 But only still images so someone later reconstructed this so you can see what satellites were at the time compared for example to the Satellite pictures that I showed earlier, and that'll show later But they could see there was a storm coming This shows communication at the time This is someone I'm standing in front of a radio where they're talking about the storm or radio announcer And they did have television. They even had color television where you can see Someone on the storm of a broadcaster talking with the emergency manager telling people to evacuate in front of this big just paper map To communicate the weather forecast with people so this shows how things had advanced from 1900 some of the same mechanisms of communication observation as well as some new mechanisms and the forecast had improved but But not as much as we've seen today Okay, so if we fast forward today How is hurricane forecasting and communication change and if you just contrast that satellite image I showed you earlier with this satellite image, which is from 2017 With three storms. It's pretty phenomenal what we can what we can do today Between the satellite observations if you think about the ways we can communicate we can see these things on television We can see them on the internet. We can look at them on our phones Although those kinds of things we can send pictures to each other All those kinds of things are really an amazing advance So I'm gonna talk about what hurricane forecasting looks like today And I'm going to use this example of Hurricane Irma from 2017 to illustrate that This image from 2017 was actually at a time when there were three major storms in the Atlantic as you can see And then this is Hurricane Irma, which is approaching Florida So in 2017 for Hurricane Irma, this is an example of one of the forecasts that was provided This is the National Weather Service is kind of one of their flagship products that people use This is their version of the graphic where it shows what's called the track cone You can see in this graphic that This X here shows where the storm currently is and this yellow kind of blob around it shows the extent of the of the wind speeds and then this black line shows the most likely track The symbols along the line show how strong the storm is expected to be at different times And then this white kind of cone around it shows kind of some of the possible tracks Although this is only two-thirds of the time the track can be expected to go inside this cone So sometimes it will go outside of it And then these red and other colors show the areas where there are warnings and watches indicating that people should be aware of impending dangerous conditions So this is the National Weather Service example of this and a lot of people in the media a lot of media broadcasters show their own examples of this kind of iconic Forecast and if any of you have followed Hurricane Ian, which happened recently One of the big issues talked about during the storm was that the cone was moving around a little bit as I'll talk about in a minute Forecasts do have some uncertainty And so people were Thinking about whether they were in or outside of the cone as a measure of whether they were at risk and That because the storm as you can see this wind field even no matter where the track goes There can be hazards outside the cone much less taking into account the fact that the track can change So there is risk outside this cone So that's some of the work that people are doing is try to communicate this forecast better But I'm just going to use an example to show kind of an overview of the storm as is often done So this shows that same plot and if you look a day later you can see the storm has gotten closer This is shortly before a landfall the storm gets bigger as it approaches landfall And then the cone extends further north because the storm has moved further north and if you go backward in time you can see that I'll go backward in time one day at a time with the forecast And you can see that at this time the forecast the storm was forecasted to affect west, Florida and Then if you look further back you can see okay The track is still over Florida, but not exactly the same spot and then as you go further back in time You can see this is about three or four days in advance The forecast was for the Miami area which raised a lot of concern So there were evacuations all across Florida because of this This was actually a very accurate forecast given the state of meteorology But when you're talking about these areas where there's so much population even a small change and the where the storm can Go can make a big difference and who will experience damage and then you go further back in time This was actually a very long-lived storm and it caused major devastation in the Caribbean as well But you can see that there was a many days of a track forecasting the storm to come towards Florida So this just shows a few things one is how much further in advance We can create forecasts these days that are accurate and can say when something is coming Although we still can't say exactly where it's going to go as well as how much more frequently the forecast are updated So I've just showed examples once per day, but the forecast are updated much more frequently than that So there's just a huge huge prevalence of information today. That wasn't available Obviously in 1969 but also even if you think back to the 1980s or 1990s the information is much better This shows some other examples of the information that is out there This shows how the different kinds of ways that people information is being communicated on television and the internet so this shows another example of the cone and This is from the weather channel and they've sort of annotated different places where there's probable and then US impacts are still uncertain at this time This is pretty early on in the storm. This is another example showing Areas under watches and warnings as well as the possible tracks So just the wide array of communication and there's hundreds of these different types of graphics available and any given time From all the different TV stations and internet outlets and so on Here's some other examples of communication. So as I mentioned earlier, it's not just about where does the storm go? But also what hazards will it produce? so this is an example on the left here of the the probability of Tropical storm force wind which are strong winds that can cause damage This plot actually looks kind of weird because there's another storm right behind it that might cause damaging winds or is expected to cause damaging winds So but this is one sort of piece of communication That people are focusing on to try to communicate the wind hazard so that you know if you should board up your home Or if you live in a housing that isn't very sturdy, could it be affected by wind as well as storm surge flooding? So this is an example of a map produced by the National Weather Service to indicate Where is at risk from storm surge flooding along the coast? I'll talk about this in a little bit more in a minute But storm surge is where the winds of the hurricane push water from the ocean to land and it comes in very fast and Has a