Social and Behavioral Influences on Weather-Driven Decisions Made by Emergency Managers

Achieving effective communication of weather information by the National Weather Service (NWS) to its partners, including the emergency management (EM) community, is a complex challenge. It was not that long ago that many meteorologists thought that as long as a forecast was accurate it did not matter how the information was communicated and people would just “get it.” Fortunately, many meteorologists have moved past this notion and realize that communicating well is just as important, if not more important, as an accurate forecast. After all, if a forecast is 100% accurate but is not received or understood, it is of no value.

Many meteorologists struggle with knowing how to communicate effectively because they are not trained in this specialty. Often times, meteorologists think that just finding the “right” words is enough for end-user decision making. However, many other factors influence decisions and can contribute to a message being derailed. These factors are what our research, Social and Behavioral Influences on Weather-Driven Decisions, seeks to explore. The goal of this research funded by NOAA as part of the Weather-Ready Nation initiative is to develop an understanding, characterization, and prioritization of the major influences on weather-driven decisions made by the larger EM community, and not just county EM directors, to protect life and property. This research is then used to make recommendations to the NWS on how to minimize negative influences in their products and accentuate the positive.

Our team from Arizona State University, East Carolina University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Oklahoma is exploring the major influences on EM decisions in complex social networks, working in collaboration with NWS entities including the Storm Prediction Center, Central, Southern, and Eastern Region forecast offices, and Weather-Ready Nation pilot projects. This project is organized around the National Research Council's Risk Paradigm that connects hazards to personal and institutional risk. We seek to identify influences that can manifest themselves as a disruption of the risk connections. In so doing, we use efficient agile approaches to highlight significant issues that inhibit the understanding of risk and the employment of good risk management practices. Using rapid prototyping techniques, we will explore possible alternative products and services to understand and prioritize influences on complex decision-making.

This paper will discuss project progress to date, specifically how we identified and characterized the major influences on risk management of the EM community during a significant weather event, our prioritized list of influences, and any prototypes that have been developed to validate product or service change recommendations in real time.