Trusted Spotter Network Austria – a new standard to utilize crowdsourced weather and impact observations

Abstract

Abstract. Information from voluntary storm spotters has been an increasingly important part for the severe weather warning process at the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie and Geodynamik (ZAMG), Austria's National Weather Service, for almost 15 years. In 2010 a collaboration was formalized and an annual training was established to educate voluntary observers into “Trusted Spotters”. The return of this investment is a higher credibility of their observations after these spotters have undergone a basic meteorological training and have become aware of their responsibility. The European Severe Storms Laboratory (ESSL) was included to this collaboration to adopt their successful quality control system of severe weather reports, which is employed in the European Severe Weather Database ESWD. That way, reports from Trusted Spotters automatically obtain a higher quality flag, which enables a faster processing by forecasters on duty for severe weather warnings, when time is a critical issue. The concept of combining training for voluntary storm spotters and a thorough quality management was recognized as a “Best Practice Model” by the European Meteorological Society. We propose to apply this concept also in other European countries and present its advancement into an even broader, pan-European approach. The European Weather Observer app EWOB, recently released by ESSL, provides a novel and easy-to-handle tool to submit weather and respective impact observations. We promote its use to provide better data and information for a further real-time improvement of severe weather warnings.

“What the weather will do” – results of a survey on impact-oriented and impact-based warnings in European NMHSs

“…Especially real-time impactdata to "see what's happening out there" in order to adapt warnings in terms of a feedback loop is considered to be essential for operational meteorologists. Concepts like reporting apps using internationally standardized weather and impact reporting parameters (European Weather Observer; ESSL, 2020a) in combination with quality control through outreach and training via Trusted Spotter Networks (Krennert et al, 2018b) allow to tackle a number of the above listed gaps, while bridging the "last mile" of communication between operational meteorologists and the general public. Further, we recommend bringing together NMHSs and social scientists to work on topics like warning communication or risk perception (e.g.…”

Crowdsourcing of weather observations at national meteorological and hydrological services in Europe

“…The inertia in exploiting such mutually beneficial aspects of collaborations between NMHSs and spotter organizations in Europe is therefore somewhat surprising. We think that the Austrian way could act as a role model for other European countries and present it in a follow-up paper of this issue (Krennert et al, 2018). A further rapid development of crowdsourcing activities in connection with weather and damage observations in Europe is to be expected, and linking training and quality management will enable an even more efficient real-time use of these data.…”

Connecting Warning with Decision and Action: A Partnership of Communicators and Users

“…Elmore et al 2014). Combining the concept of trained storm spotters or 'trusted spotters' with quality management of the data received was rated best practice by the European Meteorological Society (Krennert et al 2018). Where funding is available for a tailored service to a specific business or sector, the opportunities for building a relationship are much greater than for a general public service.…”