FEMA-Wireless Emergency Alerts

Jeannette Sutton (PI) with Ramon Gil-Garcia and Derek Werthmuller (Co-PIs).  

A significant gap remains for most alerting authorities in local jurisdictions across the United States, where the focus has been on technology for message distribution (that is, how to get the message to those at risk) rather than education, training, and tools to improve message design for imminent threat communication. Indeed, the need for message templates, including appropriate content to populate templates for a range of hazards, has been reinforced by emergency managers and risk communicators across the U.S. (see, for example the DHS S&T Report on Alerting Tactics, August 2018).

This project will address this gap by developing a tool - the Message Design Dashboard (MDD) - to help emergency managers to write effective messages for public alert and warning, and develop presentations, training materials, and workshops to educate alerting authorities on how to develop effective public alert and warning messages. At the conclusion of the MDD design, project team members will conduct training seminars/workshops at events and conferences as directed by FEMA.

Olson, M. K., Sutton, J., Cain, L. B., & Waugh, N. A decade of wireless emergency alerts: A longitudinal assessment of message content and completeness. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management.

Cain, L. B., Sutton, J., & Olson, M. K. Wireless Emergency Alerts and organisational response: Instructing and adjusting information in alerts. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management.

Sutton, J., Olson, M. K., & Waugh, N. A. (2024). The Warning Lexicon: A multiphased study to identify, design, and develop content for warning messages. Natural Hazards Review, 25(1), 04023055.

Kuligowski, E. D., Waugh, N., Sutton, J., & Cova, T. (2023). Ember alerts: Assessing wireless emergency alert (WEA) messages in wildfires using the Warning Response Model. Natural Hazards Review. 

Writing Effective Warning Messages: The Message Design Dashboard. Presented by Jeannette Sutton at the FEMA Alert and Warning Conference, May 2022

When Minutes Matter: Alert and Warning Communications.  Presented by Jeannette Sutton at the FEMA-IPAWS Community of Practice Webinar, January 2022.

Other Relevant Presentations:

NOAA Seminar (April 2019) Dr. Jeannette N Sutton and colleague Dr. Erica Kuligowski discuss Creating Alerts and Warnings for Short Messaging Channels

Nick Bassill (PI) with Jeannette Sutton, Eric Stern and Chris Thorncroft (Co-PIs)     

When one imagines deadly weather conditions, hurricanes, snowstorms or tornadoes are generally the first phenomena to come to mind. However, extreme heatwaves (and extreme temperature in general) are significantly more deadly on an annual basis. Extreme temperature impacts are also modulated by a variety of factors both socioeconomic (e.g. access to air conditioning) and geographic (e.g. proximity to water bodies, sea-breezes, etc.). Despite these characteristics, extreme temperature products issued by the National Weather Service (NWS) are rarely more granular than county-sized. The New York City (NYC) urban environment is the embodiment of many of these challenges given its high-density population, varied urban landscape features, proximity to many water bodies, and the presence of socially vulnerable groups. 

In this project, Jeannette will focus on communicating extreme heat to non-expert users and members of the public.  Her research team will conduct card sorting interviews, quantitative content analysis, and user interaction studies.
 

Olson, M. K., Sutton, J., & Waugh, N. (2023). Tweeting the Heat: An Analysis of the National Weather Service’s Approach to Extreme Heat Communication on Twitter. Weather, Climate, and Society, 15(4), 963-977.

Sutton, J., Waugh, N., & Olivas, S. (2023). Communicating about Extreme Heat: Results from Card Sorting and Think Aloud Interviews with Experts from Differing Domains. Weather, Climate, and Society.

Communicating about Extreme Heat: A Usability Study.  (January 2022) Presented at the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, 10th Symposium on Building a Weather-Ready Nation, Session 13 Innovation Leading the Way toward a Weather-Ready Nation. Houston, TX.   

The risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model allows scholars to model how individuals process information about a perceived hazard. Most studies using the RISP model have focused on how individuals process information to slow moving environmental or health hazards. However, less is known about how individuals process fast moving meteorological threats that require more immediate decision making. Even less is known about how individuals process visual risk messages.

In this project, Sutton and Co-PI Laura Fischer  investigate individual processing of visual risk images during a fictitious tornado threat. Drawing from RISP, we will identify if individuals process risk information systematically (i.e., attempts to thoroughly understand or evaluate through careful thinking and intensive reasoning) or heuristically (i.e., the activation of well-learned judgments through cues such as source credibility and visual salience) through the allocation of visual attention to maps. To do so, we will conduct eye-tracking experiments to investigate how individuals with varying levels of hazard experience process visual information for a meteorological hazard to reduce their information insufficiency. 

Findings from this research will provide empirical evidence to develop a preliminary model of Visual-Risk Information Seeking and Processing and will offer applied benefits to risk communicators in their design of risk imagery. 

Fischer, L.M., Huntsman, D.O., Orton, G., & Sutton, J. (2023) You have to send the right message. Weather, Climate and Society. 15(2)  

Fischer, L. M., Orton, G., Sutton, J., & Wallace, M. (2023). Show me and what will I remember? Exploring recall in response to NWS tornado warning graphics. Journal of  Applied Communications. 87(3)

Sutton, J. Fischer, L. M., & Wood, M. M. (2021). Tornado Warning Guidance and Graphics: Implications of the Inclusion of Protective Action Information on Perceptions and Efficacy. Weather, Climate, and Society. 

Sutton, J., & Fischer, L. (2020). Understanding visual risk communication 

messages: An analysis of visual attention allocation and think aloud responses to tornadographics. Weather, Climate, and Society. 13(1) 173-188 DOI: 

https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-20-0042.1

Calls To Action in Short Warning Messages: A Comparative Study of 3 Hazards. Presented at the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, 17th Symposium on Societal Applications: Policy, Research, and Practice, Session 10 Utilizing Social Media for Weather Research, Education, and Risk Communication. Houston, TX. 

Visual Risk Communication: Attention, Understanding, and Decision Making in Response to a Changing Tornado Scenario

A recording from the AMS 5th Conference on Weather, Warnings and Communication by Dr. Jeannette Sutton on June 14, 2019

Eye-Tracking the Storm: The Effect of Variation in Presentation of Visual Risk Information

A recording from the American Meteorological Society annual meeting, Phoenix, AZ by Dr. Jeannette Sutton on January 8, 2019