Living Through the Freeze: Insights of Erie County Residents About Extreme Cold

Whether moderate or extreme, cold weather is a deadly: some researchers have reported that it results in a higher mortality rate (four times higher) than extreme heat. In 2022, a “once-in-a-lifetime” blizzard hit Erie County during the Christmas holiday, The Buffalo Blizzard was the most significant winter storm in western New York since the Blizzard of 1977 (NOAA). Because of its unprecedented nature, officials found themselves unprepared. Of people who died in the blizzard, some were outside their homes despite travel bans issued by the City of Buffalo and Erie County and advisories issued by the National Weather Service in place. It is challenging to contextualize the impacts of strong winter storms to communities that are accustomed to them- prior to the Buffalo Blizzard, Erie County experienced 81.2” of snowfall a month prior. Pinpointing what worked and what didn’t work about the communication around the Buffalo Blizzard will aid the development of winter weather communication in the future.

The WSSI (Winter Storm Severity Index) is a tool developed by the National Weather Service (NWS) to provide a high-level overview of the potential impacts of winter storms and their severity. This tool is intended to capture the range and intensity of possible effects from winter weather on different regions. The WSSI was developed from the backbone of impact-based warnings and focus groups of professional stakeholders (emergency managers, municipal officials, water resource professionals and transportation representatives) However, since the WSSI is new, it has not yet been tested by the public, and we do not have much research on how the public understands winter weather jargon.

We conducted 11 focus groups with residents of Erie County. Participants were comprised of born-and-raised locals and transplants, or people relatively new to the area. We showed focus groups tweets sent out during the Buffalo Blizzard and asked questions about jargon use (such as snow bands, lake effect snow, wind chill, etc.), interpretation of various winter warnings and advisories. Additionally, we asked questions related to the communication of health risks (such as hypothermia) and protective actions and orders (such as driving bans, travel bans and state of emergency). We’ve qualitatively coded the data to identify how participants describe the meaning of specific jargon.

There are several key findings. (A) Overall, winter weather terms are commonly understood by their impacts. If a participant isn’t familiar with a precise definition of winter weather phenomena, they conceptualize in terms of the effects. Both groups of participants do this, but transplants do so more often. (B) However, warning and advisory language can be misunderstood, especially for cold weather advisory and extreme cold warning. (C) Driving bans and driving advisories are terms that are frequently clear in severity for participants. However, official messaging using both “travel ban” and “driving ban” interchangeably is inconsistent, and there are no clear definitions for the difference (if there is any) between them. Participants guessed a wide range of definitions when comparing the two. These findings (among others) will inform a statewide survey on the mental models of winter storm jargon.