 Great. So thank you all for joining us for this next session. I'm Dr. Marshall Shepherd from University of Georgia, and I will be moderating the session. The session is entitled risk communication in multi-hazard environments, challenges, and learning opportunities from compounding hazards and cascading impacts. We have four key or high-level goals that we would like to address in this particular session. One is how do we define compound and cascading hazards? I've been involved in another Academy's effort, and that's been quite a discussion over the last several months. Highlighting the dynamic changes in vulnerability to infrastructure and at-risk communities with respect to recent events such as Harvey, Laura, and Michael, characterizing unique challenges with risk communication associated with such events, and then finally present opportunities to advance risk communication from the perspective of compound and cascading hazards. We have a very important and exciting and engaged panel. It consists of Jen Henderson, Jason Sinkbile, Rebecca Moulton, Jeff Linder, and Jessica Schauer. Most of our panelists are actually virtual today, so shout out to Jason, who I see is I think that's Jason holding it down there at the table. But before we get into the broader panel discussion, I'd like to share the virtual mic and pass it along to Jen Henderson from Texas Tech University, who is our invited speaker for this session. So Jen, if you wouldn't mind just taking the mic and introducing yourself and then telling us what you have to say. Thank you. Are you all able to hear me okay? Yes. Okay. Yes, we can. Thank you. So to start my presentation here virtual, are you able to see my screen? We are not. Let me try again. How's that? It's good. Yep, there we go. Wonderful. Thank you and thank you for the opportunity to talk to you all today. I've just enjoyed the conversation so much so far and think there's so much to already be discussing that we're raised by the first two panels. I'm an assistant professor at Texas Tech University and I've been studying compound hazards for probably the last decade or so. And I'm really excited to share with you a lot of what I've learned from other people that I've been working with and can see them listed here on the screen. And today I wanted to talk a little bit about what Marshall just mentioned with definitions and also introduce some problems around classification and its consequences. And I wanted to start off by introducing just a few quotes that I think nicely suggest the kind of challenges that we can have when we think about definitions and classification in general. And in part the way we understand and describe risk strongly influences the way risk is analyzed and hence it may have serious implications for risk management, governance and decision making. I think this is important to keep in mind that the definitions and the classifications and the way we talk about risk is not benign that it has consequences that are material. And another quote that I really like by Bauer and Star asks specifically about classification but what are these categories and who makes them and who may change them? When and where do they become visible and how do they spread? Remarkably for such a central part of our lives we stand for the most part in formal ignorance of the social and moral order created by these invisible potent entities. And I think this really raises the stakes for us in thinking about how these conversations can shape the way that the social is created, the social order, but also sort of the ethical and moral obligations that we have around these discussions. And so I wanted to introduce a few concepts that I think with in relationship to these quotes. And the first one is the notion of extremes which already has been discussed here today. And there are so many different definitions and ways of thinking about extremes of course and you can see them listed here. But what is really important of course is that extremes are increasing given uncertainties of climate change and that's been referenced several times already. So what are our ideas and understanding of extremes is a moving target. And one of the ways that we think about extremes is through these billion-dollar hazards and in 1980 NOAA started tracking these billion-dollar hazards and I couldn't find exactly why billion dollars was the mark. But each year there are several, several dozen in case, in some cases extremes measured by billion-dollar events. You can see just the last three or four years here there have been nearly 20 and last year 28 extremes that were measured by these billion-dollar metrics. Something to think about here is that we use language like historic and unprecedented and record with these descriptions which seem to suggest that every year there are more and more extremes or there are extremes that we've never seen before. And in fact since 1980 the total cost of these events has exceeded $2.6 trillion. So we're talking about a lot of money, a lot of lives, and a lot of metrics here. But there could be other metrics that we think about. The half billion dollars, the quarter billion dollars that are significant to the population depending on who we're looking at and what context it is. So billion dollars is one way of thinking about extremes. Another way of thinking about extremes is, you know, number of hurricanes over the past several decades in terms of intensity, cost and death. And again the National Hurricane Center, part of NOAA, has a link there that provides a really nice database of storms up to 2010 that are really significant and extreme in many different ways. And this is just a sampling of them. Some of them we'll talk about throughout this workshop. But again just noting how many of them there are and the database goes back even into the 1800s. So extremes have been with us for a long time. They're getting more and more frequent. We can measure them in different ways. But I think the great question to ask ourselves is what Dr. Cutter did in 2014. What makes events extreme? And when do extreme events transcend and become routine or everyday occurrences? And I think we're on the cusp of that latter question. Are extremes the new normal? And what does that mean if extremes are the new normal? So I think there's a couple of opportunities here. How do we approach multi hazard events differently if we refrain extremes as the new normal? It's just the everyday now. And another question I think is helpful is what analogs of other extremes might help us re-see the problem this scales in the way forward. I wanted to offer an example here of pollution. A colleague of mine, Max Liberon, thinks about pollution as a kind of background noise now. Pollution is everywhere. It's in breast milk. It's in our blood. It's in our food. It's in the air. It's in our water. So it's ubiquitous. And so she contends that it's a permanently polluted world, which is one that because of its deep alteration, reclaims the need to incite new forms of response ability, not only the responses to the world, but the ability to respond and the ethics of that. And so taking a cue from her, what would happen if we conceptualized a permanently multi hazard world with the new normal extreme events? One that maybe necessitates new forms of ethics and response from us as well. So in this permanently multi hazard world, how do we think about what this means in practice? And I just wanted to highlight that I thought in the first panels, I captured as much as I could, but there are some really great ideas for what this means in terms of responsibility going forward. Everything from the risk communication itself to the types of research that we conduct. So I think we're on a good track in answering some of these questions, but there's a lot more to say, especially around the definitions and classifications. So I wanted to highlight another problem. So the first extreme is the new normal. The second is classification. And going back to extremes for just a moment, we classify these as multi hazard cascading impacts. We think of them as compound events where, you know, and sometimes they're compound cascading events. They can be both where the charters and interconnections can create more magnified emergencies and they can co-occur in time and space. We have all these different dimensions to think of, not