Towards User-Oriented Verification of Weather Warnings: Insights from Public and Stakeholder Preferences

Verifying the quality of weather warnings is important for improving warnings, building trust, and enabling stakeholders to choose the right course of action. But what makes a warning valuable from a user’s point of view? 

The recipients of weather warnings, such as emergency response teams, commercial actors, or the general public, may each prioritize different aspects of weather warnings. For instance, some may value the correct intensity of an event over its correct timing, while others may prefer correct location over the correct duration. In addition, the trade-off between over- and under-forecasted weather events may vary between stakeholders as some might prioritize minimizing missed events while others prefer not having too many false alarms. To better capture these individual preferences, this work showcases the efforts made at the German Meteorological Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) in the context of the renewal of its warning system (i.e., the RainBoW program: “Risk-based, Application-oriented and Individualizable Provision of Optimized Warning Information”) to understand how users perceive the quality of warnings.

To explore what properties of a warning are the most important to the general public - the largest group of recipients of weather warnings - we conducted two non-representative surveys during two ‘open house’ DWD events. Participants recorded how satisfied they were with forecasts if specific attributes such as intensity, timing, location, or persistence were incorrect and affected the outcome of their planned activities. 

In addition to this public survey, a workshop with stakeholders from disaster response teams provided further insights into their specific needs and interests towards forecast quality.

With this information from different stakeholders, we aim to develop verification methods that take these preferences into account when evaluating the accuracy of a warning. The development of new verification methods may be supported by user reports of the current weather collected through the official DWD weather app.

A key component of any user-oriented verification approach is an effective communication of the results. This requires translating complex statistical information into clear practical information that is accessible and meaningful for non-specialist audiences.