Baseline Measures of Reception, Comprehension, and Response to Severe Weather Forecasts and Warnings

In this presentation, we summarize results from the Severe Weather and Society Survey (WX17), a representative survey of U.S. adults (age 18+; n = 2,009) that was implemented in June 2017. WX17 was designed to establish baseline measures of the extent to which U.S. adults receive, understand, and respond to severe weather forecasts and warnings. Additionally, the survey measured public preferences about tradeoffs during the forecast process (i.e., lead time vs. accuracy/precision of warnings), trust in the NWS, hazard risk literacy, the relative importance of probability and intensity in risk characterization, and the value of geographically specific and continuous weather warnings, such as those envisioned by the FACETs project.

We highlight differences across NWS regions, demographic groups, and risk communities, discuss the implications of our results, and suggest a protocol that will allow us to track these indicators over time and space so that we can empirically detect changes that occur as, when, and where the NWS implements new policies (like FACETs or Hazard Simplification).