Code Neon Blue!

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

What you sometimes need is Weather SPOTTERS.

Weather Spotters are volunteers who attend a training session given by a National Weather Service person and then report back to their area headquarters with certain requested weather info, like large hail, rotating wall clouds, or winds strong enough to cause damage.

The reason volunteers are needed to do this is because the Earth is not flat.

In my region, SE Colorado, the NOAA radar is located in Pueblo. Radar beams shoot out in a straight line. So readings close to Pueblo show the lower atmosphere. But once the beams are zooming over MY house in Lamar, they are reading the sky about two miles up, which is not usually where the weathery action is.

The network of trained Weather Spotters provides live-time info that can verify computer forecasts or even help the main office decide whether to issue weather warnings to the general public.

This year was the seventh consecutive training for me and my son Mike. A tornado touched down here in Lamar in 2001, 7/10 of a mile from our front porch. We could see it real good. After that, any irregularly shaped cloud made Mike nervous. When the training was offered the next year, I signed us both up, thinking it would help him feel more secure if he could judge between scary clouds and plain ones on his own. (And it did help!)

This is Tom from Pueblo, who has been GIVING the trainings in SE Colorado for, well, I can say seven years for sure. Probably longer than that. In this film clip he explains why EXACTLY houses explode when tornados hit them.

I took that as practice, by the way. Since I intend to be doing more video blogging, especially at the upcoming conventions, I think I should get experience with filming and editing and uploading and such as often as I can.

There are still a few trainings being held in this region, which you can find on THIS PAGE. You can also take the training ONLINE. They are especially “looking for volunteers outside of large towns anywhere in our area, in remote mountain locations, in the San Luis Valley, and in Chaffee and Lake counties.”

If you like weather, you’ll like doing this!