That interest multiplies when she knows the stakes are high – when her fellow firefighters are responding to emergencies.
“When the guys are out on calls is when I worry,” she said.
By the end of the class Thursday evening – part of a program to train the public on reporting potentially dangerous weather – Shaffer had learned about the difference between a funnel cloud and a tornado, how to categorize winds or how to use everyday objects to easily estimate the diameter of hail.
Most important, she learned how to help the National Weather Service improve its reporting with live, on-the-ground weather events, organizers said.
An “army” of trained volunteers – about 3,000 in the state’s central regions – are important supplements to the sophisticated equipment in Centre County for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service office in State College, class instructor Peter Jung, warning coordination meteorologist for the office, told the group of about 40 people who gathered at the Somerset County HazMat building in Friedens.
“A volunteer group of trained public citizens provides a supplement to our equipment and provides real-time ground truth reports,” he said. “All of our remote sensing pieces of equipment are great tools, but none of them give us a complete picture.”
A doppler radar indicates spinning movements of a storm, it can’t actually detect when a tornado is on the ground, for example.
“Think about what a radar is doing,” he said. “It’s not sampling what’s happening right at ground level. That’s where Skywarn spotters come in. Your observations are really pretty critical for our operations.”
The class covered basics of thunderstorm development, identifying severe weather features, reporting severe weather – and what should be reported – and basic severe weather safety.
Having trained Skywarn Spotters in the county is a requirement for Somerset County to remain a certified “storm-ready” county through the National Weather Service.
To be considered storm-ready, according to the service, a community has to have a 24-hour warning point, have more than one way to receive severe weather warnings and forecasts and it has to create a system to monitor weather locally, among other requirements.
Joel Landis, training officer for the Somerset County Emergency Services Department, said the county has participated since around 2004.
Jung said that’s a good sign.
“It shows an effort on the county’s part, that they’re doing the most they can,” he said.
County Emergency Management Director Rick Lohr said the spotter program originally was aimed at amateur radio operators – who also can play an important role in emergency responses – but the idea is to make it available to more people.
“The National Weather Service is always looking for good informations and good resources,” he said. “The more accurate information we have, the safer we are in an event.”
The reports from trained volunteers also can play a role in landing emergency declarations. When the county recently was found eligible for a presidential emergency declaration as result of Winter Storm Jonas, snowfall tallies weren’t in question. That’s thanks, in part, to those kinds of volunteers, Lohr said.
“It’s everybody working together,” he said.
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