Does Spatially, Hazard Specific Vulnerability Data Impact the Content, Timing, and Frequency of NWS Messaging to Core Partners?

In this presentation, we report on findings from a 2021-2022 Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) experiment that assessed the communication between forecasters and their emergency manager partners as they used a new experimental decision support tool called the Brief Vulnerability Overview Tool (BVOT). One objective of this study was to understand how vulnerability knowledge would be applied to NWS meteorologists’ workflow. We hypothesized that having increased vulnerability awareness would influence how NWS forecasters communicate with their core partners and could impact the content, timing, and frequency of messaging to core partners.

There has been little research about how having an increased awareness of vulnerabilities may influence the work of NWS meteorologists. To remedy how this vulnerability information can be collected and applied, the BVOT provides a collective, spatial display of these weather hazard specific vulnerability data that is integrated into the everyday workflow of NWS WFOs, allowing all forecasters in a WFO to obtain critical vulnerability information that can be used as part of impact-based decision support services (IDSS). The BVOT is a set of GIS shapefiles containing knowledge-derived, weather hazard-specific, spatially discrete vulnerability points and regions across an NWS WFO’s CWA. These shapefiles can be displayed in AWIPS-II or any software that supports GIS files to provide NWS WFO meteorologists with increased spatial-situational awareness of vulnerabilities with the goal of providing enough information to prompt meteorologists to provide more granular, timely, and improved, operationally useful messaging to core partners before, during, and after severe weather events.

During the HWT experiment, NWS meteorologists were tasked with forecasting, creating IDSS, and issuing formal warning products, for eight real-world severe weather cases that were presented via the NWS’s Weather Event Simulator (WES) and AWIPS in the cloud. All NWS meteorologists issued warnings, DSS briefing packets/emails/slides, and Slack logs (a proxy for NWSChat) were saved for analysis. Using this data, we identified communication differences between forecaster teams that did and did not have access to the BVOT during several experiment cases. Timelines of each case were created to help illustrate how each forecaster team communicated hazardous weather conditions and potential vulnerabilities to their core partners. This presentation will explain the decisions made by each forecaster team and any differences in the content they shared, and the timing and frequency of their messaging.