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1. Introduction
As forecast technology advances, the challenges and opportunities associated with providing information about forecast uncertainty become both more germane and more complicated. While meteorologists have substantial information about forecast uncertainty-both in general and in specific situations-much of it is not easily accessible by the public (Morss et al. 2008). In theory, uncertainty information is very useful to both weather forecasters and to the general public as individuals decide how to prepare for weather situations. However, with the exception of the probability of precipitation, forecast uncertainty is not usually communicated formally to the public (Joslyn et al. 2007). In fact, most forecasters remain deterministic in their forecasting, in part because it is unclear whether people can successfully make use of uncertainty information (Joslyn et al. 2007).
Even though individuals in the meteorological community have sometimes discouraged probability forecasts for significant weather events because the public often misinterprets them, there can be many potential benefits to using such forecasts (Murphy et al. 1980). Providing uncertainty information to the public in an accessible format may help people decide how much confidence to place in a given forecast (Morss et al. 2008), and communicating information about data uncertainty has the potential to increase trust in results and to support decision-making that uses that data (Kinkeldey et al. 2014). Communicating forecast uncertainty is important because it avoids falsely portraying certainty in forecasts and may help forecast users make more informed decisions (Morss et al. 2008, 2010). On the forecast side of the equation, uncertainty forecasts can be used to improve deterministic forecasts (Joslyn et al. 2007).
Indeed, practitioners who make decisions based on weather forecasts (such as emergency managers and others) understand that uncertainty is an unavoidable factor that is part of decisions they must make every day, in a complex and ever-evolving environment (Morss et al. 2005). The consequence of conveying only single-value, deterministic information to practitioners is that poorer decisions may be made because they do not have the benefit of knowing and accounting for the forecast uncertainties and risks on which their decisions are based (Hirschberg et al. 2011). To that end, some practitioners seek to link probabilistic information within more traditional deterministic decision-making (Pappenberger et al. 2013). Currently, however, decisions by users at all...