The Waiting Game: The Impact of Lead Time on Protective Action in Response to Tornadoes

One of the principal challenges of hazardous weather communication is understanding what actions people will take given knowledge of impending severe weather, and how those actions may vary given changing lead times (hours instead of minutes). Understanding how responses vary with different lead times is critical as forecasts of these events become more accurate at longer lead times. While there has been some research into protective actions in response to different warning-scale lead times, little work has been done to study response actions given longer, watch-scale lead times. Do actions change given 4 or more hours until a dangerous storm? Do residents respond at all with that much lead time? Do protective action decisions change given 2 minutes of warning versus 15 minutes? In this project, we begin to address these questions with data from the Severe Weather and Society Survey, an annual national survey that is conducted by the Center for Risk and Crisis Management at the University of Oklahoma. Preliminary results suggest that lead time has a significant influence on the protective actions that people plan to undertake, both at the warning-scale and the watch-scale.