WX24

This report describes the results of an annual nationwide survey on severe weather in the United States. The 2024 Severe Weather and Society Survey (WX) was designed and administered by the Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (IPPRA) at the University of Oklahoma. It is the eighth survey in the annual series (see Silva et al. 2017, Silva et al. 2018, Silva et al. 2019, Krocak et al. 2020, Krocak et al. 2021, Bitterman et al. 2022, and Bitterman et al. 2023 for information on WX17, WX18, WX19, WX20, WX21, WX22 and WX23, respectively). WX24 was fielded October 10 – November 5, 2024, using an online questionnaire that was completed by 1,354 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. Following WX17 and WX18, which were designed to establish baseline measures of the extent to which U.S. adults receive, understand, and respond to severe weather forecasts and warnings, WX19, WX20, WX21 and WX22 were designed to continue and, in some cases, refine the measurement of these concepts. WX23 continues to measure these core concepts and tested different methods for visualizing conditional intensity in Storm Prediction Center products, as well as a variety of experimental scales for the SPC’s convective outlook. While continuing these base measures, the WX24 survey also includes more experiments related to SPC products and prototypes, including a test of the experimental interactive outlook and assessment of understanding, use and intended response for the Day 4-8 convective outlooks. This report presents an overview of methodology of the survey data collection, data weighting, and a reproduction of the survey instrument with weighted means and frequencies for the questions that elicited numeric responses.

NOAA’s Weather Program Office provided funding for survey design and data analysis.