WxEM Wave 6

This report describes the results of a regularly distributed survey of nationwide Emergency Managers (EMs) as part of The Extreme Weather and Emergency Management Survey (WxEM) series. This project aims to send surveys to EMs across the United States three to four times a year, although that frequency may change based on EM and research needs. The Extreme Weather and Emergency Management Survey, Wave 6 (WxEM Wave 6) was designed by the Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (IPPRA) at the University of Oklahoma and collaborators from the National Weather Service office in Fort Worth Texas. It is the sixth survey in the series. WxEM Wave 6 opened on July 24, 2024, using an online questionnaire and has been completed by 232 EM personnel that were recruited from an IPPRA built database of EMs from across the country (see Wanless et al. 2023a for more info on recruitment). WxEM Wave 6 follows surveys that covered a variety of topics, including: recruitment and demographic information (Wave 1, Wanless et al. 2023b), EM use of severe weather forecast information (Wave 2, Wanless et al. 2023c), compound hazards (hazardous weather events that happen in the same place at the same time) (Wave 3, Wanless et al. 2024a), EM communication and collaboration with various partners (Wave 4, Stormer et al. 2024), and EM perceptions of equity and how that might impact EM operations (Wave 5, Wanless et al. 2024b). Wave 6 focused on Emergency Manager use and preferences of probabilistic forecast communication. Wave 6 also included questions on decision thresholds. This report presents an overview of the methodology of the survey data collection, and a reproduction of the survey instrument with frequencies for the questions that elicited numeric responses.