Addressed or Unanswered?: Evaluating Public Information Seeking on Social Media throughout Severe Weather Events

Social media has shown to be an important information channel for the public when they are seeking severe weather information. However, with limited space, social media posts tend to focus on certain weather forecast attributes leading up to a severe weather event; for example, posts tend to focus on the location of the storms, protective actions people can take, the chance a storm will occur, the timing, severity, or the impacts. Building on previous work, this project assesses what types of information members of the public are seeking in advance of severe weather events. Specifically, this project evaluates whether members of the public are seeking clarification of the information in NWS Facebook posts, or if they are seeking additional information beyond what is provided. We collected a sample of questions from a database of 7,932 Facebook comments that were left on NWS posts from 2019 to 2021. These comments were collected from ten days before to one day after 35 different tornado events and vary in time of year, time of day, and severity. The sample was then manually coded to differentiate responses by whether they asked questions that could have been answered by the respective NWS posts and comments that were seeking information beyond what was provided in the original posts. This presentation will cover the initial results from this analysis and provide recommendations regarding severe weather social media messaging.