Basic Spotters Guide

At a glance..

This guide has been designed to assist the storm spotter in the important task of observing and reporting hazardous weather and protecting yourself during your encounters with hostile weather situations.

The details..

'Severe local storms occur in all parts of the continental United States in an average year.' The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has compiled this field guide as a supplement to their SKYWARN spotter training film and slide series for storm spotters across America. This book provides technical concepts that are applicable to both fixed and mobile spotters who receive or relay reports on severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, flash floods, among other hazards.

This guide also includes safety tips primarily geared towards mobile spotters but can be useful for any type of spotter observing hostile weather situations. It contains definitions and terminology used by NOAA's National Weather Service such as watch versus warning criteria for different types of severe weather events like hail size greater than three-quarters inch diameter or larger; wind speed greater than fifty-eight miles per hour; funnel cloud; rotating wall cloud; downburst with damaging winds near the ground level; rainfall one inch or more per hour among others.

Spotters should adhere strictly to these reporting criteria since some information is much more important than others when communicating vital data during urgent priority events like tornados, funnel clouds or flash flooding which require immediate attention from authorities so they can issue warnings quickly enough before it becomes too late.

Finally, this book recommends reliable sources where point/mobile spotters could obtain hazardous weather information such as amateur radio networks stationed at NWS offices providing meteorological data via radios/EMWIN systems coming online nationwide allowing access critical NWS products directly from GOES satellites.