volunteer weather spotters
おはようございます。日本でもウェザーニューズ社（旧オーシャンルーツ）がウェザーレポーターとして、民間人（laypeople）からの情報を収集し活用しています。レポーターよりspotterの方が英語らしいですね（spot "to notice someone or something, especially when they are difficult to see or recognize"--LDOCE）。Skywarn Spottersか、覚えておきます。（GP）
New York Today: Weather People
On Tuesday, the National Weather Service tweeted, “Eeek!”
The message appeared on Twitter at 8:50 p.m., as another round of thunderstorms hit Long Island.
It continued: “Lots of rumbles and cloud to ground lightning here at the office! Yes, we stayed indoors!!”
The tweet came from the National Weather Service office in Upton, N.Y.
For up-to-the-minute information on severe weather, like the kind we’ve had this week, meteorologists at that office rely on reports from 1,600 volunteer weather spotters across the region.
Lauren Nash, a meteorologist, explained.
The spotters — who are laypeople — call in from the Lower Hudson Valley, Southern Connecticut, Northern New Jersey, Long Island and New York.
Officially, they are known as Skywarn Spotters.
To earn the title, they attend a training session on severe weather and learn skills “like how to tell between a wall cloud and a funnel cloud,”
Ms. Nash said.
Along with a Spotter ID, they are given “a special phone number that only spotters have” to reach the National Weather Service.
During this storm, spotters reported flooding , and lots of lightning, like in Belmar, N.J., where there were 4,000 strikes in an hour.
(It was Ms. Nash, incidentally, who posted the unusual tweet. She said she was “just letting people know we had a thunderstorm.”)
