Anticipation and Response: Emergency Services in Severe Weather Situations in Germany

Communicating meteorological uncertainty allows earlier provision of information on possible future events. The desired benefit is to enable the end-user to start with preparatory protective actions at an earlier time based on the end-user’s own risk assessment and decision threshold. The presented results of an interview study, conducted with 27 members of German civil protection authorities, show that developments in meteorology and weather forecasting do not necessarily fit the current practices of German emergency services. These practices are mostly carried out based on alarms and ground truth in a superficial reactive manner, rather than on anticipation based on prognoses or forecasts. Emergency managers cope with uncertainty by collecting, comparing, and blending different information about an uncertain event and its uncertain outcomes within the situation assessment to validate the information. Emergency managers struggle most with an increase of emergency calls and missions due to the impacts of severe weather. Because of the additional expenditures, the weather event makes it even harder for them to fulfill their core duties. These findings support the need for impact-based warnings.