lot of force and can in and date land and Washed away houses. It's what was caused so much damage in the Galveston hurricane as well as if you Watched hurricane Ian many of the deaths there were caused by storm surge washing people away in their housing way And then of course today people get information from so many different kinds of ways So there are some people who aren't on the internet and getting information all the time But a lot of people nowadays are on their phone on their computer talking to people watching TV Potentially getting information on their tablet the same time getting information from lots of different sources at the same time And so if you just think about how that's different from even 10 years ago much less 20 or 30 years ago How you get information? It's really phenomenal to think about how this has changed the ability to communicate and the kinds of information We can get and the complexity of the information So that's some of the work that we do now is to think about that and think about How can we communicate better given all the different ways that people can get the information and the improved weather forecast? But also keeping in mind that people might not be online at any given point or people might be getting information in different ways There are people who might not speak English for example and and still be watching TV in a different language And so how do we communicate with a real? Diversity of population that's out there and make sure that as many people as possible are aware of what can happen And protect themselves so now I'll talk briefly about how modern weather forecasting works, of course, this is very Simplified, but it's a lot of work that NCAR does and a lot of researchers at universities and with our National Weather Service and other groups so I talked with the Galveston hurricane and with Camille about The observations that were available at that time and today we have a much more complicated global observing system We have many satellites that produce very high resolution data We have weather balloons that I think are still in here somewhere. Yeah, here's the weather balloon. We have radars We have ships. There's airplanes There's airplanes that fly out into storms still when there's a storm in order to take data to improve the weather forecast oops And So there are all of these observations that really provide the basis for the forecasting and how modern weather forecasting works You take all those observations and you put them together and then you run them in a computer model So this shows an example on the right of what a weather model grid might look like So you have a computer model that has a grid that has different points all across the globe And then it uses really complicated equations like this with the computer to move them forward in time and predict What's going to happen? And there's also this very important piece called data simulation, which is how you combine the observations with everything else to start off the weather model So this is all the technology behind it of course requires data requires computers or requires people to know how to do all these things And it's very complicated So it's really observations computer modeling in humans and lots of other things But this is just an idea of how modern on weather forecasting works And then what usually happens is that weather model produces output and then Forecasters human forecasters and computers look at it and interpret that in terms of whether the people might care about and decide how to communicate it so Advances in science and technology have really yielded these improve weather forecasts I talked about the observations and the models before of course There's supercomputers behind all this and as supercomputers get faster and faster that advances the capabilities And then this enabled a lot of scientific knowledge So the understanding that we have about the weather has really enabled people to interpret the weather models Be able to use their knowledge to improve the weather modeling and how it works And how the observations are put into the models and so on so all this together Really has yielded these huge advances in weather forecasts that I talked about earlier and then I showed with these examples from 1900 to 1969 to today So today's weather forecasts are more accurate They're more skillful their People like to make fun of weather forecasts because they're all often wrong They are usually wrong in some way, but they're a lot better than they used to be I'll talk about why that is in a minute why they're often wrong in some way They're more detailed so they can write a lot more specifics about what's gonna happen They're available much further in advance as I showed with that example from Hurricane Irma to be able to say a Storm is approaching Florida seven or more days in advance is just tremendous and they also better represent the confidence or uncertainty in the forecast So as I'll talk about in a minute Weather forecasts are inherently uncertain We're really being able to estimate when they're more accurate what the uncertainties look like has really Also been a huge advance and they're continuously improving if I were to give this talk in five years Actually probably even next hurricane season I would be able to show you some advances that were made Based on the research and technology and so on Okay, so now I'm going to talk briefly about why there's uncertain team weather forecast both because it's really important And it's one of my favorite topics so my PhD dissertation was on but also because it's really important for what I'm going to talk about next and communicating So just briefly some of you might have heard of chaos theory and one of the founders of chaos theory is Ed Lorenz who is a meteorologist And he wasn't trying to find chaos theory He was just trying to predict the weather and kind of ran into it along the way But one of the reasons why one of the kind of themes of chaos theory is that this plot here shows a Lorenz attractor and if you have initial conditions that are close to each other like this So you have the real atmosphere you can think of the real atmosphere as one of these And it one of these dots and then a weather model is another one and a weather Another weather model is another one of them So each of those weather models doesn't represent everything in the atmosphere But it's pretty darn close and if you move those forward in time in real time in the real atmosphere or in model time You can see that they get further apart until eventually They're not close together at all and so this is one of the reasons why weather forecasts are uncertain There's a lot more complexity behind it But this is one of the reasons just a side note is that when people talk about this they often say Oh, how can you predict climate then and there's a whole different thing that goes into climate change There's other things that are influencing the ability to forecast climate but this shows why weather forecasts are Not perfect because of this inherent uncertainty, which is really unavoidable in weather forecasting and this is one of the reasons so how this Kind of plays out in actual hurricane forecasts