Posted 12:57 am Sunday, January 15, 2012
When Weather Is Wild, Ham Radio Gets Through
By TIM MONZINGO
Staff Writer
In 1994, Don Simonton was sitting in his home in Mansfield, south of Dallas, listening to emergency broadcast traffic on a scanner, a favorite hobby.
Staff Writer
In 1994, Don Simonton was sitting in his home in Mansfield, south of Dallas, listening to emergency broadcast traffic on a scanner, a favorite hobby.
That night, he heard people calling in reports of tornadoes touching down to the east of Fort Worth. One of those tornadoes would become a raging F-4 that devastated a north Texas city, just more than 30 miles from where Simonton made his home.
"I heard several spotters reporting locations and it just kind of lifted and went over us, but touched down in Grand Prairie," Simonton said. "And then it touched down in Cedar Hill. And then it touched down in Lancaster, and downtown Lancaster was obliterated. That's when I said, 'I've got to get involved in this.'"
At 9:37 p.m. April 24, 1994, Lancaster was rocked by a tornado that demolished more than 500 buildings, injured 40 and killed three.
Shortly after, Simonton, who now lives in Swan Lake, got involved in amateur radio, also known as ham radio. Around the same time, he got involved with SKYWARN, a national effort developed by the National Weather Service to serve as eyes on the ground and report what multimillion dollar satellites in orbit could not.
Fifteen years ago, shortly after moving to Tyler, Simonton was asked to organize a Smith County SKYWARN net, which today, has almost 50 members and grows each month, he said.
"I've been involved in it ever since," he said.
From The Porch
Tyler sits 132 miles east of the National Weather Service office in Dallas, the general direction from which most severe weather comes. The city is about 91 miles away from the Shreveport office, which monitors and releases weather data for 48 counties and parishes in Northeast Texas, north Louisiana, southwest Arkansas, and southeast Oklahoma.
Because Tyler and Smith County sit almost perfectly in the middle of the two offices, weather watchers fill a niche that technology can't.
The data recorded by satellites over Smith County at the Shreveport office comes in from around 5,000 feet above ground, said Gaylen Gage, a Tyler resident, ham radio enthusiast and storm watcher. Meteorologists with the weather service can monitor what a system looks like well above the ground, but satellites can't penetrate the cloud cover.
"That's just the limitations of the technology," said Keith Stellman, the warning coordinator at the weather service office in Shreveport. "There may be small-scale things that are happening in a storm that we can't see with the way technology is."
The radars take what amounts to a snapshot of the atmosphere every 5 minutes as they rotate, he said. In the gaps between images, storm watchers can provide vital information with real-time applications.
"They (the weather service) see cloud formations and whatnot, but what's really going on the ground? That's really where these guys take over," said radio-club president Bob Jackson about the weather watchers and radio operators. "They're willing to ask what is going on on the ground. Can you see this?"
When a weather system with potential to get dangerous moves into the area, the weather service issues an alert aimed at storm watchers and radio operators: "Activation of emergency managers, SKYWARN networks and amateur radio personnel may be needed."
That's when Gage and Simonton know to get ready.
The pair works together in a radio and alert group called a net.
With that notice, Gage contacts Simonton, who gets in touch with weather watchers stationed around the county. They're on the lookout for extreme conditions and certain patterns or events the weather service thinks might come out of the storm system.
Gage and Simonton use their ham radios to stay in touch with each other and the watchers. Anywhere from 20 to 50 watchers stationed throughout the county relay information to Simonton, who passes the most relevant information to Gage. From there, the data is sent to Shreveport.
The weather service logs that data and uses it to issue detailed warnings and information on hazardous weather -- such as floods, tornadoes and hail -- and logs it.
Being a weather watcher isn't about getting close to the action like a storm chaser does. The difference is something SKYWARN operators are adamant about -- they aren't asking people to risk life and limb to get this data.
In fact, weather watchers are rarely, if ever, asked to leave their porches or yards to do their work. In his 12 years of being a watcher, Gage said that only once has he been asked to go out and check on a report.
"Storm chasers chase for various reasons," Stellman said. "Some do it for fun; some do it as their livelihood."
