Hazardous Weather Messaging - What We Can Learn From Different Users to Improve Our Message

A downed tree limb on power lines will verify a severe thunderstorm warning. Think of how many people could be affected by that one downed limb: the people who lost power as a result, the homeowner who has to pay for the limb to be taken away or thrown into a wood chipper, the linesmen who must repair the damage and the police who must secure the area. That same severe thunderstorm warning could have been issued for a thunderstorm that knocks out power to an entire community and causes significant, widespread tree, utility and structural damage.

If you rely on your weather app, each warning will look and sound exactly the same. So, how can we more effectively communicate risk?

Following a damaging thunderstorm, most people interviewed say: “it must have been a tornado.” While we can experience EF-4 tornadoes in New England, EF-0 and EF-1 tornadoes are far more common, and the fact remains that most of our severe thunderstorms cause more damage than those relatively weak tornadoes.

In the aviation world, one thunderstorm in “the wrong place” can cause widespread problems, potentially impacting hundreds of flights and thousands of passengers. Any flight delays can quickly add up to significant amounts of money lost by the airline industry, and delays and cancellations that impact the flying public.

Despite the differences in audiences, there are commonalities between these end user groups that need to be recognized and taken into consideration. Those end users, whether the general public, aviation traffic managers, emergency managers or first responders, are not meteorologists. They need us, the meteorologists, to analyze the situation and effectively provide the needed information to our “customers” and partners. How do we get everyone on the same page, all while avoiding the “boy who cried wolf” syndrome?

The similarities and differences in messaging to the public, emergency personnel and other sectors will be discussed, in terms of finding better ways to effectively get the proper message across. Recent severe weather events in southern New England (Cape Cod tornadoes of 23 July 2019, Boston microbursts on 31 July 2019) will be used as the basis of our presentation.