EAST SYRACUSE -- CNYcentral partnered with the National Weather Service in Binghamton this past Wednesday evening putting on a SKYWARN severe weather spotter course at East Syracuse – Minoa High School.
Initial indications are this SKYWARN course may have had the largest attendance of any SKYWARN course in the country with well over 150 weather enthusiasts present. This fact alone is somewhat remarkable considering tornado alley locations like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas had smaller attendance than we had!
Attendees were first welcomed by CNYcentral First Alert Chief Meteorologist Wayne Mahar who explained just how important “first hand”, or, what is technically known as “ground truth” weather observations are. Doppler Radar and other sophisticated weather technology are important, but still, nothing beats a trained human weather observer to verify what we are seeing on Triple Doppler Radar and Interactive Doppler Radar.
Erik Heden, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Binghamton, then took over the class and ran the group through a series of severe weather definitions and pictures, answered questions and ended with a severe weather quiz. After completion of the two hour course, everyone received an official Certificate of Achievement as a trained SKYWARN weather observer.
Our CNYcentral TV stations are serious about severe weather, and obviously so are many CNY residents. We and the National Weather Service appreciate the large contingent of people who attended and we are sure, at some point, we’ll be hearing from them reporting in with reports of severe weather.
Remember that if you want to let all of CNY know how bad the weather is or was at your place, you'll want to become a "fan" of CNYcentral on Facebook. We already have dozens and dozens of people on our Facebook site talking about storms and posting their pictures for all to see.
