Real-Time Response: Leveraging Social Media During the 2024 Vigilant Guard Hurricane Exercise

The National Weather Service (NWS) continues to advance and strengthen impact-based decision support services (IDSS) and messaging strategies to effectively and efficiently meet the needs of both our partners and the public. A significant portion of messaging during high-impact weather events, such as hurricanes, now occurs on social media platforms. By proactively developing social media-centric services with our partners, we can better anticipate their needs and identify the most effective ways to provide weather information to the public. To gain valuable insights into how partners receive and respond to these services, the NWS must play an active role in tabletop and full-scale exercises.

In the spring of 2024, the NWS participated in a multi-agency, full-scale Vigilant Guard Hurricane Exercise to simulate the impacts and response to a landfalling major hurricane impacting Alabama. Vigilant Guard is a unique opportunity involving the participation of federal entities like the North American Aerospace Defense Command, U.S. Northern Command, and the National Guard alongside local, county, and state partners. In the planning stage, the NWS, in collaboration with the Vigilant Guard White Cell, constructed an extensive Master Scenario Event List with hundreds of weather injects that included storm surge inundation, IDSS briefings, probabilistic messaging, and simulated social media posts. Exercise scenarios encompassed critical events such as a high-profile bridge collapse, hazmat incident, and morgue overcapacity, in addition to several cascading events. During the exercise, NWS meteorologists deployed onsite to support exercise injects, deliver real-time weather updates to crews in the field, and play significant roles on the simulated social media platforms.

Effective information flow after a hurricane requires reaching people where they are, which, in the digital age, means using social media platforms for information sharing. Incorporating social media during the exercise allowed NWS meteorologists to identify information gaps and evaluate the prevalence of fake Artificial Intelligence imagery in the aftermath of a storm. The integration of social media into the Vigilant Guard Hurricane Exercise led to strengthening messaging strategies ahead of future storms and helped to refine the communication flow between the NWS and our partners. The successful use of social media strategies strengthens information dissemination, allowing the public to take proactive measures in response to hurricane threats. This presentation will showcase the collaborative effort, emphasizing the crucial role of meteorological expertise in disaster management and of social media platforms in disaster response.