Living With Extreme Weather - NWS project

[SoonerDave]

The National Weather Service is in the midst of a project that is apparently intended to transform fundamentally the way weather warnings are developed and communicated to the public. A great deal of discussion is underway regarding this evolution, with (apparent?) products emerging such as FACETS (Forecasting Adverse Conditions in Evolving Threat Scenarios, I believe).

Twitter activity on this can be tracked via the hashtag #lwew. There are some interesting discussions going on in this - and right now, as much if not most effort is geared toward the human interaction and behavior aspect as there is actual weather information and research.

As a nearly life-long Oklahoman who has lived through many severe weather seasons, I'm not exactly sure I know how I feel about this project. Integrating social media, nowcasting, "getting" people to shelter, a future without radios (such as weather radios) all part of the discussion.

I thought Venture, Anon, and Loco might know (a lot) more about this, and could offer more insights and commentary. Weather warnings are an integral part of life in Oklahoma, so this will probably filter down to affect each of us sooner or later.

[SoonerDave]

Okay, I posted the basic article, now I'll comment

From what little I've read about LWEW, I gotta say it bugs me a little. In browsing some of the Twitter comments about certain breakout sessions, it seems there's a significant impetus in this project to construct what I'd call a "social impetus" to react to weather information provided by groups like NWS. There's considerable discussion about a goal of weather warnings to be "0 deaths," which to me is fundamentally impossible to achieve - you can neither predict all nor warn of all possible permutations of adverse weather or the consequences that arise from it.

A few of the comments I read talked about "how to get people in OK to go to a shelter" in response to a warning scenario, and as I looked at some of the notions surrounding that, it got a little bit strange to me. There's no way on earth NWS is ever going to compel anyone to go to a shelter, jump in the tub, head for the basement, merely in response to a warning. All you can do is get the information out there as efficiently as possible. And I think that's what NWS' goal has to be - get out information. If they undertake to transform behavior based on their information, they're setting themselves up for failure.

Parts of this effort are positive, it seems; they identified the issues with growing taxonomy of terms and nomenclature created by competing interests and multiple parties, which inherently diffuse the essence of disseminating information. I don't know how you fix that from the broader media (for a whole TON of reasons), but I hope that means NWS is looking at simplifying it's own products and terminology some in the role of a leader in the weather forecasting community.

Lots of things going on here, and it will be interesting to see how this results in real-world forecast products. I just hope they don't allow esoteric motivations get them away from the prime effort at getting weather information to the public, understanding the public may not always use it to their best interest.

[Jim Kyle]

Well, if they manage to educate the general public about the actual situations rather than the ratings-driven hype of the TV folk (most all of them, unfortunately, since they live or die based on rating results), they can only be a force for good. And if they can succeed in changing such local policies as OKC's crying "Wolf!" whenever a single acre of the county is touched by a warning, they'll be doing everyone lots of good.

Agreed, of course, that a goal of "zero deaths" is totally unrealistic. Everyone has a terminal illness called "life" and sometimes that runs out during a period of extreme weather, whether due to the weather or not. However, something is needed to counteract the present lemming-like behavior, so I applaud this attempt...

[SoonerDave]

Well, if they manage to educate the general public about the actual situations rather than the ratings-driven hype of the TV folk (most all of them, unfortunately, since they live or die based on rating results), they can only be a force for good. And if they can succeed in changing such local policies as OKC's crying "Wolf!" whenever a single acre of the county is touched by a warning, they'll be doing everyone lots of good.

Agreed, of course, that a goal of "zero deaths" is totally unrealistic. Everyone has a terminal illness called "life" and sometimes that runs out during a period of extreme weather, whether due to the weather or not. However, something is needed to counteract the present lemming-like behavior, so I applaud this attempt...

In that context, Jim, I agree wholeheartedly. That kind of local response improvement would be terrific.

The kind of simplification I hope to see from NWS, at least as it pertains to their SPC forecasts, is the elimination of the "degrees of risk" terms, eg "moderate," "slight," "enhanced," etc. Those words mean slightly different things to different people - to me, the most basic, minimal risk term should be "slight," but it isn't. It's "marginal." That makes sense to some people, of course, but that's the whole point - get rid of the words, and map those risk terms to numbers - 1 to 5. Condition 1 is the worst. No ambiguity. And the numbers are based on the exact same science that the existing SPC forecasts are based. I think it sounds much cleaner to say "SPC has issued a Category 1 Risk for Wednesday."

The other good side of this is that if NWS goes to a simple numbering scheme, it will make it a great deal harder for other weather entities with, shall we say, less altruistic motivations, co-opt those terms into their own slightly different lexicon. As the de-facto weather reporting/forecasting focal, I think local media types would inevitably go along - perhaps not all at once, but eventually.

Part of me hates to suggest this because it sounds too much like the "TORCON" nonsense about which I've made no bones that I loathe from the Lack Of Weather Channel. I hasten to explicitly differentiate my suggestion in this vein in that it merely suggests we replace the words already in place (as a result of a properly vetted analysis) with simple numbers that aren't subject to interpretation or wordsmithing.