Carl Cash, a Powhatan resident, volunteers with SKYWARN to learn how to report hazardous weather in his community. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Carl Cash loves inclement weather — the more severe the better. While most people are generally OK with sunshine, Cash wants quarter-sized hail, whiteout blizzards or biblical-style flooding.
In severe weather, Cash gets on his ham radio and reports to the National Weather Service to keep people safe, informed and alert to any potential for personal or property damage. He’s a spotter for SKYWARN, a nationwide network of 350,000 volunteers — several hundred of whom have been trained in the Richmond area — who help the government organization collect information on fast-changing weather conditions and report them to the public.
As with many citizen science efforts nationwide, the program enables civilians to play a key role in major scientific undertakings. “We offer training on the ground to know what severe weather is and how to report it safely to the weather service so that we can use that information in our warnings.” says Eric Seymour, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Wakefield branch.
Seymour helps conduct the trainings, which are held about a dozen times a year and average 10 to 75 attendees. The lessons, which require registration via the NWS website, include in-person and virtual sessions.
“Part of the training goes over what we want the spotter to report,” Seymour explains, which includes general damage and storm types, as well as specifics like wind speed and hail size, if possible. “We tell [our spotters] that if they are unsure if they should reach out to us, then to do it. A short call, email or social media post could help us to decide on whether to issue a warning or not.”
“The National Weather Service [forecasters are] in their office, and they look at the radar, and they know it’s going to be raining, snowing or windy,” says Cash, a volunteer with SKYWARN since 2016, “but they don’t really know how bad it’s going to be, and they don’t really know what it’s like on the ground in their coverage area. The SKYWARN spotters are their boots on the ground, the people who actually visualize the weather and report it back, ... and that helps them formulate their warnings and watches and their advisories.”
Cash got involved with SKYWARN as a member of Chesterfield County’s Community Emergency Response Team program, a network of FEMA-affiliated disaster preparedness volunteers. Programs like SKYWARN, Seymour notes, are affiliated with CERTs to round out response crews to catch a potential disaster situation before it happens and prepare accordingly.
Fortunately for all involved in Cash’s career as a volunteer, he has yet to experience severe enough weather to report, though he’s glad he knows what to look out for. “I think everyone should take a SKYWARN class, just so they know what dangerous weather is and how you spot it,” he says. “The more aware and knowledgeable we are, the safer we can be.”
