The New York Times had an interesting story this week about weather forecasters as heroes. Predicting dangerous weather patterns and warning viewers of impending doom puts the weatherman right in harms way: He shouts from your living room TV to go to the basement. With his jacket off, he tells you about the trouble of whipping winds licking your windows. And, if you listen to him, he may save your life.

The Times tells the story this way:

One evening in April, Tina Eller had the television on. Glenn Burns, the steely chief meteorologist for WSB-TV, said a tornado was three minutes away from slamming into her community.

Mr. Burns’s instructions were simple: Take cover.

Ms. Eller, 51, rushed to a closet with her mother, two sisters and four dogs.

“All of the sudden you hear the glass shattering and wood cracking and the trees just rattling,” she said.

Every room in the house was wrecked, except the space that held her family.

“It was that warning we got from him that got us into the closet on time,” she said. “I never would have lived through it.”

As the nation moves through a year of remarkable floods, drought and its deadliest tornado season in half a century, the broadcast meteorologist has emerged as an unlikely hero.

Amazing.

So is the weatherman really a hero? I thought weathermen had the only job where they could get their facts wrong (like tomorrows forecast) and still have a job, only to say, “Well, that’s the weather for you. Unpredictable.”

Why the need to make the weatherman a hero? Like a firefighter? Soldier? Cop?

That we feel the need at all to make any of these people “heroes” reveals the cultural underpinnings at play within the construction of each character.

There’s cultural meaning even in the terms we use for “forecasters,” a label that lacks immediate salience, just as meteorologist sounds too sciency. Despite the Times’ use of “forecaster,” I don’t think that’s what we think when we think of the TV weatherperson (another term we don’t use).

I keep saying the “weatherman,” because the “weathergirl” seems to be its own archetype, its own person — the ditzy blonde woman who works better as eye candy than as a meteorologist. The weatherMAN comes to your rescue.

Prime Time TV stops for him. Droves of roving weather reporters go into the hurricane, into the tornado (or sometimes into the TV station’s back yard) to report the news to him. WeatherMAN funnels that info into soundbites, pretty colors on a screen, and into calls for safety.

There has been sociological research into the production of disaster (including weather) news and its effects on sourcing, images, the role of officials and weather victims as characters in a larger narrative of Mother Nature’s destruction.

But what of the cultural significance of weather coverage? Why, for instance, as a reporter was I almost guaranteed a page-one story (and the change to get out of the office) to cover heat, snow, rain, almost anything weather related?

I even tell my students today to bust their butts on weather stories. They almost always will be given a photographer, the ear of an editor, and space to cover it. If anyone has come across research into the meanings of weather reporting, let me know. Otherwise, this goes on my list for future research.

Here, the Times tells us more about this point:

Certainly the Weather Channel, which made its debut in 1982, has made the weather game more competitive. But meteorologists maintain that there is nothing like a local forecast from someone in the community.

Changing weather has had something to do with the popularity of local forecasts, too.

“When this El Niño stuff started popping up a lot in the 1990s, that’s when weather started to really have a presence,” said Monica Pearson, a veteran newscaster who has worked with Mr. Burns in Atlanta since he arrived at the station in 1981.

“I remember when we used to take time away from Glenn,” Ms. Pearson said. “Now he takes time away from us.”

And that is how it should be, said Mr. Burns, whose fascination with weather began when he was a boy hanging out at the Miami television station his father used to run.

“Weather is the reason to watch a newscast,” Mr. Burns said. “It’s king.”

Mark Monmonier, author of How to lie with maps, also wrote a great book on mapping and weather, which gets to some of the cultural meanings of how we understand, or become obsessed with, weather patterns.

In Cartographies of danger: Mapping hazards in America, Monmonier argues that perceptions of weather — Where is it most dangerous? — influence our choices of where to live, work, and play just as much as perceptions of crime and “dangerous” neighborhoods.

What role, then, does the weatherman play? What meanings are there behind weather coverage — and the kinds of weather coverage that we do?

I haven’t spent a lot of time, yet, looking at the research on this topic, but I know some scholarship out there already talks about the need journalists seem to have to “put themselves in the line of fire” to get the news…about weather. Here is a great piece on that.

Yes, I, too, have driven into tornadoes for stories. I’ve covered my share of heat waves, blizzards, and floods. They are great stories.

But why? Even Monmonier says in his book that “good geography never asks where without also asking why” (his italics).

Possible, then, wrapped up in each of these news tales of nature gone wrong (think: California wildfires), the effect of nature on humans (any small-town tornado), and the effect of human on humans during times of disaster (Katrina), the cultural meanings of our live — and of our news — come out.

This is such an interesting topic, I think. I’d love to hear your thoughts. More to come when the dissertation is done!