just the physical, but the social and the technical. And then we have connected extreme weather events with climate extremes. How to think about the intersections of those and then complex extremes, the climate change uncertainties and what that means for new categories of multi hazard events or extremes and how that might change over time. And so as Marshall alluded to, we have so many different definitions of these terms, cascading disasters, you know, the progression over time that generate unexpected secondary impacts. The top event arises from a series of connected errors of failures and that creates conditions for a greater malfunction and more devastating consequences. And one author even suggests that in a modern networked world, most disasters will to a greater or lesser extent be cascading crises. So now we have extremes that are ubiquitous, but also cascades that are becoming more ubiquitous. And there's a lot of different ways to think about these cascades and compounds, even typologies that are out there that are useful, perhaps to think with the conceptual models. So I just raised a few examples of the many ways that these are being talked about. They raise challenges. I'll echo Cutter here in 2018 that there's little integrative science work on cascading impacts of disasters and how they become structural impediments for future disaster risk reduction. She also mentioned the social cascades that are becoming really important in a new way of thinking about cascades because the majority of work done on cascades and compounds tends to focus on physical drivers rather than social. And another set of authors talks about the need for developing scenarios for cascading failures and complex events so that we can plan for them. And I wanted to briefly highlight a couple of other ways that aren't commonly talked about in the research world about thinking about these cascading impacts, which are wonderful journalism like what's done by the Atlantic floodlines, which is about Hurricane Katrina. If you haven't listened to this, it's an amazing tracing of all these different complex factors. Zytun by David Eggers is a fictionalized nonfiction account, which is also really wonderful. And then, of course, most recently, Kyarrax and Elmory Peak released the Continuing Storm, which traces these lessons from Katrina. So we can look at other types of media for answers to these questions. There's less that I could find really important about compounds that didn't repeat a lot of the cascading literature, but a combination of multiple drivers and hazards that contributes to societal environmental risk. But there's a similar claim that these compounds are responsible for many of the most severe weather-related and climate-related impacts. And there are conceptual models of this where people are trying to create typologies and understand compound hazards. But again, many of these are the physical infrastructures. And I wanted to shift just for a moment to talk about the particular case study that I think with for compounds and cascades. And it's called TORS, which is tornado and flash floods. And perhaps this gives just a concrete example of how complex this space could be. But tornado warnings and flash flood warnings overlap and they're characterized by 30 minutes of overlap. And when they occur in the same time in the same place, they can give conflicting information to people on what to do. So you see the error there pointing to town B. And these are fairly common across the US. These are just those 30-minute overlaps distributed across the US by month to show you that there's nearly 400 of them a year. So many people are getting potentially conflicting information, or at least information they're not sure what to do with about these two hazards. And it becomes more complex in landfall and tropical cyclone contexts because you have different time scales and different spatial scales. You have multiple wind and water threats, not just tornadoes, but now you have synoptic winds. You have storm surge. And the scale of these overlaps vary in time. And the timing of these events evolve. And it can give contradictory advice as well. And you can see here Hurricane Harvey sort of brought this to some national attention though it's been ongoing for industry years. And you can see here the National Weather Service highlighting their challenges with communicating to the public about these compound hazards. When people were primarily on their roofs, they were sheltering from floods. And then they were getting tornado water, tornado warnings, excuse me. And so the question is then what do they do? How do they act? What should they do to shelter? And the National Weather Service was sort of looking to the research community, like what do we say? And this is again happened in other hurricanes like Hurricane Ida. And other kinds of questions that emerge there is not only looking at landfall, which I think has been discussed, but also the remnants of these storms. What's happening is these storms move across the US and we're now incorporating multiple agencies, the storm prediction center, the weather prediction center, the National Hurricane Center, local forecast offices, multiple scales and temporal scales and evolving threats. It gets very messy. And so what we've learned for some of this research is that the public tends to be very aware of these various threats. They may experience a higher tornado risk perception and flood perception. These dominant hazards and past hurricanes is proxies for understanding current and future hurricanes. There's a lot of information on social media and helpful to them and making sense of that space and that their preparedness can evolve as well, that it's not static. And of course, multiple languages and cultural contexts are needed because there's a dearth of information in multiple languages. In the National Weather Service context, there's policies about flood and tornado hazards that can unintentionally magnify one hazard. They can silo their practices and expertise based on kind of legacies of how offices are set up. They have the flexibility to change some of these policies in real time, which is great. We heard some of that in the panels this morning. There are also some concerns about wind information overshadowing flood risks in hurricanes due to things like the Zacher-Simpson scale. And then with broadcasters and emergency managers, we see that they rely on the National Weather Service information and if their amplifications and the National Weather Service, that could propagate through the system and be communicated to the public. There are some studies that suggest that maybe coverage of tornadoes might overshadow some of the coverage of flooding and that they are attending to several challenges like the National Weather Service, including non-weather concerns like COVID. And they're also in need of multi-language ability and to communicate hazards. And I know that Joseph Trujillo-Falcon is on the call and we'll be talking about that shortly. So we see that current warnings don't often help people prioritize wind and water threats. They have language translation and cultural representation issues and then very real are the critical incident stresses that people feel in these communities, especially the experts who are under tremendous strain and repeated events over time and must manage complex communication and threats at all and intensify. So there's just so much we don't know and I won't go through this list, it could go on and on, but there's just a lot we don't know about these spaces and this is just one case study of one type of compound hazard. There's many others. So to end I'll return to the classification and its challenges and how this relates to this particular case study. I think this quote is really important because it highlights that the traditional classification of natural human made and hybrid disaster seems to be insufficient toward the face of high complexity in the present day world. So maybe we need to add to our list a way to think about classification as potentially a problem. And in part the problem is that classifications can give advantage and they can give suffering. Jobs are made or lost. Some regions benefit at the expense of others and how these choices are made and how we think about that invisible matching process