Starting the Conversation: Emergency Manager perspectives on the SPC Convective Outlook

As core partners within the weather enterprise, Emergency Managers (EMs) play a significant role in communicating weather information to the public. The Extreme Weather and Emergency Management (WxEM) project aims to improve understanding of EM reception, understanding, and use of NWS forecast information through surveys regularly distributed to a nationwide panel of EMs. The first two surveys in this series investigated EM use of the Storm Prediction Center’s (SPC) Convective Outlook and how potential changes to the Outlook may impact their operations. In both surveys, most EMs indicated that they use the Convective Outlook (91% in the first survey, 100% in the second). Additionally, EMs overall indicated that changing the categorical SPC words to levels would improve public and EM understanding of the Convective Outlook. In the second survey, EMs were asked about potential changes to the probabilistic forecasts and the intensity information included in the Convective Outlook. This presentation will further discuss these results, including EM perception of experimental continuous probability and conditional intensity information and how such changes may impact EM operations.