Expanding the Concept of Knowledge Transition through Social Science Research Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

Two reports spanning a history of 50 years summarize some of today’s most relevant challenges and opportunities of the applicability and integration of social and behavioral sciences (SBS) within the Weather Enterprise. The first, “The Warning System: A Social Science Perspective” (McLuckie 1973), was an early attempt to describe how effective response and dissemination of warning messaging posed an operational problem to the National Weather Service (NWS). This analysis noted a disciplinary concern still echoed in the present: “There is relatively little understanding (…) of how to translate relevant existing knowledge within social science into practical applications” (McLuckie 1973). The second report, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Mathematics (NASEM), made a case for SBS’s role in the Weather Enterprise and characterized the biggest obstacles to advancing practical applications in weather readiness, hazard monitoring, emergency management, and forecasting processes. NASEM suggested that the full integration of SBS in weather operations would be a reality only when “the relatively small scale, intermittency, and inconsistency of investment in these kinds of efforts” (NASEM 2018) was overcome. Grant no. NA21OAR4590214