A Hazard Multiple: Overlapping Tornado and Flash Flood Warnings In A National Weather Service Forecast Office In The Southeastern United States

Abstract

The U.S. weather warning system is designed to help operational forecasters identify and issue alerts for hazards that assist people in taking life-saving actions. Assessing risks for individual hazards, such as flash flooding, can be challenging for individuals, depending on their contexts, resources, and abilities. When two or more hazards co-occur in time and space, such as tornadoes and flash floods, which we call TORFFs, individual risk assessment and available actions people can take to stay safe become increasingly complex and potentially dangerous. TORFF advice can suggest contradictory action–that people get low for a tornado and seek higher ground for a flash flood. The origin of risk information about such threats is the National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Office. This article contributes to an understanding of the warning and forecast system though a naturalistic study of the NWS during a TORFF event in the Southeastern United States. Drawing on literature for the Social Amplification of Risk Framework, this article argues that during TORFFs, elements of the NWS warning operations can unintentionally amplify or attenuate one threat over the other. Our results reveal three ways this amplification or attenuation might occur: 1) underlying assumptions that forecasters understandably make about the danger of different threats; 2) threat terminology and coordination with national offices that shape the communication of risks during a multi-hazard event; and 3) organizational arrangements of space and forecaster expertise during operations. We conclude with suggestions for rethinking sites of amplification and attenuation and additional areas of future study.