SAGINAW, Mich. (WNEM) – March 17th kicks off Severe Weather Awareness week in Michigan.

In Mid-Michigan, the Thomas Township Fire Department is partnering with the Saginaw County Emergency Manager and National Weather Service to host a Skywarn training class, completely free and open to the public.

“In the past years, we’ve dealt with severe weather at least a couple times a year, whether it’s the strong winds events or severe thunderstorms, tornado warnings or even with the winter weather,” said Brandon Rossi, Assistant Fire Chief at the Thomas Township Fire Department.

You might be wondering what does Skywarn storm spotting, or Skywarn, even mean. To learn more, we asked Rich Pollman, lead meteorologist at the Detroit National Weather Service office.

“We use the Skywarn spotters for a lot of different ways to help our warning operations,” said Pollman. “The Skywarn spotter will help us determine what is happening at the ground. Maybe we get a spotter report in Saginaw County, yeah we already have a warning out, but that spotter report gives us the confidence to issue the warning to Tuscola County.”

He adds the training is open to all ages, especially if you have an interest in weather and want to help report severe events.

“In the Skywarn training, we’re going to cover a little bit of what happened last year across Southeast Michigan with our severe weather, some weather safety, formation of storms, some of the characteristics to look for, whether it’s the shelf cloud or the wall cloud that may lead to different types of severe weather,” Pollmand said. “And then, we’ll also talk about how to report that information to the national weather service so we can get those accurate and timely warnings.”

Speaking of weather safety, Thomas Township Assistant Fire Chief Brandon Rossi gave us some tips on what to do if you find yourself in danger of an event like a tornado.

“The best thing is to prepare,” Rossi said. “Just like fire drills in schools, you want to do drills in your home. You also want to do a severe weather drill in your home. You know, it could be during dinner, you say hey, there’s a tornado warning. What do we do? Everybody goes to the basement. If you don’t have a basement, you go to the most interior room of your house, which could be a bathroom, it could be a closet, anything without a lot of windows is where you want to be and at the lowest level that you possibly can be. Having a standby generator is a great thing to make sure that you can still have heat in your house and your refrigerator still works and you still have food, but also having stocks of non-perishable foods that you can eat is going to be huge—no matter what the weather event is going to be.”

Rossia says the goal of this week is all about making sure people are prepared and educated.

“To know what warning means versus what a watch means and what advisories mean and that way you know what’s coming your way so you can be prepared,” said Rossi.

You can attend the Skywarn training on Thursday, Mar. 21 at seven p.m.

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