Exploring Differences in Tornado Warning Reception, Comprehension, and Response Across County Warning Areas in the Contiguous United States

Members of the weather enterprise have many responsibilities, ranging from the issuance of forecasts and warnings during high impact weather events to outreach and public education campaigns during less turbulent periods. Effective education and risk communication across this range of responsibilities requires systematic, robust, and intimate knowledge of the communities that enterprise members serve. This includes knowledge about the atmospheric and climate conditions in the communities as well as knowledge about the people in the communities. Enterprise members often have access to a wide variety data that that facilitate the first type of knowledge, but relatively little data and on the populations they serve. As a result, it can be difficult to answer basic questions like: do people in my service area generally receive, understand, and/or respond to forecasts and warnings? Or, how does my community compare to adjacent communities? This makes it challenging to develop public education and risk communication strategies that match the characteristics of the community. Perhaps more importantly (in the long run), this lack of data makes it difficult to evaluate the impact of these strategies on community resilience. Absent reliable data that vary in space and time, it is difficult to identify best practices across communities and/or track improvement within communities as members of the weather enterprise experiment with new education and communication strategies.

In this presentation we introduce an ongoing effort to overcome these difficulties by developing a community database and interactive platform that fills these gaps. Akin to climate downscaling, the approach we use leverages population scale data from the Severe Weather and Society Survey and known population characteristics from the US Census to estimate unknown parameters of interest in sub-populations (communities) across the US. We demonstrate the approach, database, and platform by using them to explore differences in tornado warning, reception, comprehension, and response across County Warning Areas in the Contiguous United States.