Severe weather season has arrived. While your 5NEWS weather team is busy tracking storms on radar, it is crucial to have eyes and ears in the field. Que storm spotters. We drove the Adventure Subaru to a national weather service storm spotting class in Fayetteville to show you what a session looks like.
“Storm Spotters are important because radar is always going to have limitations, and spotter information compliments radar information,” said Ed Calianese, National Weather Service.
“Hopefully people learned a lot of severe storms that they didn’t know before and they learn more about the structure of severe storms, how the processes that produces the clouds looks like and why does it look like that,” said Calianese.
Not everything is a tornado and it’s crucial that storm reports are as accurate as possible.
“Hopefully you’re going to have less bad reports or false reports of scary looking clouds that really aren’t very meaningful, or the wrong part of the storm that don’t really show tornado processes,” said Calianese. “The more people that show up to these, the better off we all are.”
Several community members attend these popular classes, as well as law enforcement and emergency managers. University of Arkansas police officers become storm spotters too, in case severe weather aims towards old main.
“We’ve had situations in the past where it’s been our officers who have actually spotted the weather and the clouds prior to any warning being issued, so we want to make sure know what to look for and what they’re looking at when they see it,” said Calianese.
With Adventure Arkansas and spotting the storms Where You Live, I’m 5NEWS Meteorologist Matt Standridge.
Segment Sponsored By: Adventure Subaru