Weathering Three Storms: Experiments in an Elemental Geohumanities

For cultural geographers, weather is primarily known through the body. Cultural geographers employ sensual ethnographies, diaries, interviews and visual methods to understand how weather is differentially felt. Somewhat lacking are cultural geographical accounts of weather as data: how weather is mapped, indexed and modelled with consequences not only for science but also for vernacular weather-worlds. In contrast, a growing set of artistic projects are experimenting with scientific practices that measure, modify, and produce our weather. Taking inspiration from these creative practices, this paper explores the intersection of weather as body, and weather as machine, as part of a current of transdisciplinary work I call the elemental geohumanities. Drawing from international cultural programmes such as the World Weather Network and employing vignettes from the open-weather archive, I advance a critical framework for thinking at the interface of embodied weather and “weather engines” for cultural geography and the geohumanities.


INTRODUCTION
On Friday 18th February 2022, I left my South London flat despite a red weather warning from the Met Office.Storm Eunice was sweeping across the UK.Powerful winds, including a particularly violent, narrow airstream called a sting jet, were battering the Southeast.I read that a storm with a "sting jet" has a long, pointed tail, like a scorpion.As I hurried to Burgess Park carrying a radio antenna, cables, and my laptop, I stayed clear of trees.
A few minutes later, on a hill overlooking Camberwell, Sophie Dyer and I assembled our one-metre-long turnstile antenna and connected it to a laptop.A few command lines launched a piece of software and the radio spectrum began pouring like a waterfall down our screen.We turned the volume up, and listened.The howling wind was now joined by the radiophonic bursts of local signals, some carrying packets of data, others carrying the callsigns of planes overhead, planning their turbulent descent into Heathrow.
Unlike many on that day, we were not there for the wobbling planes.For ten minutes, braced against the wind, Sophie and I tracked an orbiting weather satellite operated by the US government via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).Passing over us at 1000 km in altitude, NOAA-18 transmitted visual data in the form of a sound encoded into a 137 MHz radio wave.As the image loaded pixel-row by pixel-row on our screen, we witnessed the spine of the cyclone emerge, offset by the dark North Atlantic.As this weather image grew, our consciousness expanded."Far from an out of body experience, [we] felt profoundly situated: sandwiched between the weathered Land, [the howling wind], cloud, satellite and cosmos" (Dyer and Engelmann 2022, 104).
For me, this vignette has much to offer for thinking about how we feel the weather on the ground.When I was back in my flat minutes later, I realised I was shaking.The winds of Storm Eunice had entered my body, creating turbulence.Like the misty rain of Canada's west coast described by Vannini et al. (2012), storm Eunice became part of my "somatogeography," a living archive of weather in the body.However, this anecdote exemplifies something else too: it is an encounter with orbiting satellites and their remote sensing capacities.It is an encounter, however fleeting, with the systems that make weather into "scientific weather," or, "a code that can be mastered and controlled" (Szerszynski 2010, 19).The aim of this paper is to explore the double encounter allegorised in this story: the intersection of weather as body, and weather as machine, as part of an evolving set of cultural practices in the elemental geohumanities (Engelmann 2020).
Cultural geographers have primarily engaged weather in the first modality, via the body and the senses.Simpson (2019) writes of the elemental atmospheres of cycling in Plymouth where cyclists' bodies battle wind as well as the black carbon emissions of buses.Adams-Hutcheson (2019) employs interviews in fields and farmhouses to explore the affective materiality of the weather for farmers in Aotearoa New Zealand.As Wright and Tofa (2021) point out, scholarship on weather in cultural geography has been driven by methods like weather diaries (de Vet 2013) interviews (Allen-Collinson et al. 2019) and zine-making workshops (Hamilton et al. 2021) that foreground vernacular and quotidian experiences of weather.For cultural geographers, the weather is not a background but an immersive forcefield that weighs and presses on bodies in different ways (Ingold 2010).Ingold writes, "if the weather conditions our interaction with people and things, then, by the same token, it also conditions how we know them" (Ingold 2010, S133).As elemental condition, medium and milieu, the weather is a conduit for geographical knowledge of place, community and identity (Vannini et al. 2012).
