Abstract
Communicating meteorological uncertainty allows earlier provision of information on possible future events. The desired benefit is to enable the end-user to start with preparatory protective actions at an earlier time based on the end-user’s own risk assessment and decision threshold. The presented results of an interview study, conducted with 27 members of German civil protection authorities, show that developments in meteorology and weather forecasting do not necessarily fit the current practices of German emergency services. These practices are mostly carried out based on alarms and ground truth in a superficial reactive manner, rather than on anticipation based on prognoses or forecasts. Emergency managers cope with uncertainty by collecting, comparing, and blending different information about an uncertain event and its uncertain outcomes within the situation assessment to validate the information. Emergency managers struggle most with an increase of emergency calls and missions due to the impacts of severe weather. Because of the additional expenditures, the weather event makes it even harder for them to fulfill their core duties. These findings support the need for impact-based warnings.
Highlights
Hydrometeorological processes are the most common causes of natural hazards like storms and floods in Germany (GDV 2016)
The desired benefit is to enable the end-user to start with preparatory protective actions at an earlier time based on the end-user’s own risk assessment and decision threshold
Mitigation and prevention measures are generally summarized under the term ‘‘disaster risk management.’’ The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) defines disaster risk management as a ‘‘systematic process of using administrative directives, organizations, and operational skills and capacities to implement strategies, policies and improved coping capacities in order to lessen the adverse impacts of hazards and the possibility of disaster’’ (UNISDR 2009)
Summary
Hydrometeorological processes are the most common causes of natural hazards like storms and floods in Germany (GDV 2016). The disaster management cycle represents a systematic approach to dividing the risk management process (Alexander 2000; Weichselgartner 2002; Dikau and Weichselgartner 2005). This widely used concept in the emergency management community is adopted by various organizations for different hazards. The cycle describes successive phases of post- and pre-disaster situations that a society would undergo and the measures that emergency management would need to take in order to improve resilience and mitigate the impacts of natural hazards. The number of phases and the terminology differ, but most authors suggest three to four phases (Alexander 2000; Dikau and Weichselgartner 2005; Edwards 2009)
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