Abstract
Japan experiences many floods every year, and information on severe weather can be
improved in several ways. However, past researches into severe weather information
indicate that residents tend to wait for information to change and to rely on outside
information too much. Against this background, we propose local weather information
(LWI) as an approach to disaster mitigation. LWI is an approach to enhancing weather risk
awareness between forecasters and users of weather information. The basic concept of
LWI is that residents share disaster risk data obtained from various weather information by
using familiar, plain, and local expressions. The study area for this research is near Miya
River in Ise City, located in central Japan. From the results of a questionnaire to residents
in the study area, LWI increased evacuation likelihood. Moreover, this study introduces
a collaborative framework among relevant groups through LWI, which is identified as
a new social system of severe weather information. This new system creates smoother
risk communication on disasters by connecting the local knowledge of residents with the
expert knowledge of weather forecasters. As a next step, setting of weather conditions
corresponding to LWI and verification of this collaboration will be the subject of future
study.
