Local storm spotters help provide ‘ground truth’ to the National Weather Service — radar may indicate a tornado, but is the tornado ‘on the ground?’ Trained spotters can watch thunderstorms develop and report their observations to the National Weather Service office in Sullivan via amateur radio.

For my fellow weather geeks, here are audio streams of two local storm spotter frequencies:

Midwest Severe Storm Tracking/Response Center

The Midwest Severe Storm Tracking/Response Center (SSTRC) is a large storm spotter group covering Dane, Iowa and Rock counties. The following stream is of Midwest’s Madison (Dane County) repeater (N9BDR, hosted by Token Creek Amateur Radio Society).

MP3 stream (plays in iTunes, VLC, WinAmp): listen.pls

MKX-West Net

The MKX-West net relays information to the National Weather Service office in Sullivan from spotter groups and emergency management agencies in the following nine counties in southern Wisconsin: Columbia, Dane, Green, Green Lake, Iowa, Lafayette, Marquette, Rock and Sauk.

The MKX-West Net is hosted by the Yellow Thunder Amateur Radio Club (YTARC) repeater (WB9FDZ) in Baraboo.

MP3 stream (plays in iTunes, VLC, WinAmp): listen.pls

Troubleshooting

The above streams should play in most modern web browsers, though smartphone browser support is a little more iffy. On smartphones, if the streams won’t play in your browser, the awesome, open-source VLC player can play them and is available for both Android and iOS.