Flipping the calendar over to April means that storm season is upon us! Exciting! I have always been fascinated by weather, especially so by storms. Weather is so complex and organic and… awesome. I wrote about the coming of storm season last year and thought I would do the same this year.
Bonus Fun Fact: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offers virtual online classes about storm spotting. I highly encourage anyone interested in storms and meteorology to check them out. They are super interesting!
The class is for instructing storm spotters on what to look for when severe weather is approaching and relay that information to weather services so they can ground truth what is seen by radar. While you might not be a storm spotter (yet), the information presented in the class is applicable if you’re chasing tornadoes with combines falling out of the sky (that’s a Twister reference) or sitting in your backyard with an adult beverage watching the clouds roll in.
I took a storm spotting class from the Omaha NOAA office last spring and it was great. That’s what caused me to gush about shelf clouds, wall clouds, and the like last year. My mind was blown by the amount of cool that I experienced from the class. I’m looking forward to retaking the class this year as a refresher, and then taking the advanced storm spotting class a few days later. If you’re into these things, check out the classes.
The local NOAA offices all put on their own virtual classes each spring, so there are plenty to choose from. The class materials are the same, just presented by different folks. Here are links to the storm spotting class schedules for our region. Check them out! It’s a couple hours well spent.
If you end up taking one of the classes, please let me know. I’d love to hear about it! Be safe out there and learn lots!
Jason E. Andersen 
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