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Weather spotter classes being offered

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5:50 PM Monday, March 15, 2010

By Tom Stafford

Staff Writer

SPRINGFIELD — When spring storms blow across southwest Ohio, radar provides the National Weather Service Forecast Center in Wilmington with images of what’s happening up to 50,000 feet aloft.

What it doesn’t do, said meteorologist Brian Coniglioli, is provide “ground truth.”

To get that, the Weather Service relies on Skywarn spotters, who are being trained through April at classes offered in the center’s territory from Northern Kentucky to Bellefontaine and Wapakoneta to southeast Indiana.

“We like to have training at this time of year so everybody has (it) fresh in their minds when we get the (spring) thunderstorms,” Coniglioli said.

Although radar remains “a very important tool,” he explained, “what’s happening in the clouds is not always the same as what’s on the ground.”

Spotters “help us to correlate what’s on the radar with what’s going on, he said. “In our area, we have around 3,000 trained spotters.”

In training, he said, “we basically teach them what a severe thunderstorm is” — a storm that generates winds of 58 mph or more and could damage trees and buildings.

Spotters are asked to report hail that’s 1 inch or larger in diameter and of course, tornadoes. Part of the class deals with the difference between a funnel cloud that’s not touching the ground and a tornado that is and between a wall cloud and a shelf cloud.

The training also helps spotters distinguish between a rain shaft descending from a cloud and a funnel cloud. (“You have to be able to see the rotation,” Coniglioli said.)

A primer in storm spotting, which also deals with flooding, is available on the center’s Web site at www.erh.noaa.gov/iln/spotterguide/spotterguide.html.

Coniglioli underscored one of the points: a storm spotter is not a storm chaser.

“We don’t want anyone to get injured while they’re trying to help us,” he said. Driving into storms is dangerous.

Spotters instead relay the information from their homes to the Center by e-mail, toll-free phone lines or Ham radio. Meteorologists then sift through it.

“We still have to evaluate the reports,” Coniglioli said.

Although it’s obviously nice to have spotters spread over a wide area, “we take as many as we can get,” Coniglioli said.

There’s no such thing as too much ground truth.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.

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