By Emely Albelo
For the News-Gazette
Hurricane season can be a hectic time to keep updated on potential storms, supplies, escape routes, and shelter locations. Do you want a better way to be in the loop with the latest changes?
National Weather Service meteorologists across the state of Florida have teamed up before the peak of hurricane season to review recommended tropical readiness, preparedness, response, and recovery actions.
These webinars start July 29 and end Aug. 1, and the NWS will offer four virtual training sessions daily that anyone can attend as long as you have access to a mobile device or computer and register in advance.
The virtual classes will be one hour long and begin at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 7 p.m., and 9 p.m. Eastern time.
“The huge goal with this is to try and make this information that we’re teaching during this week available to anyone in the general public,” said National Weather Service of Jacksonville Senior and Incident Meteorologist Angela Enyedi.
National Weather Service of Tallahassee’s Warning Coordinator and Meteorologist Mark Wool said there four daily sessions with 30 to 40 minutes of useful hurricane preparation information will be held that that can house a capacity of 1,000 people each session and be accessible through any mobile device or computer.
“This will be the first time we are doing something like this,” said Wool. “I’m pretty excited about this.”
Enyedi said the first webinar will go over monitoring the tropics, identifying available tools from the Hurricane Center and local weather service office and talks about seasonal readiness, day two will talk about getting ready for potential impact and graph identifying, day three will go over sheltering and hunkering down, and day four will go over recovery.
“It’s going to be a jam packed week but hopefully full of meaningful and applicable information,” said Enyedi. “We do a lot of great science stuff, but a lot of the products can be hard to interpret, so that’s why we’re doing this.”
Enyedi explained that the several offices that helped to make this webinar happen were the National Weather services of Mobile Alabama, the Florida western panhandle, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Tampa Bay, Melbourne, Miami, and Key West.
Wool said the idea for this webinar came from a cancelled meeting during the pandemic.
“We put something similar together for our core partners like emergency managers and television media during the conference, but it got cancelled,” said Wool.
It was during that cancellation that Enyedi thought if they had ever done a big push to try and train the public and collectively come together and realized the answer was no, she proposed an idea for a virtual webinar to do just that. And with the help of her colleges throughout the NWS, she created the website that would serve the public in keeping informed about this hurricane season.
Wool said they will have two presenters per session and two people available to answer chat and questions during the presentation. He said they will try to anticipate answers ahead of time to maintain an interactive chat throughout the presentations.
“A lot of folks are out of school and focused on vacations and having fun and relaxing and we just want folks to really maintain a sense of tropical readiness as much as possible before we reach the peak of hurricane season,” said Enyedi.
To read more information about the webinar and register, go to their website at: https://www.weather.gov/jax/FloridaTropicalTrainingWeek2024
