The Natural Hazards Center recently released a publication on effective hurricane warnings.
This research sought to answer the following questions:
- How can we improve the process of defining geo-targeted hurricane warning zones by considering the built environment and hazards factors of affected areas?
- To what extent can the building-level geo-targeted warning messages motivate households to evacuate from high-risk areas before hurricanes?
- Is geo-targeted warning more effective than current general warning in motivating evacuation in high-risk areas?
From the study:
“The comparison results showed that the geo-targeted hurricane warnings are more effective than the generic warnings at increasing the average proportion of residents evacuating from high-risk census blocks prior to a hurricane. Additionally, according to the social vulnerability map, the evacuation rate of each census block with high-level social vulnerability during the whole simulation period tended to be much higher (averaging around 35%) than those under the real-world generic warnings.”