Some of you may have seen maps like this on TV They're called ensemble forecasts or they call them spaghetti model plots because they look like spaghetti So this example shows on this is for Hurricane Irma again This was the forecast was started when Hurricane Irma was right here So the hurricane had already come this way and then these are different model simulations different computer model simulations of the storm going forward And as you can see initially they're pretty close together, but then those small differences in their initial conditions Oops and the other aspects of the model they diverge over time so that as you go forward you can see that By the time you get to us landfall. They're really affecting very different areas of the coast So this is I think more than a week in advance of the storm or about a week in advance And then as you go forward in time So this is a simulation that started later or set of simulations And these are all the different models and you can see that they're initially close And then by the time they hit Florida because it's closer to the storm. They're not as far apart from each other And then as a storm gets closer They don't diverge as much they they tend to kind of Reduce you reduce the uncertainty as you get closer to the event. So this is to kind of illustrate that this Uncertainty and weather forecasts or lack of perfect prediction is kind of inherent There's no way to avoid it But we can estimate the uncertainty and then as the event gets closer Usually your uncertainty can reduce you can predict better what's going to happen And then if you think about things advancing over time what I showed earlier is that What used to be this used to be say what a two-day forecast was and now ten years later It's what a three-day forecast look like so your skill does improve over time as well Okay, so another important thing is that hurricanes are more than wind So it causes different hazards because a hurricane is approaching people often think of it in terms of strong winds and flying debris Also very important is coastal flooding from storm surge inland flooding from heavy rain depending on the storm They can cause different things or both can combine as well as tornadoes And so this example this shows storm surge on the bottom right You can see a simulation of coastal flooding from storm surge You see the water coming in from the coast and inundating the buildings this shows a schematic of how The water comes from from the ocean and gets blown over land And so storm surge is a major risk as I'll show in a minute Of course hurricanes can also cause major disruption to power Transportation communication other critical infrastructure people can have difficulty getting food water, you know Hygiene all those kinds of things Medicine that can be very important so hurricanes can have all of these different kinds of impacts If you look at the major causes of loss of life from US tropical cyclones this analysis is from about Ten years ago, and so it gets updated over time So the details change depending on the storm But the big picture doesn't that if you look at the direct deaths about half of them are from storm surge or a large number Are from storm surge and the reason why this is the case as we saw recently with Hurricane Ian is That storm surge isn't major in a lot of storms And so it doesn't cause deaths in every storm, but when it does cause deaths It can often cause a lot of them and so hurricane Katrina's one example hurricane Ian Is another example Rain actually causes a number of deaths heavy rain that leads to local flooding which can happen Far away from the eye of the storm that was actually another major factor in hurricane Ian Some of the deaths were inland from rain flooding and then other kinds of hazards do also cause deaths There's also a number of indirect deaths so deaths that are attributed to the storm but are not direct in that You know water or wind from the storm Killed someone. There's heart attacks from the storm. There's people evacuating getting in car crashes or something else happens There's people losing power Getting electrocuted trying to clean up, you know getting damaged by a tree afterwards all those kinds of things So there's a lot of indirect deaths as well But so this is just to provide some context about the kind of harm that can happen from hurricanes and why What kind of harm we're trying to reduce? Okay, so now I'll talk about how can you reduce hurricane impacts through interdisciplinary research This diagram in the bottom shows this classic hazard and disaster warning cycle Where people prepare before a storm and there's warnings and they can respond and then there's a long-term recovery process as well as longer-term mitigation And this event is what causes the impact so the hazardous event Combines with kind of where people are and what their built environment looks like and their vulnerabilities to cause the impacts Which are deaths damage disruption Everything else that when you see hazards weather on the news kind of that's what's happening and In order to reduce those impacts people can take different kinds of protective actions So a classic example is evacuation. They can also they can move someplace safer. That's less at risk for things like flooding sometimes you might not drive your car because Flooding on roads is an a common cause of death and flooding and there are other things you can do like protect your home You know prepare for a power outage gather supplies all those kinds of things you can do to reduce the hazard impacts And I've talked a lot about the hurricane forecast and the warning information Which I'll talk about as different kinds of risk information and that information is what lets people know that they should make these Protective decisions so if you think about a hurricane coming if you didn't have a forecast you wouldn't know was coming And so you wouldn't know to do anything so in the weather forecasting world this advanced information is really important So we think about this information people getting it taking actions that can reduce impacts but there's a Major complicating factor in the middle, which is that the information doesn't go straight into decisions People have to get the information. It's communicated in all their variety of ways I talked about and they have to interpret the information it intersects with their beliefs What they think can happen all those different kinds of things their capabilities Do they have a car to evacuate? What kind of structure are they in is their family at home? All those kinds of things does their grandmother want to evacuate all of those kinds of things Do they have a job that they need to stay at and so on all intersect? To intervene between the information and the decisions and so a lot of the work that we do is really trying to tile these pieces together understanding the forecast The uncertainty in them the capabilities how the forecast can improve in the future and then the actions that we think can help People protect themselves and kind of in this space understanding what's going on and how we can improve the situation So a lot of what we do is really work backwards from these decisions through