A journal from the American Meteorological Society about the consistency of weather messages and risks in communication says, “Results show that the message consistency predicts message credibility, but the effect depends on the source.”
Part of the mission of the National Weather Service (NWS) is to protect life and property. They periodically ask their partners for feedback to help them with their messages to the public.
Recent examples include changes to the National Hurricane Center's (NHC) cone to better communicate hazards of tropical storms and hurricanes. The cone shows the probable path of the storm center over five days, but other things are new this year, like showing inland tropical storm and hurricane watches and warnings.
Central Texas meteorologist Troy Kimmel says the NWS does a good job with its messaging.
"I think the weather service does a pretty good job with their, what we call, watch warnings advisory program. I think they do a pretty good job with that,” Kimmel says. “Could they be better? Yes. Are there problems that I have with some of it? Yeah. I think there are too many warnings in this country."
He says another issue is misleading weather messaging on social media.
"You don't post a 360-hour model run and tell people to 'run for the hills.' We're seeing that nowadays, and that's terribly unfortunate,” Kimmel states.
He informs what to do to insure reliable information is received.
“Make sure that, on your cell phones you, have those WEA Alerts set so that when you get a substantial flash flood warning or a tornado warning that comes out, you're going to end up getting that information,” Kimmel says.
Kimmel advises one to have a weather radio and an NWS app for phones, where someone could input their county and location in the settings.
