Storm Spotting A Lifelong Dream For Hugo Man
Volunteers Are Eyes And Ears Of Weather Service
HUGO - When severe weather strikes, Matt Todd is one of dozens of volunteers around the Metro area who picks up a radio and calls in his observations.
The Hugo resident serves on the frontline of a hidden network of Skywarn storm spotters - individuals who are trained to detect the telltale signs of weather events which could prove deadly. These volunteers are the ground army of the National Weather Service.
"It's kind of like we're the eyes on the ground for the weather service," explained Todd, who lives on 158th Street in Hugo.
Photo by Louise Edwards
"The radar can be fooled; I would say we [play] a fairly important role."
Undeterred by cystic fibrosis, which was diagnosed when he was just three months old, Todd has been storm spotting for Metro Skywarn for three years now, and will call in weather events including hail, funnel clouds, wall clouds, tornados, flooding and high wind damage.
The calls all help the National Weather Service determine whether to issue or increase the level of any warnings, enabling communities in the path of any storm system to better prepare for when it hits.
The closest Todd has ever come to devastating severe weather is, of course, the May 25 tornado in Hugo. "I was at a White Bear Historical Society event in White Bear Township," he said.
"I was keeping an eye on the system for them. Then the fire department kicked us out from the event and told us to go home because of the storms.
"[Driving back to Hugo] I kept hearing reports of wall clouds up this way.
"I was going to sit at the [Oneka] school out there, because it's a pretty good vantage point.
"I got to the parking lot, and I could see there were two houses that were missing, so I thought I had better come home to check on our two dogs."
That was when it started to hail, golf ball-sized hail, and so Todd got on his radio to call in the hail and the house debris he could see in his back yard.
He doesn't believe anyone called in to report seeing the Hugo tornado, and is amazed that for an F3 tornado, there are reportedly no good pictures or video footage captured.
Storm spotting dates back more than 100 years in origin to 1849, when weather observers were employed by the Smithsonian Institute.
It wasn't until 1884 that tornado forecasts first began, according to the Metro Skywarn Web site, although the use of the word "tornado" was avoided up until 1938 in the belief that it would cause panic and fear among the public.
Skywarn itself was only gradually formed aft er a series of 51 tornados ripped through the Midwest on Palm Sunday, 1965, in which 256 people were killed.
For Todd, both his amateur radio operation (he has a technician's class license) and storm spotting are the realization of interests dating from his childhood. He still recalls Christmas as a 10-yearold, when he asked his parents for a short wave radio. He says "the radio thing" runs in his family: his grandparents and parents possessed and listened to scanners and now Todd and his wife, Nichole, do the same.
"I've always had an interest in radios," he refl ected. "I don't know why; it's romanticism, maybehearing and contacting people from far away."
Anyone can become a Skywarn volunteer. Training sessions are held across the Metro area every spring, although the last such event for this year was held on June 14.
Throughout the three-to four-hour class, people are educated on the warning signs of a tornado, what to call in and report, and what not to report.
"They tell you to watch it for a while before you report it," explained Todd, adding that another Skywarn rule is to use standard sized objects when reporting hail, such as peas, golf balls, baseballs or coins, and not, as he and his wife recently heard, a comparison to marbles, "because marbles can be diff erent sizes."
But amateur radio isn't all about the classes and studying, as Todd found when he was working as a pizza delivery worker in White Bear Lake and Mahtomedi.
He hooked up his radio to his GPS, and linked them in to a Web site to allow his wife and mom to "watch" him as he went about his route.
Devastating as the Hugo tornado was, it's thanks in part to Todd and the countless other Skywarn volunteers like him that it wasn't far, far worse.
"What I and others do as spotters is much diff erent that the storm chasers you see on TV and the movies," added Todd.
"Storm chasers set out to find the storm for the purposes of research or excitement or in self interest or whatever else. "However, storm spotters such as myself generally do not go and seek out the storm.
"Rather, we report the conditions at our current location. I think that the goal of storm spotting is more to provide a public service than to seek entertainment or excitement."
If you are interested in signing up for a Skywarn class next year to learn about the warning signs of severe weather, log on to the Metro Skywarn website at www.metroskywarn.org.