Feb 12 Winter Weather Event in Savannah

Well a good swath of Georgia got some sleet and snow this evening. We got about half an inch in parts of Savannah with some of the inland counties getting as much as 2.5 inches. Once the rain started turning into sleet and then snow, a number of amateur radio operators and Skywarn weather spotters gathered on our local ARES designated repeater to deliver weather reports to pass on to the National Weather Service in Charleston. NWS Charleston has responsibility for twelve Coastal Georgia counties and really depend on weather spotters to provide real time weather updates. We established communications with the NWS Charleston office amateur radio station WX4CHS first on 3.975 and then moved to one of the South Carolina repeaters. As Dan-KF4MND who is the new DEC for NWS Charleston began to gather reports from Chatham, Effingham, Bulloch, Bryan, Liberty and Long counties, I relayed the reports to WX4CHS via the 146.715 repeater in Whitehall, SC. We continued to feed reports to Charleston until the snow had passed through the area. This was another great opportunity to exercise our ARES and Skywarn procedures. Great job all around.