is the core maybe of our ethical work. How does classifying our hazards even by you know single hazards, how does that have cascades to be funny here to pun through this? How does that cascade through the system? Well, each of these hazards has its own epistemic culture of risk. These create disciplinary knowledges that get siloed. Research agenda and funding mechanisms get formed around these particular hazards and it makes it difficult to study the intersections of them with compounding and cascading of them. And labs especially in you know our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration those labs are formed around specific hazards and it becomes difficult then to work across those labs and the technologies and policies that follow from this. So we have material consequences for these classifications that are unintended and so it can make it difficult for interdisciplinary and convergent holistic thinking. So I think we have a couple of opportunities here to conceptualize and create scenarios for social cascades and compounds, emphasize integrated convergent work and examine cascading impacts across different time spaces and unanticipated consequences of them and then think more cohesively and flexibly than classification allows or at least reexamine the things that classification hides or doesn't make visible for us. And I'll conclude here and say that I love this quote because I think it's really useful in light of the panels where there was a highlighting of flexibility and being able to navigate and be nimble with what's happening in our world. The only good classification is a living classification. So I'll end there and just say thank you so much. Thank you, Jen. That was amazing. Hopefully the audience virtually and in the room can see why we asked Jen Henderson to set the stage in context for this panel. I think we will continue to move forward in the panel and then synthesize all of our questions at the end. So next up, and we'll have a series of five to eight minute talks from our next four panelists and then we'll have a Q&A session after that. So I'll turn it over to Jason Sinkbao from the University of Alabama. He's in the room. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Jason Sinkbao University of Alabama. I'm a professor in the Department of Geography. So I'm a geographer, meteorologist, climatologist, depending on my audience. I guess I'm all three today. As I could talk forever about these topics and there's already been a lot said it was really informative in the first session. And so I'm going to introduce that was introduced then I'm going to come back to some of that. But the two themes as far as compounding and cascading hazards and impacts. These are two themes that I think are the most important. And are we seeing more hurricanes in the tail of the distribution in the recent extremes? Well, Lee et al published an article in Nature Communications 2023 and the number of hurricanes that have rapidly intensified within 400 kilometers of the coastline has tripled since 1980. So I'd say that's a fairly strong signal. And then getting into the social aspect of this, the social science, how do people perceive these recent hurricanes? And so I'll put some quotes up from some of my research in the field. But many people have a benchmark storm in that area. And this is certainly true for my family on the Alabama coast. And I've been through a lot of hurricanes and I go into most of them on purpose to do research and to also see the storm. But they we have a benchmark storm and and that's the ceiling like it could never possibly be stronger than that storm because that one lives on in folklore sometimes. And so I'm going to talk about resetting the bar based on what we're seeing now and and trying to convey that information and talk about how both these themes intersect with compounding cascading hazards and impacts next slide please. So I've done a lot of research on classifying storms into two types. There's water storms and there's wind storms. And then occasionally you do have a perfect balance. Dorian was the the worst case scenario. And that's a slow moving category five hurricane. We've never seen that in the U.S. And let's hope that we do not. But it is probably going to happen one day. So that is a balance. That's a hybrid. That's awful. Some of these classic water storms and I've been in many of these. Normally with these, you do start to see some weakening. The pressure starts to increase. The wind field expands, it begins to slow down and this becomes more of a rain and surge event. A larger storm tends to flood a larger volume of water on the coastline instead of a higher peak surge right near the landfall point. And all these things are very difficult to communicate to the public. And the National Hurricane Center does a great job. The storm surge division does a great job. But these are these water storms. Sometimes it's hard to get the message across. And some of these classic wind storms on the other side. Well, you see all the category fives that have hit the U.S. We see Michael. We see Camille. We see the Labor Day Hurricane 1935. We see Andrew and then some other classic ones in there that were a little bit smaller, more concentric. Maybe they went through an eye wall replacement cycle or something and rapidly intensified. But those are more of the classic wind storms. Now, the influence of storm size, well, it varies between both. But the water storms do tend to be a little larger than the classic wind storms. And so going back to what Robbie said earlier about emphasizing the most important hazards with each hurricane. Yes, every hurricane is different. They are all unique. But many of them, the water is more important or the wind is more important. And so I'm going to talk about suggesting to emphasize that. Next slide, please. So article, Jen just brought up the Atlantic too. Well, this is an article in the Atlantic two weeks ago about are we entering a grace one climate? And I really enjoyed the article. So grace one events, they're predictable, but they're very unlikely, extremely low odds in the very skinny tails of the distribution. So are we entering a grace one climate? You can look at the bottom of some of the hurricanes that I've identified is grace one hurricanes. And I got all this data from Ibtrax. And we're looking at the intensification rate and miles per hour in millibars in the last 24 hours before landfall. And this is all what we've seen in the last seven years. And then of course, I put Otis there at the top Otis was mentioned this morning, I think Otis is a black swan event that is that's a nightmare scenario that we don't want to go through of a rapid intensification of tropical storm to cat five and less than 24 hours. And I hope we never have to see something like that. But you can see Harvey, Maria, Michael, Laura, Ida, Ian, all these rapidly intensified within the last 24 hours. Some did rapid transitions before landfall and it caught people off guard. Irma, I did a lot of research with Irma. Roxanne was talking about Irma earlier. I also did some research during the evacuation in Irma. And that was a long timeframe event. And that long timeframe event caught everybody's attention and then it weakened. And that that got everybody's attention. And then it wasn't quite as strong. So a close call there. And we also have a close call with Dorian. So next slide, please. So some of the quotes. And these two Michael quotes, we did that after Michael came through, I was not able to get down into Michael and interview people during the evacuation. But Florence and Harvey, that was during the evacuation. So Michael, this was an older couple and they went to bed. It was a cat three woke up as a cat five didn't have enough time to get their stuff together. And they were shocked. They'd never seen anything like that. And most of us in here have not gone through a category five hurricane. And I imagine I have not either. But I imagine it is incredible. It's not something anybody would want to experience. So really surprised them. The second one is from Mariana, Florida. Mariana, about 55 miles inland straight line from Tendall Air Force Base where Michael came ashore. And Mariana was devastated. It's a town of about five to 10,000 people. But it looked like a high end EF one low end EF two tornado went through