Emergency Management Decision-Making during Severe Weather

Abstract

The Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) project will provide its end users with new weather radar data with finer spatial and temporal resolution than existing WSR-88D data. It is not clear what impact this new information will have on emergency managers. This work introduces a descriptive decision-making model of emergency management during the four severe weather phases: Pre-Storm, Severe Weather Watch, Severe Weather Warning, and Severe Weather Event. The initial model describes EMs' use of information and their decisions made. Eleven emergency managers participated in three questionnaires and two part-task simulated weather scenarios based on archived weather data. This work then refines the Severe Weather Warning phase of the model by validating the entries and adding data concerning the role of the information and precursors to decisions made and actions taken. The scenarios also highlight problems that EMs have with interpreting velocity data and with integrating data from multiple radar sources. These results will impact CASA system visualization design and training.