BACKGROUND

The National Weather Service (NWS) in Indianapolis and its Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma rely upon volunteers to track and report severe weather events. Those volunteers sometimes include licensees in the Amateur Radio Service (ARS). Those licensees make up hundreds of discrete groups of volunteers. NWS cares not whether a licensee is affiliated with a particular group. What they care about is accurate and detailed reports from trained spotters who can provide the critical “eyes on the ground” data not available via radar and computer simulations.

Central Indiana Skywarn, Inc. (CIS) is one such group, made up of many county-specific groups of ARS licensees and their repeater trustees. Their website, W9NWS.org, provides general guidelines for tracking and reporting storm events. Below is their statement, “How do we respond?” which has been standardized since 2012 and applies to the 39 counties of central Indiana covered by the NWS Indianapollis office.

“The Central Indiana SKYWARN Severe Weather Network is activated solely at the request of the Indianapolis NWS Office. Their request for spotter activation is based on information gathered from the Storm Prediction Center as well as local input from the Indianapolis NWS staff. The near real time information spotters provide is an essential piece of the total flow of information the NWS uses to determine whether a severe weather warning is issued. It is vital that the SKYWARN program strive to continuously improve the delivery of information to the NWS. This increase in lead-time will give the general public an opportunity to prepare themselves for the threat of severe weather.

Not every severe weather watch issuance requires network activation. However the Central Indiana SKYWARN Association is alerted to the severe weather potential and the appropriate measures are put into motion to ensure an immediate response if conditions warrant.

Each county in Central Indiana has the authority, and is encouraged, to activate their local county net prior to any request from the NWS. This proactive approach has proven extremely successful in positioning the appropriate resources in preparation of severe weather. It has been proven that developing a severe weather pre-plan can provide that extra few seconds that can make a difference. If there is an active pre-plan in place with adequate support training then it takes less time to manage those resources and therefore the information those spotters develop is available without delay.

In addition, each time a spotter turns in a report this information is not only recorded as a Local Storm Report, to aid in the warning verification process, it is also valuable to researchers. These climatologists, who study the atmosphere and develop tools to predict severe weather, take your reports and apply them to the study of storm structure and development. It is essential that no matter how insignificant the report may seem, when taken as a whole, it could be an important piece of a puzzle researchers need to describe the atmosphere.”

– http://www.w9nws.org/node/5 “How do we respond?” 5/14/2022

Mark Shaffer, N9GDR, President of CIS, summarizes this information thus: “Each county should have their own independent SKYWARN operation and call up protocol. Each county should be prepared to activate whether or not the Storm Prediction Center has issued a large area Watch box. As we have seen many times, local storms can produce severe weather without the entire 39 county warning area being involved. Our Central Indiana SKYWARN operation is only activated by Indy NWS when these larger Watch box products are issued. Each county should be independent, but then if the CIS net is active, they should prepared to send a liaison station to our operation.

CURRENT STATUS

While the Columbus repeater at 146.790 MHz, minus 600 KC offset, CTCSS tone 103.5 Hz has been utilized for several decades as a place where ARS-licensed spotters in adjacent counties collected information and designated a liason station for relay to NWS itself, the advent of the JCARA 442.975 repeater’s link to NWS via the CIS system has reserved the 442.975 system in Scipio as an NWS-Indy-controlled liaison frequency for use by activated groups in Decatur, Jackson, and Jennings counties. This arrangement placed the Columbus/W9ALQ/.79 repeater back into local use status. As always, a severe weather net can be activated by any licensee, regardless of affiliation. For 50 years, the Columbus Amateur Radio Club (CARC) has been consistent in its expectation that on the 146.790 repeater, such activities take precedence over regular Amateur use, both for pre-Warning preparation (a.k.a. “Watch” with a review of resources as appropriate) and for immediate local severe weather tracking and reporting. These activities also include receiving and transmitting cross-county information as a courtesy, such as a heads-up from upwind counties and a heads-up to downwind counties as the tracks of storms progress. It is the obligation of any severe weather net control station (NCS) to remind his or her listeners of these priorities. The purpose is to save lives.