Gauge Catch and Citizen Science
Every morning, I trudge out the side door of the garage and make my way across to the rain gauge posted at the edge of the nearby field. My rain gauge is more than yard art. It is a tool, because the precipitation it measures goes beyond mere curiosity. I have a job to do: to measure and report to a national database what amount of rain or snowfall has arrived to nourish my little patch of land in the past 24 hours.
When I get to my computer, I call up www.CoCoRaHS.org, log in, and report my findings. As of this writing, I have made 543 such reports (some of them multi-day, if I have been traveling or it has not been raining lately). Since inception of the grassroots, volunteer network of backyard weather observers in 1998, the information gathered has gained widespread credibility with the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Weather Service, local meteorologists, emergency managers, farmers, event planners, The Weather Channel, mosquito control, sports teams, engineers, educators, and more.
The acronym “CoCoRaHS” (odd, yes) stands for Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow, a network that had humble beginnings in Ft. Collins, Colorado after devastating floods in 1998 led to fatalities and $200 million in property damage. Nolan Doesken, founder and chief cheerleader/bottlewasher for CoCoRaHS (pronounced KO-ko-rozz), and a few CSU students gathered data for several months afterwards to ferret out an explanation for what had happened. The introduction to CoCoRaHS and graphics at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHmz5IyjV80 are worth the four-minute viewing. The upshot: even though it was “a rainy day” in the area, the amounts measured sometimes just blocks apart in the metro area ranged from 2 to 14+ inches! It resulted in the network’s catch phrase, “rain doesn’t fall the same on all.”
By 2010, the CoCoRaHS network had attracted volunteers in all fifty states, and later added Canada and the Bahamas. In his profession as a climatologist for the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University, Doesken was perfectly situated to champion the network and its value to science. He learned the value of tracking weather data from his father, who kept a daily ledger in the farm country of central Illinois. Just this May (2021), the network’s record for daily reports in a single month was broken with 475,875 submissions from 20,097 different observers (another record). All month, CoCoRaHS saw an average of more than 15,000 reports per day (a number reached for the first time just last year). The data is organized and displayed for easy access and interpretation by many high-level end users as well as people curious to compare rainfall with their neighbors.
It is exciting that I can be here, at home, and still be part of something widespread and helpful to so many agencies and people. All it takes is a light investment (they have specific gauge recommendations), a bit of time to situate it, and then about five minutes of time a day. As the website says, “Everyone can help, young, old, and in-between. The only requirements are an enthusiasm for watching and reporting weather conditions and a desire to learn more about how weather can affect and impact our lives.”
I used to check the rain gauge in conjunction with my dog’s morning routine. Now that she is (very) sadly gone, CoCoRaHS has held me to the habit of exiting the house. Checking my daily “gauge catch” gets me outdoors first thing, into the day—the REAL day. In addition to making a smidgeon of a contribution as a citizen scientist, I receive the benefits of smelling the air, gazing at the sky, hearing the birds and the breeze. It is a gift I give to myself, and honestly, I might end up skipping it if I didn’t have CoCoRaHS as a welcome prod.
