Improving Effectiveness of Weather Risk Communication on the NWS Point-and-Click Webpage

An important goal of weather forecasting is to serve society by providing useful and usable information that enhances people's decision-making and reduces their risk of harm. A primary channel through which the National Weather Service (NWS) directly provides routine and hazardous weather information to its users is via its point-and-click (PnC) webpage, which includes the forecast-at-a-glance icons, text forecasts, and links to hazardous weather products. Because the PnC webpage provides important--and, at times, potentially life-saving--weather information to its millions of users, it is important that the webpage effectively communicates forecast information.

We conducted a multi-method, multi-phase research project aimed at assessing and improving the PnC webpage. In the initial research phase, we conducted focus groups, a usability evaluation, and an Internet-based survey that, collectively, identified a variety of strengths and limitations of the PnC webpage. Among these initial findings was that getting information about potential hazardous weather threats is important to PnC webpage users, but that the existence and timing of hazardous weather threats are not clearly conveyed on the PnC webpage. Readily and accurately receiving information about threat existence and timing is critical for PnC webpage users to personalize and respond to a weather threat. The second research phase therefore was aimed at improving these two aspects of hazardous weather risk communication. We designed experimental presentations of PnC forecast information for two weather scenarios: a severe thunderstorm warning and a flood watch. The experimental presentations were created by adding new textual and graphical pieces of information that were intended to better convey threat existence and timing. We evaluated the experimental presentations in two rounds of nationwide surveys of PnC webpage users by asking questions about respondents' identification of weather threat existence and understanding of threat timing; perceptions of how well the forecasts conveyed the threat existence and timing and of the forecasts' visual aesthetics; and preferences for the different pieces of graphical and textual information that were added. This presentation will discuss key findings from the research project, with an emphasis on the experimental results and their broader implications for people's lives and well-being.