Watchers are trained to observe weather on the ground, such as hail sizes, or funnel clouds and fronts that might produce a tornado, for example. The criteria for reportable information is dictated by the National Weather Service and taught in special training sessions to potential watchers, who receive a certificate qualifying them as trained reporters.
"If somebody doesn't have that (certificate), we don't listen to them," Simonton said.
Jackson said the criteria taught in the training courses are important in filtering out the most important information to be relayed and recorded.
"After being trained, you can look at one of these things and know which way it's going," he says of storms and systems. "That's the basics of storm spotting."
Signals, Storms
Jackson called storm-watching a perfect "marriage" for amateur radio operators.
"Part of amateur radio's tenants is public service," he says. "In this part of the country, being as far north as we are from coast, public interest includes serious weather."
The radio club works with volunteer fire departments, local police departments and sheriff's offices and national organizations in a variety of capacities, he said.
Part of the reason their work is so diverse and used by so many agencies is the exact nature of how amateur radio operates.
"There's a slogan in amateur radio about public service that goes, 'When all else fails, HAM radio gets through," Jackson said.
The radios operate on UHF, VHF and HF frequencies (ultra-high, very high, and high frequencies respectively), much like the FM radio in a car.
In Smith County, a 350-foot tower acts as a repeater linking all the radio operators in the area and providing them with a greater range than the radios alone would - up to 50 extra miles beyond what handheld and home-based radio systems. The tower's location is kept secret to avoid vandalism.
Gage owns a small handheld radio that he can receive and send transmissions for up to 18 hours on battery power alone.
That kind of mobility and connectivity means watchers can stay in touch even in the worst weather conditions when power and phone lines are down.
When tornadoes were touching down in the county last spring, Jackson and his wife, Elaine, hunkered down in their bathroom with a small radio to keep in touch with the latest developments.
"It's almost like walkie-talkies, it's that fast, and much more reliable," he said. "Almost all (amateur radio operators) have at least a weather alert radio."
Many watchers use ham radios in league with complex home-based weather stations to keep accurate data flowing into the weather service.
Stellman said at just about every National Weather Service location in the country, amateur radio operators are integral parts of responding when the skies turn dark. In many cases, offices will call in operators to monitor the flow of information and keep in touch with watchers during emergencies.
Learning To Look
On Thursday, Stellman and members of the radio club will be at the Shiloh Road Church of Christ, at 1801 Shiloh Road, in Tyler.
In a two-hour course that's free to the public, interested people can get the training necessary to become a storm watcher.
During the course, Stellman will explain the data of interest to the weather service such as specific hail sizes -- which can indicate the potential strength and severity of a storm system -- safety tips for when bad weather hits, and how to identify and predict movements of phenomena like tornadoes and cloud masses.
That data goes into more detailed storm warnings, which emergency responders rely on to know where and how they need to respond to a situation. It's even used by independent bodies, such as insurance companies, which use the information to approve or deny claims on hail damage, flooding and the like, Stellman said.
The payout is participation in a nationwide program that encompasses thousands of watchers, mostly east of the Rocky Mountains, across the county, he says.
"It's enormous," he said of participation in the program. "The bang for the buck is we're getting these reports in from the field from weather enthusiast, responders and amateur radio folks."
Though he wouldn't speculate on just how extensive the SKYWARN program has become since it began in the 1970s, he estimated between 400 and 600 people are trained annually to be watchers.
Stellman said Simonton's story about the Lancaster tornado in 1994 is what it usually takes to get a person involved in the program -- some severe event hitting close to home.
The Tyler Amateur Radio Club hosts a training session each year, and Jackson estimated attendance is between 50 and 70 people at each one.
Being a storm watcher is very much about a personal interest in the weather and public service. As "unpaid employees" of the weather service, Gage said that's important to remember.
Jackson said a person need not be an amateur radio operator or rocket scientist to join SKYWARN.
"Ask yourself this: What other thing in your life that you have absolutely no control over could ruin your day? The weather," he said. "When it really gets bad out there, you need to be interested in it."
The basic training offered at SKYWARN courses is enough to get a watcher started, enough to teach what to look for. The longer a person watches, the more they learn and the better they get, Simonton said.
There's also an inherent appreciation of nature, Jackson said, and the powerful forces that drive it.
"Anybody can look at a cloud, but when you know what you're looking at, it means a lot more to you," he said.
