What is Skywarn?
From the National Weather Service
Skywarn is a concept developed in the early 1970s that was intended to promote a cooperative effort between the National Weather Service and communities. The emphisis of the effort is often focused on the storm spotter, an individual who takes a position near their community and reports wind gusts, hail size, rainfall, and cloud formations that could signal a developing tornado. Another part of Skywarn is the receipt and effective distribution of National Weather Service information.

The organization of spotters and the distribution of warning information typically lies with an emergency managment agency within the community. This agency could be a police or fire department, or often is an emergency management/service group (what people might still think of as civil defense groups). In Oklahoma these groups are called Civil Emergency Management Agencies, while in Arkansas they are the Office of Emergency Services.

Skywarn is NOT a club or organization, however, in some areas where emergency management programs do not perform the function, people have organized Skywarn groups that work indepent of a parent government agency and feed valuable information to the National Weather Service. While this provides the radar meteorologist with much needed input, the circuit is not complete if the information does not reach those who can activate sirens or local broadcast systems.

Skywarn spotters are not Storm Chasers. While their functions are similar, the spotter stays close to home, while chasers often cover hundreds of miles a day. The term Storm Chaser covers a wide variety of people. Some are meteorologists doing specific research or are gathering basic information (like video) for training and comparison to radar data. Others chase storms to provide live information for the media, and others simply do it for the thrill.

Storm Spotting and Storm Chasing is dangerous and should not be done with out proper training, experience and equipment. The National Weather Service in Tulsa does not train Storm Chasers, however we do conduct spotter training classes at the request of emergency management agencies and spotter groups.