Integrating Social and Behavioral Sciences Within the Weather Enterprise (2018) / Chapter Skim
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roadways each year. Also of concern are the many examples of severe weather events that had accurate forecasts and widespread warnings yet nonetheless resulted in considerable loss of life or other adverse outcomes -- for example, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, when more than 100 deaths were reported, and the August 2017 H urricane Harvey–related flooding disaster in south Texas, which led to more than 60 deaths and required many thousands of emergency rescues.
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Meeting these more ambitious goals requires a paradigm shift in the weather enterprise to make social and behavioral sciences an integral part of research and operations. As illustrated in Figure S.1, SBS research offers great potential not just for improving communications of hazardous weather warnings, but also for improving preparedness and mitigation for weather risks, for hazard monitoring, assessment, and forecasting processes; for emergency management and response; and for long-term recovery efforts.
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Summary FIGURE S.1 Stages of communication and decision support that must be addressed under the Weather Ready Nation paradigm, with examples of how social and behavioral science (SBS) research can provide critical insights and understanding in each of these stages.
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; the ways that people receive, interpret, and use hazardous weather forecasts, warnings, and preparedness information; the factors that underlie social vulnerability to different types of weather hazards; and the economic value of weather information to different sectors and stakeholders. Research advances are providing transformative opportunities for expanding these contributions to the weather enterprise, with new tools and models making it possible to collect, analyze, interpret, and apply data and information both at smaller and larger scales.
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Several existing federal agency data collection activities could, with modest additions and greater interagency coordination, significantly expand our understanding of the social context of hazardous weather. This includes, for instance, data collection activities led by NOAA (National Weather Service "Service Assessments," Natural Hazard Statistics)
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Across the weather enterprise, leaders themselves need to invest time in understanding and spreading awareness to key constituencies and stakeholders of the many ways that social and behavioral sciences can help advance their organization's goals related to weather readiness; hazard monitoring, assessment, and forecasting processes; emergency management and response; and long-term recovery. To aid these efforts, federal agencies, private companies, and leading academic programs within the weather enterprise need to augment their leadership teams to include executives and managers with strong and diverse social science backgrounds.
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Building capacity to support and implement SBS research depends on more sustained funding and increased intellectual resources, including professional staff trained and experienced in SBS research and its effective application. Several possible mechanisms for advancing SBS capacity at NOAA are described in this report, such as innovative public–private partnerships for interdisciplinary weather research, the development of an SBS-focused NOAA Cooperative Institute, or creation of SBS-focused programs within existing Cooperative Institutes.
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This planning process should also address critical supporting activities for research assessment, agenda setting, community building, and information sharing and the development of methods to collectively track funding support for this suite of research activities at the SBS-weather interface. In addition, NOAA should build more sustainable institutional capacity for research and operations at the SBS-weather interface and should advance cooperative planning to expand SBS research among other federal agencies that play critical roles in weather-related research operations.
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Recommendation: The weather enterprise should support research efforts in the following areas: • Weather enterprise system–focused research. To address this gap requires system-level studies of weather information production, dissemination, and evaluation; studies of how forecasters, broadcast media, emergency and trans portation managers, and private weather companies create information and interact and communicate among themselves; studies of forecaster decision making, such as what observational platforms and numerical weather predic tion guidance forecasters use and how they use them; studies of how to assess the economic value of weather services; and studies of team performance and organizational behavior within weather forecast offices and other parts of the weather enterprise.
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While efforts to advance meteorological research and numerical weather prediction should continue, realizing the greatest return on investment from such efforts requires fully engaging the social and behavioral sciences -- both to expand the frontiers of knowledge within SBS disciplines and to foster more extensive application of these sciences across the weather enterprise. Other areas of applied science -- particularly in the realm of public health -- offer important lessons about effective strategies for integrating social and behavioral sciences.
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