NCAR/ SIP The Societal Impacts Program

This article summarizes comments from Larry Mooney, the meteorologist-in-charge (MIC) in the Boulder/Denver National Weather Service (NWS) office. During his four decades with the agency, Larry has taken on numerous assignments around the country. He speaks passionately about how collaborations between meteorologists and social scientists over the years have resulted in findings beneficial to the NWS (such as including warning coordination meteorologists in each forecast office). This article was inspired by Larry’s remarks at the October 2007 meeting of the Central Region’s Meteorologists in Charge in Kansas City, where he talked about how social science has informed and improved the NWS not only in the last 10 years but for the last 40 years or so. Eve Gruntfest first drafted the piece after a long chat with Larry, who then crafted this article in his own voice.

From My Perspective

In looking at Web chat and Web pages, it’s easy to get the impression that the collaborations between meteorologists and social scientists began with the Societal Impacts Program (SIP) at NCAR or with Weather and Society*Integrated Studies (WAS*IS) or with Roger Pielke’s work in the 1990s. These efforts, though, are actually the continuation of the good practice of involving social science in meteorology, which has been around for at least 40 years.

When I started with the NWS as an intern in the early 1970s, the general philosophy of warning operations was that once a warning message was sent, your job was done. Most of the forecasters considered this to be a logical approach because many had begun their meteorological careers as military forecasters in World War II or Korea. In their minds, the meteorological facts were all that the user needed. These were some of the best forecasters I ever worked with, but they did not understand the scope and the impact of their forecasts. They had little contact with their users and the dissemination of weather information was very limited compared to today’s weather enterprise.

This began to change when the supervising meteorological technician at the Fort Worth office ventured outside of our weather world and took some journalism courses at a local university. He immediately began to teach the interns how to write in a different style, one that was clear and more focused on the users’ needs. NWS Southern Region Headquarters soon recognized the importance of this broader approach. The result was a training course publication called “Clear Weather Writing,” which became mandatory training for much of the NWS.

At the same time, leaders in the NWS Southern Region Headquarters, such as Jack Riley and Andy Anderson, recognized that we could make our warning products more effective by learning more about the warning process. From the work of Benjamin McLuckie, they learned that the warning response decision was not an immediate stimulus response process and concluded that we needed to do more to get people to respond to our warnings. To address this problem, the NWS hired McLuckie from the University of Delaware to write “Warning, A Call to Action,” a training guide stating that the NWS has further obligations beyond just conveying hazardous weather information. The publication asserted that the agency needs to influence people and to offer intermediate statements and updates on storm progress. The content of current warning products is still based on McLuckie’s work.

Also in the early 1970s, a visionary at NWS Headquarters, Herb Lieb, recognized the importance of greater involvement of NWS staff in all phases of the warning process, including response. A community preparedness specialist (CPS) position was established at most of the forecast offices to train spotters and raise public awareness. The history of the duties and evolution of this position is contained an excellent publication by Doswell, Moller, and Brooks. I was fortunate to be selected as a community preparedness meteorologist (CPM) in the Fort Worth office.

In the meantime, the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University had done an interesting study on public response to Hurricane Camille. In September 1975, Anderson quickly put together a team of CPSs (including me) to work with Peggy Ross from Mississippi State on a post-storm survey on public response to Hurricane Eloise. Ms. Ross trained us to do house-to-house interviews. It was certainly an interesting experience that gave the NWS staff new insights into the hurricane evacuation process from the point of view of those who actually used our forecasts.

Equally important from my perspective, that exercise created the first group of WAS*ISers. Many of us on the team went on to be warning coordination meteorologists (WCM) and meteorologists in charge (MIC). I soon moved to Corpus Christi as an MIC. My Eloise experience had increased my interest in and understanding of the evacuation process, which proved beneficial both while working hurricanes and later in my career.

After a tour as a warning preparedness meteorologist in the Oklahoma City office, I returned to Fort Worth as the regional warning preparedness meteorologist. That job description included the role of flash flood and hurricane program manager for the Southern Region. The social scientist in me surfaced again when we started looking at the continued rise in flash flood deaths. These fatalities were occurring despite our increased efforts to forecast heavy rain. I wanted to know more about why people were not responding the way we expected.

I reviewed every flash flood death listed in Storm Data and published a report that, for the first time, documented that more than half of flash flood deaths occurred in vehicles. As a result, we increased our office’s attention to this aspect of the flood risk. In addition, we were able to influence national headquarters to increase the emphasis on including more detail about flash flood deaths in Storm Data, an emphasis that continues today. After the 1976 Big Thompson Flood in Colorado, Eve Gruntfest worked with many agencies to move from simple detection to integrated detection and response for flash flood warning systems. It has been a pleasure to work with Eve and her colleagues for the past three decades.

The Hurricane Program offered me additional opportunities to partner again with social scientists. In the early 1980s, the NWS decided to make public hurricane probability forecasts available to emergency managers and the public. Some people, in and out of the NWS, expressed concern about this decision as they feared the forecasts would be misunderstood and improperly used. Mike Carter, a sociologist the Office of Meteorology at NWS Headquarters, was a strong advocate of sharing all NWS information with the public. He argued for implementation along with a comprehensive training program for local government decision makers.
In response to this need to educate users of hurricane probability forecasts, two teams (including me) visited more than 30 cities in 29 days to brief news media and emergency managers on the probabilities. Our briefings included information from the social science community on anticipated public response to the probabilities. Following this training, probability forecasts were implemented and have remained a key part of the hurricane forecast product suite for over two decades. Social scientists played a vital role in taking a giant step toward communicating the uncertainty in coastal living.

