Volunteered Geographic Information for people-centred severe weather early warning: A literature review

This paper conducted a scoping literature review and explored 29 journal papers published in academic journals and conference proceedings retrieved from EBSCO Discovery and Scopus. The literature review found that VGI plays various roles for severe weather early warning systems (EWSs). The examples from the selected studies show that VGI furthers the development of people-centred EWSs; it brings people, their knowledge, and their experiences into EWSs.

The research reveals that in the always shifting EWSs landscape, a new type of severe weather EWS is emerging that is causing national meteorological and hydrological services and warning services to re-think their traditional warning practices. The World Meteorological Organization is advocating for the aforementioned services to adopt impact-based forecasts and warning systems.

Impact-based forecasts and warnings are meant to shift the focus from the physical hazard phenomena to the risk of impacts produced by the hazard, including communicating impacts in warning messages and building new warning thresholds based on the risk of impact. However, warning services have indicated a limited understanding of, and access to, the data required for developing impact-based forecasting and warning systems.