Section outline

  • Everything before this taught you to see something. This teaches you to say it in a form a forecaster can act on inside two minutes. Six lessons on the national criteria, copied from the source rather than paraphrased, how to find the part your own forecast office decides for itself, and the wording that separates a usable report from a discarded one.

    • Where your report actually goes Page
      Students must
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      Five stages, one of which is preliminary and one of which is permanent, and the documented reasons the archive is not a fair sample of what happened. (25 min)

    • Tornado, funnel, wall cloud, waterspout Page
      Students must
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      The current definition of a tornado, the rule that you do not wait for a funnel to reach the ground, and the moment a waterspout becomes a tornado. (30 min)

    • Hail and wind: the two numbers Page
      Students must
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      One inch and 58 miles an hour, quoted from the notice that set them, and why no course can tell you your own office's reporting threshold. (30 min)

    • Water, tropical, coastal and winter Page
      Students must
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      The water, tropical, coastal and winter categories, what a tropical cyclone asks of a spotter over two days, and the one rule about lightning that surprises people. (30 min)

    • When to report Page
      Students must
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      Occurrence time against reporting time, why a warning already being out is a reason to report rather than not to, and the tag ladder your report can push a storm up. (25 min)

    • How to word it, and where to send it Page
      Students must
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      Seven elements, the location mistake almost everybody makes, three coordinate traps, and which channels exist in 2026. (30 min)