the entire town. They had wind gusts over 100 miles an hour that far inland. And it just, they'd never experienced anything like that. If storms come through there before, but it totally shocked them. So they weren't prepared for that at all. Florence. So I did research in Florence, that family in Carolina Beach and everybody evacuated as a cat four. And then it weakened and it was going to become more of a water storm as I was talking about water storms just a minute ago. And this particular guy just, he didn't know what to do. He's more concerned about his store. And I told him your store is going to have about four feet of water in it. So I would stop worrying. There's not as much you can do. And I would get out of the area. So I did have a good conversation with him. And I hope he left. Harvey, I was on my way down into Harvey. I stopped in Houston overnight, had a conversation with the assistant manager, and she was very confident that they would not see that much rainfall. And I said, I'm very confident you're going to see more rainfall than Tropical Storm Allison. And you'll need to be aware of that. So again, sometimes people receive the message, but sometimes because that message seems absurd, because it's something that is so extreme, it may not be believed by everyone. Next slide. So just some suggestions. Trying to emphasize the greatest hazard of concern, is this going to be more of a water storm or more of a wind storm? If it's a water storm, really, I mean, we do a good job of getting people out of the surge zones, but try to emphasize the the inland flooding potential and how you have that much inland flooding, then the rivers get swollen and the rivers can't drain into the estuaries because the surge is acting like a dam and not letting the estuarine water flow out to the ocean. And everything starts to rise. And I've seen some extreme values at the tops of estuaries that people thought were impossible. The new experimental NHC cone of uncertainty, I've seen the debut of that product. I think that's a step in the right direction, has more inland impacts. I was excited to see that in the news just a couple of weeks ago. And last week, I've seen a few articles about that. And then again, if many people are using this benchmark storm, we're not going to stop human behavior. If people are going to do that, then let's use it is what I'm saying. So say, okay, if this hurricane coming in is going to be stronger than Katrina, and we are 90% confident it's going to be stronger than Katrina in this example, then let's say it. And let's try to list the different values we're going to see in these categories and then show it in our maps and our graphical products. Let's try to be as transparent as possible in the communication. And that's what I would like to see going forward. I'm done. Thank you, Jason, for that discussion. He didn't mention it in his discussion, but Jason's also really been what I consider a pioneer in developing alternative scales that try to capture all aspects of impacts to tropical cyclones. So perhaps throughout the course of the next couple of days, Jason will be able to share some of that work too, because that's one of the ways that I'm very familiar with Jason's work. I want to move on in this session. Next up, we have Rebecca Moulton from FEMA. And I believe Rebecca is on virtually. Yes, thank you, Marshall. And good afternoon, everyone. Hopefully you can hear me okay. All right. All right, great. Thanks. Yeah, good afternoon from Atlanta. My name is Rebecca Moulton. I'm a meteorologist with FEMA here in Region 4, which as you'll see in some examples that I'm going to share with you, has a little bit of a different connotation a lot like what Jason said. I am sort of a discipline within a discipline, really focusing on emergency managers as opposed to the public. And as I was reflecting on this presentation, I realized I've been in the hurricane world for 20 years. And I remember vividly Hurricane Charlie back in 2004. And it brought back a lot of lessons learned and best practices. And it really made me think about what's changed, what hasn't changed, what has stayed the same, and how that has influenced, I think, not only multiple hazards, but communication. And it started really with the forecast accuracy versus the perception of the public of the forecast. And we saw that a little bit again with Ian, but it's an interesting, kind of, very fine line that is wopped amongst all of us in the community. And it really informed going into 2005, my career, going in from the perspective of a meteorologist, having the expertise in supporting evacuation messaging, and going on to FEMA. I came in thinking I have always subject matter expertise and realized I had a lot of different ways to say no to the questions I was being asked. And at the time, that's because we had a lot of deterministic information. Believe it or not, we didn't even have iPhones. But we had a lot of deterministic information. And so the forecasts have evolved since then. But the turning point for me was, again, we use Charlie a lot in our training and outreach. And the turning point for me was really the opportunity to talk directly to and go out to the counties that we serve and talk to the people I worked with. And there was a moment when I was giving a briefing, I can't remember what storm it was, but there were people in the room were a little frustrated. And I thought, I'm doing everything right. I'm saying things the right way. I'm giving the best data. But from their perspective, I wasn't answering any questions. And FEMA does not have luxury of waiting. Even waiting is an action. So after listening to some of the problems and contingencies that were on their plate to plan for, it really made me kind of flip my perspective about, first of all, who the experts are. There's been a lot of discussion today about who's accurate and inaccurate. And, you know, it's worth kind of looking into that a little deeper to consider who really owns that. But for my perspective, it really helped me understand how my role was no longer the meteorologist with the important information to share. It was, how can I see things from their perspective from the emergency managers at whatever level and let their needs inform all stages of our process from planning to the briefings operationally and during the incident response. So that was definitely a pivotal moment when suddenly and at the same time we have, you know, an explosion of data that's freely available to everyone, whether or not they understand it is another topic. But we have all this information, but having those specific questions, criteria, understanding what decisions had to be made and what was driving that underneath it and coming from that perspective. Now, suddenly we're able to provide context and select the right information from all of the possible knows and to say, well, here's what we do know. And it was surprising how that actually was more than enough. We have very important life or death decisions. We have to mobilize very early. And so we can tolerate a large degree of uncertainty, which I learned during Florence, uncertainty is virtually meaningless when it comes to actions, but meteorologists use it possibly more than any other qualifier. But it helps us go from those extended timelines where we have, we can tolerate a lot of changes. We just have to get started doing something. And that was really a big shift for me in how I communicate. So in terms of what that means for multiple events, it's just a reminder to me that even now we have more probabilistic products. We have all of these advances in the forecast and the science. When I'm supporting emergency managers, we're all people. And really, even though the scientists in the room, the meteorologists are experts in our discipline, emergency managers are experts at what they do as well. And I really had to take off my hat subject matter expert to see that in many ways. So people in general are complicated. So every single event in on any given day, emergency managers are juggling multiple events. So, you know, I'll just wrap up with, I took a detail to the White House interagency working group on extreme heat thinking I would get a break from some of the stress from hurricanes and ended up being more stressful. And on my very last day, my air conditioning broke