 "Photo: Chris Kominczak")
Bad weather seems to find Austin storm spotter Jim Finney at the most inopportune times. Lightning struck his sailboat's mast on two separate outings, and softball-sized hail pelted his car while at a farm east of Dallas.
To most people, Finney has terrible luck. However, in the eyes of storm spotters, he is fortunate: He has witnessed severe weather up close.
"It's a humbling experience," Finney said.
Weather enthusiasts like Finney gathered Saturday at UT's J.J. Pickle Research Campus for the 18th annual SKYWARN Severe Weather Spotter Training Session. The training was free and open to the general public but aimed at public safety professionals, media representatives and amateur ham radio operators.
Trained spotters are indispensable to weather reporting, said Troy Kimmel, a chief meteorologist and UT senior lecturer in geography. Kimmel was the session chairperson.
Trainees learned to tell the difference between a funnel cloud and a tornado, how to estimate the distance to a storm and what to do in a flash flood. Several attendees won door prizes like rain gauges, umbrellas and escape hammers, which help passengers exit cars during a flash flood.
Keynote speaker Kevin Kloesel, assistant dean of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, advised spotters to always have 91 cents in their pockets: A half dollar, a quarter, a nickel, a penny and a dime. The coins help spotters accurately report hail measurements.
Ham radio operators represented a large proportion of the 250 who attended. Ham radio is important to weather reporting because operators are part of a wide, reliable communication network. When the weather starts to look bad, ham radio operators broadcast the conditions they see. Local media outlets listen to ham radio broadcasts to stay on top of developing weather.
Storm chasers from the Texas Severe Storms Intercept team also attended the training. Their mission is to put warnings out faster by reporting severe weather as it happens.
"Chasers will go out and meet the weather, run along with it. We do our own forecasting and give reports as we go," said Jeff Draper, a Volente firefighter and storm chaser.
Chase team member Shane Hale said storm chasers are often firefighters.
"You're crazy to run into a burning house; you're crazy to run into a tornado," Hale said.
Draper's black SUV is equipped with a ham radio, a scanner, a video camera, a GPS with street-level mapping, firefighting gear, cones, maps, a first aid kit and live radar that comes in over a cellular signal. He said he typically puts 60,000 to 80,000 miles on his chase truck every year.
"You can run 1,000 miles in a day," he said. "This is my fourth chase truck."
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