Start here if this is all new

In plain English, before any of the jargon.

Nothing here assumes you have reported weather before, or that you know a single one of the words the rest of the site uses. Read these four, then open the first lesson. That is the whole on-ramp.

What a spotter is

Somebody who says what they can actually see

Not a meteorologist and not a forecaster. A person on the ground who looks at a storm and reports concrete things: hail on the driveway, a tree across the road, water where the road should be, a funnel over the field. That is the job, and it is smaller than it sounds.

Why it matters

Radar is looking over your head

Weather radar sees a slice of the storm thousands of feet up, and the further you stand from the antenna the higher that slice sits. It cannot see the stone that just hit your car or the water crossing your street. Somebody standing there can, and that gap is the reason the spotter network exists at all.

What this training is

Reading, not a credential

The modules here are informational. WxAlerts is not affiliated with the National Weather Service, and reading them does not make you an NWS trained spotter: official SKYWARN training comes from your local forecast office, and MetEd publishes NWS-aligned courses online.

What it costs

Nothing, and you can read all of it without an account

Every written module is open right now to anybody with a browser. Read as much as you want before deciding whether to sign up for anything.

No experienceModule one starts at what a warning is and who makes it. If that sounds basic, it is meant to.

No equipmentA phone is enough to begin. The course is specific about the few things worth buying later and blunt about the ones that are not.

No chasingNobody here is telling you to drive toward a storm. What happens where you already are counts, and an entire module is about not getting hurt.

No deadlineNothing expires while you read, nothing is scheduled, and no lesson has to be finished before the next one opens.

Begin with lesson one: What radar can't see

30 minutes, free, no account. It is the lesson that explains why a person standing under a storm is worth anything to a forecaster, and the rest of the course follows from it.

Start learning See all 11 modules

The words on this page, in one line eachOpen this first and the rest of the page reads.

Spotter: A person reporting what a storm is doing where they are standing.
Chaser: Somebody who drives to storms on purpose. You do not have to be one to do any of this.
Ground truth: What actually happened at the surface, as opposed to what radar inferred. It is the thing a spotter supplies.
Supercell: A thunderstorm with one rotating updraft that can last hours. The kind behind most strong tornadoes and the biggest hail.
Wall cloud: A lowering hanging under the part of a storm that is drawing air in. One that rotates is worth reporting.
Shelf cloud: The low wedge on the leading edge of a storm. It looks alarming and means wind, not rotation.
Scud: Ragged low cloud drifting near a storm. It does not rotate, and it is the thing most often mistaken for a funnel.
QLCS: A long line of storms rather than one separate cell. Its tornadoes are brief and give almost no warning.
Reflectivity and velocity: The two radar pictures: how much is falling, and how fast it is moving toward or away from the radar. Rotation shows up in the second one.
MESH: Radar guessing the biggest hail in a storm. It is a guess about hail up in the cloud, which is why somebody measuring a stone on the ground still matters.
SKYWARN: The National Weather Service's own volunteer spotter program. It is separate from this site, and only a forecast office can make you SKYWARN-trained.

Inside a lesson you do not need this list. Every term is defined where it appears: hover it, or tap it on a phone.

Ready for the rest? The training page lists all eleven modules, and where official SKYWARN and MetEd training comes from.