and I became one of the people. So it's just another example, Murphy's Law, but also slipping my perspective, so to speak. I'll wrap up my comments there and look forward to answering the questions later with our panel discussion. Thank you, Rebecca, for those remarks. I always know that you have a bring perspectives from multiple lenses, which I think is very valuable to this panel. And so thank you for participating. I want to now pivot to Jeff Linder, who really has been in the field for some time now. But I think the nation became aware of who he was with the with the Hurricane Harvey and his outstanding work there. So we'll pass it along to Jeff Linder, who is a meteorologist with Harris County Flood Control District. Jeff, the floor is yours. Thank you, sir. Yeah, so I'm going to talk a little bit. This is really going to focus on Harvey and a lot of the communication we had with Harvey. But you can apply this to so many of the different aspects. And I'll kind of mention that as we go through that. We go to the next slide. So I work as the meteorologist in Harris County. I'm sitting with the Flood Control District, but I do work in the Mercy Operations Center for Harris County anytime we have a weather event. So it's Hurricane Flood, Wildfire, Winter Storm, all that. We get it all down here in Texas, like most places. And so this was the messaging that we that we were dealing with with with Harvey. We had a category for hurricane impact on the mid coast. So we consider the mid coast down that Corpus Christi Victoria area. And then we're up here on the upper Texas coast. And we were never going to have a hurricane impact on the upper Texas coast in Houston. It was always going to be a flooding event. And you can see we kind of had to separate the two. The thing is a lot of people heard hurricane. And when they hear the word hurricane, they think it's going to be wind. We're going to have power outages. We're going to have trees down. We're going to have roof damage. We're going to have fences blown over all the stuff that you generally expect with the word hurricane. And the other two aspects tend to get kind of pushed to the side, the storm surge flooding, then also the inland freshwater rainfall flooding that we get with a lot of these. And so we were really hammering that flood threat with this. We never, you know, used, you know, hurricane warning and stuff like that. We're never into hurricane warning up here on the upper Texas coast. We did have a little bit of storm surge, but we downplayed that. You know, we're talking about this is not going to be any worse than a tropical storm when it comes to the storm surge flooding. That was different messaging down on the lower Texas coast. And then it's as usual with a, and this has been mentioned before, with a tropical system, you have a multi hazard threat over a geographic area, right? So, you know, the storm surges in this area, the wind threat is in this area, the flooding threat could potentially overlap with all that or be outside of that area. And so it's how do you communicate these with different areas? And again, people are hearing different things. So somebody knows somebody who lives down in Victoria or Corpus Christi and they're like, Oh, well, they're telling us to evacuate from the storm surge. Oh, well, maybe I need to do that up here in Houston. And that never was really the case. We don't evacuate in Houston or in Harris County from rainfall flooding. Now we do have storm surge evacuation here. We do have zip code zones. We evacuate by zip code here. Kind of had that conversation around about people don't know what's on there. We have ABC also, but we overlay those with the zip codes and everybody knows their zip code for the most part. And so we have not actually had an evacuation for storm surgeons Hurricane Ike back in 2008. Prior to that it was Hurricane Rita, which many of you may remember was kind of a debacle if you will on the evacuation side. Next slide. And so this was the forecast. And we just saw this a minute ago, I think with Jason's presentation and what people gather from a forecast. And you can see I'm looking at this. And even in the blue, it's bad. You know, everybody's drawn down to that purple, magenta area 3040 inches of rain. But we're talking 1510 to 15 inches rain, even well outside of that kind of bullseye in that blue area. That's still a very bad day. And so people are tend to be drawn to that maximum total the maximum color scheme and all that type of stuff. And it's like, Oh, well, I'm not in I'm not in that bullseye. So I'll be fine. Right. I'm only going to get a foot of rain. We've had a foot of rain and we kind of talked about that just a minute ago. The other thing is this is over five days. That's not that bad. So if I take 35 inches divided by five days, that gives me seven inches a day. Oh, that's not that's not that big of a that's not that big of a problem. We can handle that. And as we all know with tropical systems and flood situations, it's all about the rainfall rate. And we are extremely sensitive to that rainfall rate here in Southeast Texas and Houston with our urban environment. So, you know, we start talking four, five, six inches in an hour, which we get, which we saw with Harvey, that's a huge, huge problem for us. It's not this spread out equal amount of rainfall over a period of time. That was sort of a challenge that I don't think we really realized we were having until after the fact, after that people were saying, Hey, we thought this was this was 35 inches spread over a week. And it was going to be, you know, we're going to get a little here, a little here, a little here. And we kind of, I think, maybe missed a little bit of the focus on, you know, at certain periods of time, we're at 10, 15, 20 inches in a 12 hour period. And we probably could have hit that a little bit harder when we had that forecast confidence of when that was going to happen. Of course, there's always the hurricane is going somewhere else, right? But well, the cone is is Corpus Christi. So why should I be worried up here in Houston? The hurricane is going some down to Corpus Christi. Of course, that's that's just that education part of not understanding the impacts for reaching. Of course, we are on the dirty side. Even if this wasn't a big rainfall event, we were going to get impacted regardless because of the location we were with respect to the storm. And so again, that's just kind of an educational impact. The what about this model? We haven't really covered much of that today. Model model forecaster all out there. There were some obviously extreme model forecast for this event, and there's always going to be some extreme and that works its way into not only the public thinking and the media sometimes showing it, but also works its way into the emergency management community. And, you know, sitting in the EOC, people will walk up to you and say, hey, well, the European is showing this or the Canadian is showing this. And you know, a lot of times I'm having to sit there and say, how about we take the official forecast, we base our decisions on the official forecast, and not so much these deterministic model runs that people are seeing because they can, you know, as we all know, they could be out there. And this was mentioned earlier, and this was a big one. This won't happen. I've lived for all my life. We've been through everything. This isn't going to happen. This, you know, we went through tropical storm Allison. This can't be worse than Allison. And the fact is, is that when people use prior experience, whatever prior experience they have in that area, the chances of having that exact same storm that you had in 1960 or whatever is unlikely, every storm is going to be unique, every storm is going to have its own impacts. And we've seen this in other places, not only, you know, in flooding, but also with, you know, Katrina in Mississippi, oh, I was here for Camille, I'll be fine. And then you had all this, you know, fatalities and storm surge flooding on the Mississippi coast that exceeded Katrina saw the same thing with with Hurricane Ian back in South Coast, Florida, we were down there doing some work with storm surge. And we heard a lot of the we just couldn't believe it, you know, we went through Charlie, and everything was fine. And we just couldn't believe this could