Communication during the warning process: observations of performance

For years, the National Weather Service has conducted assessments of its performance following high-impact weather events. A review of several decades of these reports reveals some common recurring themes regarding communication among critical stakeholders during warning events. In addition, the NWS' Warning Decision Training Branch introduced to forecasters a root cause analysis technique that can be applied to both successful and missed warning events. WDTB has collected thousands of these analyses and has extracted common issues related to the warning process. This paper will summarize some of the communications challenges revealed by these two analysis methods, examples of other communications problems, and some recommendations.