the interpretations and the communication To really go from what what people are thinking when they get the information what they can do to try to improve the Information that the forecasters and the weather community is producing and tie all the pieces together So just talk briefly about some of the ways that we do this research The methods methods that we use for understanding what's going on in this complicated space One is surveys we do a lot of survey work where we ask people different kinds of questions And then analyze the data using statistical analysis to understand what they're thinking and how things are interacting We conduct interviews where we walk people through different situations or ask them about what happened during an event to understand What's going on? We do focus groups. This is an example of some focus groups conducted by my colleagues. They'll talk about later Where they were showing some maps and asking different people how they would use that information We use Experimental changes and messages So this is an example from a study where we tested changing something on the National Weather Service page in a hypothetical setting and asking people How they would respond to it. So we use that to kind of test what could happen in the real world And then we also do computational modeling This is an example from some work where we with some colleagues built a model of an approaching hurricane and the forecast and these Little dots show different people making decisions and deciding to evacuate. So with this kind of thing, of course It's not a perfect model, but you can simulate situations. You can't simulate in the real world You can say, okay, what if her hurricane Irma did this or what if people acted in this way? So these are some of the kinds of tools we use we also use analysis of social media data Including Twitter And this is something we've been doing for the last ten years or so Because Twitter data now Twitter data is analyzable for research So this example just shows how during the 2017 hurricane season you could see the number of tweets about hurricanes change with the with the Storms as they made landfall and then we can really dig into this data deeply to understand what kind of information is being Communicated how people are responding to it how they're sharing it all that kind of stuff So this just shows one example from a tweet here from someone who was providing weather forecast information He tweeted about weather forecasting as Irma was approaching landfall and then someone replies and says can you tell me what I need to do? Do I need to get out? Okay, so I've talked about how advances in science and technology have really Made huge advances in providing more accurate and more detailed weather forecasts further in advance I've also talked about how advances in interdisciplinary research have improved weather risk communication to support risk interpretations and decisions And all of these things are still ongoing There's a lot of people working to improve the forecast as well as now in the weather community really working to improve the communication and to understand how people are making decisions so next I'll talk about Really one of the possible solutions to this that the weather community has been working on for the last Ten or more years is really how to improve Forecasts of hazardous conditions and impacts given the predictive uncertainties So I talked about how weather forecasts are unavoidably uncertain so you can't say 20 days in advance a tornado might hit this location, but given those uncertainties and what we know about them How can we improve? Forecasting the kinds of things that people care about that are going to affect their lives So next I'll talk about that a little bit For this I'll use an example from some research I did about 15 years ago after Hurricane Ike which was a major storm that affected the Galveston area the same area that was Affected by that 1900s storm where a colleague and I went down after the storm and did interviews It was pretty amazing experience to talk to people who had lost everything in the storm and what they knew Before the storm what they were thinking all those kinds of things that was really informed by research So hurricane Ike was a large category two storm There was a 20-foot storm surge predicted for the Galveston area So it wasn't a very it wasn't the strongest type of storm not a category four or five storm But it was strong enough to cause wind damage And then because it was such a large storm and where it was expected to affect the coast it was anticipated to Produce a large storm surge as I mentioned there had been a seawall built in Galveston You're not you can actually see the edge of the seawall right here It turned out and the seawall is 17 or 18 feet high So there was a lot of concern that the water was going to go over the seawall and turned out that the worst storm surge Was a little bit further east So the water didn't go over the seawall it just went around the backside of the island and flooded the island from the back So you can see what the storm the kind of damage storm surge can do This is on the ocean side of the seawall and this is what the damage looked like in Galveston This is actually a few blocks inland if you're right along the coast the storm surge Just like there's a giant hole in the middle of your house and then inland you know people You can see this is their lives are everywhere their homes were destroyed So we asked people we did interviews and asked a number of questions But what I'll focus on here is that people were getting a lot of information before the storm even back You know in the old 2008 days before we had mobile phones and I guess social media I don't know what we had back then but um, they were watching television They were using their computer every once in a while, you know stuff like that They were getting a lot of information. They told us and a lot of them really believe their property might be at risk And most of them did something to prepare their property But only about a quarter of them prepared for flooding and these were all in flooded areas We were doing these interviews and it's because many of them expected never expected flooding to be so bad And so you can think back to the Galveston storm and what I said then that people said they didn't expect flooding to be so bad again Hurricane Ike they didn't expect flooding to be so bad And people told us a variety of reasons for this some reasons were because of the mitigation Some reasons were because of the forecast they evacuated before the forecast of the major flooding You know came out because it's hard to predict flooding so far in advance But it was it's really sad to talk to people afterwards and have them say they only wish they had known And that really motivated a lot of my work in this area going forward to try to see how can we improve Communication and and help people understand what they can do so that They can even just save their picture albums or their most precious things even if they can't save their home So this is an example of a quote from one of those interviews Someone said I never dreamed of seven feet of water in my home people