happen. I just could never believe the water we get this time. It's interesting, because I did ask one person down there with with Ian, I said, well, what what could have what he stayed and said, what could have been said to you were done differently or, or anything that would have changed your mind and his answer was nothing. He said, I fully knew of the of the warnings, I heard all that information, but I wasn't going to change my, you know, what I was going to do because of any of that. We go to the next slide. And so that was a little bit eye opening. There's there's going to be some of those types of things where you just can't really wrap your head around it. And we've kind of covered that right here, you know, the lack of historical context of rare events, you know, I tell people, all right, we've been through the flooding here, we have some context of a big flood with Harvey, but what does 150 mile an hour winds look like? Most of us have never been through 150 mile an hour winds. And so, you know, it's like, oh, if that day comes, when we're facing a high end category for hurricane, there's no context of that. There's no context of, you know, the entire area just kind of being level to the ground with the wind. And then you always get into these things with the forecast of can this happen? You know, even us as meteorologists are questioning, you know, something like Harvey, which is so high end and off the scale, are we really putting out 40, 45, 50 inches of rain? Are we really going to do that? And, you know, obviously in the end, it all worked out, but most people are going to go and they're going to try to verify when they hear these really, I don't know, you kind of call them outlandish forecast, if you will, they're going to go try and verify that with other sources. And so it's really important that your weather enterprise, all be on the same, the National Weather Service, your emergency managers, your TV media, other folks that may be posting stuff, we've touched on that a little bit today, are kind of all on the same page. And if everybody, if the public and emergency managers are all kind of hearing the same thing, you know, we might be an inch or less here, an inch more here. But if they're all kind of hearing the same values and that kind of builds the confidence and the forecast is going to work out like we think it's going to work out and what we want them to do. What's interesting, and nobody's brought this up yet, and I learned this during the winter storm back in 2021, is where does the job of the meteorologists kind of stop? You know, our job is to forecast, explain those forecasts, but then you get into this whole part of impact. And we don't have all of the knowledge for all of the impacts that can happen in a certain situation. And for example, the winter storm, the biggest one for us was, yes, we knew it was going to be very cold, we knew people were going to have problems with their pipes and stuff like that. But what we did not know was the power situation, because we don't have the details of all the situations you have running the power grid and how you get power and how you generate power. And so never in any of the forecasts and the potential impacts was there this narrative about large portions of the area losing power. That's easy in a hurricane event, we kind of know that. But what is it that we don't know out there that we're kind of being asked to communicate? And is it our job? Is it the forecaster's job to cover all of the impacts? Does that fall to your local elected officials or does that fall to the emergency managers to know all of the impacts? We give you the forecast and then you put those impacts in there. And I think there's kind of a fine line there of what we're kind of getting into when we talk about the impacts of certain events. Last slide, and this has already been covered, which is kind of what I am. We saw this slide earlier. This was a big issue for us. Like the previous person mentioned, our call to action statements are contradictory. At this point, you know, for tornado lowest floor interior room, they might have water on the lowest floor telling them to get to the roof under flash flood emergency. And so the decision we made early on in this event was to go with the flooding as a primary threat. So, you know, we talked, the Weather Service and I, we kind of talked about this a little bit in WS chat privately. And the Weather Service folks, you know, it's their mission to warn, but these were your typical tropical tornadoes in feeder bands. They lasted five minutes or less, generally weak. And so some of them, they were letting go. They weren't warning on every single one. And we wanted to keep the focus on the flood and flash flood threat. That was, that was the primary situation we were facing with, you know, potential loss of life and stuff like that, not really the tornado aspect of this. And so it's kind of important to, you know, realize in the event, and sometimes that can be hard to do. What is the primary threat right now? Tropical, maybe it's a little bit easier if you have the flooding aspect of it, the tornadoes tend to be weaker. But if you get into a situation where you have, you know, big supercell thunderstorms producing terms of rainfall with the tie tornado threat, they could be equal sometimes with the tornado threat is greater already your tornado threat is going to tend to be more pronounced with most people than the flood threat. And so we want it in this particular case, we wanted to keep that in and at the forefront is that the flooding was the more dangerous of the situations versus the tornado. But that may not always be the case. And obviously, you know, we talked about in some cases, the storm surge may be more dangerous than the wind or the storm surge may be more dangerous than the inland flood threat. And so it's really putting that primary threat out there and keeping it out there and making sure that hopefully what is happening, what you're asking people to do is matching what the highest threat is. That's all I got. I'll turn it back over for the last speaker and questions later. Thank you, Jeff. Excellent discussion and you raised some very important points that I hope we can dig deeper into throughout the course of the day and the workshop. Our final speaker is Jessica Schauer from the National Weather Service Marine Weather Program and she is also virtual. Thank you, Marshall. Yes, I'm actually the Tropical Services Program Manager for the National Weather Service. We can move on to the next slide. I want to thank the National Academies for inviting me to come talk today. I'll try to get us back on schedule. I know you guys have a tight ship today. So we're asked to talk about risk communication and where does it originate, like within the National Weather Service? And you can see in the inset there, we have coordination happening on the floor at the National Hurricane Center to coordinate key messages that go out from the National Hurricane Center but coordinated through multiple parts of the agency. So you can see in the picture, we actually, this is an example of one of the first times that we had what we call the decision support services coordinator. So there's a person who's there to coordinate the messaging across W forecast offices, river forecast centers, working with a national water center, working with like Alex at WPC, working with the storm prediction center in Norman to try to get those key messages out there amplified through NHC's products and then through everybody's products downstream so that we can have consistency in the messaging that we're providing. And the larger part of this slide here, you can see this is an example of our NWS chat 2.0 which is like in a Slack format. And this is something that went into effect last year and it's really been a great way for us to effectively coordinate on graphics. So graphical messaging ahead of time allow us to be a little bit more nimble. Like we try to have like, you know, call to actions and things in our pocket for your tropical cyclone events, but every storm is different. And that's something that's kind of been a theme today, you know, that we need to be able to be nimble to change those things on the fly. This is the way for us to coordinate that messaging across the board. So move on to the next slide, please. And