The BVOT Vulnerability Tool's Effect on Information Flow in a Hazardous Weather Testbed Project and its Potential to Support Effective Responses to Severe Weather

In the last decade, the National Weather Service (NWS) has focused heavily on cultivating an impact-based approach to its operations, including increased focus on supporting severe weather preparation and response. NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) also aim to communicate effectively and consistently during weather events. To assist this goal, Friedman and LaDue created the Brief Vulnerability Overview Tool (BVOT), a series of GIS shapefiles containing Emergency Managers’ (EMs) and WFO meteorologists’ knowledge of how weather has— or could— impact their local area. Identifying the spatial intersection of weather hazards and vulnerability, BVOT attempts to give NWS forecasters greater situational awareness in their County Warning Areas (CWAs) and improve messaging to EMs and other core partners. In this presentation, we investigate how the use of a BVOT in simulations of real-world severe weather events affected information flow between NWS forecasters and EMs, and whether communication driven by BVOT aided in a more efficient and effective response by EMs before or during these events.

To examine how NWS and EMs might interact with a BVOT before and during severe weather, an eight week experiment in the Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) was conducted with eight real-world scenarios of varying intensity that had occurred in two WFO CWAs in the Southeast U.S. During each week, three forecaster teams were each paired with one or more EMs to whom they provided forecasts, warnings, and decision support. Two forecaster teams were provided with the BVOT and one was not. Experiment conditions rotated, such that of the four cases studied for this analysis, each team had the BVOT for two cases.

Qualitative analysis was conducted on data from the HWT to determine whether EMs believed they would better understand and act upon BVOT-driven messaging they received from NWS forecasters, as well as whether two-way communication between forecasters and EMs increased or stayed consistent across teams during the experiment. Because of the HWT’s experimental design, we were able to compare the control and experiment groups. Specifically, we analyzed transcripts from cases of interest, particularly during the high communication storm-on-the-ground period; Slack message history that recorded direct communication between NWS and EMs; and guided discussions with NWS and EMs, individually and together, at the end of each week of the HWT. In this presentation, we will report on whether and how BVOT affected communication between NWS and EMs before or during simulated weather events in the HWT.