Developing and Pilot-Testing Societal Outcome Measures for the NWS Weather-Ready Nation

This report summarizes the work that ERG performed to develop and pilot test a set of societal outcome metrics for the National Weather Service (NWS) Weather‐Ready Nation (WRN) initiative. ERG’s initial work on the project considered a subset of five WRN programs and products. Our research into these five programs and products, however, led to the conclusion that a simplified, general logic model could be used to depict how WRN (and many NWS activities in general) lead to societal outcomes. This simplified model appears in Figure ES‐1. The flow in the model can be described as follows. NWS performs activities that generate outputs. These outputs (warnings, alerts, information from awareness campaigns, etc.) generated by NWS are transmitted to NWS’ audiences (partners and the public); these outputs can flow directly to the public or be transmitted (presumably with some value‐added) by partners to the public. These outputs should lead to the public being better informed and then to being better prepared for weather‐related events. Once a weather‐related event is imminent or occurring, the public should then be better able to take appropriate actions which ultimately should lead to reduced injuries and fatalities and reduced property damage. 2016 NWS (National Weather Service) Submitted Public Domain 1931