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 01

Role of the spotter & the warning system

Where your report enters the warning decision, and where it does not. Seven lessons on what radar cannot see, who else is standing under the storm, how a warning is built and read, and what happens to a report after you make it.

Start lesson 01

Lessons7

Reading timeabout 3 hrs

Objectives29

The lessons

Take them in order, or don't

01What radar can't seeRadar has known blind spots. This lesson gives you the numbers for them, so you can tell when your eyes are the only instrument with the answer.Field contextRadar can't see everything. This lesson shows exactly what it misses, with numbers.30 min 02Spotters, chasers, and what "trained" meansThree kinds of people stand under the same storm with three different sets of obligations. Which one you are changes what a forecast office does with your call.Field contextAddresses the chaser ecosystem directly instead of pretending it doesn't exist.20 min 03How we got here: 1884 to presentMost of the rules in this course were written after something went wrong. The timeline is the short version of why the warning system has its current shape, and why spotters are still in it.Field contextCovers the history of spotting and warnings, which is what explains why the system works the way it does.25 min 04The forecast-to-warning chainSix acronyms issue nearly everything you will act on, and they do not do the same job. Knowing which office owns which product tells you who your report is for and when it is worth making.25 min 05Reading a warning like a meteorologistA warning is a structured document, not a paragraph. Read the structure and you can see which parts came from radar, which came from a person, and which line your own report would land on.Field contextThis is the lesson where spotters learn that their report can change the warning text.30 min 06Dissemination and its gapsA warning that nobody receives is a file on a server. This lesson follows the product out of the office and finds the places it stops.20 min 07What happens after you reportYour report does not stop at the forecast office. It scores the warning, enters the national record, and becomes part of the climatology the next generation of forecasts is built on.Field contextFollows the report past "call it in", all the way to the climatological record.30 min

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