Yet the weather is conduit for knowledge in ways that are less frequently examined in cultural geography.Alongside feminist STS and anthropology scholars, cultural geographers have largely resisted technoscientific accounts of nature in investigations of weather.Weather forecasts in the media, like those on the television referenced in Adams-Hutcheson (2019), are enrolled for their affective potency rather than their means of production or status as knowledge in the first place.Allen-Collinson et al. (2019) emphasise the centrality of weather forecasts for the "weather work" of high-altitude mountaineers, but they do not engage in any detail with the components of these forecasts.Notable exceptions include scholarship examining cultures of meteorological knowledge making (e.g.Mahony 2018) and the special issue on Monsoon Assemblages in this journal, with its invocation of, "monsoonal way[s] of thinking" between the scientific, geographical and experiential (Bremner 2021).However, despite growing social scientific interest in environmental sensing infrastructures (Gabrys 2016;Pritchard and Gabrys 2016;Calvillo 2018;Calvillo and Garnett 2019) cultural geographers have not engaged with the widespread contemporary processes of sensing, recording and monitoring weather.This means the political asymmetries, military-industrial legacies and collective consequences of "reading" and "writing" the weather (Szerszynski 2010) are underexamined in the field.
In contrast, a growing set of artistic projects are investigating the machines that measure, modify and produce our weather.For example, the recent Weather Engines (Parrika and Dragona 2022) exhibition curated by Daphne Dragona and Jussi Parikka at Onassis Stegi in Athens, Greece brings attention to atmosphere together with technological experiments in sensing weather patterns.In the exhibition, wearable radio antennas listen to the sounds of space data (Briot and Psarra 2022), sculptures measure temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, announcing weather conditions like a grandfather clock (Coti 2022), and an installation composed of a series of "wind-meters," "is a statement against the neurotic treatment of meteorological data by the media" (Kotionis 2022, 15).In these and other ways, artists are querying the registers through which weather is studied and made known, thinking not only through the body but also with and through infrastructures of measurement, remote sensing and prediction.
Inspired by these practices, in this paper I advance a critical framework for thinking at the interface of embodied weather and "weather engines."The aim of this framework is not to reproduce dichotomies of body/technology, ground/sky or local/planetary but rather to explore their miscibility in cultural geographies of weather.To do so, I first engage with artistic practices that question the ways weather is measured, created and known, as part of a current of transdisciplinary work I call the elemental geohumanities.Then, I use three vignettes from open-weather-a feminist, artistic project I co-lead with researcher and designer Sophie Dyer-to think through the production of knowledge on weather via satellite imagery.More specifically, I consider how sensing bodies together with remote sensing technologies subvert norms of earth observation, highlight the power relations inherent to knowledge on weather, and complicate the relationship between situated context and planetary measurement.

EXPERIMENTS IN AN ELEMENTAL GEOHUMANITIES
A few months after Storm Eunice, on July 19 th 2022, I was in a train on the Piccadilly Line trying to reach Heathrow Airport to meet my Mom.It was 40 degrees outside, and even hotter in the train, which had been sitting in the sun while several point errors on the tracks halted service.Inside the train, John Donne's poem "No Man is an Island" was displayed on a poster.As I hugged my arms away from scalding plastic armrests, the lines, "No man is an island entire of itself; every man/is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" felt like a bad joke.The weather on that day was a media event, reports circling around the island of the number 40.Yet while headlines featured melting tarmac and tips for using your indoor fan, hardly anyone discussed how the number 40 had been measured and what conditions precipitated its arrival.Such questions were easily forgotten inside a slow-moving, stiflingly hot train.
If Storm Eunice created turbulence -of the atmosphere and in the body-this heat wave caused pressure.On that day in London, the weather weighed on bodies and infrastructures differently and unevenly.Thinking about weather as pressure-as an affective and material forceis common in geography.Through fieldwork, social practices and writing, geographers have long considered weather as a dimension and manifestation of power (e.g.Manley, 1958).More specifically, recent contributions to weather geographies emphasise the politics of weather in relation to land.Liboiron (2021) describes weather in Newfoundland, Canada, where weather is not reducible to "small talk" but is an elemental force that brings human activity to a standstill.Authors from Bawaka Country (Wright 2019) in Northern Australia share the song spirals of Wukun to refuse abstract and distant notions of weather and climate linked to colonial meteorology.Wright and Tofa (2021) explore how weather is an important dimension of sovereignty.Sovereign relations are, "the preexisting and ongoing relationships, agreements and cobecomings with/as land, sea and sky that form the basis of belonging" (Wright and Tofa 2021, 1127-1128) Sovereignty has many registers relating to, "winds, waters and other weathery beings" and the belonging, identity and Law/Lore of indigenous peoples (Wright andTofa 2021, 1128).For these authors, knowing the weather depends on sovereign relations: Despite the ongoing efforts to produce objective and standardised knowledge about weather, quantification of weather knowledge does not inherently render this knowledge more precise, accurate or correct, neither does it negate the many hybridised and richly plural vernacular knowledges of weather that continue to inform lived experiences of weather through the world.(Wright andTofa 2021, 1130) Thus, the "standardization" of weather conditions does not invalidate embodied and historical knowledge of weather.At the same time, as Hannah Swee (2017) shows in Far North Queensland, Australia, neither are the "richly plural" forms of weather knowledge of communities independent from weather forecasts.Wright and Tofa add, "the focus on the intimate and embodied risks overlooking the cultural politics and power dimensions of how weather is known, whose experiences matter and how micro-geographies of weather link to other scales of weather knowledge" (2021,1133).In other words, we need better models for understanding the interplay of weather knowledges across scales, registers and disciplines; between sovereign relationships, the aesthetics of lived experience and the production of weather data.
