Perceptions and expected immediate reactions to tornado warning polygons (original) (raw)
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Natural Hazards, 2020
When the National Weather Service (NWS) issues a tornado warning, the alert is rapidly and widely disseminated to individuals in the general area of the warning. Historically, the assumption has been that a false-negative warning perception (i.e., when someone located within a warning polygon does not believe they have received a tornado warning) carries a higher cost than a false-positive warning perception (i.e., when someone located outside the warning area believes they have received a warning). While many studies investigate tornado warning false alarms (i.e., when the NWS issues a tornado warning, but a tornado does not actually occur), less work focuses on studying individuals outside of the warning polygon bounds who believe they received a warning (i.e., false-positive perceptions). This work attempts to quantify the occurrence of false-positive perceptions and possible factors associated with the rate of occurrence. Following two separate storm events, Oklahomans were asked whether they perceived a tornado warning. Their geolocated responses were then compared to issued warning polygons. Individuals closer to tornado warnings or within a different type of warning (e.g., a severe thunderstorm warning) are more likely to report a false-positive perception than those farther away or outside of other hazard warnings. Further work is needed to understand the rate of false-positive perceptions across different hazards and how this may influence warning response and trust in the National Weather Service.
Putting people at the centre of tornado warnings: How perception analysis can cut fatalities
Despite improvements in tornado Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), since the 1990s the number, and proportion, of people dying in tornadoes in America has increased. This paper examines how people rely, understand and trust tornado alerts and the Early Warning Systems (EWS) that disseminate them, if socio-demographics cause specific groups to experience greater risk, whether these factors have affected the rise in fatalities and what mitigation measures could reverse this. Ford County, Kansas, was selected as a case study. Interviews were conducted with officials and an online survey marketed through Facebook was undertaken, receiving 547 responses. Results showed white men were particularly vulnerable to tornadoes as they were more likely to ignore warnings. Hispanics, older people and those with tornado experience were also at higher risk if they heard an alert from an EWS they distrusted or did not understand. Population growth in these groups and technology changes have helped cause the recent fatality rise and, unless changes are made to the EWS, the continued increase in size of these groups will lead to more people becoming at risk from, or perishing in, tornadoes. Recommendations to prevent this include federal regulation and improved education materials for sirens, alerts translated into Spanish, discontinuing NOAA radio and developing an official forecast and alerting app.
Tornado Warnings: Delivery, Economics, & Public Perception
2018
The study reported here explores how to enhance the public value of hurricane forecast and warning information by examining the entire warning process. A mental models research approach is applied to address three risk management tasks critical to warnings for extreme weather events: 1) understanding the risk decision and action context for hurricane warnings, 2) understanding the
Decision Making by Austin, Texas, Residents in Hypothetical Tornado Scenarios*
Weather, Climate, and Society, 2010
One of the goals of the Warning Project is to understand how people receive warnings of hazardous weather and subsequently use this information to make decisions. As part of the project, 519 surveys from Austin, Texas, floodplain residents were collected and analyzed. About 90% of respondents understood that a tornado warning represented a more serious and more likely threat than a tornado watch. Most respondents (86%) were not concerned about a limited number of false alarms or close calls reducing their confidence in future warnings, suggesting no cry-wolf effect. Most respondents reported safe decisions in two hypothetical scenarios: a tornado warning issued while the respondent was home and a tornado visible by the respondent while driving. However, nearly half the respondents indicated that they would seek shelter from a tornado under a highway overpass if they were driving. Despite the limitations of this study, these results suggest that more education is needed on the danger...
The Impact of Past Experience with Tornadoes on Future Decisions
2018
Tornadoes are a dangerous threat to public safety. The National Weather Service (NWS), therefore, advises the public to go to an interior room on the lowest level of their houses when a tornado warning is issued for their area. As the NWS Central Region Service Assessment of the Joplin, Missouri Tornado published in July 2011 reveals, however, this is often not the first action taken after learning that there is danger of being hit by a tornado. Rather, people need to seek confirmation from more than one source before following the recommended action. The goal of this research project is to determine how the number of sources residents use vary with respect to characteristics such as the gravity of their past experiences. A total of 20 residents from two small Nebraskan towns, Pilger and Saint Helena, were interviewed. Residents were first asked to share their current sources of weather information and how they would respond to a given situation at the present time. Next, they were ...
Predictors for People’s Response to a Tornado Warning: Arkansas, 1 March 1997
Disasters, 2000
On 1 March 1997, powerful tornadoes touched down in Arkansas (USA) on a Saturday afternoon. Twenty-six fatalities and 400 non-fatal injuries were reported. We performed a population-based cross-sectional study to determine factors associated with appropriate responses to tornado warnings. Of 146 survey participants, 140 (96 per cent) knew the difference between 'torna do watch' and 'torna do warning' and were aware of when the warning was announced. Of those 140 participants, 64 (45.7 per cent) responded to the warning by seeking shelter, and 58 (90.6 per cent) of those 64 acted within five minutes of hearing the warning. Four factors were positively associated with those seeking shelter: having graduated from high school (OR = 4.2, 95 per cent CI =1.1À15.5); having a basement in one=s house (OR = 3.8, 95 per cent exact CI=1.1À17.1); hearing a siren (OR = 4.4, 95 per cent CI = 1.3À18.9); and having prepared a household plan of response when tornadoes occur (OR=2.6, 95 per cent CI = 1.1À6.3).
The Influence of Consequence-Based Messages on Public Responses to Tornado Warnings
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2015
The Central Region Headquarters of the National Weather Service (NWS) recently launched an experimental product that supplements traditional tornado and severe thunderstorm warning products with information about the potential impact of warned storms. As yet, however, we know relatively little about the influence of consequence-based messages on warning responsiveness. To address this gap, we fielded two surveys of U.S. residents that live in tornado-prone regions of the country. Both surveys contained an experiment wherein participants were randomly assigned a consequence-based tornado warning message and asked to indicate how they would respond if they were to receive such a warning. Respondents that were assigned to higher-impact categories were more likely choose protective action than respondents assigned to lower-impact categories. There was, however, a threshold beyond which escalating the projected consequences of the storm no longer increased the probability of protective a...
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2020
Effective risk communication in the weather enterprise requires deep knowledge about the communities that enterprise members serve. This includes knowledge of the atmospheric and climate conditions in these communities as well as knowledge about the characteristics of the people living in these communities. Enterprise members often have access to data that facilitate the first type of knowledge, but relatively little social or behavioral data on the populations they serve. This article introduces an effort to overcome these challenges by developing a database of community statistics and an interactive platform that provides dynamic access to the database. Specific emphasis is given to one set of statistics in the community database: estimates of tornado warning reception, comprehension, and response by county warning area in the contiguous United States. Exploration of these estimates indicates significant variation in reception and comprehension across communities. This variation b...
Tornado Climatology and Risk Perception in Central Oklahoma
Weather, Climate, and Society, 2021
Residents of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area are frequently threatened by tornadoes. Previous research indicates that perceptions of tornado threat affect behavioral choices when severe weather threatens, and as such are important to study. In this paper, we examine the potential influence of tornado climatology on risk perception. Residents across central Oklahoma were surveyed about their perceptions of tornado proneness for their home location, and this was compared to the local tornado climatology. Mapping and programming tools were then used to identify relationships between respondents’ perceptions and actual tornado events. Research found that some dimensions of the climatology, such as tornado frequency, nearness, and intensity have complex effects on risk perception. In particular, tornadoes that were intense, close, and recent had the strongest positive influence on risk perception, but weaker tornadoes appeared to produce an “inoculating” effect. Additional factors we...