User Survey for the Stevens Flood Advisory System

The Stevens Flood Advisory System (http://Stevens.edu/SFAS) is an ensemble total water level forecast system run by the Stevens Institute of Technology since 2016. An anonymous survey was created and completed by 351 (23%) users out of about 1500 SFAS users who were invited to take it. Those invited are advanced users who are signed up to receive flood watch and advisory emails and may not reflect all the website’s users, nor those who use information secondhand after it is shared by other users, which is common. While all users were given some of the same questions, the survey branched to ask different questions of different user types. A total of 99 respondents responded who share the information with their community or use it for company or government operations (e.g. emergency management). Another 225 users consult SFAS for their own personal household decisions only. The remaining users were research-oriented users.斯蒂文斯洪水咨询系统（Stevens Flood Advisory System，官网地址http://Stevens.edu/SFAS）是斯蒂文斯理工学院自2016年起运营的集合式总水位预报系统。研究团队向约1500名SFAS用户发送了匿名调查问卷，最终共有351名用户完成问卷，有效回收率为23%。本次受邀用户均为订阅洪水预警与咨询邮件的高级用户，该样本群体无法代表该网站的全部用户，也无法涵盖通过其他用户转发间接获取系统信息的用户——这类间接使用场景十分普遍。尽管所有受访者均需回答部分通用问题，但问卷会根据不同用户类型设置分支问题。其中，99名受访者会将系统信息分享至所在社区，或用于企业、政府相关业务（如应急管理工作）；另有225名用户仅将该系统用于个人家庭决策；剩余受访者则为以研究为导向的用户。