Some of these models may be found not in academic scholarship but in creative practice.There is a long history of artistic experiments with weather sensing, from the role of weather in Caribbean poetic metrics by authors like Kamau Braithwaite (1984), to sound artworks composed of winds and warbles, sprites and sferics (Kahn, 2013), to paintings of industrial skies (Thornes, 2008).Though a longer survey of this work is beyond the scope of this article (see Randerson, 2018), an emerging body of artistic work is intervening in the interstices of "quantified" or "standardized" and "lived," "plural" or "vernacular" knowledge of weather.This work is not only significant for its destabilising of disciplinary boundaries; it also makes a series of propositions for the geohumanities.For this article, the geohumanities is neither new nor limited to geography.I understand it as an intensification of dialogue and shared methods between geography and the arts and humanities, contingent on the cultural, ecological and economic conditions of academic and artistic production today (Engelmann, 2020).Like geography, the geohumanities have largely been tethered to the ground: to ideas of earth-writing, whether physical (Bowring 2021) digital (Sheren 2018) or geopoetic (Springer 2017); to the palimpsests of landscapes via ideas of ruin (l opez Galviz et al. 2017) and repair (Riding 2017); and to cartographic mobilities, both linear and circumstantial (Powell et al. 2018), pragmatic and fictional (Peterle 2018).Following many attempts to "un-earth" the discipline of geography (e.g.Jackson and Fannin 2011;Adey 2015;Peters and Steinberg 2019) the artists I foreground advance geographical methods for sensing the elements, and more specifically, weather patterns.Although many of these experiments take place in and with atmosphere, they remind us that air, atmosphere and ground are mutually constitutive.In doing so they hint at what an elemental geohumanities might be.
The first of these propositions is that the elements are not abstract: they are intimate, embodied and personal, and they are measured by equally intimate and embodied technical systems.In a project called Listening Space (Psarra and Briot 2019) artists Afroditi Psarra and Audrey Briot record meteorological satellite transmissions and decode these transmissions into images of the weather.The images, which feature ghostly patterns of clouds and land masses, are knitted into a series of textile artworks called "Satellite Ikats."In the movement from radio wave to sound to image to textile, information is decoded and re-encoded multiple times.The artists describe how the "Satellite Ikats," "encapsulate the information of the system in which they are created-the SDR radio, the error-prone nature of the handmade antennas we used, and the encoded information of the NOAA transmissions of Earth from space" (Psarra and Briot 2019, 2).In this process the goal is not to isolate a satellite image of weather from the technical system, but rather to record the operations of the system in a form of "textile memory" (Psarra and Briot 2019, 3).For these artists, as for a long lineage of "satellite translators" (Parks 2007), remote sensing the weather is not about performing an abstract or distant gaze; it is about listening to a system and recording its memories.
The second proposition is that the elements are metamorphic: they are forces and processes that transform the conditions of the present and the horizon of the future.In these futures, agency is not the sole preserve of humans but is shared by nonhumans, humans and machines.In Sybille Neumeyer's video work "souvenirs entomologiqes #1: odonata / weathering data" (2020) commissioned for the exhibition, "Critical Zones-Observatories for Earthly Politics" curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel with Martin Guinard and Bettina Korintenberg, dragonflies lead us on a journey about the monitoring of weather, the creation of clouds of data, and the production of scientific evidence of ecological conditions.Instead of playing mute objects, these dragonflies engage in conversation with a databank; in turn, the databank shares its prophecies of meteorological and climate systems.In many ways, this story mirrors well documented entanglements of insects and weather.Cullen writes of dragonflies and the monsoon: "their fluctuating movements provide humans situated in specific places with an indication of impending weather patterns, facilitating meteorological understandings through trans-species communication" (Cullen 2022, 317).In other ways, viewers of Neumeyer's video are invited into a world in which insects speak to, and transform, the weather and clouds of data.Neumeyer writes, "the databank takes inspiration from the dragonfly, as master of transformation, and calls for a metamorphosis of digital practices towards the integration of different understandings of observation" (S.Neumeyer, personal communication, 8 th August 2022).The artwork, "ponders about the gaps between data, evidence and knowledge" (Neumeyer 2022, 11), envisioning future forms of weather sensing that are less about calculation and more about "liquifying, dissolving, reprogramming" (Neumeyer 2020).
