WW23

This report describes the results of an annual nationwide survey on winter weather in the United States. The 2023 Winter Weather and Society Survey (WW23) was designed and administered by the Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (IPPRA) at the University of Oklahoma. It was fielded from October 26 through November 6, 2023, using an online questionnaire that was completed by 1,459 U.S. adults (age 18+) that were recruited from an Internet panel that matches the characteristics of the U.S. 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 continues to test these measures, while adding questions addressing how prebunk messaging impacts the ability of members of the public to identify high-quality forecast information. 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.