What’s that Warning?: Testing Public Responses to Alternative Convective Hazard Alerts

In response to the findings of the HazSimp program, the National Weather Service (NWS) has begun to reduce the complexity of the NWS’ weather hazard warning product suite. These reductions have primarily taken the form of consolidating warnings with similar impacts to single products as well as renaming pre-existing alert products to better highlight the impact that each alert is meant to communicate. However, recent studies have found that the Severe Thunderstorm Warning, which is intended to communicate thunderstorm wind, hail, and tornado hazards, leads members of the public to anticipate heavy rain and lightning hazards more so than hail or wind threats. To identify whether changes to the Severe Thunderstorm Warning product could address these misinterpretations, we asked members of the public to describe their level of concern and likelihood of response to separate “thunderstorm wind” and “hail” warnings in a national survey of US adults. The analysis of this survey data compares public participants’ responses to several different warning scenarios, including base Severe Thunderstorm Warnings and overlaps between multiple alerts, as well as what hazards participants would expect to experience given the alerts presented to them. Future work should seek to identify how core partners, such as emergency managers and broadcast meteorologists, might respond to alternative convective hazard alerts like these, as well as explore NWS forecasters’ ability to issue more hazard-specific warnings for short-fuse hazards like those posed by convective storms.