Emergency Management Decision Biases for Climate and Weather Forecasts

Emergency managers who work on weather-related disasters comprise an important audience for climate forecasts. This paper examine how such emergency managers—a class of experts who routinely deal with uncertain information—interpret weather forecasts as well as longer-range forecasts of seasonal climate anomalies such as El Niño events. We rely on a national-level survey of county emergency managers engaged in flood and drought planning and response, drawing on hypothetical climate and flood emergency management scenarios to investigate the role of several well-known decision shortcuts and biases in influencing decisions. Our broadest finding is that even emergency managers with substantial experience employ decision shortcuts, just like members of the general population or the students that many psychologists use in their experiments. We argue that forecast producers should take these decision perversities into consideration when developing products. Project supported by National Science Foundation award 1133024 and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration award NA13OAR4310116 Working paper for NYU Colloquium on Market Institutions & Economic Processes, April 11, 2016