here are some examples of some of the ways that we differentiate for our partners what characteristic of the storm is going to pose the greatest risk. So on top, you see the hurricane threats and impacts graphics. And these graphics incorporate probabilistic information in order to provide a reasonable worst case scenario for each of the four hazards that you see there so that our emergency managers, partners, and even the public can get a look at this to determine what they should be preparing for for the storm. So it's not a deterministic forecast. It incorporates those probabilities. And I know like Rebecca was saying that uncertainties were that maybe our emergency managers don't always want to hear. And this kind of packages it in a way that, you know, we're incorporating that information. So they're giving you basically what you should be preparing for in this scenario. So you can see there's wind, storm surge, flooding rain, and tornado graphics for this paradigm. And they're issued every time there's watches and warnings in the continental United States. On the bottom, you see examples of some of the standard graphics that are in the weather forecast offices, standard briefings. We're always emphasizing the hazard that's the most threat for that local area. And on the right, you can see how we look at the hazards, you know, relative to each other and providing a sense of the confidence the forecaster has in that forecast. You know, so that's, we've heard a loud and clear, though, that, you know, people want more localized information. Those graphics that are provided at top, there's an interface on every weather forecast office website, every tropical weather forecast offices website that can provide that information in a clickable interface, so that you can drill down to, you know, a smaller local level. And so that's one of the ways that we're able to provide more localized information, but also keeping into account the uncertainty for the storm. So move on to the next slide, please. So we were asked to focus on three storms, I think primarily because they were rapid intensifiers, as Jason had pointed out. But in Harvey, I know Jeff, it's been quite a while talking about Harvey, but, you know, and Jen Henderson has done a lot of work with the torfs, the tornado warnings and flash flood overlaps. That is something that we're still struggling with and that we are looking for more information from the social science community and the community at large about how to rectify the call to actions. They're conflicting there with, you know, for a tornado trying to go to the lower level of your house, you know, in an interior room and with flooding to try to get higher to higher ground. So, and then in Michael, that was a case where we had a large multi-houser damage spot. And, you know, as you can see there, we're going well into Georgia from that storm. And that's a tremendous amount of area that was without power, with damage, with trees down, etc. And then with Laura, one of the main issues that we had to deal with there was with the power outages. A lot of people had generators, they were trying to deal with the heat. They had no air conditioning. So that was a significant characteristic of Laura that was different from Michael and Harvey. So each one of these storms, even though they were all rapid intensifiers, all had different scenarios, different hazards that were really the ones to be of major concern for the event. So move on to the next slide. So you can see them looking at the indirect fatality statistics for these storms that kind of plays out that picture. For Harvey, medical access was a really big issue because the roads were flooded. So even if you had a tornado and you had, you know, people that were injured because of that, medical access was going to be, it was an issue. And then for Michael, the recovery after the storm, because you had such a large area that was impacted, you had more people who were out there trying to take down tree limbs, cut things up, try to clean up their area, and that caused big problems. And then with Laura, as you can see the carbon monoxide poisoning, that was a really big problem with generators after the storm. And, you know, that's something that the weather service did, you know, get messaging out about that pretty early after the storm. But even into October, as we continue to have heat in Louisiana, we're still having people, you know, perish from carbon monoxide poisoning and from heat. And we were sending out, you know, tweets, messages, trying to remind people for a generator safety. So that's one way that we're incorporating, you know, what we've learned, you know, from these past events into messaging that we can send out after the event, that the event really isn't over when the weather part of it is over. There's so many, so much more that can, you know, be dangerous to people after these events. So you move on to the next line. So, and just in general, just looking at the direct and indirect fatalities, one of the big things that we are looking for help with the weather service is that, you know, the statistics show that we need to target males over 50, because they're the most likely people to die with clear preparing for during or after the storm. And if there's ways that we can hone our messaging as the event draws near to kind of be able to tailor it towards these things that we can see coming as, you know, direct or indirect fatalities, then I think that that would be, you know, much more beneficial to the public to be able to adjust our messaging and think about that. And that's why we have those DSS coordinator, the Decision Sport Coordinator embedded within the weather, or within NHC to help coordinate that messaging. And, you know, probably something that we need to think about more is how to do that better after the fact. So you can move on to the next slide. And with that, I'll just say, say thank you. And I know that we're running a little behind, so let's see if we can get to the questions. Thank you. Great, great presentations, very thorough. And I think we do have time for questions. I have a couple that I want to ask, but I want to sort of actually change the game plan a little bit and defer to you. If there's anyone in the room that you see that's really itching for a question, I'd like to defer to them. Then I see one hand. Absolutely. So go ahead. Do you realize you can see me? I can see only you. I can't see actually beyond you. I can see you and Brad Coleman. Sunny Westcott Homeland Security says, I'm a chief meteorologist over here. And I think one of the biggest problems that I've run into is communicating some of the changes that we've seen with the storm systems. Stronger winds, Taiwan reported 212 mile per hour gusts on shore before their sensor broke. Puerto Rico from a tropical storm saw 32 inches of rain and unmarked tropical low for Fort Lauderdale produced 26 inches of rain. And these aren't systems that typically like they're not reaching category five. So a lot of people, their responses, well, it's just a tropical storm. So I'm not going to stand up the EOC. It's the winds aren't that bad, but it's not always wind as you were saying. And the Jason, this is probably a little bit more oriented to you as somebody who works on some of these classification problems is I think that there was a huge folly in the initial setup of assigning wind to be the sole indicator of the strength of systems and the concern for evacuation. And that we've we've sort of shot ourselves in the foot and backing up and getting some of these emergency evacuations to get people to care about it to get them to their responses. Always I've survived a cat for a tropical storm is nothing. I've spent six years in Florida growing up and my family was the exact same way they were not going to evacuate. They want to evacuate until the home is destroyed in most cases. And then when they move further inland, they're the only ones evacuating after that and often mocked for doing so. So I guess my question is, are we are we looking at changing the way we're categorizing the storm as opposed to changing the way that people perceive the category? I've been a proponent of trying to make changes to classification. But really, this comes down to the NHC, they're going to call the shots. And the trick is, do we do we know