Warnings about impending hazards help to minimise the impacts and reduce the risk through encouraging an appropriate and timely behavioural response. Many hydrometeorological agencies are moving towards impact-based forecast and warning (IBFW) systems, as encouraged by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Yet little research has been conducted on such systems from the perspectives of agencies who are or would be involved in their implementation. We investigated the challenges and benefits of IBFW systems as perceived by participants from agencies internationally and within New Zealand. Interviews and workshops were held with meteorologists and weather forecasters, flood forecasters and hydrologists, and emergency managers.We found that the benefits of implementing IBFW systems included a perceived increase in the understanding of the potential impacts by the public, added awareness of antecedent conditions by forecasters, a possible reduction in ‘false alarms’, and increased interagency communication. Challenges identified by the participants included whether the system should be designed for individuals or society, a lack of impact data, verification of warnings based on impacts, a conflict with roles and responsibilities, the potential for conflicting messages, and the increased burden on agencies providing information to forecasters with a perception of little benefit in return.We argue that IBFWs could be designed for individual members of the public, with an increased focus on understanding vulnerability and capacities; and that more impact data needs to be collected and stored to inform future warnings. Increased interagency coordination would assist with rapid decision-making and the success of IBFWs.
<p>As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in Earth&#8217;s atmosphere, the nature of extreme weather events (EWEs) has been changing and is expected to change in the future. EWEs have contributions from anthropogenic climate change as well as from natural variability, which complicates attribution statements. EWERAM is a project that has been funded through the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Smart Ideas programme to develop the capability to provide, within days of an EWE having occurred over New Zealand, and while public interest is still high, scientifically defensible statements about the role of climate change in both the severity and frequency of that event. This is expected to raise public awareness and understanding of the effects of climate change on EWEs.</p><p>A team of researchers from five institutions across New Zealand are participating in EWERAM. EWE attribution is a multi-faceted problem and different approaches are required to address different research aims. Although robustly assessing the contribution of changes in the thermodynamic state to an observed event can be more tractable than including changes in the dynamics of weather systems, for New Zealand, changes in dynamics have had a large impact on the frequency and location of EWEs. As such, we have initiated several lines of research to deliver metrics on EWE attribution, tailored to meet the needs of various stakeholders, that encompass the effects of both dynamical and thermodynamical changes in the atmosphere. This presentation will give an overview of EWERAM and present the methodologies and tools used in the project.</p>
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