Outstanding Publication Award

This work represents an important effort to connect the forecast community that generates high-impact weather warnings, the emergency management community that uses these warnings to determine protective response actions, and the media who deliver the risk, warning, and response action information to the public to save lives and property. In doing so, this effort fully embraces an institutional imperative set forth in the new NCAR Strategic Plan: "Integrate the physical and social sciences to provide meaningful, useable information on the societal impacts of and vulnerabilities to climate change ...and improve the communication of risk and uncertainty to a diverse population." In their article, Demuth et al. outline the complex interactions among components of the United States hurricane warning system and elucidate the challenges in communicating risk through an effective partnership. This paper identifies concepts that researchers may have observed or thought of, and it ties those ideas together in a novel, coherent way of explaining the warning system. The study clearly reveals that collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, and between researchers and practitioners, is needed to understand and improve the translation and communication of weather threats into risk reduction actions.