Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Spotters Important To Area

Weather.

Everybody talks about it, but no one does anything about it, as the old saying goes. Then again, there isn't much anyone can do about the weather except live with it.

However, the next three months in Arkansas will be times of severe trials and tribulations where weather is concerned. March, April and May are predominantly the worst months for severe weather during any given year.

Jim Burns, Clark County Office of Emergency Services coordinator, said one of the county's biggest problems weatherwise is its terrain.

Because of the heavy forests, it is hard to see clouds coming. This makes it difficult for weather spotters to see funnel clouds form and possible tornadoes touch down.

Additionally, Burns said Clark County falls outside of the magic 50 mile area the National Weather Service radar covers in Little Rock and Shreveport, La.

"We fall into no man's land with radar returns," he said. "They get good information, but aren't able to see any specifics on radar."

Burns said the Nexrad, for Next Generation Radar, helps some, and will be a big help if a weather radar is placed in Montgomery County, as has been discussed.

"We'd be able to get a better look at this area," he said. "Then we could see better specifics and get advanced warnings with approaching storms."

Still, he said, it will be up to the weather spotters to give the most important and fastest information.

He said there is a good cadre of weather spotters in the northern part of Clark County, but relatively few trained spotters in the southern part of the county.

To help alleviate this situation, Burns will be holding a weather spotter class at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, at Gurdon's City Hall.

"People don't realize you can have all kinds of equipment, but can't beat a pair of human eyes," he said. "If you have a god corps of spotters, you can pick up storms faster than radar."

Burns said he would like to get a satellite system with real time feed for live radar pictures.

Clark County's OES office has access to the Emergency Manager Weather Information Network (EMWIN) on the World Wide Web, along with all the data the National Weather Service provides on the Internet.

However, he said, the satellite system would be an important addition to the OES office.

One such system is the Data Transmission Network or DTN. This system is based in Omaha, Neb. The Omaha office is linked to all weather offices in the U.S. via satellite, and provides real-time information.

In fact, the DTN system is updated every 15 minutes, and offers a computerized menu which will allow subscribers to view literally any weather pattern on earth.

The system has the capability of zooming in on portions of states, which could provide Clark County, if the OES was a subscriber, with almost instant information on severe storms approaching.

This system also shows the storm cells with color coding, just like the television weather segments. The color coding goes from a light green to a dark red for the most severe storms.

The vast majority of Arkansas' weather tracks from southwest to northeast, meaning most of the state's weather patterns come up from Texas and Louisiana.

With a DTN system, Burns and the OES could track a storm from its point of origin, follow its path and see if the county would be hit and where. However, there is no way a tornado can be predicted with any existing weather monitoring system -- including the much-vaunted Doppler radar.

Burns said anyone interested in looking at the NWS's home page, which is dedicated to severe weather, can do so by contacting this e-mail address: HTTP://www.srh.noaa.gov/ftproot/lzk.html.