The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
The eyes know best
Meteorologists rely more on weather spotters on the ground than technology during severe weather
With all the technology available to meteorologists today, their most important monitoring tool during times of severe weather isn’t their equipment, it’s the eyes of their weather spotters on the ground.
The National Weather Service’s Cleveland Forecast Office located on the grounds of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport has a set of surface tools and instruments such as an anemometer that sits 10 meters above the ground
to measure windspeed, a temperature sensor, Doppler radar and a ceilometer that actually will look at the base layer of the clouds up to about 12,000 feet.
In addition to those tools, most of the seven airports in region have weather observers that can augment the automated systems and send in information about what is happening at their locations at least every hour and even more frequently if weather patterns are changing, according to NWS meteorologist Nick Greenawalt.
“They will send us updated information and updated observations,” Greenawalt said. “This is kind of the most crucial thing, actually knowing what is happening on the ground.
“We rely a lot on that along with this data,” he added. “During severe weather we can see what is happening with storms with all this technology but actually knowing what is happening on the ground is important.”
The National Weather Service network of trained weather spotters are emergency managers, first responders and private citizens who attend trainings offered in each county. The
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series looking at how science, technology and human knowledge and intuition combine to forecast weather in Northeast Ohio.
training, which is typically offered in the spring, instructs the spotters on how to identify severe weather and how to report that information back.
“Knowing that information is crucial because there are limitations on what this technology can do,” Greenawalt said. “The farther out you go from where the radar is the harder it is to accurately predict.
During a recent interview with Greenawalt at the Cleveland Forecast Center, he pointed out showers were being picked up by radar on the computer screen that were happening over Findlay that day. He said the radar beam for that area hits at about 11,000 feet above ground so that the meteorologist were not capable of seeing anything occurring below 11,000 feet.
Greenawalt considers weather spotters to be the most important process in predicting and forecasting severe weather.
“If something is happening underneath a thunderstorm out here (Findlay) we might not be able to see it on radar,” he said. “We can tell that the thunderstorm
is growing and that the thunderstorm is strong and that it has some type of rotation with it if it’s a rotating thunderstorm. We know a lot about the environment that we can predict that conditions are favorable for a tornado development based on what we are seeing with the winds temperature and weather pattern. But until we actually know for sure that there is something happening under there, there is still the element of the unknown.”
It is the goal of the National Weather Service and their meteorologists to be as accurate as possible in
getting the information out and not issue a bunch of warnings if it turns out to really be no threat.
It’s not always possible for meteorologists even with their equipment to know a funnel cloud touched down under a storm.
“Again it just depends on how far away from the radar the storm is. So, it all comes back to having eyes in that area,” he said. “The most important thing we do is every spring season is go out and train our weather spotters and we try to recruit as many weather spotters as possible.”
The weather spotters
know cloud formations to look for and the correct terminology, what to expect when there are certain types of thunderstorms, and the hazards associated with those storms. Most importantly, they know how to get that information into the meteorologists as quickly as possible.
“That really helps us in making a warning decision and having confidence in putting out the most accurate forecast,” Greenawalt said. “We want to be able to tell people that they need to take shelter to protect themselves when they absolutely have to but our goal is to do that accurately.”
He said the National Weather Service is aware that if every time someone gets a storm warning and they take shelter but then nothing happens then people start ignoring it.
“We want to know what is going on and sometimes we just have to make a quick decision based on our knowledge of meteorology, our knowledge of what we are looking at and the conditions,” Greenawalt said. “What we do as well with our spotters is we try to get information after the fact as well to try to verify if there was damage with the storm.”