HOULTON – They have satellites, Doppler radar and an assortment of detectors to tell them what the weather might do. But when the National Weather Service wants to know for sure what’s going on, it turns to people.

On Saturday, about a dozen people from the southern Aroostook County area attended a 21/2-hour training session to be weather spotters for the Weather Service Skywarn program.

“Doppler [radar] tells where a storm is located, but it doesn’t let us know where the snow is or how big the hail is,” said Hendricus Lulofs, warning coordination meteorologist for the NWS Forecasting Center at Caribou.

“Weather spotters are the eyes and ears of the weather service,” he said, explaining that the information that spotters provide is referred to as “ground truth,” the visual confirmation of what the electronic instruments think is happening.

About four years ago, when the Caribou Weather Office was expanded to a forecasting center, the center inherited about 100 weather spotters in Aroostook, Hancock, Penobscot, Piscataquis and Washington counties who had served as spotters for the forecasting center in Gray, Lulofs said.

That number since has grown to more than 400, Lulofs said, and he hopes to have 500 in the five-county region by the end of this season.

During Saturday’s session, spotters learned about the different cloud formations associated with thunderstorms as well as lightning, wind, hail, tornadoes, and when and how to report snowfall and other winter storm events.

The spotters also were given basic safety instructions on such topics as flash floods and lightning. Maine has the eighth-highest per capita rate of lightning-related injuries and deaths in the nation, Lulofs said.

Across the country, there are 121 forecasting centers like the one in Caribou. Each one is responsible for issuing weather reports, watches and warnings in a given area.

The accuracy of those warnings is directly dependent on whether someone can verify what is going on. In metropolitan and suburban areas, there are enough people around to do that. It’s harder to get a visual confirmation in rural states such as Maine.

Part of the funding for each forecasting center is directly linked to the accuracy of the warnings that center has issued.

“We could have a very good forecast going, but if we don’t get a report back on the ground truth of the warning information … it gets counted against us,” said Lulofs.

For Aroostook County, the biggest need for spotters is along the Route 11 corridor, especially to the west where few people live, he said.

Although when storms are forecast spotters are expected to be on the lookout for anything unusual, such as freezing rain, hail or high winds, they don’t report information daily to the Caribou center.

“Weather spotting is an event-driven thing,” said Lulofs. “If they happen to be in an area where severe weather is occurring, they have the opportunity to let us know. That’s all we ask.”

Peter Hurd, 67, of Houlton has been a weather spotter since 1997 when the program still was managed out of the forecasting center at Gray. He also serves as area coordinator for ham radio operators in the region who also are spotters.

For Hurd, being a spotter is a continuation of an interest in weather that began more than 45 years ago in college when he majored in meteorology.

“At that time, meteorology was still laborious,” he said of his early studies. “It was still all by hand.”

He decided not to go into the field and instead joined the U.S. Air Force.

When he returned to Houlton in the late 1980s, a friend and fellow ham radio enthusiast reintroduced him to his interest in the weather. When the opportunity came along to be a spotter in 1997, “I just decided it would be worth a try,” he said Saturday.

Hurd said that in the last few years he has seen the interest in the weather spotters program grow.

“It’s becoming more and more recognized as a reliable asset and resource to the National Weather Service,” he said, adding that “it’s easy to do.”

For more information about the Skywarn program and training sessions, contact Lulofs at 496-8931, option 3.