Public Warnings Response

A silver lining to a busted forecast? Building relationships after the storm through humanising messages

“…First, we show that communicators should use conversational human voice messages when admitting forecasting errors in the false alarm context. Specifically, our results show that communicators can have confidence in their ability to explain false alarms without damaging their relationships with community members or harming community members' perceptions of resilience, which is important given the fear of crying wolf in the meteorological community (Breznitz, 1984;Brotzge & Donner, 2013;Donner et al, 2022;Lim et al, 2019). Additionally, in the tornado context, the preponderance of tornado forecasting errors in the conterminous U.S. are false alarms (e.g., Brotzge & Donner, 2013), making it imperative that communicators deploy an effective message strategy.…”

“…This includes communication in the absence of any weather threat and/or after a potential threat has passed. Government communicators are centred, given their responsibility to warn community members on what actions they can take to protect themselves and others from potential threats (e.g., Atwell Seate, in press; Donner et al, 2022). The goal of quiet weather communication is to build strong disaster organisation‐public relationships.…”

“…A second less common forecasting failure is a missed event, which is when a high‐impact storm was not forecasted but does occur (Trainor et al, 2015). We selected these contexts because weather communicators believe that forecasting failures can undermine their relationships with community members, which in turn diminishes community resilience (e.g., Atwell Seate et al, 2022; Donner et al, 2022).…”

“…We selected these contexts because weather communicators believe that forecasting failures can undermine their relationships with community members, which in turn diminishes community resilience (e.g., Atwell Donner et al, 2022).…”