Making Social Science Actionable for the NWS: The Brief Vulnerability Overview Tool (BVOT)

Abstract This paper provides an introduction to a new tool that is designed to provide operationally useful vulnerability information to National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecasting Offices (WFOs). The Brief Vulnerability Overview Tool (BVOT) is a shapefile containing local known, spatially specific, and weather hazard-related vulnerabilities in a format that is easily integrated into the existing forecasting, warning, and decision support responsibilities and tasks of NWS WFO meteorologists. The methods for gathering vulnerability data and then building a BVOT for a WFO leverages and strengthens the relationships that NWS WFOs already have with their local emergency managers (EMs) and core partners to work together to identify operationally useful, local vulnerability knowledge. The BVOT is populated with discrete, known vulnerabilities to provide NWS meteorologists spatial-situational awareness of those people, places, and things of greatest concern to their core partners. Crucially, the BVOT is a sub-sample of all potential vulnerabilities; its primary purpose is to make meteorologists aware of those weather hazard-specific vulnerabilities that, as we posed to them, “keep them awake at night.” Here we describe the development of the BVOT as a social science-informed operational tool; how the BVOT methods have evolved and how it can be integrated into the culture of the NWS as a tool for building and maintaining relationships with partners; and how the BVOT is designed to be used and its impact on operational decision making as observed in NOAA’s Hazardous Weather Testbed.