The third proposition is the elements are indices.More specifically, heat and cold are indices of elemental conditions that have been mobilised in sculpture, video and performance to spark discussions on environmental law and institutional violence.Kent Chan elaborates a tropical aesthetics of heat in a series of video works titled A Tropics Expanded (Chan 2020), Heat Waves (Chan 2021a(Chan , 2021b) ) and Warm Fronts (Chan 2022).Heat Waves features filmed and found footage, social media excerpts, satellite imagery and television weather forecasts.These materials unravel the interstices of temperature, humid weather and deterministic narratives of tropical places as, "abundant yet poor … dynamic but lacking order" (Chan 2021a(Chan , 2021b)).In a set of Cold Cases (Schuppli 2021) artist, academic and filmmaker Susan Schuppli investigates temperature not as ambient background but as political device.Schuppli's practice is a form of counter-mapping and "counter-listening" to temperature regimes, from the glaciers of the Himalayas to Spitsbergen Island, Svalbard.Thinking of justice as "just ice" she asks: "How might we conceive of a "just" notion of activities and actions related to the breaking, thawing, and melting of "ice" or to the ways in which "cold" has been weaponized as a tactical instrument of policing, custody, and detention of indigenous and migrant bodies?"(Schuppli 2021).The elemental conditions of cold and processes of freezing and melting become a lens into geopolitics, human rights violations and an ethics of care toward earth's remaining ice.
In addition to these selected works, the elemental geohumanities is developing at the scale of exhibitions, with important consequences for the relationships between different registers of knowledge on weather and climate.As mentioned earlier, the major exhibition Weather Engines (Onassis Stegi 2022) at Onassis Stegi, Athens in May 2022 curated by Daphne Dragona and Jussi Parikka foregrounded artists' experiments in making weather knowledge, from the embodied and historical to the cartographic and quantitative.The summer solstice of June 2022 saw the notable launch of the World Weather Network (WWN), a project spanning twenty-eight cultural and artistic institutions around the world that feed into an online platform hosting artwork, weather reports and climate dispatches.Like the World Weather Watch of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), each participating institution in the WWN is its own "weather station."Yet in contrast to the WWW, a global system of observing, telecommunicating and data analysing for atmospheric science (Hayes 2008), the WWN commissions works by artists on topics including floods in Seoul and heat waves in Northern India.In resonance with the project's self-proclaimed link to meteorologist Gilbert Walker who proposed the notion of "world weather" in the late 19 th century, several of the artworks foreground environmental data (World Weather Network 2022).However, they do so through situated traditions, design speculations and data stories.For example, an online artwork by Ron Bull, Stefan Marks, Heather Purdie, Janine Randerson and Rachel Shearer called Haupapa: The Chilled Breath of Rakamaomao (Bull et al. 2022) offers a weather report from the Haupapa/Tasman glacier in Aotearoa New Zealand.The artwork, "is represented as abstract patterns using live data stream from Aoraki and Haupapa glacier" while, "Ron Bull's voice is woven through the sound and images to connect these images to the Kai Tahu ng a kupu, words and names of the ancestors" (Bull et al. 2022).The work invites us to, "attune to weather patterns through pulsing data patterns, voice and our ears" (Bull et al. 2022).In doing so, the artists place, "scientific epistemic infrastructures in question and in conversation with other ways of knowing," producing unanticipated patterns (Bremner 2022, 191).Projects like these engage explicitly with the interface of embodiment and measurement, experience and calculation-an interface that is understudied in cultural geography.At a time of worsening climate emergency, the propositions of these cultural projects are not only intellectually important, they are ethically urgent too.
In the remainder of the article I extend this critical framework in the elemental geohumanities and continue to think at the intersection of lived weather knowledges and "scientific weather" through three vignettes from the feminist, artistic project open-weather.Open-weather is an experiment in imaging and imagining earth's weather systems using DIY tools.Co-led by researcher-designer Sophie Dyer and myself, open-weather encompasses a series of how-to guides, artworks and public workshops on the reception of satellite images using free or inexpensive amateur radio technologies.Like the artistic projects and exhibitions cited earlier, open-weather furthers an account of the elements as intimate and embodied, as metamorphic and as indices.Yet the project also proposes that the elements agitate: they create conditions of noise, interference and mis/attunement that speak powerfully to the meeting of embodied and technical systems of weather sensing.

