WWS23

This report describes the results of a nationwide survey of Spanish speakers on tropical cyclones in the United States. The 2023 Winter Weather Spanish Survey (WWS23) was designed and administered by the Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (IPPRA) at the University of Oklahoma. While it is the first time the survey has been translated into Spanish, an English-language version of the survey has been fielded annually for the last three years (see Krocak et al. 2021, Bitterman et al. 2022, and Bitterman et al. 2023 for more information on the 2021 Winter Weather Survey (WW21), WW22, and WW23 surveys, respectively). It was fielded from November 1 - December 20, 2023, using an online questionnaire that was completed by 370 U.S. adults (age 18+) who self-reported that they speak Spanish at least “well” and were recruited from an Internet panel that matches the characteristics of the U.S. Spanish speaking population as estimated in the U.S. Census. The WW21 survey was designed to establish baseline measures of the extent to which U.S. adults receive, understand, and respond to winter weather forecasts and warnings. The survey also measured public trust in the National Weather Service (NWS), extreme weather and climate risk perceptions, risk literacy, interpretations of probabilistic language, and winter weather preparedness. In the WW22 survey, those baseline questions were refined, and respondents’ threshold for winter weather events, the perceived impact of winter weather on their location and daily life and their perceptions of the amount of snow that will fall given certain forecast messaging are all tested. The WW23 survey continued to test these measures, while adding questions addressing how prebunk messaging impacts the ability of members of the public to identify low- vs. high-quality forecast information. This survey, WWS23, is the first Spanish-language iteration of the survey and most closely resembled WW21 to establish a baseline of how adult Spanish speakers receive, understand, and respond to winter weather forecasts and warnings. This report briefly describes the methodology, survey data collection, data weighting, and a reproduction of the survey instrument with weighted means and frequencies for the questions that elicited numeric responses.