Abstract
In the past four decades, the private weather forecast sector has been developing next to National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, resulting in additional weather providers. This plurality has led to a critical duplication of public weather warnings. For a specific event, different providers disseminate warnings that are more or less severe, or that are visualized differently, leading to inconsistent information that could impact perceived warning quality and response. So far, past research has not studied the influence of inconsistent information from multiple providers. This knowledge gap is addressed here. An inconsistency matrix was developed and employed to categorize the level of inconsistency across multiple warnings. The matrix provides warning pairs inconsistent in visualization, text or both. A survey experiment was conducted in Switzerland (N = 1,335). The results show that half of the people who received warnings from different providers for the same event indicated that these were inconsistent. The evaluation of warning quality and intended actions in a decision scenario characterized by two severe rainfall warnings shows the negative impacts of inconsistency. For example, consistent warnings are least confusing and inconsistent visual and textual warnings are most confusing. However, there are no significant differences in the effects of inconsistent textual information compared to inconsistent visual information on warning quality and intended actions. These findings offer empirical justification to enhance co‐operation between public and private weather providers. To improve warnings, the providers should find an agreement to be consistent either in the text or in the visualization.
Highlights
On a rainy day in November 2017, several different weather information providers issued to the general public a variety of extreme weather warnings for the southernmost part of Switzerland around Lake Lugano
This study indicates that the existing misunderstanding and mistrust about the respective roles of the public and private sector need to be overcome and things are slowly changing
In Switzerland, for instance, public and private weather providers are in regular contact to improve the warning process and there are ongoing discussions on how warning information could become more consistent, especially with regard to visualization
Summary
On a rainy day in November 2017, several different weather information providers issued to the general public a variety of extreme weather warnings for the southernmost part of Switzerland around Lake Lugano (a region known as Sottoceneri). Savelli and Joslyn (2013) found that forecast messages containing only visualizations were more likely to lead to erroneous interpretation than text alone, whereas Casteel and Downing (2015) found no effect of graphics (or text) on the perceived risk, perceived severity and likelihood to contact a loved one for each message They used a scenario in which participants were told they were driving through an unknown region of the United States to investigate wireless emergency alert weather warning message effectiveness across one of four conditions (text, text + polygon, text + radar image, text + radar image + polygon). Does inconsistency affect evaluation of warning quality and does it influence intended behavioural response? The possible effects of different types of forecast inconsistency are considered and warning characteristic effects (such as visual graphics) on user evaluation of quality are analysed
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