STORM 1: EUNICE
As the winds of Storm Eunice whirled around me and Sophie, exposed to the elements with our antenna and laptop on a hill in South London, the satellite NOAA-18 captured movements of water, air, soil and dust from 1,000 km away.One might characterise this event as the "seeing" of earth's weather through the "eyes" of an orbiting entity.Elsewhere, together with other members of open-weather, Sophie and I have figured the relationship of satellite to the body as a "subversive prosthetic" (Engelmann et al., 2022).In this section I want to push further, in dialogue with Sophie's earlier work on the material politics of radio (Dyer 2017), to understand this encounter as a mutual agitation: an agitation of embodied and sensory weather knowledges, and, in turn, an agitation of the "scientific weather" made accessible through orbiting satellites and the ubiquitous, noisy spectrum that is Earth's radio environment.
To make this claim it is important to engage briefly with the historical geographies of weather recording and weather-making that is NOAA's meteorological programme.Scholars and NOAA representatives have commonly referred to NOAA as, "the original whole earth agency" (Shea 1987, i).While NOAA was established by President Nixon in 1970, the same year that the first NOAA satellite, NOAA-1, was launched, the establishment of NOAA built on the prior existence of the Survey of the Coast (formed in 1807), the Weather Bureau (formed in 1870) and the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries (formed in 1871).Therefore, the birth of NOAA, … was part of a reorganisation effort … designed to unify the nation's widely scattered, piecemeal environmental activities and provide a rational and systematic approach to understanding, protecting, developing and enhancing the total environment.emphasis mine; Shea, 1987: 1 Underlying NOAA's approach to "developing and enhancing the total environment" were political orientations toward the territories of North America.According to NOAA's 50 th Anniversary Birthday Story, NOAA's origins can be traced to, "the early 19 th century [when] president Thomas Jefferson led a country that was largely unmapped and unexplored" (my emphasis; NOAA 2020).A 2007 exhibition of NOAA's history titled From Sea to Shining Sea: 200 Years of Charting America's Coasts alludes to ideas of manifest destiny.Thus, NOAA's mission was informed by, and is still narrated through, notions of terra, aqua and aer nullius: the notion that land, sea and air were, prior to the US settler-colonial state, "unexplored" "unmapped" or "blank," and could be "developed" or "enhanced" through nationalistic and scientific means (for more on aer nullius, see Wright and Tofa 2021).
NOAA's meteorological satellite programme was aimed at monitoring clouds and weather patterns, especially those that would form into hurricanes, to create an atmosphere out of aer nullius: to create weather that was intimately known to the US government, its scientists, military and citizens.Thus, satellites and their remote sensing capacities were crucial to this total capture of weather.In the 1950s the Weather Bureau, along with the military, NASA and the private sector, undertook the development of a global weather satellite observing system that began with the launch of the TIROS-1 satellite in 1960 (Davis 2007).Importantly: "TIROS showed clouds banded and clustered in unexpected ways.Sightings from the surface had not prepared meteorologists for the interpretation of the cloud patterns that the view from an orbiting satellite would show" (NOAA 2022).The first few TIROS satellites featured tests of camera lenses and sensors.According to Shea (1987, 11) it wasn't until TIROS 8, launched in 1963, that an Automatic Picture Transmission (APT) system was established to relay satellite imagery to receiving stations.In a significant departure from film and television-based systems, in an APT system, the satellite scans earth's surface and immediately sends information to the ground over the radio spectrum.In direct inheritance of TIROS, NOAA satellites 1 through 19, three of which are still operational in 2023, have all made use of an APT "direct readout" system for transmitting images to earth.When Sophie and I captured our image of Storm Eunice in February 2022 from NOAA-18, we were employing a contemporary version of this system.
Since the 1970s, APT transmissions from NOAA satellites have become a staple for citizen ground station operators around the world.NOAA estimated in 2009 that thousands of independent satellite ground stations had been built to receive APT transmissions, with the fastest growing sector being the educational community (NOAA 2009).Though APT has been outpaced by newer transmission formats that support images at much higher resolution, it is valuable for thinking at the intersection of body, weather and satellite for a few key reasons.First, APT images are analogue.This means that the data being transmitted is directly encoded in radio waves that travel from the satellite to earth's surface.In contrast to digital transmission modes, APT does not arrive in "packets" of data that require decryption; the data is rather "stored" in the radio wave itself.Second, APT images are noisy.They are susceptible to interference on their way to the ground.Interference may be caused by the emissions of heavy storms; sunspots and solar winds; the local radio environment on the ground; and the signals of other satellites.Whereas a digital transmission can often only be decoded when the "packet" is fully intact, an APT transmission registers the disturbances of its cosmic and earthly environment.Third, APT images are durational.Since the satellite senses and relays data instantly, each line of data in the resulting satellite image has a different time stamp.Therefore, the image is not a "snapshot" so much as a durational recording of moving planetary surfaces and bodies.Fourth, APT images are diagrammatic.The images arrive in a specific visual format that has remained relatively consistent since it was invented.The format is reminiscent of analogue film (see Figure 1).There are two channels of image-data, one containing data from sensors measuring visible light, the other containing data from medium and far infrared sensors.Each channel is 909 "words" or pixels wide.Separating the channels are bars holding telemetry information.Finally, there are two "sync" signals that enable a decoding programme to arrange each line into a coherent image.
