NWS announces 2025 storm spotter classes around St. Louis

ST. LOUIS - The meteorologists with the National Weather Service have a very important role in generating warnings for dangerous weather, and many tools are used to do this. They analyze Doppler radar, satellite, lightning detection, and most importantly, the ground truth.

"Ground truth is imperative for us throughout our service area, not just far away but nearby, near the office; it's great to have that. As soon as the radar beam goes out, it's already several hundred feet above the surface of the earth, so it's never telling us what's happening at the ground. Only up to 10, 12, and 13,000 feet above it, so it's fantastic to get those reports and a necessary component of our operations," Mark Fuchs with the National Weather Service of St. Louis said.

The NWS relies on trained storm spotters areawide to provide real-time observations of severe weather events from their locations, such as tornadoes, hail, flooding, and winter weather.

"As long as they're old enough to accurately describe what they're seeing and understand what they're seeing, and that's why the storm spotting classes are important. You can see things and think you might understand what's going on, but it really helps to get a thorough training on what they might see and how they might interpret that when describing that to us," Fuchs added.

Storm spotter classes for 2025 are now available for those interested in reporting weather observations to the National Weather Service.

Requirements to become a spotter include signing up for an in-person or virtual course that teaches you about severe weather and how to report that information. 

To become a Certified Storm Spotter, click here.