Details:

Personal Author:
Galluppi, Ken ; Losego, Jessica ; Montz, Burrell
Galluppi, Ken ; Losego, Jessica ; Montz, Burrell Less -
Corporate Authors:
United States. National Weather Service. ; CR (Central Region)
United States. National Weather Service. ; CR (Central Region) Less -
NOAA Program & Office:
NWS (National Weather Service) ; CR (Central Region)
NWS (National Weather Service) ; CR (Central Region) Less -
Description:
From service assessments of large impacting tornadoes in 2011, the National Weather Service (NWS) inferred that emergency managers and media decision makers wanted a better sense of the potential impacts from storms so that they could make better response and business decisions. In response to this challenge, the Central Region Headquarters (CRH), in collaboration with a number of internal entities, devised a prototype of a modified severe weather and tornado warning message in hopes of improving the urgent and correct decision making. The message, called the Impact Based Warning (IBW), was planned to convey a sense of severity of the potential impact of storms, thus giving decision makers more information to base decisions. A pilot demonstration project was developed to test the message utility in five Weather Forecast Offices (WFO) for the severe weather season starting April 2, 2013. The goal was to see if by changing the message to emphasize tiers of impact severity, emergency management and media decision-making could be enhanced. The CRH team focused on the message structure that could convey some additional information while staying within current warning system. Prior to using the warnings, the team created tiers of impact wording for the IBW, and trained WFO personnel to develop consistency of use. The question was left open, how to evaluate the effectiveness of the IBW in achieving its limited goal of providing improved information. The Weather for Emergency Management Decision Support (WxEM) team, in collaboration with the NWS Office of Science and Technology, was developing methods to better understand how to improve weather products and services from the emergency management point of view. The WxEM project had previously explored the development and testing of agile development for winter weather and tropical weather. The methods employed enabled a rapid assessment of critical emergency management needs for information and prototyped development to meet those needs. The success and promise of the WxEM approach seemed appropriate to assist CRH in evaluating its IBW pilot. It was mutually agreed upon by OST, CRH, and WxEM that a collaboration could be defined where the WxEM team, who had nothing to do with the design of the IBW or pilot, could serve to independently evaluate effectiveness from the customer point of view. This final report details the overall plan and background, the methods used, the quantitative and quality evaluation of IBW, and lists findings and recommendations that can be used by NWS to improve IBW and other warnings.
Keywords:
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Emergency Drills Emergency Management
Document Type:
Non-series Report
Rights Information:
Public Domain
Compliance:
Submitted
Main Document Checksum:
[+]
urn:sha256:f35966256dc4ea0bdd1d332a2f488812ed2677de7d2803124c617a9766b8138a
Download URL:
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/28893/noaa_28893_DS1.pdf
File Type:

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