Advances in Storm Surge Modeling, Forecasting, and Warnings: An Update on NOAA's Efforts to Improve Storm Surge Awareness and Prediction

Last decade, hurricanes such as Katrina and Ike became watershed moments in how NOAA communicates storm surge forecasts, and even though significant advancements have been made since then, Hurricane Florence and Michael in 2018 showed that some aspects of communicating the storm surge hazards remain challenging. Social science studies have shown that the hesitation to prepare and evacuate from storm surge stems from multiple factors and cognitive biases, including a lack of understanding of what storm surge is and what it can do, the inability of people to personalize the hazard and accept that a devastating storm surge could occur where they live (perceived risk does not equal actual risk), and bad practices of comparing individual storms to previous events (the availability heuristic and normalcy bias).

To address these issues, the National Weather Service has been engaged in a decade-long initiative aimed at helping people overcome these cognitive biases and by improving the communication of the storm surge hazard. The National Weather Service implemented an operational high-resolution inundation graphic, and accompanying GIS dataset, in 2016, and the first-ever explicit storm surge watch/warning product in 2017. Using recent hurricanes from 2017 and 2018, this presentation provides an assessment and validation of these new service improvements as well as the path ahead for additional improvements and expansion of similar capabilities for U.S. territories and island environments within the Caribbean and Pacific.