The Impact-Based Warnings Demonstration: Background and History

A key aspect of the Weather-Ready Nation initiative is to increase community response to weather information through enhanced decision support services to partners such as the emergency management (EM) community and the media. The Impact-Based Warning (IBW) Demonstration has served as one example of this, as its goal is to measure how the changes made to the warning products relate to the collective ability of the NWS, EM community, and the media to better assess, communicate, and manage severe convective weather risks. It is also an example of how collaboration with partners can help to evolve a product that communicates critical weather information into something that is more useful to the community.

This presentation will give background on how IBW was developed, as an effort to address findings from the service assessments for the 27 April 2011 outbreak across the southeastern U.S. and the EF-5 tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri of 22 May 2011, and will also review the initial list the objectives and goals of the project. History and context will be provided on how the original IBW messages were crafted, leveraging a connection to the Emergency Management community through the Risk Paradigm concept developed by the National Research Council. Context will also be provided on the various groups which assisted in social science research from 2012 to 2016.

The presentation will serve to kick off a moderated session on IBW, featuring presentations by Casteel, and Eosco and Ripberger.