if changing is going to improve things? Because this one to five scale gets people's attention. It's simple. It's definitely got flaws. But people react to a one to five system. And Jessica was just showing that graphic that had all the different hazards and it showed the maps of the different hazards and showed the uncertainty. I love that. But the average person is only going to process that for 10 to 20 seconds. So how do we get how do we find a middle ground between the graphic Jessica had that had all the hazards and a one to five scale that has flaws? And that's the trick here, because we have to find something that people are going to spend 20 seconds on and get all the information. And that is almost an impossible task. But I will never be satisfied with where we are right now. There's I guess some some implication just to end on that going back to the first meeting that we are the first prisoner that we had the atmospheric rivers that they do the category one through five, but they scale it based off of the area expecting to see the worst impact from the atmospheric river as opposed to this is a cat five circle that's hitting this whole area and everyone needs to, you know, envision it as such. You could essentially take their same scale and fluctuate it based off of impact inland. That was I guess from what I saw from their graphic to what I see from these graph. There's a lot of possibilities and people have done that with heat waves. It's been the aerial extent of the heat wave and the magnitude of the heat wave to come up with some type of metric. There's a bunch of different things we can do. But more on that later. Any of our other panelists want to respond to that? Okay. I think Jeff actually, oh, go ahead, Rebecca. Just, Sunny, I think you definitely summed up that there's a background level of disasters that don't meet the criteria that people might see coming like hurricanes, but that are more and more causing those impacts. And I think it reminds me of former administrator Fugue and one of his most successful viral indices isn't anything technical or scientific, but the Waffle House index. People understand that they relate to it, especially in Florida. And you know, we can all joke about it, but is another hurricane classification really going to land when we already have challenges getting people to prepare? We already know that there's evacuation and preparation challenges. How do we translate the impacts of water regardless of whether it's coming from the sky or the ocean or river or the pipes and drains in asphalt that Alex mentioned? How do we translate that to your basement will be wet or you need to pick up and go? And I think that's when we have to not so much just speculate, but really get out there and see from their perspective what lands and consider using some of those lessons. So I'm going to use moderator privilege here. I see a couple of questions over on our question format. The slide, Slido, one is from Castle Williamsburg. Castle asks, in addition to cascading or compounding effects, it's crucial to also evaluate the compounding impacts or effects of our risk communication messaging across our information ecosystem. So how do we again begin to assess these consequences to? Yeah, so I'll answer a little bit. I think this is something I sort of covered that we went through with the winter storm in 21. You know, when you lose power, the cascading effects of losing power. So eventually you're going to lose cell, you're going to lose backup systems. And what we found out was, you know, all these folks who thought their backup systems were in place, they all fail, a lot of them failed because they hadn't tried any backup generation since Hurricane Ike back in 2008. And it's not at the forefront of everybody's mind to try and test their backup systems. Everybody says they do it. Everybody plans to do it every year, but they don't actually do it. And we very quickly got into a cascading impact of the power loss, losing comms, losing, you know, emergency services, losing backup generation, all that type of stuff. And so, you know, I didn't know until 21 that diesel fuel freezes at a certain point, it becomes slushy. And the generators don't run on that. And so we actually reached that point when everybody thought their diesel fuel generators would be fine, they couldn't use them. And so that kind of goes back to my point of, you know, as forecasters, we're forecasting is going to be 10 degrees with a 40% chance of freezing rain, you're going to have ice, you're going to have travel impacts. But we don't know all of the impacts that are going to occur, for example, when we lose power in all the second and third type of impacts we have. And so I don't know how we can incorporate that. Obviously, you know, the first thing would be, well, we got to bring more people in, but you're also trying to get the products out, right? So you're getting the warnings and the watches out from the National Weather Service, bringing more people in and saying, Hey, what's the impact of 10 degrees in Houston, Texas? There's a lot that goes into that we know now, we have some idea now, of course, every event is different, something's going to happen next time that didn't happen this time. And so I think that's that's important. And the reason I say that is because sometimes people's opinion on how the forecast went is based on the impacts that happened and how they perceive those impacts being. And sometimes we missed the point a little bit on the impact part of it. Yeah, we're running a little bit shorter time, but I'm going to synthesize two questions here. I'm going to summarize them and let maybe a panelist have a quick reaction. One actually was posed by fellow panelists, Jen Henderson. She mentioned that she loved the Rebecca's question about who owns expertise and accuracy of the forecast, and Jeff's question about roles. She's curious about how this panel thinks about or grapples with the responsibility given multiple hazards and impacts. And then I think Leela has a similar question. She says, as at Leela or Leila, she says, should the meteorologists be utilized to discuss impacts of things like power outages? Or should these be discussed by others to maintain the clarity of forecasters, communications roles? So I'll wrap up both of those questions and present that to the panel for a response. Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, power, that's such a great example because what we've learned from things like extreme heat, and even to some extent talking about hurricanes, it's really not about the rain itself. We think it is. But the most important question in the room isn't how much rain are we going to get? It's what will that do to my critical infrastructure, my nursing homes, my, you know, the people. And so I am not the expert in that, but the emergency managers I work with are. And so I can hand the baton to them and working as a team because we're integrated and I work, I literally sit next to them every day and collaborate. And even with the hurricane center, we see each other constantly. I can hand the baton when needed. So I don't have to, you know, put their hat on. And that's what I was going to say, too, that it's a community. Like, it has to be that way because everybody has their different expertise and the impacts are local. It's what's going to happen to me and my location to my business. And in order for, we can't all be experts at all of that, there has to be, you know, different people that we turn to and have good, constant communication. Like Rebecca pointed out, that they have with emergency managers as well as with the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service. And I see that Amanda Schroeder mentioned that there is some ongoing work in the National Weather Service. I know Amanda is a panelist a little bit later. So she'll be talking a bit more about that. But I want to thank our panelists. This was an outstanding session. I knew it would be when we were thinking about who we wanted in this panel. So thank you all for accepting our invitation and the charge. And I believe we are going to transition into a break right now and then we'll return with a high level summary. I will disappear for about an hour or so. And so I will see you all a little bit later. Thank you all. And I think we're in our next break.