Weather reports are a prime example of a text genre and can be found in various media. Yet empirical research on them is limited, especially regarding their linguistic properties and relationship with other meteorological text genres like the more scientific synoptic overview of the future weather situation. Whereas the former is meant for a lay public, the latter is only published by meteorological institutions and therefore meant for a more specialised audience. This leads to the question how information and terminology are appropriated from one medium to the other, particularly since the synoptic overview also serves as the weather report’s pretext. Departing from Von Stutterheim’s quaestio-model, the present article aims at a better understanding of such differences, focusing on the lexical means for three referential domains that are of crucial importance in communicating the weather situation: the weather phenomena themselves on the one hand, and the time and place of their occurrence on the other hand.

Keywords: meteorological forecasts – quaestio – text linguistics – LSP-research – lexicology