These four features of APT satellite images-analogue, noisy, durational, and diagrammatic-provide openings for agitation.To elaborate: the analogue nature of these images means they are inseparable from the radio waves that carry them to the ground.Just as we cannot separate a voice from the air it vibrates, so too is the satellite image part of an oscillating radio wave moving through space.As Sophie attempted to receive this oscillating radio wave during Storm Eunice, her body was buffeted about by strong winds, such that the antenna she was holding moved around.This movement meant the antenna was not always aligned with the satellite's line-of-sight radio transmission, disrupting reception.Kneeling on my laptop, I could see the image loading in its durational increments in almost real-time, and thus how our laboured movements translated into noise.I could see and hear, also, when other events in the radio spectrum, such as nearby high-power transmissions, interrupted the signal.Multiple human, nonhuman, machinic, electromagnetic and elemental forces intervened in our attempt to capture an image of Storm Eunice.One way to describe these entities, forces and relations is through a notion of perturbation, developed by James Ash (2013) to refer to nonhuman agencies such as those in the fragile relations of a mobile phone and a network tower.However, the term agitation better suits the processes I am describing here.Agitation originates from French describing a state or condition of being moved to and fro; disturbance or unrest; or the action of shaking (OED 2022).Agitation has a relationship to radio; in a talk at Goldsmiths University, scholar Esther Leslie spoke of the radio spectrum as "an agitation all around" (Leslie 2017;Dyer 2017).As Dyer further elaborates, "Unlike the sound waves that are mechanical, electromagnetic radio waves do not displace material: they excite it.In other words, they agitate it" (2017: 21).In the experiments I engage with in this paper, images of weather, and the bodies and technologies that make them, are agitated: they are moved, oscillated, shaken, and this movement is evidence of relations, as well as the radiophonic medium on which the images are borne.Through agitation, multiple scales intersect: the forensic gaze of the satellite is agitated with local weather and the movements of bodies.In consequence, as Bremner writes, "for all their cartographic detail" agitated images of weather demonstrate, "resistance to being read empirically" (Bremner 2022, 191).They are aesthetic artefacts performing the errors, excesses and miscibilities of remote sensing.
As a site of agitation, however, the image of Eunice cannot be generalised.It is a singular outcome; a work that cannot be replicated.One key aim of open-weather is to host an archive of unique amateur-generated images from NOAA satellites.Since its launch in September 2020, the open-weather archive has become a repository of these images contributed by a growing number of people (approximately one hundred and ten as of June 2023) operating DIY satellite ground stations around the world.The archive is an index, not only of weather conditions, but also of relations between grounded practitioners and infrastructures of meteorological knowledge-making.Like other experiments in the elemental geohumanities, the archive highlights the intimate relationships between people and technical systems, documents processes of "weathering data" (Neumeyer 2020), and through encounters with government-operated satellites, proposes methods of counter-mapping and counter-imaging earth's weather.In the following sections I will explore two other examples of agitation between embodied weather and weather-making machines.These examples are linked to the image of Eunice not only through their co-presence in the open-weather archive, but also because they emerged in two other storms.

STORM 2: MISATTUNEMENT
In October 2021 I received a much-awaited phone call from C edrick Tshimbalanga, an artist based in Kinshasa.After weeks of logistics challenges, C edrick had acquired a laptop, an antenna and other spare parts to set up his own DIY Satellite Ground Station.We had spoken many times, exchanging how-to guides, video links and notes on amateur radio frequencies.Still, after many attempts, C edrick was yet to receive an image from a NOAA satellite.
At the time my smartphone was full of screenshots of satellites orbiting over Kinshasa.They became a catalogue of eerie traces, signatures of a global infrastructure of earth observation that is largely intangible to most on the ground.Far from an index of possibility, these satellite trajectories are records of the passage of orbiting machines whose radio transmissions meet, reflect from, and are absorbed by earth's surface, whether or not there are antennas ready to receive them.
After his fifth attempt at receiving a satellite image, I didn't hear anything from C edrick for four days.I began to think he had become, understandably, frustrated.When he finally called me back, he said there had been neighbourhood power cuts, wifi was down, and he was unable to leave his house for long periods due to pouring rain.This was a storm of meteorological and more-than-meteorological forces: a singularity of pressures on life (Neimanis and Hamilton 2018).The weather of failed infrastructure intersected with unseasonal showers: conditions that make radio reception of satellite imagery difficult, if not impossible.I thought of the NOAA satellites, like a family of ghosts, continuing to orbit like clockwork overhead.
