Exploring the effectiveness of Integrated Warning Teams

An Integrated Warning Team (IWT) is an ad hoc team of people involved in the preparedness and response to high-impact weather events, such as the NWS, broadcast media and emergency managers. This study focuses on the effectiveness of IWT activities. NWS offices are leading many IWT activities with little communication between offices about what is working and what isn't. The goal of this study is to evaluate if IWT workshops enable more effective operational IWTs before, during, and after real events. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with IWT workshop participants to evaluate the effectiveness of the workshops. IWT participants from the NWS, broadcast meteorology, emergency management, and social science were interviewed. The interview was designed to identify characteristics of effective/ineffective IWT workshops and also help to develop a set of ideas on how to improve IWT activities. Overall this study succeeded in identifying ideas for improvements and also identified a weakness between some of the core groups of an IWT.