Assessing Public Information Needs Leading Up to Severe Weather Events

While there is an abundance of guidance and tools available for meteorologists to incorporate into their forecasts, there is often limited time and space to explain the details of severe weather forecasts. Previous work has identified what information people need to make protective action decisions, including information about the chance, location, severity, timing, impacts, and protective actions related to the hazard. This project aims to analyze the main subject of questions left on NWS Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) accounts. Posts were collected from 10 days prior until one day after 35 tornado events that occurred between 2019 and 2021. Using context from the original posts and mutually exclusive categories, we aim to evaluate public information needs across time and geographic regions, and provide recommendations for tailoring severe weather messaging on social media. Initial results show that many individuals need location and chance information prior to these events, which may indicate the need for risk personalization in the decision making process. This presentation will discuss these results and strategies for prioritizing location information and other forecast attributes with limited space and time.