The Lucknow Sentinel, 2016-06-01, Page 16EACH
MONTH,
16 Lucknow Sentinel • Wednesday, June 1, 2016
CANWARN trains storm watchers to keep eye on the sky during severe weather season
Darryl Coote
Reporter
Would-be storm
received an education in severe
storms Tuesday so they can keep a
trained eye on the sky come this
year's severe weather season.
Environment Canada held its
CANWARN storm spotter training
session May 17 in Kincardine's Bruce
Power Visitors' Centre arming nearly
100 people with the knowledge to
spot potentially dangerous weather
before it hits and causes damage.
Geoff Coulson, the warning pre-
paredness meteorologist at Environ-
ment Canada, gave the storm spot-
ters a two-hour presentation on the
anatomy, frequency and terminol-
ogy of severe storms so they can relay
credible, real-time information to the
ministry.
"It's getting more people to be the
eyes and ears of Environment Canada,
giving us credible reports -- and really,
the key is credible because in our soci-
ety right now I can get a lot of reports,
but I have to do a lot of legwork to fig-
ure out are they real," he said.
With social media Coulson said he is
inundated with questionable weather
updates from the public, but when the
report comes from a registered CAN -
WARN -trained storm spotter the infor-
mation is greatly more reliable.
"If we're getting it from someone
watchers
who is CANWARN trained, these are
people who have given a couple hours
of their life on an evening or a weekend
to come out and get the training ...
There's already built in credibility, he
said.
While the program boasts of over
6,000 spotters in Ontario, Coulson
said there are still "gap areas," such as
east of Lake Huron, which many
severe storms cross coming from the
west.
He has seen the number of storm
watchers increase here since the
Goderich tornado of 2011, but the
more people here with eyes on the
sky the better.
It is important to have more peo-
ple here looking at the sky, he said,
because the Lake Huron shoreline
has an "excellent vantage point" to
see storms develop over the water. It
will also be the first place those
storms make landfall, as was the case
with the Goderich tornado that
resulted in one death and over $100
million in damages.
A better understanding of what
storms are doing near the Lake
Huron shoreline, the better that
helps the forecasters at the weather
centre, he said.
CANWARN will be holding train-
ing sessions in northwestern and
northeastern Ontario upcoming to
the severe weather season that runs
from June to August.
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CANWARN _ Storm Spottei training
The Eyes and Ears of Environment Canada
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Darryl Coote/Reporter
Environment Canada's warning preparedness meteorologist Geoff Coulson educates 97 would-be storm watchers in the
finer points of severe weather formations so as to keep the ministry up to date with real-time weather reports.
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