Summer is here!
At the National Weather Service, we usher in each season with new safety tips and infographics on key weather hazards to keep everyone ahead of any storm. Our 2024 Summer Safety Campaign features warmer weather dangers from heat to rip currents and more.
The summer months around the country usually have a central, core theme - hot and humid conditions. Do you have a plan to combat the intense heat? One of the new infographics for heat involves planning for it - well ahead of time, a few days out and during and after extreme heat.
In addition to the heat safety graphic, NOAA’s NWS has a new experimental color-numeric tool called HeatRisk to plan for the summer heat. HeatRisk takes in consideration NWS forecasts and Center for Disease Control and Prevention heat-health data to identify potentially dangerous heat over the next 7 days.
Are you headed to the beach and one of the great U.S. coastlines? Wave action can change in a moment's notice and one of our new rip current infographics offers advice in helping someone caught in a rip current. Did you know that the yearly average number of rip current fatalities is nearly 75? So be aware and prepared for dangerous rip currents.
So what’s the best way to use this weather safety information to communicate with local or regional communities and the media?
We spoke to National Weather Service Warning Coordination Meteorologists, Lauren Nash, from New Orleans/Baton Rouge, and Brian Garcia, from San Francisco Bay Area/Monterey, to find out how they use the seasonal safety campaign materials to keep their communities informed about summer weather hazards.
How do you use the NWS seasonal safety campaigns?
Lauren: “The best avenue we have with seasonal safety graphics is on social media and our partners and the broadcast media share them on their own perspective sites.”
Brian: “We focus on social media and seasonal briefings with partners to focus on hard hitting weather hazards in the Bay area.”
Do you prioritize outreach about certain hazards based on societal impacts?
Brian: “We focus quite a bit on heat and cold impacts along with flooding and coastal impacts, like rip currents. In fact, our partners ask for infographics in additional languages, given multi-diverse ethnic communities in the Greater San Francisco area.
Lauren: “The New Orleans metropolitan area has relatively large Spanish and Vietnamese communities, so we have been placing an emphasis on these languages and English with certain weather safety campaigns.”
Do media partners use these graphics and any media engagement with the safety graphics/campaigns?
Lauren: “Our newspapers in southeast Louisiana and online news outlets definitely use the safety graphics, and we are trying to encourage other media in the area to use and share them, especially with heat.”
Brian: “Yes, a lot. From small newspapers to the San Francisco Chronicle, the safety infographics are used quite frequently. Even television meteorologists have placed them in their online stories.”
As Lauren and Brian mentioned, we have so many wonderful multicultural and diverse areas throughout the U.S. and the NWS is proud to promote an additional set of weather safety infographics in five more languages - Spanish, Chinese, Samoan, Vietnamese, and French, that are available now or coming soon.
The National Weather Service provides seasonal weather safety campaign materials to support the efforts of TV meteorologists and others as they engage their communities to be more weather aware.
Our campaign infographics provide a quick snapshot of the recommended steps people can take to increase their resilience to summer weather hazards. We invite you to share them on social media and incorporate them into community outreach efforts!
Resources:
Media Contact: Michael Musher, NOAA Communications, michael.musher@noaa.gov
