Identification

Title

Emergency Manager preferences for rapidly updating severe weather warnings

Abstract

Threats-in-motion (TIM) is a technological innovation that would allow NWS forecasters to expand severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings in area and/or time, instead of issuing a series of new warnings. TIM allows warnings to “move” with the storm and provide more equitable lead time for locations downstream of the initial warning. While conceptual research demonstrates this value for example cases, research in NOAA’s Hazardous Weather Testbed revealed that motion instabilities (uncertainties in storm speed or direction, time intervals between forecaster intervention, and combinations of each) could also arise with this system that potentially limit usefulness or effectiveness of the product. To understand the potential trade-offs between the current and future systems, it is important to understand how core partners, such as emergency managers (EMs), would use TIM. In this study, 21 EMs from across the country participated in a simulated severe weather activity where they examined multiple TIM scenarios and provided feedback through surveys and focus groups. The TIM scenarios included visualizations of how TIM might behave under different situations: changes in storm speed, direction, and combinations of each. The simulation revealed that although EMs were optimistic about TIM, they had concerns about warning dissemination and public response. Specifically, the EMs were concerned about how the moving warning polygon could put locations in and out of warnings multiple times over relatively short periods of time, causing confusion from public safety and alerting standpoints.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7w09b8b

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;" data-sheets-root="1">Copyright 2025 American Meteorological Society (AMS).</span>

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2025-07-10T19:55:35.580153

Metadata language

eng; USA