might have moved things But they moved them up to a upper a shelf a little bit higher on the bookshelf But that was flooded as well and these are some examples from some of our other studies and one of the focus groups We did after a hurricane someone said we knew about the risk But by the way it came in this time it was just mind-boggling They just couldn't believe that this could possibly happen and then on one of our surveys We asked people what information they would want and they say they would want more specific information and really local information Like even the information they got wasn't local enough and this is an example from I'm one of the Twitter studies We did where forecaster says storm surge may reach eight feet with waves on top Rockaway set for major flooding and this person tweets right back They live right in this area and they say define major flooding, please so the forecaster thinks they're defining major flooding But this person wants to know what's going to happen to me So really we find throughout our research and others have found that people want to know what hazardous conditions and impacts They will experience and then the question is how can we communicate this given the limits of predictive skill And that's really a major challenge for weather forecasting the people are working on today So one possible solution as I mentioned is forecasting and Communicating hazards and impacts and so on the left here This is an example from one of our studies where this is sort of a standard map of what oops Keep going forward by accident Standard map of what storm surge a Storm surge map looks like and so this is one way that we tested Communicating showing people of that what the flooding look like compared to a house and for some people this was really helpful They said oh, I can see my garage is going to be underwater My fridge is going to be underwater for other people it didn't help as much because they said that my home doesn't look like this I don't live in this kind of area. So it shows the opportunities and the challenges This example here. Yes, the video that's going to play that shows storm surge inundating an area So this is based on some password where people said they really didn't know how fast it could happen They thought they'd have time to gather things and so this was designed to show how fast from surge can happen this simulation is a sped up version of 12 minutes, which you can see on the bottom and For example one of the people that saw this said the map coupled with the video would really help because you could see How fast it's going to happen and they really do need to get out because you won't have time to run or to get in your car and drive So again, I've talked about the advances in science technology and improve forecasts all the interdisciplinary research We can do to improve the communication and then the importance of improving forecasts and communication of things that people can Are going to experience so they can really personalize it and understand what what they need to do what can happen and what they need to do And the last thing I'll talk about briefly is really kind of where we're going next Which is forecasting and communicating ways it really connect with people's capacities So really thinking about all of these things together and doing this in the complexity of the modern information environment Which is all the complex ways that many people are getting information today and the really complicated information That's out there. It's not like back in the Galveston or the Camille days where there was one or two pieces of information Now there's hundreds and thousands out there at any given time So as I mentioned with this kind of simplified model of we think about hurricane information people interpreting it and the actions They take really what we've seen our research is these things are all intermingled today because people are getting information all the time They're talking to their neighbors as they were in Galveston But their neighbors are on the internet getting new information asking someone you know questions on social media and all those kinds of things So all of this is really happening in a complicated way And so this is just one example From some of the work we've done with with Twitter or social media as a way of Understanding what people are doing during and during a storm so you can go back and interview people after a storm like I've talked About before or surveyed them, but it's really difficult to understand what they were thinking at the time and kind of Understand given this information. What did you think given this? You know at this time with this information was available What did you think and these are ways that we can kind of go back and try to reconstruct what they were Thinking and doing at different times so we can understand more Specifically where the gaps are that we can try to improve communication These are just some examples of the kind of information people talk about getting they talk about Evacuation orders for hurricane, you know when the storm is going to come they talk about hearing what other people are doing They talk about what they can smell and see in here. That's a lot of how a lot of people experience weather And they use their environment around them We get a lot of information about their interpretations. This is just one example This is someone who said my block never floods So I'm mostly worried about things coming through a window or wind. There's also a joke So people make a lot of jokes during storms This is another example of a joke that someone makes their people actually they do tell us that they eat a lot During storms and they watch movies But actually if you look at the research on you know risk communication and decision-making This is a way that people cope with their fear So when they're afraid about something happening They do things that are going to help themselves feel better or pass the time And then of course people do things like they pack their things and evacuate So these are the kinds of things we're looking at to understand what different people are doing and kind of if someone's really in a High-risk area what what can make them switch over from baking cookies to saying I need to pack now on those kinds of things? So I just talked about how these responses interpretations Perceptions and so on and info information is all interlinked and so if you think about this that As a person and each of these people is evolving over time So we're trying to observe what they're doing at different times to understand their trajectory as a weather Forecast a weather event approaches and see other responding to different kinds of information To identify places where if we could have given different information that would have helped And then of course all these different people are interacting So just the last point one of the areas we've been working in the last few years and one of the areas that we're trying to go We'll see if it's possible, but really is to take methods that we have such as Analyzing social media data or data available on the internet or doing surveys in real time To ask people in real time as a weather event is