From Forecaster to Decision Maker: Examining Information Sharing Practices of Emergency Managers

It is a common practice for National Weather Service Forecast Offices and other forecasting entities to provide detailed forecast briefing packets to their emergency management partners in the days or hours leading up to a local severe weather event. What emergency managers do with this information, however, is largely something of a mystery. The wide variety of emergency manager background weather knowledge, jurisdictional responsibilities, and the lack of clear guidance or training on how best to communicate forecast information to their partners and stakeholders means that there isn’t a common practice from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In an effort to better understand the state of current emergency management practice in this space, the Extreme Weather and Emergency Management (WxEM) project asked a nationwide database of over 700 emergency managers questions related to information sharing. This included questions designed to understand what sources of forecast information emergency managers are most frequently sharing, what audiences EMs are communicating with, and by what methods this information is being shared. This talk will provide an overview of the responses to these questions, thus providing forecasters and communicators with greater insights into the needs and practices of one of their core partners.