Center receives major grant to study flOOD FORECAST, RIVER WARNING TOOLS

Nurture Nature Center, Inc. (NNC), a non-profit organization in Easton with a focus on flooding issues, has been awarded a twoyear AN60,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to fund a new social science study about weather decision-making. NNC’s project will help National Weather Service (NWS) to understand how people living in the Delaware River Basin understand and use NWS flood forecast and warning tools in understanding their flood risk, and how they could be improved to better motivate flood preparedness and warning response by the public.

The project, “Flood Risk and rncertainty: Assessing the National Weather Service’s Forecast and Warning Tools,” supports NOAA’s new Weather-Ready Nation initiative designed to help the nation become better equipped to prepare for and respond to weather events.

For this project, NNC will partner with the NWS Middle Atlantic River Forecast Center and the Weather Forecast Offices in Mt. Holly, N.J./Philadelphia and Binghamton, N.v. NNC will also collaborate on the project with Dr. Burrell Montz, a social science researcher from East Carolina rniversity with expertise in flooding and natural hazards.

NNC Director Rachel Hogan Carr, who will lead the project, said the study creates a tremendous opportunity to improve public response to flooding nationally.

“diven the frequency and intensity of flooding not only in this region, but across the country, improving how people prepare for flooding is critical to reducing losses,” she said. “This project provides an excellent opportunity to help NWS understand how the public uses its flood forecast and warning tools, and what further refinements might improve public preparedness as people respond to news of impending flood events.”

For the project, NNC will organize a se- ries of four focus groups among individuals living in the urban City of Easton and the more rural community of Lambertville, N.J. Specifically, the focus groups will aim to reveal how people understand messages about uncertainty in forecasts, as well as how the timing, specificity, wording and graphic design of messages influence readability and understanding.

The tools that will be analyzed in the focus groups include: the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service, which provides information about river heights during flood events (water.weather.gov/ ahps); flood watch and warning messages issued in advance of forecast flood events; and a new “ensemble forecast” system that shares a range of forecast predictions (www.erh.noaa.gov/mmefs/).

Additionally, the project team will create a series of “weather scenarios” using these tools that will test how the public responds to notifications and warnings about severe flood events.

This is NNC’s third partnership with National Weather Service in the Delaware River Basin. The first was through a flood education campaign in the Delaware River Basin, “Focus on Floods.” The second project was the installation and programming for NNC’s new Science on a Sphere exhibit.