Skywarn

[kubandalum]

You’ve probably seen videos of tornadoes, on tv or on YouTube, made by storm chasers who travel across the Midwest chasing storms. Those storm chasers are not the same as tornado spotters. When such severe weather is possible, the eyes in the field for the National Weather Service are provided by trained, local, volunteer ham radio operators of the Skywarn Network. The following link has a good description of Skywarn:

https://www.weather.gov/tae/taeskywarn

Back in the ‘90s I had a ham radio license, and I attended a couple of the Skywarn training sessions taught by NWS meteorologists. (I let my license lapse since then.) There are several such classes posted on YouTube. This one is typical — about 2 hours long:



For local communications ham operators use VHF and UHF radios and repeaters. Repeaters are radios that receive signals on one frequency and retransmit them on another frequency. Normally, repeaters are set up in one of the taller buildings in an area, so that someone with a handheld or mobile radio can talk to someone 20 or 30 or more miles away. If you’d like to listen to them on a radio scanner, most of the repeaters used for Skywarn are in the 144-148 MHz band. You can Google frequencies for local areas. (Example: Skywarn repeater Douglas Co Ks)

When I lived in the DFW area in the ‘90s, one of the local tv meteorologists was a ham operator, and he talked to spotters in the field.

[ChalkRocker]

Thanks for the intro, kba. Very interesting post.

[Deleted User 89]

^^^^^^^^^