threatening. What are they thinking? What information are they getting? What do they think is going to happen so we can identify if there are misunderstandings that we could then and weather Forecasters can then intervene and try oh my gosh. Sorry. I need to do that that was my phone weather forecasters can intervene and Try to improve the communication so that's something that you know We're hoping maybe in the next 10 years that may develop is there real right now What happens is if you're a meteorologist you watch an event happening and you see this person thinking that or you Ask someone and they tell you what they're thinking, but we don't have really Kind of data across a large large enough population to really be able to say oh, yes This one thing is really widely misunderstood in this area, but these people are understanding this and so really to try to improve the communication by Just like we take planes out and have satellites and so on to observe a storm in real time Can we observe what people are thinking and doing in real time and how they're interpreting the information so that we can improve it? So I'll just close by you know Reviewing what I've talked about again weather forecasts have gotten so much better if you haven't gotten that point I hope you do they really have gotten a lot better There's a lot of advances in interdisciplinary research and bringing different fields together to improve weather risk communication It's really important to not only improve Forecasting a weather phenomenon like a hurricane, but also what is going to happen in different areas so people can make better Decisions of course given the uncertainties I talked about and then really to forecast and communicate in ways that connect with people's capacities and Collaborate to really not be communicating to communities at risk but really communicating with them about what they care about the most and what What information they can use given their situations to improve their forecasts and really to meet people where they are Instead of saying we're the forecasters We're the scientists we're communicating with you to really meet people where they are the things that they can do and potentially using real Time societal observations as well as meteorological observations So I just want to close again with my acknowledgments and I also wanted to close by Dedicating this talk to one of my colleagues Heather Lazarus Heather is one of the people who conducted these focus groups that I've shown here and this is Heather right here and unfortunately Heather passed away very recently after a long battle with cancer and so It's really Heather's work. Heather's the one who really helped me understand about these capacities and This research about communicating with people and meeting people where they are there's a lot of the work we did together So it was a huge honor to work with Heather She was a close colleague and friend and she's informed a lot of the work here today And we hope to continue working with her legacy so I will stop there and take questions and I think that the microphone is going to be passed around for the question so if you want to ask a question you can raise your hand and someone will bring you the microphone and Then please speak into the microphone so that the people who are listening online can hear Thanks living in the Louisville area. Yeah, how did you personally? Handle your family and your situation when you heard about the winds Yeah, that's a very complicated question Yeah, so I was home that day with with my children as were many other people I actually left when the fire was Happening and I knew it was very windy But I did not think the fire was going to get to my house because I lived so far away in the middle of suburbia And so because it was smoky and my mother was visiting and she's in her 80s We were going to go to the zoo that day. So we went there to get away from the smoke We had planned to do that and so then as we were driving to the zoo My phone was dinging and I knew that things were wrong and then it was too late to go back And so then the whole next A few hours were people telling me what was burning our friends and neighbors and just that process of like of those people who I talked about in the Galveston hurricane or in Hurricane Ike or Hurricane Ian or any of these events like how do you? How do you understand that something you never thought was possible is happening and I actually because I studied this I watched myself Go through that process like the information coming in the text message is one of my kids was getting the information We were getting when you start to think about this really happening It's pretty amazing and Yeah, and then of course, you know so many people I know went through these experiences and so Talking to everyone else about what they did and what they thought Is is it's unforgettable. I'll just put it that way But I mean there's it's really a challenge. I think overall as someone who studies this to know that You know, you can't go through life thinking bad things are gonna happen all the time and so Sometimes people, you know one place gets unlucky sort of all the time and we were actually very fortunate With some really good firefighting and a lot of good luck. Our house was not burned down, but we thought for a For at least 12 or 18 hours that our house was gone and then so many people we know their house is gone And so it's yeah, it's really informed how I how I think about how I think about our research And I did have compassion before for people who you know, didn't know it was gonna happen But having experienced it, you know, you can know a lot but you can always make mistakes. So yeah That's just maybe the short version. I don't know hi We were in Boulder at the time of the Big Flood But we live in Pinewood now and Pinewood had its own big Years before the Big Flood I would go to meetings and they would talk about the little clickers They had on the streams and how that would predict if it's gonna flood. I mean they were They really seemed like they were on top of it and we lived on a Rise, I mean we weren't even in like a floodplain or anything And we ended up getting a foot and a half of water in our basement because it rained so hard it literally pushed into the Basement When you look at the Boulder flood now or any of the other ones that were happening I'm sure it happened in Longmont and stuff, too Was that a success or a failure? I mean it seemed like they were really prepared. Yeah, but then It was really a mess Yeah, that's a really good question and unfortunately I know a lot about that one, too We had actually done a study of Flash flooding in Boulder before the floods. So we had talked to meteorologists weather forecasters Emergency managers, we'd been in the Boulder emergency manager office. They told us all about how they were prepared So when I was watching the flood happen I would say it's amazing success and amazing luck that there wasn't more loss of life I mean when I was watching what was happening I was just picturing how many people would have died and that's what the emergency managers were thinking, too so in that sense and the Marshall fire was the same thing it