Using Twitter to receive storm reports

The Twitter micro-blogging platform has proven to be a useful tool for Meteorologists to get their message out to a weather-hungry public. Through Twitter, media outlets are able to interact directly with their viewers. But now, the National Weather Service is proposing a new program that will allow television stations to leverage their vast army of loyal viewers into mobile weather observers. For the past several months, the National Weather Service has tested a pilot project in which amateur (and some professional) weather observers will tweet their significant weather conditions to Twitter. The National Weather Service is proposing a set hashtag search word that mobile tweeters could insert in their tweets. This hashtag will allow media outlets (as well as the National Weather Service) to pull out the tweets from the twitter database for use in weather reporting and ground truth verification. It is hoped that with the assistance of literally thousands and thousands of on-the-spot weather observers, significant weather reports can be readily made available to the National Weather Service and Broadcast Media for use in warning verification and up-to-the-second weather updates.