WxAlerts is not affiliated with the National Weather Service. This training is informational and does not confer NWS Trained Spotter status. Official SKYWARN certification is issued by your local NWS forecast office.

Module 07

What, when & how to report

Everything before this taught you to see something. This teaches you to say it in a form a forecaster can act on inside two minutes. Six lessons on the national criteria, copied from the source rather than paraphrased, how to find the part your own forecast office decides for itself, and the wording that separates a usable report from a discarded one.

Start lesson 01

Lessons6

Reading timeabout 3 hrs

Objectives24

The lessons

Take them in order, or don't

01Where your report actually goesFive stages, one of which is preliminary and one of which is permanent, and the documented reasons the archive is not a fair sample of what happened.Reporting detailFollows one report from your mouth to the national archive and shows you the two places it can be changed, which is why the wording you choose outlives the storm.25 min 02Tornado, funnel, wall cloud, waterspoutThe current definition of a tornado, the rule that you do not wait for a funnel to reach the ground, and the moment a waterspout becomes a tornado.Reporting detailModules 3 and 4 taught you to identify these. This is the narrower question of which of them you pick up the phone for, which has a different and much shorter answer.30 min 03Hail and wind: the two numbersOne inch and 58 miles an hour, quoted from the notice that set them, and why no course can tell you your own office's reporting threshold.Reporting detailModule 5 taught you to estimate these. This is the narrower question of which values cross a line, and it is the lesson that corrects the most widely repeated wrong number in spotting.30 min 04Water, tropical, coastal and winterThe water, tropical, coastal and winter categories, what a tropical cyclone asks of a spotter over two days, and the one rule about lightning that surprises people.Reporting detailCovers the categories on your office's list you have never used, because the rare hazard is the badly reported one everywhere.30 min 05When to reportOccurrence time against reporting time, why a warning already being out is a reason to report rather than not to, and the tag ladder your report can push a storm up.Reporting detail"Report right away" is the rule. This covers the three cases where it is not the answer, including the one where your report is worth more a week later than it was that night.25 min 06How to word it, and where to send itSeven elements, the location mistake almost everybody makes, three coordinate traps, and which channels exist in 2026.Reporting detailThe lesson that turns everything in this course into two sentences a forecaster can act on without asking you a single follow-up question.30 min

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