Sharpiegate

Science, the state and professional vision in the constitution of weather

Abstract

In this article, we use the case of Hurricane Dorian, which hit the southeastern United States in 2019, to expand on the scholarship about professional vision by taking up how weather is materialized in the negotiation of seeing between members of the scientific community and the state. Attending to the controversy known popularly as Sharpiegate, in which President Donald Trump, the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Birmingham (Alabama) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offered conflicting accounts of Hurricane Dorian’s predicted path, we use discourse analysis to examine four tweets, a NOAA official statement and the Commerce Department’s investigative report to show how institutional actors negotiated their entitlement to see, accounts of what was seen and accountability to their claims as seers. We argue that Sharpiegate significantly disrupted the relationship between science and the state, which depends upon scientists’ professional re-semiotizing of hurricanes in images which the state can use to legitimize its crisis response. Our findings show how NOAA and the Commerce Department utilize strategic ambiguity, distributed agency and accountability and the careful maintenance of boundaries in their claims of what was seen and what counts as legitimate seeing in weather forecasting.