Dealing with inconsistent weather warnings: effects on warning quality and intended actions

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.