Meteorologists aim to curb weather alert fatigue
OKLAHOMA CITY – It’s hard to make a tornado.
“To get this to happen, it requires an unbelievably delicate mix of air and water, which is constantly moving, constantly changing,” said Rick Smith, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma.
The wrong air temperature, humidity or wind direction – any little thing can kill a tornado’s chances of forming.
“We’re working as hard as we can. People devote their lives to this,” Smith said.
To produce severe weather forecasts, meteorologists spend time carefully picking out the words they would use, even organizing a conference call to decide whether a forecast would include the attention-grabbing term “outbreak.”
While making a tornado is hard, selecting the message in an intentional effort to speak more casually to the public can be just as hard.
“Social media does give us the ability to break outside of our traditional, very scripted, formatted warning products and things that we do traditionally,” Smith said. “Don’t talk to them like a scientist with a master’s degree who’s studied this their whole life. Talk to them like it’s your aunt or grandma or best friend calling you on the phone.”
The National Weather Service and its parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have taken steps in recent years to understand how the general public responds to severe weather messaging. It’s a delicate balance to strike.
“We can have the perfect forecast, but if people don’t understand it, if they don’t trust it, then they’re probably not going to make decisions that best protect themselves,” said Makenzie Krocak, a research scientist with NOAA’S National Severe Storms Laboratory.
The efforts, which included focus groups, simulations and surveys, have
led to a simplification in how the National Weather Service issues bulletins.
A major factor in reviewing messaging has been the proliferation of weather information on the internet. It’s allowed the general public to see raw data and technical discussions even if they don’t have the training to understand it, and social media has spawned countless sources of analysis and forecasting that wasn’t available 30 years ago.
“The message gets really boiled down to something simple, which is understandable because most people don’t have the time or the need to really sit down and understand the probabilities and all the different scenarios,” Smith said. “It’s never a slam dunk.”
Meteorologists also worry about weather fatigue.
Krocak said there’s quite a bit of research on the impact of false alarms. Unfortunately, the results are mixed. Some studies show false alarms influence behavior, while others show no link.
“So it’s something that forecasters really, really worry about,” she said. “One thing to remember is if we’re trying to reduce the number of false alarm warnings, that means that we’re going to reduce the number of warnings we issue. That probably means we’re going to miss more tornadoes.”