Building NOAA's Capacity to Collect Multi-Year, Multi-Event Data on the Publics' Perception and Response to Weather Events

Social science data collection has been identified as an important priority for NOAA by several National Academies and NOAA-sponsored studies. In recent years, NOAA has begun to fund data collection efforts through the Weather Program Office’s Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences program and other departments within NOAA. One such effort is the grant “Using Quick Response Surveys to Build a Public Perception and Response Database”. In this grant, university researchers are collaborating with nine National Weather Service Forecast Offices to disseminate surveys to the public 1 - 14 days after a medium to high-end tornado, severe thunderstorm, flash flood, or winter weather event occurs in a forecast office’s County Warning Area (CWA). The surveys seek capture how an individual navigates an unfolding weather hazard. They explore how warnings, social and environmental cues, situational factors, and demographics influence individual actions before and during a weather event. Over 10,000 surveys have been collected for 24 events as of September 2023. This talk will focus on the successes and challenges of the on-going capacity building activities that are part of the grant. These include: piloting operationally feasible, non-burdensome processes for forecast offices to activate, disseminate, and monitor surveys; approaches for collecting demographically representative and equitable survey responses; developing post-survey reports that are timely and useful to forecast offices; and efforts to create a database of survey results with appended demographic and vulnerability data for the SBES researcher community and NOAA departments.