Geographic and virtual dissemination of an international climatic announcement

The WMO evaluation committee determined that the Libyan 1922 temperature extreme was invalid due to a variety of reasons, including type of instrumentation used and inexperience of the temporary observer at that time. The initial international press announcement was made in Geneva, Switzerland, coincident with announcements at a London scientific conference, from the AMS in Boston, and from the Weather Channel/Weather Underground. Detailed analytics for web traffic to the WMO Extremes website reveals interesting geographic and virtual variations in the diffusion of the news story. These variations follow from geographic diffusion theory, which considers the spread of ideas and information from one person or location to another. A significant number of site visits to the WMO Extremes Archive originated from other social media sites.