Designing Research to Co-Create a New Paradigm for a Continuous Flow of Information During Severe Weather

The various Testbeds that NOAA has initiated support  a variety of research projects, from R&D for analysis and forecasting support systems, fundamental studies of forecaster reasoning, to highly applied, realistic evaluations of sensor and display systems. For example, a recent project of the Hazardous Weather Testbed in Norman, Oklahoma, dramatically increased the level of realism of the testing environment in the last two years. This particular project tests feasibility of fundamentally changing the severe convective weather warning processes of National Weather Service forecasters, enabled by new software tools and guidance. Prior research had established the potential of the tools and guidance, and the first Prototype Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI) study involved human factors analyses of tool design and forecaster decision making. We then expanded the project in 2015 to include emergency managers, and further expanded to the full integrated warning team by involving broadcast meteorologists in 2016. Each stage of the research brought increased complexity, and utilized cases along a wide spectrum of events in order to mimic real world situations in which this paradigm, guidance, and software must work. This design method allowed participants to co-create the emerging vision for a new warning paradigm, and a work system that would meet NOAA's goals in Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs). While the method developed and applied in PHI is appropriate for a range of similar research goals, the design of any project should be driven by its particular goals. In this regard, consultation with experienced experimental psychologists can be essential.