Quantifying the Benefit of Hazard Services in Communicating Hazardous Environmental Information

Hazard Services (HS) is a software application developed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) and revolutionizes the way hazardous environmental information is generated and disseminated. Ensemble-based, probabilistic, and machine-learning techniques are used to generate more accurate and detailed information about hazardous environmental conditions such as high winds, winter weather, and storm surge. This includes essential attributes like spatial extent and hazard timing, as well as associated metadata for enhanced impact-based decision support (IDSS). The HS software is highly extensible and can generate flexible output formats such as the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), which significantly reduces over-warning from the existing Weather Emergency Alert (WEA) paradigm. Researchers at GSL compared Legacy and HS methodologies and outputs to examine the extent that they aligned with Storm Surge flood inundation of greater than 3ft. HS Storm Surge Watch/Warning (SSWW) outputs were found to be at a higher resolution and a “better fit” to the actual inundation area compared to Legacy outputs. As a next step, GSL researchers are creating an approach to evaluate the comparative benefits of using HS SSWW outputs to communicate risk information, particularly as it relates to reduced social and economic disruptions as a result of over-warning. This presentation will outline this approach and how it may be adapted and applied to other extreme weather events to test the viability of polygon-based hazards as it applies to social vulnerability.