Ice chunks thud to the ground at 90 miles per hour and shatter. A branch snaps off a tree under its frozen weight. A bus hurtles down an ice-slicked road. These are some of the dangers that an ice storm can unleash, and they’re featured in The Weather Channel’s new mixed reality segment just in time for a winter storm to pummel the Midwest and Northeast.

It’s the latest video in The Weather Channel’s terrifying campaign to communicate the dangers of natural hazards, before they hit. The ice storm video uses the same Immersive Mixed Reality technology that we saw in the storm surge graphic The Weather Channel launched as Hurricane Florence began battering the Carolinas. The growing collection of segments features wildfires, tornadoes, lightning strikes, and now, ice storms. “We wanted to explain why you get ice, what’s that process in the atmosphere that produces these tremendous ice storms. And then what are some of the dangers that you have to be aware of,” says Michael Chesterfield, the director of weather presentation at The Weather Channel.

“It translates what we’re showing in the forecast to what we’re going to expect in reality.”

Chesterfield heads up a group of weather producers, graphic designers, and engineers whose focus is telling stories about the weather. And the new mixed reality segments give the team a new capability: showing the worst that could happen before a disaster strikes. When meteorologists go outside to report the weather during storms and hurricanes, viewers can imagine themselves in those conditions, Chesterfield says. But to do that, the storm has to already be happening. That’s where the graphics come in. “It translates what we’re showing in the forecast to what we’re going to expect in reality,” he says.

The Verge spoke with Chesterfield about making these terrifying segments, communicating risk, and how they make meteorologist Jim Cantore duck.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How did you make the graphics we’re seeing in the ice storm segment The Weather Channel just released?

The ice storm experience is an Immersive Mixed Reality segment, where we are actually able to immerse the talent within an environment. We do that through a complete large green screen studio and special technology that allows us to take these experiences to air. It starts with the Unreal Engine, which is a high-end video gaming graphics engine. It allows us to build and adjust these graphics in real time.

And then there’s a layer on top of that. We partner with The Future Group. They provide us with a tool called Frontier, and that Frontier engine allows us to translate the graphics and put them into television. There’s a process it needs to go through to composite the talent into the graphic. There’s a camera tracking technology called Mo-Sys that tracks the graphic and the talent in real time to put them in sync. So that means when the camera moves, everything moves as if it was in real life, and then the broadcast technology takes the graphic, composites it, and pushes it out to our control room, which allows us to record and then eventually pump it out to television.

What are the challenges to making these?

I like to compare this to producing a small movie. We start off with a concept and an idea of what’s going to be topical for this time of year, and then we’ll get together and write up a script, create a storyboard. Our goal is to be as realistic as possible in order to allow the audience to picture themselves in these experiences.

“Our goal is to be as realistic as possible in order to allow the audience to picture themselves in these experiences.”

For this one in particular, we’re trying to duplicate past imagery from ice storms in the graphic itself. So, that’s the first challenge. And then the second challenge really comes down to executing. Putting a talent into a green screen where they don’t actually see the graphic itself, and getting them to react to the things that are occurring around them can be difficult. Luckily for this one in particular we had [meteorologist] Jim Cantore, and Jim always brings a high level of energy — he really ends up being the storyteller. When you put it all together, hopefully what you end up with is something that’s both educational and also interesting to the viewer visually. They get something out of it, at the same time they’re attached to it in some way, so that they remember what they’re seeing

How did you get meteorologist Jim Cantore to react to, say, the runaway bus or flying ice missiles? Do you have like tennis balls bouncing at him, or someone in a green suit running at him?

“We’ll do everything from yelling at him at certain times to react.”

We’ll do everything from yelling at him at certain times to react, or we’ve gone so far to put numbers on the wall, so he’s looking at the right place and it matches with what the graphic is going to be. This was the first time we employed a projector, which takes all the colors out of the graphic itself, but we projected it onto the wall so he could actually see what was going on when he was looking at the wall directly. Otherwise, he just would have been completely blind to what was going on as he was narrating the experience. So we tried to get as creative as possible to make sure the timing was correct and to make sure that his reactions were as genuine as possible.

These graphics look realistic, but there’s also this video game or movie quality to them — what do you hope this accomplishes that a traditional weather forecast or actual footage of a natural hazard won’t?

What this allows us to do is to play God, if you will, and to make these hyper-realistic videos that show what the storm is going to look like before it actually strikes. This way we’re actually able to marry a forecast with what one can expect in these situations. For example, we have a big winter storm heading towards the Northeast this weekend, and we’re able to show this experience explaining to people why this is going to occur, and how to keep yourself safe. Hopefully, by doing so, they’re able to see, “What’s coming towards me is really dangerous, and I know what to expect, so now I know to keep myself safe.”

“The idea there is to give people a real sense for what’s going on.”

The realism portion of it is extremely important, because it allows the viewer to put themselves into these situations, much like when we do put somebody out there in the field and we’re reporting live in rain or snow. The idea there is to give people a real sense for what’s going on. In this case, we’re able to give people a real sense for what to expect. It’s been a very successful way so far to translate the forecast, and makes it much easier to tell a weather story that is more impactful than just showing a map with colors on it.

Are you worried that people are going to get desensitized to these graphics and stop taking them seriously? What are you doing to avoid that?

We’ve been choosing the most high impact type of events; so far we’ve chosen lightning strikes, tornadoes, storm surge from hurricanes. The idea there is to make sure we’re pinpointing the biggest dangers. I think as long as we keep in mind that there is a goal for each one of these experiences and that we’re mixing them up, and that we’re mixing in the information, I think we’re going to be okay on that front.

We want to change things up as best we can to make sure we’re having the impact that we need to. I think there’s a danger in doing anything over and over again — for example if you’re just showing a radar image over and over, people are eventually going to ignore or lose sight of what we’re actually trying to say. But if we’re able to mix in with that radar image maybe a 3D image that shows the storm in a different format, you may be able to keep the viewer’s attention longer, and actually have a better chance of getting that safety message through.

In the wildfire graphic, you addressed the role of climate change in exacerbating wildfires in the west. Do you intend to continue to address the role of climate change in worsening certain natural hazards? How do you think this format will change how people react to this climate change message?

Climate is something that we’ve struggled to get our arms around as far as how best to communicate it. For me, as a scientist, as long as we are sticking to the facts, and as long as we are telling people this is scientifically accurate, we will insert it into the story where it makes sense. This technology allows us to show examples of not only what the weather is going to do in the future, but also what the climate is likely to do in the future. So I can definitely see us exploring other opportunities to show our audience what climate change is going to bring, or is already bringing in some cases, to the country and to the world. This is just another added storytelling tool which hopefully will allow us to be better messengers not only for weather, but also for climate.

What’s next for your team?

The exciting part for me is that we were really just getting started. A few things that have me excited for the future is that we’re going to be able to start importing real weather model data into these environments. So if you were in New York City, we could put a hyper-realistic view of New York City around an on-camera meteorologist and then have it rain, or snow, or be windy based on what the weather forecast was actually saying was going to happen in the future. So essentially what you’re showing is a future time lapse, which is something we’ve never been able to do before. That should be coming in the next year.

Some of the short-term items we’re attacking: one thing we’ve had issues with during the late winter months is people falling through ice, so we’re going to attack that through an ice-thickness explainer, showing how thick the ice needs to be before you venture out on the ice, and some steps that you can take to make sure you’re keeping yourself safe. And then the longer-term goal is to continue to utilize this tool in order to transform how we present the weather, not just in these explainer experiences, but also how we’re telling our day-to-day weather stories as well — using every opportunity to make sure we’re making an impact.