May 23 - July 29
Before, During, and After Severe Weather: How the Brief Vulnerability Overview Tool May Impact Emergency Manager Decision-Making and NWS Forecaster-EM Communications
Jada Smith (University of Georgia) and Dr. Daphne LaDue (OU/CAPS)
What is already known:
- Emergency managers value their relationships with NWS forecasters.
- Greater communication between EMs and NWS forecasters leads to greater trust.
- Emergency managers want to be updated more frequently, especially prior to an issuance of a watch and/or warning.
What this study adds:
- Emergency managers observed that the BVOT can be useful before a storm, to prepare the community for a severe weather event, during, to see which vulnerable areas are impacted, and after, to send emergency services to the areas that were affected.
- While some EMs mentioned that they would not need BVOT for themselves, they do see it being useful when they need to provide mutual aid to nearby county EMs to pinpoint the vulnerabilities they will assess the damage on.
- EMs see BVOT as useful for training new EMs on their local vulnerabilities.
Abstract:
People, places, and things vulnerable to severe weather are everywhere and the only people that know where the majority are located are emergency managers (EM). The National Weather Service forecasters know where some are, but because of the large area that they forecast for, it is difficult for them to keep track of the vulnerabilities that some EMs are concerned about. To increase the NWS forecasters’ situational- spatial awareness, along with improving the understanding of messaging to EMs and assist in the closing of the information gap, the Brief Vulnerability Overview Tool (BVOT) was created. The BVOT was tested in a NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed project with 35 forecasters and 38 EMs over a course of six experimental weeks. Each week consisted of eight cases and an end-of-week discussion; each case was made up of three periods: 24–48 hours before the storm, 4–12 hours ahead of the storm, and lastly, a 35-min “storm on the ground” period. These experimental weeks were recorded and professionally transcribed, then qualitatively analyzed using structural and thematic coding. Within this process, the question of whether BVOT serves EMs through NWS forecaster use became the focus, causing the broad ideas to be broken down into more focused themes. This study found that BVOT serves EMs before, by reminding EMs of vulnerabilities, during, by seeing what a storm is impacting, and after, to help them plan for damage assessment and response. BVOT also improved EM-NWS and EM-EM relationships by communicating the BVOT points affected.