Identifying the Implications of Using a Spatially and Hazard-Specific Vulnerability Tool

In this presentation, we report on the findings from a 2021-2022 Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) experiment that assessed how NWS meteorologists and their core partners would use a new experimental vulnerability tool known as the Brief Vulnerability Overview Tool (BVOT). Previous presentations addressed how BVOT impacted warning decisions, how BVOT impacted NWS-EM communications, and the potential impact of BVOT on secondary stress during this project. One final objective of this study was to discover the intended and unintended consequences of using BVOT in severe weather operations and the potential for BVOT to help Emergency Managers make effective decisions.

This HWT experiment required NWS meteorologists and Emergency Managers to work through eight real-world severe weather cases using the NWS’s Weather Event Simulator (WES) and AWIPS in the cloud. Meteorologists were tasked with issuing warnings, preparing and sending Decision Support Service (DSS) briefing packets and materials, and using Slack (a proxy for NWSchat at the time) during active severe weather simulations. All materials created by meteorologists were used in our analyses including recordings of meteorologists working in teams via Google Meet. The BVOT tool was purposefully provided without direction, desiring to see whether and how NWS meteorologists would use it in their DSS and other communications with EMs and when they would find it most useful.

Our team conducted a thematic analysis to identify how BVOT would most likely be used during NWS operations as well as what unintended consequences could come from using BVOT. Themes for intended uses of BVOT include its operational use, including DSS, providing extra situational awareness, as a training tool for new forecasters in an office, and for use in backup operations to assist another WFO. BVOT was also identified to catalog the collective vulnerability knowledge within a WFO.

Unintended consequences included that some areas had no BVOT polygons. Would this discourage DSS due to the implication that nothing was there? There were also discussions of potential political implications. A few meteorologists expressed concern over False Alarm Rates (FARs) increasing from using BVOT and the potential for overall workload to increase due to using this new vulnerability tool.

EMs identified many ways BVOT would benefit their operations and decision-making. EMs received DSS regarding potential impacts to particular vulnerabilities; BVOT helped them with messaging, both to the public and their jurisdiction’s response agencies; BVOT helped EMs anticipate what support another EM might request through mutual aid agreements; and new EMs would benefit by being able to quickly learn some of the greatest concerns about their area. There were several cases in which NWS meteorologists conveyed the projected track of a tornado debris signature relative to specific vulnerabilities and EMs used that information to infer what else may be impacted and what type of response may be needed.

Overall, both groups, NWS meteorologists and EMs saw the potential benefits of using BVOT to assist in their situation awareness and decision-making, each group in ways unique to their role. We will discuss both the advantages of BVOT and the hurdles that must be navigated before the transition of the BVOT to NWS operations.