WARREN - Emily Wells has kept her eyes on the sky most of her life.
Where some people scope out the clouds looking for animals, people or cartoon characters, Wells looks for clues to help her determine whether danger is brewing on the horizon.
"I don't look at the clouds and see puffy white shapes or anything," the Warren woman explained last week. "I look to see if there's an updraft or if a cloud is holding water. I look to see whether it could turn into something to worry about."
Wells and her husband, Gale, are part of Trumbull County SKYWARN team - a network of local storm spotters who watch the sky and report what they see to the National Weather Service in Cleveland.
Often, when Mother Nature acts up, NWS representatives dispatch local storm spotters to check out a situation and report on weather conditions. The information the local SKYWARN volunteers provide to the NWS can be passed on to the public by way of storm watches or warnings.
"I like to call (storm watchers) our reality check," explained Gary Garnet, a warning coordinator meteorologist at the NWS Cleveland branch. "They let us know what's really happening right then and there. They can see it, and they tell us what's going on."
SKYWARN was developed to coordinate efforts between the NWS and local communities. The program offers free classes each spring for individuals interested in becoming storm spotters. They report wind gusts, hail size, rainfall and cloud formations that could signal a developing tornado. They also provide information after a storm including photographs and eyewitness accounts. Spotters are volunteers.
Many spotters, like the Wells, are also amateur radio operators and communicate with Cleveland that way. But a spotter also can use a telephone to relay information to the NWS.
"What's nice about being an amateur radio operator is that you can communicate even when you've lost other ways to communicate," Gale Wells explained. "You might lose cell service, your phone lines might go down. But you still have your radio."
Garnet trains local SKYWARN volunteers to be "weather-wise" and recognize what's going on around them.
Like many area natives, Garnet's passion for weather watching was sparked by the tornado that hit Trumbull County on May 31, 1985. Garnet, a Fowler native, was at his high school graduation at Mathews High School when word of the twister spread through the community.
"It was amazing," he said. "It sparked my interest in weather, and that's really why I pursued a career in meteorology. It was incredible, devastating, but incredible."
That tornado left a lasting impression on many of the area's volunteer storm watchers, including Gale Wales, who serves as Trumbull County emergency coordinator for SKYWARN. He said he remembers much of the aftermath of the 1985 storm as if it happened yesterday.
"I had never seen such devastation," he commented. "I haven't since."
The Warren man, who has been spotting storms for more than 10 years, often gets word of a condition of concern, hops in his truck and journeys to the hot spot.
"I've had some scares," he said. "One time I was in a cloudburst and the wind actually moved my pickup truck."
While Gale Wells is out spotting the storms, Emily Wells often remains at home serving as a network control operator, dispatching the spotters, taking reports from them and relaying information to Cleveland and back to the spotters.
"You let Cleveland know what's going on in the local sky or on the ground," she said. "They can let people know if there's something coming their way, if they need to take cover."
Garnet explained that the spotters verify what could be happening based on what the radar picture suggests. They can help the NWS change a watch, in which conditions are favorable for tornadoes, severe thunderstorms or flash floods, into a warning.