was Phenomenal that not you know a lot more people could have died of course some people did died Which is very sad, but it could have been much much worse given how I'm trying to think of how crazy things got I think what what happened in the Boulder flood was the forecasters and the emergency managers They had thought of scenario their their scenario They were preparing for was something like the big Thompson flood which happened up in Fort Collins many years ago So it was really like one canyon being flooded and they hadn't envisioned a scenario where it flooded for three or four days And every canyon was flooded and they couldn't get anywhere and they couldn't get anything in the air for several days And so the emergency manager told us stories about people who were in these dire situations and they couldn't do anything because they couldn't get there So yeah, I mean as far as and and I've because I've studied flooding I know that what happens when flooding happens is that the water kind of goes where it wants to so it goes over It goes over streets it goes through other channels, and so it was a really extreme weather event I think up in Longmont There I don't remember the exact details But there was an area where they had filled an old riverbed and trying to reach channel the river and the water just went back You know to its old place and took out some houses and people just had no preparation at all because they didn't even know they Lived in a flood risk area, and it was just like all of a sudden so I guess there's two pieces of that one is that you know, that's what extreme weather does is it's extreme so it goes outside what we prepared for And so, you know, but the more advanced notice we can have the more preparation we can have the more The emergency managers and others can think through different scenarios really helps them Get up to speed I think another challenge with the boulder flood was that it happened The flooding got really bad at night and this is often the case like at the Marshall fire or tornadoes or other events It takes time to figure out what's happening like when it's actually happening They don't know where the water is going. They have people calling saying what do I do and they don't know where the water is going They don't know where to send the firefighters So all of those observations that we can get we can get something in the air to see what's happening or have Some modeling that can say okay the water we think it's going here to kind of help you Get people aware as soon as possible so that the people whose basements haven't flooded yet Maybe you can figure out a way to tell them your basement might flood so get the most important stuff up So yeah, so they were very prepared. I mean they're phenomenally prepared really It's pretty amazing and they were still caught by surprise But there were ways that their preparation did really help that I'm not going to talk about now But but there are some details of how the preparation did help things, you know not be worse So yeah, I guess that's the way I think about it. It could have been a lot worse How much does the fragmented Communication these days cause you troubles trying to communicate You know hazards and things like that, you know if you get all of you if you get all of your information from YouTube or Yeah, things like that. How do you how do you learn about what's out there? Yeah, that's a great question I mean there are people there are also people who like don't watch local TV They're always watching cable TV or you know up for example during the fire I have a teenager who we almost left him at home that day You didn't want to go to the zoo and he would have just been like plugged into his headphones not answering the phone Right, so there is that situation and what we do find in a lot of our research is that a lot of people that you think wouldn't get information do get Information from someone it's a matter of someone else coming to them or calling them or getting the information And so being plugged in is what enables you even if for example, we have examples where Someone who is an elderly Russian speaker who lives in an area that's about to be affected by a hurricane They're watching Russian TV listening to Russian radio not on the internet But their nephew who lives in California will see it and call them And so there are ways that all that information kind of filters in but that's what people who aren't online But people who are just watching YouTube, you know Hopefully someone's like discording them or Instagraming or whatever to to let them know what's happening or they have time to do that We we worked for a while with some Colleagues who study computer and information science and when I started working with them ten or more years ago That's kind of how I thought about it the way you're talking about it But in working with them the way they talked about it was that People are inventing new things all the time and by the time you understand what's going on Some teenagers going to invent something or someone's going to invent something new that's going to change everything And so they really think of it as much as an opportunity of Kind of the creativeness of how people are communicating today And I've definitely seen examples of that of how in my own experience with the fire or watching other kinds of events where the creativeness of how you can See internet news story and be like oh that's someone I know and good or go to Facebook or Twitter and be like Oh, I know this person who might know this or who lives there or you know See this source of information and how when kind of things do go crazy in these events How different people communicating at the same time can somehow filter so that people can get the information more quickly And there's there's lots of work that's been done on that about how people can use these communication mechanisms to Kind of come together in times of disaster to protect themselves to help each other You know all those different kinds of things, so I Think it's an opportunity as much as a challenge and the other thing. It's just the way the world is we can't change it That's the other piece of it is we don't control that and so then I think our role is to Use it as much as we can as an opportunity and identify the challenges and ways to address them and I mean in weather we haven't seen examples yet of like Evil bots trying to miscommunicate whether that we know about but that might be coming But that's another a whole nother thing, but there are examples of Kind of how In even the weather communication around there can be misinformation just because people see something and they think it's a hernita Where they hear this or they're just you know and how that information can be re-correct can be corrected So if a lot of people are communicating that also gives opportunity for correction as well as kind of misinformation So you mentioned Different ways of getting that information whether it's news cable or social media But I think something I've noticed a lot more is emergency texts. I feel a good amount of people already have phones available and I'm curious if there's data on How effective that's been in getting the message