Warning! The use of meteorological information during a<br />flash-flood warning process

Consultable en ligne : http://www.adv-sci-res.net/3/99/2009/asr-3-99-2009.pdfInternational audienceWarning is a key issue to reduce flash floods impacts. But, despite many studies, local and nationalauthorities still struggle to issue good flash floods warnings. We will argue that this failure results from aclassical approach of warnings, based on a strict separation between the assessment world and the actionworld. We will go further than the previous criticisms (Pielke and Carbone, 2002) and show that forecasters,decision makers, emergency services and local population have quite similar practices during a flash-floodwarning. Focusing on the use of meteorological information in the warning process, our case study shows thatmore research about the real practices of stakeholders would be another step towards integrated studies