Developing an Effective Set of Questions to Extract Partner Needs from NWS IDSS

The National Weather Service (NWS) provides Decision Support Services (DSS) to “core partners,” including emergency managers. Other local officials in sectors such as Schools, Fire Departments, Law Enforcement, and Public Works or Transportation Departments, also need decision support information to help them decide when to open/delay/close, prepare specialized rescue equipment, plan for staffing, or anticipate challenges in keeping roads clear and open during and after storms or winter precipitation. This study is simultaneously exploring how local officials make these decisions while also building and testing a method by which NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) can obtain this type of information for themselves.

Our student-led team created and tested a set of questions by which to understand partner needs. The question set first inquired about the background of participants and proceeded with DSS-specific questions via interviews and focus groups to learn about their decision-making thought processes. These questions were tested in two Integrated Warning Team exercises. The first exercise tested the utility of a new weekly webinar during the winter season; the second exercise tested event-specific DSS briefings for a fictional warm season convective severe and flooding event. Both exercises were conducted with the same question set; some modifications were made through development. Based on the goals of each exercise, questions were pulled from our set to learn what information participants used, or would use, from the DSS. Those interviews and focus groups were audio recorded and transcribed for analysis.

Responses were analyzed to understand how different sectors use DSS, and comparisons were made across officials in each sector to understand their information needs and how their responsibilities and experiences drove those needs. Using thematic analysis, we are examining participants’ responses to identify how officials understood and used DSS. To assist NWS WFOs in simultaneously meeting the needs of diverse partners, we seek to make connections across sectors to help us make recommendations for improvement. Regarding our effort to create a method NWS WFOs can use to elicit helpful feedback, our team is analyzing the relative success of alternate wordings of questions, their composition, and how the context of each question may have affected how participants responded. Responses to each question and its variants were compiled together in one document. Organizing our data in such a way is revealing similarities and differences in responses across participants to help us gain insight into which questions were more informative when discussing the DSS and participant’s information needs.

This talk will report on NWS partner’s needs from forecast information for slower-timescale winter weather and faster-timescale warm season convective severe weather. We will also discuss planned improvements to our question set, which will be tested in additional WFOs before being shared with the NWS.