NOAA's National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office

The SKYWARN program at National Weather Service Forecast Office (WFO) Romeoville/Chicago consists of spotters who watch the sky during threatening weather conditions. The spotters are emergency management, fire and police personnel, amateur radio operators and trained citizens. They report severe weather such as tornadoes, flash floods and large hail to the WFO by radio or phone.

Our amateur radio program consists of amateur radio operators (Hams) who come to the WFO during severe weather and work the radios. They are the National Weather Service Ham Team. The Ham Team communicates with other amateur radio operators who run local networks of storm spotters across north central and northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana . The Ham Team then passes severe weather information from the spotter networks to the meteorologists.

We have an amateur radio station and communicate on most of the amateur radio bands. We operate in the 70 cm Band and 2 meter Band most of the time. The Ham Team use 70 cm and 2 meter “liaison” repeaters for receiving weather information. Emergency managers and local spotter network control operators may relay severe weather information via these liaison repeaters to the Ham Team, who work along side the meteorologists monitoring radar and issuing warnings. Individual amateur radio spotters are encouraged to join a local spotters net in their county.

Use of radio communication is the preferred way of getting information to the NWS. However, the Ham Team will use Echolink as well.  Our Station call sign is WX9LOT.   

From time to time, the Ham Team will transmit information about the weather situation on the liaison repeater. This information, from a meteorologist, would be about weather affecting any of the 23 counties in the WFO Chicago warning area. For example, information may be the direction and speed of thunderstorms producing very heavy rainfall or large hail.  

The Repeaters we use are the following:

There are backup repeaters. 

We would use this repeater only if we need an additional repeater.

This repeater is a backup to the DuPage Radio club repeater.

The criteria for choosing a liaison repeater are the following:

1. The trustee must be in agreement of the use of the repeater for severe weather operations.
2. The repeater must have reasonably wide coverage in north central and northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana. 
3. The repeater must have backup power and be well maintained. 

SkyWarn Recognition Day was developed in 1999 by the National Weather Service and the American Radio Relay League. It celebrates the contributions that volunteer SkyWarn spotters and Amateur Radio Operators (Hams) make to the National Weather Service for public safety. Spotters, using radio in the Amateur Radio frequencies report severe weather such as flash floods, tornadoes and damaging wind to local county network control radio operators. Then the reports are relayed by radio to the National Weather Service Office here in Romeoville . The meteorologists use these reports in preparing warnings for Illinois and Indiana .

 The statistics have been completed for Skywarn Recognition Day, December  1, 2007. During the 24 hours , twenty one Ham Operators made the following contacts;

128 contacts on the 80 meter band
328 contacts on 40 and 20 meter band
39 contacts on 2 meter and 70 centimeter band
42 contacts on echolink

That is a total of 537 radio contacts.  We made contacts to  47 states, except for  Nevada, Idaho and Hawaii. We contacted three Canadian provinces.   We look forward to Skywarn Recognition Day in 2008.