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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 Download ()

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 Download ()

Abstract: At the beginning of the twenty-first century a research-to-operations program was initiated to design and develop operational systems to support local forecasters in their challenging task to provide advance warning for flash floods worldwide. Twenty-some years later, the Flash Flood Guidance System with global coverage provides real-time assessment and guidance products to more than 60 countries, serving nearly 3 billion people. The implementation domains cover a wide range of hydroclimatological, geomorphological, and land-use regimes worldwide. This flexible and evolving system combines meteorology and hydrology data and concepts as well as supports product utility for flash flood disaster mitigation on very large scales with high spatial and temporal resolution. Through quality control procedures, it integrates remotely sensed data of land surface precipitation and of land surface properties from geostationary and polar-orbiting satellite platforms, reflectivity data from a variety of weather radar systems, and asynchronous precipitation data from ground-based automated precipitation gauges in order to produce assessments and short-term forecasts that support forecasters and disaster managers in real time. For each region, it also integrates mesoscale meteorological model forecasts with land surface model response to produce longer-term guidance products. It contains components and interfaces that allow real-time forecaster adjustments to products based on local last-minute field information and relevant forecaster experience. Assessments of utility for flash flood warning operations by national forecasting agencies worldwide are positive. The article exemplifies the process of realization and evolution of the Flash Flood Guidance System (FFGS) from research in interdisciplinary fields to operations in diverse environments, and discusses lessons learned. Georgakakos, K. P., Modrick, T. M., Shamir, E., Campbell, R., Cheng, Z., Jubach, R., Sperfslage, J. A., Spencer, C. R., & Banks, R. (2022). The Flash Flood Guidance System Implementation Worldwide: A Successful Multidecadal Research-to-Operations Effort, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 103(3), E665-E679. Retrieved Mar 31, 2022, from https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/3/BAMS-D-20-0241.1.xml     Download ()

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 Download ()

The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report assesses the impacts of climate change, looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change.

Access link: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Working Group II Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Download ()

Las  autoridades del Ministerio de Medio Ambiente, a través de la Dirección General del Observatorio de Amenazas y Recursos Naturales emiten el nuevo enfoque de pronósticos, “PRONÓSTICO BASADO EN IMPACTO” que proporciona información específica sobre los potenciales impactos a ocurrir, según los fenómenos naturales esperados. Pronóstico basado en impactos, Dirección General de Observatorio de Amenazas y Recursos Naturales, El Salvador   Download (14 MB)

The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) presents key findings of the Working Group II (WGII) contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the IPCC. The report builds on the WGII contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the IPCC, three Special Reports, and the Working Group I (WGI) contribution to the AR6 cycle. This report recognizes the interdependence of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societies and integrates knowledge more strongly across the natural, ecological, social and economic sciences than earlier IPCC assessments. The assessment of climate change impacts and risks as well as adaptation is set against concurrently unfolding non-climatic global trends e.g., biodiversity loss, overall unsustainable consumption of natural resources, land and ecosystem degradation, rapid urbanisation, human demographic shifts, social and economic inequalities and a pandemic. Link: IPCC Summary for Policymakers (SPM). In Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change   Download ()