The Importance of SKYWARN Spotters and Social Media
Severe Weather Awareness Week
Intro:
When meteorologists cut into regular programming, we can only see the same thing you see on your television. For this reason we rely heavily on spotter reports and footage from several social media platforms to get you the most accurate details as to what is happening on the ground. The radar only tells us what it sees and more often than not, that beam is several thousand feet aloft by the time it reaches the storm, so we have little to nothing telling us what is happening on the ground. We can only make educated guesses based on the scans until we get reports from someone on the ground.
Spotting:
You, the viewer, can help with this if you are interested. SKYWARN offers a free, one-time spotting class that takes about two hours to complete. After the class concludes, you will be considered a certified spotter and will be able to give valuable reports to both the National Weather Service as well as your local news networks. These reports allow us to better warn communities ahead of dangerous weather, thus increasing warning time, which is at an all time high and continues to climb with the technological advancements in the weather field.
In West Tennessee, the Memphis office of the NWS operates their classes on an even-odd year fall-spring schedule. The Spring 2024 plan on their website is to have classes in the following counties: Dyer, Gibson, Henderson, Obion, Shelby, Tipton, and Weakley.
Social Media:
If spotting isn’t for you, then submitting pictures and videos to social media feeds also greatly enhances our ability to help those in the path. Whether that media is Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), or Instagram does not matter. Just be sure to use proper hashtags for your area. For example, in West Tennessee, we would usually use the hashtags #TNwx #WestTennessee #Severe and a hashtag for what type of damage or severe weather you are submitting like #Hail or #Tornado. This makes your reports much easier to find through a search bar, because we are usually searching for reports by what hashtags we’re looking for.
Closing Thoughts:
As a reminder, it is never a good idea to put yourself in harm’s way for a piece of footage. Leave that to professional storm chasers. They have vehicles built to deal with extremely adverse conditions. Please wait until it is safe to take pictures or video before doing so. We appreciate your reports as it helps us keep everyone safe while on-air.
Storm Team 7 Weekend Meteorologist
Jordan Hubbard