In relation to NOAA's automated infrastructures of weather making, the absence of an image is agitating.It agitates in an affective and embodied sense.Following Ahmed, each passage of a satellite in the sky overhead, and each attempt to receive its signal, makes an impression-a mark, a trace-and these repeated impressions agitate (Ahmed 2013).This is an agitation of relationships of bodies to weather worlds, where these worlds are understood to reach from the ground to earth orbit and are mediated by infrastructures susceptible to failure.It is an agitation of processes of attunement to "scientific weather," since, following Zhang, corporeal exposure, "underwrites the very possibility of attuning in the first place" (Zhang 2020, 648).In contrast to events of attunement figured as harmony and smooth calibration, misattuned encounters agitate: they disturb, disrupt, and ultimately change us (Zhang 2020).Events of misattunement reveal the many forms of weather and weathering that prefigure our abilities to detect a signal in the noise.
What emerges from this agitation of weather worlds?First, this event highlights the contingency of meteorological knowledge-making: the notion that the systems and infrastructures that produce "scientific weather" are thoroughly embedded in, and dependent on, a set of volatile radiophonic, elemental and planetary conditions.Indeed, after power returned and the rains subsided, C edrick captured an image spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Tanganyika (see Figure 2).In the field notes that accompany the image in the open-weather archive, he wrote of rapidly changing seasons producing dry conditions where the "sun dominates" (Tshimbalanga 2021).Second, it highlights the value of misattunement as an orientation to the infrastructures that record and produce weather, one that produces a different set of observations on these infrastructures.Third, and in resonance with other geographical experiments in sensing the elements, this event demonstrates the limits to ideas of aer nullius, and to the "total capture" of earth's weather.It also begins to trouble the notion that "total capture" always brings us closer to understanding how weather becomes climate, where climate is a "thickening" of weather, or weather's "collective noun" (Hulme 2008, 7).In the next section I think with a third encounter of weather knowledges and satellite images that further evidences this point: that weather noisily exceeds our capacities to capture and measure it.
STORM 3: DUST Ankit Sharma, an engineering student in Mumbai and contributor to open-weather, joined Sophie Dyer and I online for a public talk.When asked about his experience capturing a threepart sequence of satellite images spanning Saudi Arabia to the Himalayas, Ankit spoke of dust: The 7[am] pass was very pleasant the atmosphere was quite good and the traffic and other things in Mumbai was also quite moderate, but as I got the 10am pass the traffic got a lot more, there was a lot more pollution, and even the winds were high as well as things got a lot dusty, and it was such a dust, dusty wind that I … I mean my laptop was covered in mud totally, and when I actually rubbed my laptop, I was able to see that the mud covering my hands … when I came back to my apartment and I rubbed my mouth with the towel it got, you know, the black marks on it, so it was very dusty out here.(Sharma 2021) Noise also figures prominently in Ankit's images (see Figure 3).The grainy bars, hazy veils and grey bands are records of disturbance in signal: the tall towers around Ankit's residential complex that blocked reception; radio transmitters near and far; the electromagnetic emissions of storms.The noise bears a striking resemblance to dust.Together with elemental geohumanities scholars, we can read the noise as dust in material-aesthetic and metaphorical ways.For Nassar, "dust … is the materiality of noise" (2021, 457).More specifically, the dust in Ankit's image is the materialisation of the noise of difference: "no communication would be necessary if not for difference, and no signal across difference comes without noise" (Zhang 2020, 649).The communicative difference is that of urban Mumbai to the vacuum of space, oscillating radio wave to static image, dust above and dust below.The places where Ankit's image blurs, where grains and particles break up the coastline or the sweep of the Himalayas: these are the dusts, the entropies, the weathers, of sensing across spaces and scales.An "elemental geopoetics of dust" (Nassar 2021) recognises how dust cross-agitates the weather of lived experience with the "immutable mobile" (Latour 1999) of the satellite image.
