A Weather-Ready Nation for All? The Demographics of Severe Weather Understanding, Reception, and Response1

Abstract

NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) provides forecasts, warnings, and decision support to the public for the protection of life and property. The NWS Weather Ready Nation model describes the process of applying weather information to achieve societal value. However, it is not clear how different racial and socioeconomic groups across the United States receive, understand, and act upon the weather information supplied under this model. There may be barriers that keep important, life-saving information from the populations at the highest risk of severe weather impacts. This paper estimates the extent of racial and socioeconomic disparities in severe weather risk information reception, comprehension, response, and trust, as well as severe weather preparedness and risk perceptions in the United States. We use data from the University of Oklahoma’s Severe Weather and Society Survey which is annually completed by a sample of 3,000 U.S. adults (age 18+) that is designed to match the characteristics of the U.S. population. We pool data over four years (2017-2020) to provide reliable severe weather risk prevalence statistics for adults by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic characteristics. As a robustness check, we supplement this information with data from the FEMA Annual Household Survey. We find that racial and socioeconomic groups receive, understand, trust, and act upon severe weather information differently. These findings suggest NWS and their partners adjust their communication strategies to ensure all populations receive and understand actionable severe weather information.