All of Hearst Television’s stations will begin airing a special on April 21 that examines the changing weather patterns across the stations’ footprints.

Can tree rings help us forecast drought conditions and other weather risks? How are ski resorts coping with increasingly unpredictable snow patterns, and Gulf residents with multiplying storms and rising sea levels? And what simple and convenient additional steps can consumers take in their daily lives to do their part in helping reduce climate-unfriendly emissions and waste?

These and other questions will be addressed in the primetime special that is part of the Hearst’s Forecasting Our Future initiative, recently launched to address issues Americans face in navigating changing weather patterns and their impact on local communities and economies.

Forecasting our Future includes contributions from group-wide resources, including Hearst Television’s national investigative and consumer reporting units, more than 100 meteorologists and weather experts from around the country, and local educational offerings for schools and community organizations.

The Forecasting Our Future special programming also will be available to stream for free on the Very Local app, available for download on Roku, Amazon Fire TV and other platforms.

Studies from Pew and other organizations consistently find that most consumers rely on local television for their news, ahead of all other sources, and that they consider weather the most important local-news topic.

“Our viewers in every region are experiencing the shifting frequency and intensity of severe weather and climate events,” says Barbara Maushard, Hearst Television senior vice president, news.  “Whether it’s storms, hurricanes and tornadoes, or growing anomalies with wildfires, droughts, and unseasonal temperatures, our local experts are on the frontlines to see and report the impact firsthand. In this program we present data that underscores weather shifts impacting our communities and explore homegrown solutions to lessen risk of damage and impact on people and property.”

For the inaugural primetime special, Mark Albert, Hearst Television chief national investigative correspondent, talks to researchers at both the US Forest Service and at a little-known laboratory for the study of tree rings — all working together to analyze and predict drought conditions and the impact on forests.

Viewers will witness a longstanding but rarely seen “forest census,” for which Forest Service researchers go trunk-to-trunk in more than 170,000 plots across the country, and the first-ever application of a simulation tool using tree rings to predict the effects of a changing climate; among other revelations, the tree ring data shows a massive annual decrease in average tree growth that impacts the carbon in our atmosphere.

Experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration address analyses that “Tornado Alley,” the loosely defined area of the central U.S. where tornadoes are considered most frequent, could be shifting; the NOAA scientists also discuss the potential impact of increased temperatures and moisture on tornado and hurricane trends.

Jeff Rossen, Hearst Television chief national consumer correspondent, informs viewers about three sustainable products they can use around the home in place of longtime commonly used products that add to unhealthy emissions and to the mounting problem of plastics disposal.

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