Winter is over and the weather will be shifting to a summer pattern in the next few weeks. Time to think about thunderstorms and the Skywarn spotting network. The purpose of Anne Arundel County Skywarn Subnet is to feed information on weather conditions to The National Weather Service Office in Sterling, VA. Skywarn observers provide "ground-truth" and supplement the data received from Doppler radar and other tools.
The main Skywarn net will be activated (Bluemont, VA, 2-meter repeater, 147.300+) when severe weather is in the Baltimore-Washington forecast area. The county subnet will be activated only when severe weather is occurring in, or is approaching, Anne Arundel County, so as not to unnecessarily tie up the local repeaters. The subnet will be activated at the request of The National Weather Service, the Northeast Maryland net manager, or by the county coordinator when severe weather is actually present. The role of Skywarn is not to provide forecast products to other amateur operators or the general public. There are better channels of communication that provides that service.
The Davidsonville 2-meter repeater (147.105+) of The Anne Arundel Radio Club has been designated as the primary repeater, with the north county machine, located near Glen Burnie, (147.075+) as the back-up. When the net is activated, the net control operator will establish another station as an alternate net control. The net criteria will then be announced and check-ins will be logged. All operators will be accepted even if they are untrained and/or unregistered Skywarn observers. The National Weather Service values all observations. Observations are then recorded. The net will be handed off to the alternate net control while the primary reports to The National Weather Service. The alternate will take observations and then report, etc.
Reports to The National Weather Service Office in Sterling, VA, are made directly to the Bluemont repeater or by telephone.
Weather conditions should be monitored by net control using either TV or the internet. Once severe weather has moved out of the county, the subnet will be closed. If a watch or warning is still in effect for the county, it will be announced that the net may come up again if conditions warrant.
If there is a concurrent ARES or RACES net, the Skywarn net control will check into that net to make a request for weather, as long as the net is not handling emergency/priority traffic at the time. This will be done as briefly as possible so as not to interfere with emergency net operations.
Contact me (Bill/W3NWS) at w3nwsbox-w3vpr at yahoo.com if you would like to participate.
More information here:
