After a record 125 tornadoes touched down in Iowa last year, the National Weather Service is making an urgent pitch to recruit more of the state’s residents to become trained severe weather spotters.

NWS meteorologist Brad Small says the first regional spotter training course of the year is being held tonight and they’re planning 18 more around the state over the coming weeks.

“We’re not covering every county in the state, but we will discuss spotter training, including how to spot cloud features, how to report severe weather, wall clouds, shelf clouds, things of that nature,” Small says, “and also some look-alikes, things that look like tornadoes, but may not be tornadoes.”

Small says the free training courses used to start in March but they’ve decided to move them forward several weeks.

“We started a little earlier this season to try to get it out of the actual severe weather season,” Small says. “We’ve run into talks being canceled due to actual severe weather days, so, we’re trying to get a little bit of a head start this year.”

Tonight’s training session will be held at the Greene City Hall in Butler County. Others are planned through early April in: Algona, Leon, Corydon, Garwin, Des Moines, Winterset, Newton, Mason City, Denison, Carroll, Ottumwa, Atlantic, Lenox, Marshalltown, Sac City, Bremer County, and Estherville.

See the full schedule at weather.gov/dmx

(Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City contributed to this story.)

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