“The NHC really has had a pretty long history of being involved with societal impacts and how hurricanes affect people in society. Even before I started working at the Hurricane Center, which was 20 years ago now”. 

That’s Robbie Berg, a hurricane specialist working for the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. His relationship with social science started about 10 years ago when he got involved with the WAS*IS program. The WAS*IS, or Weather and Society*Integrated Studies was a movement to incorporate social sciences into the physical science aspect of traditional meteorology.

“It all began with storm surge and the storm surge products that we produced five to 10 years ago. At the time we realized there was this really strong need for more specific information. We saw, looking at the number of deaths from storms, at least half the deaths from tropical cyclones were due to this surge of water. People didn't really understand what storm surge was and at that point, it doesn’t matter how accurate our forecasts were if people didn’t recognize the need to take protective action. Obviously, we weren't addressing the severity of this phenomenon very well”. So how does an agency, whose mission is to save lives, reevaluate their ways of operation to induce change? We went right to the source to learn how the NHC incorporated social science to turn their products into a success story for the agency.

Enter Social Science…..

We can't just make products and assume that they're going to work. Creating an impactful product requires a collaborative approach with our user groups. The combination of social science and meteorology grants NWS access to a more holistic approach to communicating the forecast.

The NHC helped develop a working group under the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) where we had weather service people join in with some of our users like broadcasting meteorologists and emergency managers to help us decide what types of things we should be looking at when it comes to social science. It was these other people within the community that expressed their needs and helped us figure out the best way to develop new products. We decided to look at the arrival of tropical-storm-force winds and storm surge.

There is a serious need amongst a variety of user groups, emergency managers, broadcast meteorologists, and individuals to know and understand the timing of the arrival of tropical-storm-force winds because once the tropical-storm-force winds start, all your preparations and evacuations have to be done. Boarding up your house is too dangerous once the winds arrive.

We contracted researchers to conduct surveys and focus groups. They worked with our partners to develop products that would more effectively meet their needs. These researchers rebranded our product and messaging because it’s not about improving the forecast; it is about improving the communication of that forecast. 

Our methods for analyzing the storm surge forecasts were similar to those of the Arrival of Tropical Storm Force Winds. Our surveys and focus groups helped us understand what people needed to know in order to take protective action for storm surge. In fact, after we implemented our findings from the study, we noticed a decrease in the amount of deaths from storm surge. Before 2017, we lost hundreds to even thousands of lives to storm surge in storms like Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina.  But since 2017, the U.S. has been affected by 14 hurricanes, including 6 major hurricanes, and we’ve only lost 7 lives to storm surge.  We aren’t ready to claim we cracked some sort of code, but we have witnessed a notable change in outcomes since issuing our new products.