Designing, Creating, and Testing the Brief Vulnerability Overview Tool (BVOT) for NWS Forecasters

This talk describes the design, creation, and testing of the Brief Vulnerability Overview Tool (BVOT) for NWS forecasters. The BVOT brings together spatially-specific vulnerability knowledge from NWS WFO forecasters and their Emergency Manager (EM) partners in order to create GIS layers that can be displayed in AWIPS. These spatial data provide forecasters critical situational awareness information before, during, and after severe weather events in order to assist them with streamlining the process of decision-making, communication, and messaging within the WFO, between the WFO and EMs/partners, and directly to the public (via social media). This Research-to-Operations focused effort emerged out of 3+ years of research on and collaboration with NWS forecasters, local EMs, and various publics in Alabama as part of NOAA’s recent Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment – Southeast (VORTEX-SE) efforts.

Traditional approaches to the study of vulnerabilities in the context of severe weather have tended to focus on the end-users of weather forecasts: emergency managers, agencies, planners, community groups, and individuals/individual households. In rare cases, the identification of discrete vulnerabilities – for instance, populations that might be viewed as vulnerable because they cannot/do not receive traditional watch/warning messages due to disabilities or the fact that they do not understand English – has led to efforts to change some aspect of the communication system that is used to distribute forecast/alert information from weather forecasters. Far more typically, though, when a vulnerability is identified, it is viewed as something that should be addressed by a solution like improved preparedness (have a plan, know where to go in the event of severe weather, etc.) or changes in engineering (changes to building codes, improvements to warning systems, etc.). On the other hand, there has been little attention paid to how knowledge about vulnerabilities across a region do or do not impact the work of NWS forecasters themselves. This can be explained by the NWS’s general philosophy that forecasters do not warn on vulnerabilities, but, rather, on meteorological conditions – atmospheric dynamics are identified, interpreted, and future states/conditions are forecasted, this information being packaged in a manner that can be communicated to “partners” who, ultimately, interpret the potential impacts of those forecasted events on various vulnerabilities across their region of responsibility.

The BVOT provides a graphical database of forecaster- and EM-identified, spatially-specific vulnerabilities that can be displayed as a layer in AWIPS in order to provide additional situational awareness for NWS forecasters. The broader purpose of the BVOT, though, is also to improve the linkages between the work of the weather enterprise and vulnerabilities across the communities and regions that the enterprise serves. This talk will summarize 1) how and why the BVOT was created, 2) challenges and successes regarding implementing the BVOT in an operational setting, and 3) early results from the operational testing of the BVOT around real-world severe weather events. All told, this talk will demonstrate how deep, applied social scientific research among forecasters and EMs can be translated from Research-to-Operations.