Post-event surveys to assess public perceptions of and response to weather warnings in Norway

When hazardous weather conditions occur, it is essential that all societal actors are made aware in a timely and understandable manner. Much attention to development and implementation of actionable warning systems has therefore been given, not the least through the WMO EW4ALL initiative. For warning issuing authorities it is equally essential to gain in-depth understanding of how warning information is received, understood and acted upon. While this need is widely acknowledged, systematic post-event evaluation is still limited and often excludes collection of subjective data among affected populations.

Under the Norwegian Meteorological Institute’s project ‘Impact-based warnings for society’ (K2S), a multi-year series of post-event warning evaluation surveys has been implemented since 2025. In this presentation, we discuss the methodological procedure and provide key insights from surveys that have been conducted thus far. Four surveys were disseminated in 2025, respectively for 1. An orange level warning for wind gusts; 2. A yellow level warning for lightning; 3. An orange level warning for heavy rain, and; 4. A yellow level warning for a polar low. For each of the warned events, an invitation to participate in the online survey was sent to a selection of residents in municipalities covered by a given weather warning, in the days immediately after the event. Each of the surveys resulted in around 500 responses. Next to key demographics, the surveys included several validated constructs from the field of behavioural science. Measures included knowledge of, attitudes towards and trust in the warnings issued, as well as perceived relevance of warning information provided, behavioural response and experienced consequences.

Results show that most respondents have high trust in weather warnings, while trust levels are positively related to general interest in weather conditions and negatively with weather information literacy. While the majority understand the information provided in the warnings, knowledge of the content varies for different phenomena and between age groups. Most people who received the weather warnings took one or more measures, and relatively few experienced major negative consequences. Worry and fear was a relatively commonly mentioned consequence, emphasising that weather events not only have physical, but also emotional and mental impacts. Also, several reasons were mentioned for not acting upon a warning, including warning skepticism, high levels of perceived self-preparedness, and contextual irrelevance of possible impacts. We conclude with suggestions for how post-event surveys can feed into improvements of operational warning procedures, including a need to follow-up with public communication about evaluations after weather events to inform about warning accuracy and observed societal impacts, and provide topics for further in-depth research.