Gary Woodall with the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Memphis came to Lee County to conduct the training.
Volunteer weather spotters play an important role in helping the NWS monitor emergency weather conditions, Woodall said.
According to Woodall, a number of “tremendous” electronic tools including Doppler radar, weather satellites and computer work stations help the NWS track and monitor storms.
However, despite the power of these tools, spotters provide information that can’t be obtained any other way.
“Those electronic tools still do not tell us everything that is going on with a thunderstorm,” said Woodall. “Spotters can see visual cloud features and cloud structures associated with the storm, and they can provide information that might be happening around the storm.”
During the 2014 tornado that struck Tupelo, Woodall said spotters provided vital information.
“We could see on radar that it was a significant storm that was moving in and certainly that we had rotation and the potential for a tornado,” Woodall said. “The spotter reports were helpful in confirming some of that.”
Lee County Emergency Management Director Lee Bowdry offered a similar explanation of a spotter’s value.
“Say that there’s rotation within a storm and the National Weather Service knows where it’s at,” Bowdry said. “If there’s spotters in an area, they can tell if a storm has actually touched down or not.”
There are approximately 75 spotters in Lee County, Woodall estimated. Spotters must attend a training course every two years.
The Tuesday evening training was open to new residents interested in spotting, current spotters, or simply members of the public interested in learning new information.
New spotters have to attend a training session and fill out an information sheet.
During the Tuesday training, Woodall talked about visual and environmental clues produced by different kinds of thunderstorms as well as storms that might mimic tornadic conditions without ever producing a tornado.
Bowdry and Woodall estimated that about 30 people attended the Tuesday training.
The NWS conducts training in the spring and the fall every year and typically conducts training in Lee County every spring, Woodall said.
The training sessions are free and open to the public.
Two more upcoming sessions will take place in the Northeast Mississippi region, one on April 4 in Corinth and one on April 5 in Amory.
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