“This Isn’t a Hurricane, This is a Flood Event”: A Qualitative Analysis of National Weather Service Forecaster Messaging during Hurricane Florence

Abstract Hurricanes threaten communities in complex and evolving ways due to storm characteristics and geography, as well as demographic and cultural factors. Risks to people in the path of these storms are compounded when wind and water hazards co-occur, such as tornadoes and flash floods, a hazard often referred to as TORFFs. For National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters, messaging these co-occurring threats poses many challenges, including the ongoing assessment and prioritization of which threat is likely to have the greatest impacts and the communication of risks to different publics. In this research, we focus on Hurricane Florence, a category 1 hurricane that produced historic flooding and some wind-related threats, including tornadoes, across the mid-Atlantic coast in September 2018. Through inductive, qualitative analysis of 33 semi-structured interviews with NWS forecasters responsible for issuing alerts during Florence, we examine the intricacies of messaging flood and wind threats as they evolved over the hurricane’s life cycle. Our results show that forecasters aimed to amplify messaging for flood threats over wind threats during Florence. Along with forecast details and expected impacts, motivations for this messaging choice included the potential for flood fatalities and concerns that the public would not understand the severity of compounding hurricane threats. One reason for this disconnect may be the emphasis placed by experts in weather prediction on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale (SSHWS) as a metric of hurricane severity. Forecaster messaging strategies were informed by these concerns, which may also have implications for how messaging should be shaped in the future.