Knowing how long it would take to evacuate a given area was critical to local governments if they were to use the probabilities effectively. Mike Carter joined our effort to develop hurricane evacuation studies, and his understanding of the warning process was critical to that work. I did not complete this effort before moving to Norman, Oklahoma, as the deputy MIC. There was, however, at least a draft hurricane evacuation study for New Orleans. It would probably be difficult to find a copy of it today, but I recall that it identified some of the problems we saw in Hurricane Katrina.

In Norman I was heavily involved in the testing and operational integration of the NEXRAD (Next-Generation Radar) Doppler radar. My past exposure to the social sciences once again proved valuable as we tried to address issues like how to best present these new and complex data to our partners and the public.

While at Southern Region Headquarters, I had my first opportunity to attend the Annual Natural Hazards Workshop in Boulder, Colorado. I’ve been an embedded meteorologist in the Colorado social scientist community ever since. By the time I became the MIC in Boulder, Chris Adams, a sociologist, had replaced Mike Carter at NWS headquarters. When the position was moved to Colorado State University, working with Chris became more convenient.

NOAA’s Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) was nearing completion of the design of the NWS Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) when Chris and I met with FSL scientist Dave Small to discuss how AWIPS would interface with external users and partners. To our amazement, we discovered that no such capability was planned. Working as a team, we visited NWS Headquarters and briefed NWS Director, Joe Friday ,on the importance of creating and maintaining interfaces with the other elements of the warning system such as spotters, hydrologic data networks, emergency managers, and the Internet, among others. As a result of Chris’s arguments and Dave’s technical knowledge, we were able to add a last-minute requirement for functionality that would become the Local Data Acquisition and Dissemination (LDAD) system.

Early Social Scientist Impacts Still Benefit NWS Today

I’m sure that social scientists made many contributions to the NWS that I’ve overlooked or am not even aware of. Nevertheless, their influence is pretty impressive when you consider the impacts I observed:

The inclusion of action statements in NWS products
A better understanding of the warning response process and the NWS role in this process
Increased understanding of the hurricane evacuation process
Use of hurricane probability forecasts
Greater focus on the true nature of the flash flood risk and appropriate actions
Hurricane evacuation studies
The ability for AWIPS to communicate with the rest of the warning team.

In each of these, input from the social science community was critical to improving public warning services and ultimately to saving lives. All because meteorologists and social scientists listened to each other and worked to find solutions to problems that could not be solved within the scope of a single discipline. Links among researchers and practitioners in the weather world are more frequent and more fruitful as the end-to-end-to-end approach gains more acceptance (Morss 2005).

Incorporating social science is part of an evolutionary process. The increasing complexity of our society and the growing impact of weather phenomena make it essential that we build on these previous accomplishments. Increased collaboration across disciplines must not only be accomplished in formal programs or projects; it needs to be a daily way of doing business down at the weather forecast office level. WAS*IS is a fantastic way to accomplish this goal.

I am excited about the potential of the WAS*IS program to serve as the cornerstone of future improvements to the nation’s disaster warning program. The program has been an outstanding success to date. It’s breaking down barriers between operational and academic cultures, and providing a sustainable way to develop and implement improvements to the country’s disaster warning and response system. Continued support at the federal level is a great investment. The talent, enthusiasm, and innovation of the WAS*ISers is exciting. The program has become a magnet that attracts the young scientists with the “right stuff,” and I can’t wait to see all the great things they will do!

*Larry (Larry.Mooney@noaa.gov) is the meteorologist-in-charge (MIC) for the Boulder/Denver National Weather Service office.

**Eve (ecg@uccs.edu) is professor emeritus of geography and environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and project director for Social Science Woven into Meteorology (SSWIM) at the University of Oklahoma.

Bibliography

Note: The University of Delaware Library Institutional Repository (http://dspace.udel.edu:8080/dspace/) has McLuckie’s pieces and many others available in pdf format. Conference presentations also are available there.

Baker, J., 1984: Public response to hurricane probability forecasts. Washington, D.C.: NWS.

Carter, T. M., 1980: Community warning systems: The relationship among the broadcast media, emergency service agencies and the National Weather Service. Pages 214–228 in Disaster and the Mass Media. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences Committee on Disasters and Mass Media.

Carter, T. M., S. D. Kendall, and J. P. Clark, 1983: Household response to warnings. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 9 (1):94–104.

Doswell, C.A. III, A. R. Moller and H.E. Brooks (1999): Storm spotting and public awareness since the first tornado forecasts of 1948. Wea. Forecasting, 14 , 544-557.Gruntfest, E. and B. Montz, 2002: Flash flood mitigation: Recommendations for research & applications. Global Change Environmental Hazards 4(1):15–22.

Leik, R. K., Carter, T.M., Clark, J.P., Kendall, S.D., Gifford, G.A., Bielefeld, W. and Ekker, K. 1981. Community Response to Natural Hazard Warnings. Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

McLuckie, B. F., 1970: The warning system in disaster situations: A selective analysis. Disaster Research Center Research Notes/Report 9.

McLuckie, B. F. and R. G. Whitman, 1968: A study of warning and response in ten Colorado communities during the floods of 1965. Disaster Research Center, Working Paper 40.

Morss, R. E. 2005. Problem definition in atmospheric science public policy: The example of observing system design for weather prediction. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 86:181–191.

Windham, G. O., E. I. Posey, P. J. Ross, and B. Spencer, 1977: Reaction to Storm Threat during Hurricane Eloise. Starkville, Miss.: Social Science Research Center, Mississippi State University