National Weather Service watches and warnings might sound a little different, starting this April.
Meteorologists plan to word their messages in a way they think will resonate with the public.
Pat Spoden is the science and operations officer at the National Weather Service in Paducah. At a meeting with southeast Missouri emergency managers on Wednesday, Spoden said the NWS will change how they word their warnings, especially tornado warnings.
“Us being scientists sometimes we get into thinking everyone else is a scientist. But we’re working with social scientists, actually, to help us,” Spoden said. “How can we better tune the wording of our warnings and other statements so that we can reach people that we want to reach and not tune them out.”
Spoden says they will use more comparisons.
“If we’re expecting 70 mile per hour winds, we might try to say, well here’s what this normally will do. It could knock down trees, maybe some power lines,” Spoden said. “If we have a report of a large tornado on the ground we might say that it could cause considerable damage to kind of [give] people an idea of, hey, this is what could happen.”