across like you may not have all the graphics, but you're like, oh, okay I'm in the location where yeah, it's being Had hazards happening Yeah, it is helpful and it is one way that people get alerted And people have have studied the best ways to communicate and what's more effective I think there's also a lot of challenges with it If the message doesn't go out, you know, if you're communicating over a large area It can take a long time for the messages to get to people I actually had an experience Actually, I think I was driving from Longmont back to my house and I must have passed through an area where there had been a warning It was a you know, police warning And I got the warning the message that the warning had been cleared But not the warning and I didn't know where it was for so when I was driving You know somehow I clipped to the edge of the area where the warning was being cleared So then it just leads to you know, people have to seek more information, but it can be An entry point to seeking more information which can be really valuable. I think the real challenge is those systems can Get people to be alert know some things might be happening pay more attention to their surroundings But it can still be really challenging to decide what to do and I have a friend who during the boulder floods About ten years ago was driving From she lived in Lafayette into Boulder and she got a message on her phone that was a warning It said seek higher ground She's just driving on the planes So she drove up to a little local hill in the dark. She's like here. I am and then she thought like what do I do? I don't know Do I sit here and wait right and so that can be the challenge when there's a situation that's very Rapidly changing or complicated you still have to figure out what to do But it was the first alert to be like, okay seek more information I think if she looked outside and saw a bunch of water coming she would have been like, oh, no, so So we do see plenty of examples though where you know you get the warning and then you're just like okay Well, what do I do now? But at least it alerts you to look for more information and it can be a link to get more information You can click on it sometimes and look and so on or phone a friend and ask them It still works Great presentation. Thank you My question is about earlier on in your slides you showed places and dates where Hurricanes have happened and I was curious are the frequency and magnitude of these storms increasing as like climate change occurs or You know due to some other anomaly Yeah, that's a great question and I have to say I haven't kept up on the latest research on that So I'm not the best person to answer it but I Think the research That shows that Hurricanes will produce our will or are producing more rain is pretty strong in the sense that you have more heat And you have more rain there have been more instances of Rapid intensification of hurricanes in the last five years which Ian was like an example of that and there are others where a Hurricane will say reach the Gulf of Mexico and rapidly intensify and that's because of the ocean is warmer and that warm layer is deeper And that's something that's a kind of first-order effect of climate change that there's more warmth and so the ocean is warmer I think the complexities of Whether it be more hurricanes will there be stronger there's different research on that and I Don't know the latest. I think the other challenge with hurricanes is a lot of it Is it just will there be more of them? But where will they go and so it really matters if they you know hit land, but I think there are things we do know that Indicate that Hurricanes might be getting they're rapidly intensifying for example that makes them harder to predict it makes them Hit land, you know Stronger if they're producing more rain, that's more damage And so those things you know all together make things worse as well as just sea level rise in general So you have the same hurricane on top of an area where the sea level has risen a little bit The water can go much further inland. So there are lots of ways. We already know that the climate change is affecting the the potential for damage and then there's lots of other ways that people are still studying and trying to understand But with extreme events you're sort of on the kind of extreme end of the distribution of what can possibly happen And so it can be harder to say exactly how climate change is affecting something or not, but there's a lot of people Looking at that question. I Think we have time for one last question Regarding the different categories of hurricanes my understanding is it's mainly Focused on wind speed, but there's other factors such as storm surge and forward winds that can determine how Devastating a hurricane actually is I've heard of discussions happening with kind of change in the categories Is that something that is happening and is NCAR Participating in those discussions in any way. Yeah, that's a great question. I'm trying to go back to that slide. I'll get there eventually Yeah, so Yeah, so originally the Saffir-Simpsons scale as Saffir and Simpson originally created it actually had things besides the wind It had storm surge and other damage associated with it And that's because they didn't have very good observations then so they were mainly determining based on what happened afterwards and Then I think it's about 10 years ago The National Hurricane Center decided to take out the storm surge and other damage And just make it a wind scale because they realized that people there was some miscommunication so there have been a Number of different proposals for how to improve the scale or change it or add things to it from different kinds of people and P you including people at NCAR I think the challenge is that people know what the Saffir-Simpsons scale is and they understand it in most cases and so Actually, I have a colleague who also studies earthquake prediction And she says that the people who do earthquake prediction really hate the Richter scale because it's not a very it's a Magnitude the earthquake, but it depends on where it happens and how close to this and what the shape of the fault is and so one number can't really communicate all those things and so I think it's a there's still a lot of discussion about How do you communicate the complexity of the risk for different people where one person might be more risk from wind and another From inland flooding and another from storm surge another from power outages So I don't that's really an answer your question, but there have been a lot of different proposals And no clear answers yet. There's not one that's kind of been adopted as the as the New thing yet, and I haven't seen something where based on what I know I can think oh, yeah That would like really help it's like I think it seems like everything I've seen so far It's like yeah, I could make some things better, but it might make some other things worse So it's still still some people are working on Let's thank dr. Rebecca Morse for a fabulous presentation I'd also like to thank NCAR and the Explorer series and all of you for joining us See you soon Thank you everyone have a good rest of your evening