The introduction to severe weather spotting came not in a classroom for Heather Asbell, but in a truck driven by her boyfriend, Jordan Hamilton, that was being pummeled by golf-ball-sized hail.

"It being my first time out it was scary," said Asbell, from Carthage. "I thought for sure we were going to get caught out in it, get hurt or not be able to get back in our vehicle because I was damaged or something like that. But it was interesting to see the weather and hear him providing the information for the National Weather Service."

That experience about two years ago was one of the most exciting for Hamilton in his three-year spotting career.

"Personally, so far since I've been spotting, I've never seen a tornado touch down," Hamilton, also from Carthage, said. "I've seen them drop out of the sky, but never touch down. About two years ago me and my girlfriend Heather were spotting a storm, probably in November, and we were going south of Carthage on 71 The National Weather Service was on the repeater with us and they said they didn't have a lot of observers between here and Springfield, so they wanted to know if I could follow the storm. I followed it and we ran into probably golf ball sized hail as we were going at 70 miles an hour down the highway. I just knew I was going to lose a windshield that day."

The two spent their afternoon on Thursday taking a refresher course on severe weather in anticipation of the spring season, coming up almost any time now.

The months of March through June are busy times for meteorologists and weather spotters alike as Tornado Alley earns its nickname, and some of that nasty weather spills out into Southwest Missouri.

Doug Cramer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Springfield, taught two severe weather spotter classes on Thursday at the Joplin City Hall building.
Keith Stammer, Jasper County Emergency Management Director, said 85 people attended the afternoon session.

"I think there is a common misconception out there that the National Weather Service radar can see a tornado," Cramer said. "That's not necessarily the case, we can see a storm that's rotating, we can see the mid-level rotation and the upper-level rotation and a lot of times, those storms that rotate form the tornadoes, but in order to actually know if a tornado is forming from a storm, we need a spotter, a trained spotter that knows what to look at and can tell is that the tornado is forming, exactly where that tornado is forming, and how it's moving."

Hamilton said he got interested with the movie Twister, which dramatized a story about two scientific tornado spotter teams working in Oklahoma.

"I was probably 11 or 12 when the movie Twister came out, and I've got a scanner at the house, and as a kid, I used to listen to the fire department call in the weather reports. Then I ran across the amateur radio frequency and I heard their conversations back and forth. I had heard of amateur radio but I didn't really know what they did, so I got on the Internet and looked and saw that there was the Skywarn network that was pretty active in Jasper County so I went and took my HAM test four years ago and I've been doing it ever since."

Hamilton said he works around Carthage and the city's location makes for some of the most difficult and dangerous weather spotting.

"One of the hardest things around here is that the majority of the severe weather hits at night," Hamilton said. "You're at the mercy of your radar and what you can see in the lightning flashes and hear."

"We'll be in the truck and it'll be dark at night and you'll see these flashes and the lightning will strike and you'll be going oh wall cloud," Asbell added.

Cramer said his goal is to teach the spotters storm structure, and show them what hazards to look for in specific kinds of storms, where exactly to look for those hazards and how to communicate what they're seeing to the National Weather Service.

"Spotters give us all kinds of specifics," Cramer said. "Some guys actually have weather stations on their cars and they can give us dew point, depressions, wind speed and direction and those are all environmental clues that tell us what kinds of environments we're dealing with. There are some types of environments that are just not conducive for tornadoes, and there are some kinds of environments that are. We get good stuff from these spotters we have a good network here in Jasper County and they know what they're doing."