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Pueblo, CO

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Information We Need from You to Become a Weather Spotter for WFO Pueblo

If you are interested in becoming a VOLUNTEER weather spotter for WFO Pueblo, and live in south central and southeast Colorado, we would be interested in talking with you. The National Weather Service in Pueblo has over 1500 volunteer weather spotters across its area of responsibility. Over 300 of those are within the city limits of Colorado Springs. If you have wind equipment and a VERY, VERY strong interest in weather, we would still encourage you to volunteer if you live in Colorado Springs. We are specifically looking for volunteers outside of large towns anywhere in our area, in remote mountain locations, in the San Luis Valley, and in Chaffee and Lake counties.

 

 A weather spotter's job during the cold months is generally to relay snowfall amounts, freezing precipitation occurrences, high wind events, and dense fog reports. Little training is required to relay this information; a yardstick and a good pair of eyes.

 During the warm season, it can get a bit more involved. Between 80 and 90 percent of the thunderstorms for which we issue warnings have large hail and heavy rain ONLY. Your tools to report back to us would be an inexpensive rain gauge (highly recommended, but not necessary), and a device to measure hail diameter (ruler, or our nifty hail card). When thunderstorms develop into high wind producers and even tornadoes, specific training is necessary to report these events to WFO Pueblo. There are specific cloud structures and clues around thunderstorms that indicate high winds and tornadic development. If you are interested in reporting this type of information to us, it is highly recommended that you attend, in person, a SKYWARN Spotter Training Meeting in your area.

 

In the meantime, take on-line SKYWARN Training...

 

A condensed version of "in person" SKYWARN training is on this web site.  A few words on this training. The slide shows are in PowerPoint format. If you do not have Microsoft PowerPoint you can still do the training by downloading PowerPoint viewer (it's free of charge). We cannot provide a "hot" link to the download website, so you can either:

The presentation is split up into three separate parts, to facilitate break times for you. Each part will probably take you between 30 minutes and 45 minutes to complete. Especially when viewing the presentation with a slower internet connection, some of the images will take a little time to load up. We suggest, you read the notes below the slide before the image loads, so as not to take up any more of you time than need be. We tried to make this presentation with MPEG movies, but the loading speeds of the movies was too slow given the current technology and bandwidth.

 

After studying the material in the SKYWARN weather spotter training, you may take a 25 question quiz by clicking here. If you score 88% or better (you can miss three questions), we will send you a wallet sized SKYWARN Spotter Card with your name on it.

Below are the links to the presentation.

In summary, you can still be a spotter for us by just reporting snow amounts, freezing precipitation, high wind events, dense fog, hail diameter, and rainfall amounts. It's up to you! Please fill out the form below if you want further information on becoming a VOLUNTEER weather spotter for WFO Pueblo. The following information is requested so that we can provide you with additional information about Pueblo's SKYWARN Spotter program. Submission of the information is voluntary, however, without it we cannot provide you with the requested materials. You may also request the SKYWARN information by phone at (719) 948-3371 (Pueblo), (719) 573-6846 (Colorado Springs), or (719) 589-3232 (Alamosa), or email us at pubnws@noaa.gov. Regardless, after we correspond back to you, we will send you a packet of information to get you started. Thanks!

 

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