Weather Spotting

[♠SARKID♠]

I figured I'd post this in the general interest of lifesaving and ES.  Just this night I attended a course to become a trained weather spotter, one of the citizens who make reports to the National Weather Service about severe weather occurrences.  The NWS should have links to classes in your area for those who are interested.  Definitely worth checking out; even if you don't spot, there's some pretty rocking tornado vids and pics in the presentation.

[JoeTomasone]

That depends on your NWS Office, each one trains somewhat differently, usually customized a bit for the predominant severe weather in a given area.   I used to teach the class for the NYC forecast office (KOKX), and it was somewhat different than the one taught here in Tampa. 

CAP is a great target pool of volunteers for SKYWARN, and it makes good sense to get the training since we do a lot of outdoor activities/missions where being "weather smart" makes good sense from a personal perspective.    I taught such a class for CAP once...  To one whole Cadet.  No one else seemed interested.

[_]

Good program.  I've taken the basics I & II classes.  They often do other classes as well like hurricane, winter weather, and flooding classes.

[CASH172]

My entire squadron received the basic training.  It's a nice thing to do one meeting and can be a valuable teaching tool for cadets. 

[RiverAux]

Worthwhile for us, though since CAP members are pretty clustered we probably aren't their main target audience --- I'm assuming that ideally they'd like spotters distributed out all over and probably need more in rural areas than in the medium-sized to large towns where most CAP units are. 

[♠SARKID♠]

Worthwhile for us, though since CAP members are pretty clustered we probably aren't their main target audience --- I'm assuming that ideally they'd like spotters distributed out all over and probably need more in rural areas than in the medium-sized to large towns where most CAP units are. 

They need more spotters everywhere as our instructor put it.  The larger the network of spotters the better.