Using Amateur Radio For Storm Spotters

The WX5FWD SKYWARN™ team are volunteer radio operator liaisons for the Fort Worth National Weather Service (NWS) North Texas SKYWARN™ Spotters. During SKYWARN events, you are reporting information to our team and the NWS warning forecasters. Three goals of a storm spotter are to safely observe, identify and report conditions.

Weather spotters provide what's called "ground truth" to the National Weather Service and emergency weather management. Spotters are needed because, while radar is very good at helping the National Weather Service see what's going on in the upper atmosphere, it's unable to detect what's actually happening on the ground because of the curvature of the Earth. Knowing the "ground truth" about a weather event from the location can be the deciding factor to issue a warning.

Using Amateur Radio For Storm Spotters

Submitted by wd5m on Fri, 2021-11-26 20:22

The Storm Spotters Checklist handout provided by the National Weather Service (NWS) includes a sub-section titled "SKYWARN Reporting Methods" www.weather.gov/fwd/skywarn-report. "Amateur Radio: WX5FWD" is at the top of the list.

From time to time we are asked to provide details about using amateur radio for storm spotter activity such as methods,frequencies, repeaters, or local storm spotter groups. The WX5FWD.org web site attempts to provide some of this information on various pages. Hopefully, this brief page will help organize and reference this information.

SKYWARN® Radio Network Conference Guidelines

Submitted by wd5m on Fri, 2021-11-26 20:21

Emergency traffic, tornado activity or weather that is an imminent threat to life and/or property has top priority.

This guideline applies to the Fort Worth NWS SKYWARN® Radio Desk EchoLink and Internet Radio Linking Project (IRLP) conference during SKYWARN® weather events. See the RoIP page for other details on connecting to the conference. See "How to Submit A Report to NWS Fort Worth" for additional sotter reporting information.

SPOTTER reporting with Radio over Internet Protocol (RoIP) Links

Submitted by wd5m on Mon, 2021-08-16 16:20

The Ft. Worth NWS SKYWARN Team operate multiple amateur radio systems, including RoIP systems such as EchoLink IRLP and Allstar. Our RoIP systems are normally dedicated to direct connections with remote SKYWARN spotter radio stations in affected areas during weather events.