Summary

Lewis returns his consideration to Kathy Sullivan, describing how efficiently she was able to do her job. He also describes how, throughout her career, she had been able to persuade people to listen to the opinions of others whose ideas might not seem, at first, to be connected to those people’s original intention. Sullivan also realized, the author says, that a key factor in communicating weather information was to determine how the listener would be best able to hear it, which was usually not the way the scientists wanted to speak about it. This led her, in the aftermath of the Joplin tornado, to bring psychologists and behavioral scientists into the NOAA’s work. They, she thought, would help NOAA administration and scientists figure out how best to communicate information to people who were not interested in windspeeds and rainfall amounts, but more...