Appropriate communication and dissemination strategies and mechanisms ensure that communities at risk, strategic stakeholder sectors, and the public receive appropriate warnings. IBF Services, which provide accurate and understandable information, can be easily integrated into the decision-making process, and influence the recipient’s perception of the hazardous events and understanding of potential impacts, thus enabling more effective mitigation and protective actions.
The fundamental goal of risk communication is to provide meaningful, relevant, and accurate information in clear and understandable terms targeted to a specific audience. Risk-informed early action and response preparedness requires timely, accurate vulnerability and exposure data that are accessible and which enable stakeholders and other actors to perform rapid estimations on the benefits of action and the costs of inaction. Studies of human interaction and reactions to warnings can also provide insights to improve the performance of early warning systems.
The WRN project aims to leverage the existing capabilities of NMHSs and NDMAs to understand better and anticipate the likely human and socio-economic impacts associated with severe weather. Then communicate those impacts to various stakeholders effectively, delivering accurate and easily understandable information, data services, and products integrated into the decision-making process.
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In recent years, the National Weather Service (NWS) increased its focus on providing decision support services to the emergency management community and other core partners to help them understand its forecasts and take appropriate actions in the face of upcoming extreme events. In 2011, the Weather-Ready Nation Strategic Plan began to formalize the NWS approach to impact-based decision support services (IDSS). NWS recognizes IDSS as a primary service and is working to fully and more effectively provide it to federal, state, local, and tribal decision-makers. To do so, it is important that NWS understands how users are benefiting from existing IDSS, even as they look to improve it. This article aims to provide emergency managers (EMs) with an understanding of the efficacy of IDSS. The authors define IDSS and describe the IDSS products and services available during each stage of the emergency-management cycle: preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. To demonstrate the role of IDSS for the emergency management community, the authors use a case study analysis to compare two winter storms in the New York City area with similar characteristics but differing in their implementation of IDSS: the December 2010 winter storm (no formal IDSS) and the January 2016 winter storm (formal IDSS). In comparing the winter storm case studies, the authors find that formal IDSS provides EMs and other core partners with accurate, actionable, and consistent weather information and support that allows them to respond to winter storms in a way that reduces impacts to lives and livelihoods.
Hosterman, H. R., Lazo, J. K., Sprague-Hilderbrand, J. M., & Adkins, J. E. (2019). Using the National Weather Service's impact-based decision support services to prepare for extreme winter storms. Journal of Emergency Management (Weston, Mass.), 17(6), 455-467, from https://wmpllc.org/ojs/index.php/jem/article/view/2681
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As part of its strategic plan for Building a Weather-Ready Nation, the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) has increased their efforts to provide decision support services connecting forecasts and warnings to decision-making for core partners responsible for public safety. In 2011, the NWS formalized their approach to provide impact-based decision support services (IDSS) to help core partners better understand and utilize NWS forecasts and warnings in the face of upcoming extreme events. IDSS encourages weather forecasters to better consider societal impacts from weather events. This shift in emphasis toward impacts ensures NWS information and services are more relevant to decision-makers, which will allow those decision-makers to use NWS information and services to take proactive mitigating actions to protect life and property. This study posits that formal IDSS provides core partners with better information and supports decisions that reduce socioeconomic impacts during extreme winter storms. We compare two storms in the New York City area with similar characteristics but differing in their implementation of IDSS: the December 2010 storm occurred before the implementation of formal IDSS, whereas the January 2016 storm occurred after the implementation of formal IDSS. The comparison of the storm events indicates that IDSS and mitigating actions reduce flight cancellations, improve recovery time in the ground transportation sector, and reduce the duration and number of customers affected by power outages. We recommend that future studies of the value of IDSS consider using case studies for a range of weather events as well as other methodological approaches to assessing benefits.
Lazo, J. K., Hosterman, H. R., Sprague-Hilderbrand, J. M., & Adkins, J. E. (2020). Impact-Based Decision Support Services and the Socioeconomic Impacts of Winter Storms, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 101(5), E626-E639. Retrieved Mar 31, 2022, from https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/101/5/bams-d-18-0153.1.xml
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The devastating event that was hurricane Katrina is a fertile field for risk and crisis communication scholars. As a case study in failed risk communication by the City of New Orleans, this paper explores the inadequacies of the risk communication based upon Lundgren and McMakin (2004) as augmented by Rowan’s (1991) rhetorical perspective. The analysis concludes that while the care communication was adequate, inadequate clarity, insufficient credibility, and a failure to properly adapt to critical audiences resulted in a failure of consensus communication and crisis communication. Several lessons learned are advanced: (a) effective care communication is to little avail if the subsequent consensus and crisis messages are inadequate, (b) message preparation before the crisis is essential, (c) to be effective, messages must be credible to their recipient audiences, and (d) ethnicity, class, gender, and similar demographic characteristics of audiences must be adapted to if risk communication messages are to be effective.
Terry W. Cole & Kelli L. Fellows (2008) Risk Communication Failure: A Case Study of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, Southern Communication Journal, 73:3, 211-228, DOI: 10.1080/10417940802219702
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