Thread by @RyanMaue

Research paper (May 2021)

Forecast Hesitancy: Why are People Reluctant to Believe, Accept, or Respond to Various Weather, Water, and Climate Hazard-Related Forecasts?

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

“The varying degrees of reluctance by different individuals, groups, communities, and nations to respond to or rely on forecasts in order to take advantage of forecast-afforded lead time to prepare effectively for threats that are known to accompany different hydromet hazards.”

"Such hydromet hazards can include floods, flash floods, tornadoes, heatwaves, ice storms, tropical storms, forest and brush fires, dry spells and droughts, disease outbreaks, and ENSO-extreme anomalies of El Niño and La Niña."

Quoting from Glantz and Pierce (2021)

Sequence of advisories, alerts and warnings treated like another form of news, heard and perhaps heeded, but not necessarily right now.

Oh no! The paper goes off the rails in a discussion about the disastrous Texas Freeze in February 2021.

Claim made by authors is that Texas was warned in mid-January about collapse of the Polar Vortex b/c a local TV weather broadcast showed a map.

Yikes!

This is wild. The authors assert that a general article about potential of "polar vortex" split and stratospheric warming is actionable information.

This article might be prescient but it's just speculation. There's no forecast here.

kxan.com/weather/weathe…

"The latter three (February 4th–6th) early warning entries ... tell the unfortunate tale of what eventually happened, despite several weeks of lead time from forecasted warnings, over the course of the recent tragedy in Texas."

Okay, just going to reject that and move on.

Table 3: lead times typically available between first forecasts (as warnings) and the first sign of onset of impacts for different hydromet hazards.

I'd stratify by "Outlook (%)" on seasonal time scales, 2-weekly potential hazards, 7-day forecasts, Daily Watches, Severe Warnings

The comparison between COVID vaccine hesitancy and failure to plan for the Texas freeze (forecast hesitancy) is really stretching.

I'll address the Texas freeze from point of view of someone w/full access to all the forecast model information.

In the 2 weeks leading up to the Texas freeze, ensemble weather models showed increasing risk for highly anomalous cold temperatures + wintry precipitation plunging across the U.S. into the Plains and even Texas, but the details were not sharp = high uncertainty.

Note, all weather information is readily available and constantly poured over by variety of forecast professionals, decision makers, utilities etc. within the free market including commodity (gas/electricity) traders.
Question is what level of risk or threshold triggers action.

Generic agency plugs in forecast into their demand models, experts analyze results, and policy decisions are made.

If the forecast exceeds ability to mitigate, then you're in trouble. But, in Texas, unexpected circumstances blew up the triage plan.

Unexpected != unforeseen

We can judge with the benefit of hindsight knowing which information was accurate, but that's not always the case leading up to an extreme weather event.

That leads to how people process probabilistic information and risks in the absence of binary forecast info (Y/N)
/end