Gainesville — Emergency officials gave the public a crash course in severe weather-spotting during Wednesday’s seminar coordinated by the National Weather Service (NWS).

Cooke County Emergency Management Coordinator Ray Fletcher and NWS Fort Worth meteorologist Dan Huckaby led a packed Gainesville Civic Center audience through a multimedia checklist of various storm and tornado patterns.

Fletcher said the purpose of the seminar was to help the public know what they’re seeing when nature frenzies.

The education could allow them to keep experts notified.

“We can multiply and have people scattered throughout the county and all the different areas who can see the weather and call us up and do a whole lot more than scream, ‘Oh my gosh!’” Fletcher said. “How much better that we get a really good report.”

Huckaby told the audience his NWS office covers 46 counties — all susceptible to floods, high winds and “supercells,” defined as thunderstorms with persistent cyclone rotations that can become tornadoes. Supercells have special characteristics, such as a duration of more than 30 minutes, a beaver-shaped tail and an absence of rain at the base. Intense storms with durations longer than a half-hour, Huckaby said, are almost guaranteed to become more dangerous.

Only 10 to 15 percent of supercells that form, however, produce bonafide tornadoes. Huckaby admitted that if the NWS issued a tornado warning based on every supercell in the forecast, the public would suffer a massive false alarm rate. He cited a series of 10 wind funnels throughout north Texas in April that belonged to the same storm system responsible for a severe, destructive tornado in Tuscaloosa County, Ala.

But many of those funnels were mistaken for tornado-grade supercells more powerful than they were, and this was due to a lack of information about storm features.

“We had some wind damage but no tornadoes,” Huckaby said, adding that during a storm, NWS radar can’t detect the ground-level storm traits that an informed spotter can see up close. “As storm spotters, you not only help us but the entire community as a result.”

Huckaby emphasized that aside from making safety the first priority, spotters should declare what they see in the sky rather than what they presume from radar reports. He led the audience through a long catalogue of storm features and facts. This included a tip that in order to qualify as a tornado, a funnel has to actually touch the ground; otherwise it is a funnel cloud.

He also defined a “downburst,” which is a strong downdraft wind, also known as a “straight-line” wind, that does ground damage. Downbursts can be large or small, and they do account for most of the storm wind damage in Texas, but shouldn’t be mistaken for tornadoes.

And Huckaby discussed the clear difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning. A “watch” should indicate that conditions are still favorable, while a “warning” indicates a storm that presents an actual imminent threat.

“Not every day does it rain, not every day that it rains do we have thunderstorms, and not every day that we have thunderstorms are they severe,” Huckaby said. “What we try to do as meteorologists is try to figure out, ‘Is this a day with potential for a particular type of hazardous weather?’”

Fletcher later told the audience county officials are organizing a HAM radio group of local storm spotters through a radio licensing class set for Feb. 25-26 at the Cooke County Emergency Management Office at 301 S. Chestnut St. in Gainesville.

Through radio communication, licensed residents can keep people alert for sudden storms. Fletcher explained that severe storms typically include lightning, which can lead to fires that occupy emergency teams while other problem areas go undetected.

“We need to make sure we’ve got quality reporting,” he said.

More information about storm spotting is available at www.nws.noaa.gov/skywarn/.

For more information about the HAM radio class, call (940) 668-5400.