitchell 2 , Dr Jaclyn Brown 2
1
Square V Software for Agriculture, email: [email protected]
2
CSIRO Agriculture & Food
Do you ever look at an app on your phone or a website and
think—“all I want is this one thing, why isn’t it there?”, or “this is
a poor product, it’s really hard to use”? Chances are that the end
users of your research are thinking the same thing.
A team of climate and agricultural scientists, including three
from CSIRO Hobart and two from the Bureau of Meteorology,
have been visiting grain farmers in different parts of Australia,
with the goal of understanding the types of weather and climate
information that farmers need, and ultimately helping farmers
make more ‘climate smart’ decisions by building better products
and services. The team focussed on how farmer decision-
making impacts behaviour and the types of climate information
that can inform this. To do this they took a ‘Us