Recognising the presence of dust in Ankit's images has further implications for the intersection of embodied weather and "weather machines."In Continent in Dust, Zee (2022, 7) describes the, "eclipse of the air by the sky" felt by villagers in China weathering a dust storm in 2001.He contrasts, "[the] occlusion of vision" felt on the ground with the gaze from NASA's Earth Observation programme, writing, "Satellites photographed the storm as an airborne landscape, complete with its own shifting geomorphology" (Zee 2022, 7).This anecdote resonates with the way dust obscured Ankit's vision as it coated his face and laptop screen, while the NOAA satellite orbited overhead.However, in other ways, Ankit's image, and the process he narrates of making it, complicates what Zee after Haraway calls the "one-off universality" of satellite imagery (Zee 2022, 29).For, in contrast to "vertiginous parallax" (Zee 2022, 29) or "the perceptual gap between remote satellite data and the immediacy of weather experience" (Bremner 2022, 191) the dust-as-noise in Ankit's image is the signature of agitations that operate across, and between, the ground-to-orbit continuum.Indeed for Leslie, the image of a NASA radiometer is, "drawn to the dust, the particulate, which it has itself apparently become.It finds ways to make evanescence detectable, such as the stress factors on a curve, the agitation of the air, clouds, the wind … " (Leslie 2021, 102).Perhaps more successfully than NASA's spectacular documentation of the dust storm in China, Ankit's image evokes what Zee calls wind-sand: the notion that lands and skies are phases-shifts and permutations of one another, "land whipped into floating land, a weather event now creating its own weather" (Zee 2022, 7).
Following Zee, how can we hold all these weathers in view-the weather recorded by satellite from above, the weather felt below, and the wind-sand in between (Zee 2022)?How do we hold together, rather than separate into distinct spheres of practice, the "weather engines" of science, the weather of the body and the weather as medium in all its phase-shifting, solid-fluid, turbulent complexity?A partial answer might be: in the dust, in the noise, and in their miscibility.

FOR FUTURE STORMS
In George R. Stewart's (1941) novel Storm an "incipient little whorl" off the coast of Japan becomes the powerful storm Maria.Unfolding 80 years ago, in the novel we "see" Maria take shape through the practices of an amateur meteorologist, an electrical Load Disposer, a telegraph operator and a highway maintainer.Today, we still see and feel storms through their impressions on bodies, landscapes and infrastructures.But we also sense them through the circulation of weather reports, satellite images and climate predictions: dominant currencies of knowledge on weather and the climate crisis in our time.
In this paper I explored how creative practitioners are experimenting with the intersection of embodied weather and weather data.Artists are subverting national scientific tools for environmental sensing, foregrounding the power relations in the capture of weather, and complicating the distinction between local experience and global records of environmental processes.I focused on the work of open-weather: a project producing an index of weather systems, field notes and emerging relations between bodies and earth-sensing infrastructures.Employing analogue image formats and the signals of NOAA satellites, contributors to the open-weather archive propose interscalar diagrams of weather.These are diagrams in which different registers of weather knowledge are moved, perturbed, and mutually agitated.Volunteers are making these diagrams in storms both meteorological and more-than-meteorological.The storms are collaborating in this process: elementally luring bodies into wind, sand, and heavy weather, troubling our view from above and below, adding dust to the signal.This article is not a call for cultural geographers to become satellite signal decoders the better to interrogate different forms of weather knowledge.However, the artwork explored here raises important provocations for geographers and geohumanities scholars.First, at a time of "elemental infrastructures" (McCormack 2017) and "electromagnetic economies" (Bremner 2022), knowledge of weather is spatially and materially distributed across a vast array of bodies, human and nonhuman.What noise persists in these distributions and translations (Zhang 2020)?How does the interference-prone modification of weathers across, into and through bodies produce misattunement as well as recognition?Second, artists operating at the interface of embodied weather and weather engines are proposing tools for the geohumanities.What is the potential of the index-figured as spreadsheet, repository or set of "case files"-for thinking about how we know weather in geography?How can we tell both more grounded and speculative stories of weather with indices, including indices of satellite imagery?Third, countering terra, aqua and aer nullius, and in dialogue with a long lineage of feminist thinkers, the geohumanities might advance an "elemental politics of location": a tactic and method for tracing exposure and weathering, where to weather is not only to endure, but also to form political microclimates of resistance (see Sharpe 2016;Neimanis and Hamilton 2018).This would include furthering accounts of difference as intrinsic to elemental experience and illuminating the power matrices that condition these experiences.
Together, projects like open-weather and the World Weather Network marshal an additional critique of geographical ideas of the globe, the planet and the "whole earth."For, in contrast to attempts to capture "world weather" through scientific networks, or to image the "whole earth" through the instruments of geostationary satellites, these artistic projects propose grounded, trans-locally networked, and ever-partial perspectives on planetary weather.Learning from these gestures, the elemental geohumanities may be at the forefront of developing alternative senses of the planetary, ones not based on total capture, but on collaging and composing different modes of being and knowing.To operate in this way is to recognise the value in low resolution (Bennett et al. 2022) and irresolution (Zee 2022).It is to listen above and below the signal for the interference of context, translation and reproduction (Wright 2022).It is also, perhaps, to see ourselves in the shape of a storm.