What your report becomes

What module 7 already covered

Module 7 lesson 1 owns the lifecycle and this lesson assumes it: the five stages from you to the national archive, the fact that a Local Storm Report is preliminary while Storm DataThe official national archive of significant weather events and their impacts, published by NOAA and built largely from local storm reports. It is the source almost every long-term severe weather statistic comes from. is the certified record, the fields an LSRLocal Storm ReportA forecast office's published record of what was reported, where, when and by whom, usually within minutes. NWS Instruction 10-517 is explicit that LSRs are preliminary; the certified record is Storm Data. carries, and the measured or estimated tag. Go back to it if any of that is hazy.

What module 7 did not do is open up the source field, and that is this lesson, because it is where the whole idea of a trained spotter turns into something mechanical.

A credibility ranking, written into the format

Every report carries a source, chosen from a fixed national list. It is not a courtesy field. A forecaster reading two conflicting reports uses it to decide which to act on, and the list is ordered in their head even though it is alphabetical on the page.

Two things that are not sources

Which is a useful test for any report you relay: the source is the human being who observed it, not the last link in the chain. Lesson 4 returns to this, because a relayed report that records the relayer as the source has lost the only thing that made it worth relaying.

What your report can change, while it is still running

Module 7 lesson 5 gave the reasons to report during an active warning. Here is the mechanism, which is more concrete than people expect.

1. A new or upgraded warning. A severe thunderstorm warningSevere weather is happening or about to happen for the people inside a drawn polygon. Issued by the local forecast office. It means act now. becomes a tornado warning on the strength of an observation. The office does not need to wait for radar to agree.
2. A severe weather statementThe follow-up product that updates a warning already running. It can narrow the area, extend the time, or carry a spotter confirmation out to everybody inside the polygon.. The follow-up product that updates a running warning: it can narrow the area, extend the time, or carry your confirmation out to everybody already inside the polygonThe shape a warning is drawn on, replacing whole-county warnings in 2007. Being inside the shape is what matters, not which county you are in..
3. A damage threat tag. Module 7 lesson 5 had the ladder. A measured hail size can move a storm onto the rung that reaches phones.
4. A storm survey. After the fact, and your report is often what tells the office there is something to go and look at.

Remarks

The last field, and the one people waste. It takes a few hundred characters of plain English and it is where everything the fixed fields cannot hold goes: what the damage actually looked like, that the size was measured with calipers, that the water was still rising when you left, that the report came via a relay.

Write it in full sentences for somebody reading it in five years with no context, because that is who reads it. Module 7 lesson 1 explained that Storm Data is the version that still exists in thirty years. The remarks are the only part of it that sounds like a person was there.