The Impact of Past Experience with Tornadoes on Future Decisions (original) (raw)
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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...
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).
A strong F-3 tornado devastated the northwest Wisconsin Village of Siren during the evening of 18 June 2001. The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a tornado watch, and severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings for Siren, but the emergency warning siren was inoperative. The survey team traveled to the disaster site several days after the tornado and surveyed the path of the tornado by ground and air. A field study utilizing a questionnaire helped in comprehending the nature of warnings and responses on the periphery of the tornado damage path. Administered through interviews, the standardized survey aided in gathering information on awareness, preparedness, monitoring of the developing extreme event, and perceptions of risk. The team identified common beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes for this "near miss" experience. Though this research utilized a small sample size of 30 individuals, it provided insight into people's responses to a relatively rare and dangerous event. The public should not rely exclusively on anyone method of warning dissemination, especially one that may be vulnerable to electrical outages. While television is a very popular way of obtaining weather warnings, findings hint that NOAA weather radio remains a largely untapped and potentially successful resource if publicized properly in this part of the country.
Severe weather impacts the lives of many people. Today's technology allows weather information to be distributed to the general public in many ways. However, it is not clear how people obtain information regarding severe weather, and how they make decisions based on the information. This study surveyed people in the Oklahoma City metroplex about their weather information–seeking and decision-making behaviors during the May 2013 tornado outbreaks. The preliminary results based on 124 survey responses show that people used and trusted television news most to obtain the severe weather information, followed by siren, weather radio, radio, looking at the sky, and smart device. Behavior during the May 31 storm was different than that reported for the May 20 event. On the positive side, more people sought shelter during the May 31 storm. However, the number of people attempting to leave the area in a vehicle also increased. These behavior patterns demonstrate the strong influence of th...
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
Perceptions and expected immediate reactions to tornado warning polygons
To provide people with more specific information about tornado threats, the National Weather Service has replaced its county-wide warnings with smaller warning polygons that more specifically indicate the risk area. However, tornado warning polygons do not have a standardized definition regarding tornado strike probabilities (p s) so it is unclear how warning recipients interpret them. To better understand this issue, 155 participants responded to 15 hypothetical warning polygons. After viewing each polygon, they rated the likelihood of a tornado striking their location and the likelihood that they would take nine different response actions ranging from continuing normal activities to getting in a car and driving somewhere safer. The results showed participants inferred that the p s was highest at the polygon's centroid, lower just inside the edges of the polygon, still lower (but not zero) just outside the edges of the polygon, and lowest in locations beyond that. Moreover, higher p s values were associated with lower expectations of continuing normal activities and higher expectations of seeking information from social sources (but not environmental cues) and higher expectations of seeking shelter (but not evacuating in their cars). These results indicate that most people make some errors in their p s judgments but are likely to respond appropriately to the p s they infer from the warning polygons. Overall, the findings from this study and other research can help meteorologists to better understand how people interpret the uncertainty associated with warning polygons and, thus, improve tornado warning systems.
This study examines public response to tornado warnings through an application of the framework laid out by Mileti and colleagues (2000). A qualitative approach was adopted to supplement our knowledge of public warning response with detailed descriptions of how individuals interpret and react to risk information. Following tornado outbreaks, data were collected from individuals in regions surrounding New Orleans, LA, and Springfield, MO, using indepth interview guides. As each region is characterized by significant diversity, researchers developed a purposive sampling strategy to ensure the collection of representative data. Interviewees (n=40) were asked about how they received, interpreted, and responded to warning information. Researchers then used content analysis to analyze these data in order to evaluate and supplement Mileti's model. Ongoing analysis confirms Mileti's model, yet reveals a high degree of complexity with regard to a) stage transition, b) interaction and communication, and c) social factors. Findings from this study will contribute to the development of quantitative models intended to establish end-user policies. These policies will guide the deployment and use of radar technology currently under development by the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA). From a forecasting perspective, findings suggest whose contributions to this project have been extremely valuable. that a meteorological approach to public safety could be greatly augmented through the incorporation of social science methods and data. For instance, paying greater attention to how cultural myths about tornado threats shape risk communication could improve the effectiveness of watches and warnings.
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...