Public Response to Fire Weather and Wildfire Risk Communications

This presentation will provide the key results from a set of public focus groups and a public survey on how to best convey fire weather information to the public. This research, performed by Eastern Research Group, Inc. (ERG) under contract to the National Weather Service (NWS), provides a wealth of information on how the public understands and responds to fire weather messaging. The focus groups provided in-depth understanding of how members of the public understand and respond to fire weather information and assisted us in developing a detailed public survey. Prior to implementing the survey, NWS and ERG worked to develop a set of potential new messages that could be used to convey fire weather and fire risk information to the public as alternatives to the current messaging (e.g., red flag warnings). The survey involved presenting fire risk scenarios to respondents that evolve over time along with providing messages to convey the risk to the respondent; both the risk and messaging were designed to evolve over time. Respondents were also asked how they would react to the risk scenario based on the risk messaging provided. ERG’s analysis involved comparing the responses to the fire risk scenarios between the different messages provided to respondents to determine whether the new potential message approaches would lead to more desirable responses. Combing the survey data analysis with the focus group information allowed us to determine which types of messages work best and under what circumstances.