The WxEM Survey: Reflections on the First Year

Emergency managers (EMs) are important fixtures in the severe weather community. Around the country, severe weather events pose emergency managers with complex challenges that require them to make swift, critical decisions. EMs are a diverse population, but little is known about how they receive, process, and use forecast information. After many months compiling contact information, creating an initial database of over 5,000 emergency managers, and fielding a preliminary recruitment survey, we formed the Extreme Weather and Emergency Management (WxEM) Panel: an “active” catalog of over 700 emergency managers who have agreed to provide routine feedback on NOAA/NWS data, products, information, and decision support when addressing high impact weather events.

This study seeks to understand how emergency managers use NOAA/NWS data, products, information, and decision support when addressing high impact weather events. Since the initial enrollment survey in August 2022, three more waves have been successfully fielded. Each unique survey presented unique challenges. Managing a diverse panel with hundreds of members, collaborating with experts across a wide variety of disciplines, collecting and connecting data across waves, and expanding the panel all offered distinctive challenges for the research team. There are many lessons garnered from these four surveys and the research processes that accompanied them. In this work we reflect on the first year of the WxEM survey, explain the challenges we worked through, and discuss expansion efforts and plans for future waves.